Successful integration of ergonomics into continuous improvement initiatives

Process improvement initiatives are receiving renewed attention by large corporations as they attempt to reduce manufacturing costs and stay competitive in the global marketplace. These initiatives include 5S, Six Sigma, and Lean. These programs often take up a large amount of available time and budget resources. More often than not, existing ergonomics processes are considered separate initiatives by upper management and struggle to gain a seat at the table. To effectively maintain their programs, ergonomics program managers need to overcome those obstacles and demonstrate how ergonomics initiatives are a natural fit with continuous improvement philosophies.     

Higher Education and the Largest Impoverished and Marginalized Group of the Indian Population: Reviewing Enrolment and Access to Higher Education among Tribals in India

Higher education has been found to have a significant relationship with the Human Development Index and also the Gender Development Index. Its significance is especially apparent in the largest impoverished and marginalized group of the Indian population, Tribals. Tribals constitute the second largest social group in India and account for approximately 8% (equivalent to 85 million people) of the total population. Access to higher education in the Tribal population as reflected by the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) is an issue of concern as it falls behind the rest of the population even when compared with other deprived groups. Additionally, the GER of female Tribals falls behind that of their male counterparts. These factors reflect the inequality persisting among Tribals within Indian society. The present paper provides and analyses the current GER of Tribals in India and across states as well as taking a more detailed look at the enrolment of Tribals across various faculties in higher education.     

Nonstandard Schedules and Young Children’s Behavioral Outcomes Among Working Low‐Income Families

This article focuses on how maternal employment in nonstandard schedules at night, on the weekends, or that rotate on a weekly basis influence preschoolers’ behavioral outcomes. Examining low‐income working mothers and their children aged 2 – 4 years from the Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three‐City Study (N= 206), we find that maternal nonstandard schedules are associated with negative behavioral outcomes for young children. There is some evidence that the negative effects of nonstandard schedules on behavior problems operate indirectly through increased parenting stress. Moderating influences of child gender and family composition are also detected. These findings are consistent with the small number of studies demonstrating the negative effects of nonstandard schedules on children of varying ages.     

Land Tenure,Democracy, and Patterns of Violence During the Maoist Insurgency in Nepal, 1996–2005*

Objectives. We seek to investigate the determinants of Nepal's relapse into authoritarianism and resort to violence rather than reform as a response to the Maoist insurgency. Revolutionary insurgency emerged in Nepal after a transition to parliamentary democracy, whereas democracy is supposed to inoculate a nation against the risk of civil war. We present a theory of how the level of violence varies across districts with variations in the distribution of peasants among land tenure categories. Methods. We use district‐level data from Nepal and test hypotheses by using negative binominal statistical analysis. Results. Our results indicate that the level of violence varies across districts with variations in land tenure patterns, the level of electoral participation, and the extent of poverty. Conclusions. Our study provides insights into how the concentration of landed resources and political power creates incentives for a landowning coalition that dominated the state to use violence against those segments of the peasantry that have incentives to support an insurgency that promised to redistribute land.     

Comparing the Childrearing Lifetimes of Britain's Divorce-Revolution Men and Women

British men and women who became parents in the 1960s and 1970s were about to experience a new regime of marital instability. The effect of this on the balance between men's and women's contributions to childrearing is potentially very large. This study estimates the co-residential foundations of the new gender balance, focusing on the measurement of lifetime number of years of living with dependent-aged children. A variant of the family-status life table is used to combine two data sources: census panel observations of family status across three points ten years apart, and survey data on the years between censuses. One-quarter of women who became parents in the 1960s, and one-third of women who became parents in the 1970s, have been or will be a lone mother at some point. Lone parenthood is the main way in which women's childrearing lifetimes differ from men's, with seven and eight years respectively of lone motherhood per ever-lone-mother of the 1960s and 1970s parenting cohorts. Men's lone-father years and greater numbers of years spent in second families together provide an average of two years offset against women's lone mother years.     

Estimation of a change point in the hazard rate of Lindley model under right censoring

In this article, we consider a single change point model for a sudden change in the hazard rate of Lindley distribution to model right-censored survival data. We derive the quantile function to generate random numbers from the proposed distribution by using the Lambert function. The maximum likelihood estimation method is used to estimate parameters of the change point model. A simulation study is also carried out to analyze the performance of the estimators. To validate our findings, a dataset on bone marrow transplant for patients of acute lymphoblastic leukemia is analyzed using the proposed model and is compared with the existing exponential single change point model.     

The Impact of Complex Family Structure on Child Well‐being: Evidence From Siblings

Evidence from the United Kingdom Millennium Cohort on children at ages 3 and 5 with older siblings addresses the questions of whether those living with both biological parents and only full siblings have better emotional and behavior outcomes than other children, and whether nonfull siblings affect children's outcomes independently of parents' partnership status. Adjusting for measured family circumstances and resources in cross‐sectional regressions accounted for much of the adverse association of family complexity with child outcomes. Controlling for unobserved family and child fixed effects did not, however, attenuate all estimates further. Fixed unobservable factors appeared to be masking underlying associations. Allowing for them intensified some, albeit modest, estimates. These revealed excess externalizing behavior problems for boys with single or stepparents but only full siblings. For girls with single mothers, the chances of internalizing problems were raised. Whether siblings were full or not made little difference to outcomes in general.     

A side sensitive modified group runs control chart to detect shifts in the process mean

Gadre and Rattihalli [5 Gadre, M. P. and Rattihalli, R. N. 2006. Modified group runs control charts to detect increases in fraction non-conforming and shifts in the process mean. Commun. Stat. Simul. Comput., 35: 225–240. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]] have introduced the Modified Group Runs (MGR) control chart to identify the increases in fraction non-conforming and to detect shifts in the process mean. The MGR chart reduces the out-of-control average time-to-signal (ATS), as compared with most of the well-known control charts. In this article, we develop the Side Sensitive Modified Group Runs (SSMGR) chart to detect shifts in the process mean. With the help of numerical examples, it is illustrated that the SSMGR chart performs better than the Shewhart's X¯ chart, the synthetic chart [12 Wu, Z. and Spedding, T. A. 2000. A synthetic control chart for detecting small shifts in the process mean. J. Qual. Technol., 32: 32–38. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]], the Group Runs chart [4 Gadre, M. P. and Rattihalli, R. N. 2004. A group runs control chart for detecting shifts in the process mean. Econ. Qual. Control, 19: 29–43. [Crossref] [Google Scholar]], the Side Sensitive Group Runs chart [6 Gadre, M. P. and Rattihalli, R. N. 2007. A side sensitive group runs control chart for detecting shifts in the process mean. Stat. Methods Appl., 16: 27–37. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]], as well as the MGR chart [5 Gadre, M. P. and Rattihalli, R. N. 2006. Modified group runs control charts to detect increases in fraction non-conforming and shifts in the process mean. Commun. Stat. Simul. Comput., 35: 225–240. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]]. In some situations it is also superior to the Cumulative Sum chart p9 Page, E. S. 1954. Continuous inspection schemes. Biometrika, 41: 100–114. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]] and the exponentially weighed moving average chart [10 Roberts, S. W. 1959. Control chart tests based on geometric moving averages. Technometrics, 1: 239–250. [Taylor & Francis Online] [Google Scholar]]. In the steady state also, its performance is better than the above charts.     

Alternating sums of sub-diagonal product moments of order statistics

A relation satisfied by the product moments of order statistics from an arbitrary continuous distribution symmetric about the origin has been established in this paper. We have shown that in such a situation, for samples of even size, sum of the sub-diagonal product moments of order statistics with alternating plus and minus signs assumes a compact form.