Cognitive ergonomics: the use of mind mapping tool in maintaining productive sector of a Brazilian paper company

The use of mind maps as a method of building knowledge, planning, organizing activities and ideas can be seen in the literature related to ergonomics. The results of such use are relevant and its use in academic area found. However, regarding to its use in industrial environments, studies can't not be found. With this scenario, and based on the perception of the ergonomist about the importance of using methods such as mind maps in support of human cognition, it seems pertinent to its use in industry sectors whose cognitive demand requires. Given these assumptions, this study aimed to apply the method of Mind Maps in Productive Maintenance sector of a Brazilian paper. The Productive Maintenance sector in the Paper Industry has an important contribution to operational performance. With practical Predictive Maintenance, Preventive Maintenance and Corrective Maintenance, the industry advocates to make the machines to produce paper is not to stop producing when they are programmed to do so. Among the practices cited, the Preventive Maintenance is one that leads to pre-determined intervals in order to reduce the possibility of placing the equipment in a condition below the required level of acceptance. Therefore, this article aims to propose using the tool "mental maps" in order to collaborate in planning and implementation of preventive maintenance activities in the sector of mechanical maintenance of a pulp and paper industry in southern Brazil. The study investigated the maintenance sector through its employees, who went through training about the tool and then use it and ergonomists company.     

Detecting a change in wealth concentration without the knowledge of the wealth distribution

Consumption is commonly used as a proxy for permanent income. We go a step further by establishing the link between the distribution of consumption and that of permanent income in terms of dominance orderings. We introduce two new dominance orderings, the Generalized Top Lorenz test and the related affluence ordering. If consumption is a concave function of permanent income, we get an indirect and robust method to detect a change in permanent income concentration when the full stream of income receipts along the life cycle is unknown and only consumption data are available. Our application on US data for the period 1980?C2002 points out the difficult start in life of people belonging to the ??Baby loser generation?? (people born in the sixties) with respect to the previous and following cohort.     

Automatic specification of piecewise linear additive models: application to forecasting natural gas demand

When facing any forecasting problem not only is accuracy on the predictions sought. Also, useful information about the underlying physics of the process and about the relevance of the forecasting variables is very much appreciated. In this paper, it is presented an automatic specification procedure for models that are based on additivity assumptions and piecewise linear regression. This procedure allows the analyst to gain insight about the problem by examining the automatically selected model, thus easily checking the validity of the forecast. Monte Carlo simulations have been run to ensure that the model selection procedure behaves correctly under weakly dependent data. Moreover, comparison over other well-known methodologies has been done to evaluate its accuracy performance, both in simulated data and in the context of short-term natural gas demand forecasting. Empirical results show that the accuracy of the proposed model is competitive against more complex methods such as neural networks.     

The Role of Scientific Expertise in COVID-19 Policy-making: Evidence from Four European Countries

Public Organization Review - Immense uncertainty and the need for drastic interventions cause politicians to rely heavily on scientific advice for underpinning or legitimating their COVID-19...