There has been a great deal of interest recently in the Japanese approach to manufacturing, growing out of a concern for finding ways to reduce inventories and increase productivity. At this project's inception, its objective was to assess whether the kanban system could perform well in the manufacturing environments found in this country. Based on observations from managers visiting Japan, the project was enlarged to also assess which factors in a production environment have the biggest impact on performance---regardless of the system in use. Guided by a panel of production and inventory managers from diverse plant environments, a comprehensive list of factors thought most important to manufacturing effectiveness was constructed. The panel established low and high values for each one. These settings were considered representative of the range experienced in U.S. plant environments. The factor settings allowed a variety of representative plants to be tested with a large scale simulator. Results show that kanban, when implemented in certain environmental settings, does indeed perform exceptionally well. However, so do the more traditional systems used in the United States. Conversely, there are other plant environments in which all systems perform much worse. This suggests that the factors themselves are the keys to major improvement. Simultaneously reducing setup times and lot sizes is found to be the single most effective way to cut inventory levels and improve customer service. Shop factors of particular importance are yield rates and worker flexibility. Degree of product standardization and the product structure are also high impact factors. Less crucial than earlier believed, at least over the factor settings simulated, are inventory record inaccuracy, equipment failures, and vendor reliability. Such results suggest that the selection of a production/inventory system can be of less importance than the improvement of the manufacturing environment itself.inventory/production: operating characteristics, inventory/production: simulation, production/scheduling

Increasing concerns over growing CO 2 levels in the atmosphere have led to a worldwide demand for efficient, cost-effective, and clean carbon capture technologies. One of these technologies is the Carbonation-Calcination Reaction (CCR) process, which utilizes a calcium-based sorbent in a high-temperature reaction (carbonation) to capture the CO 2 from the flue gas stream and releases a pure stream of CO 2 in the subsequent calcination reaction that can be sequestered. A 120 KWth subpilot-scale combustion plant utilizing coal at 20 pph along with natural gas has been established at The Ohio State University to test the CCR process. Experimental studies on CO 2 capture using calcium-based sorbents have been performed at this facility. Greater than 99% CO 2 and SO 2 capture has been achieved at the subpilot-scale facility on a once-through basis at a Ca:C mole ratio of 1.6. In addition, the sorbent reactivity is maintained over multiple cycles by the incorporation of a sorbent reactivation hydration step in the carbonation-calcination cycle.

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Nonorthogonal analysis of variance (ANOV A) is defined as a factorial ANOVA with differing numbers of subjects in the cells. Despite the volume of literature in the psychological journals dealing with the problems of nonorthogonal ANOVA, little attention has been focused on the robustness properties of the corresponding hypothesis tests. Monte Carlo results are presented for the two-way ANOVA design indicating that all of the standard computational routines for the unequal cell size case are nonrobust. This occurs when the assumptions of homogeneity of variance or normality are violated. The user is cautioned against collecting such data. If such data must be analyzed, then alternative or supplemental analysis strategies should be used. Alternative approaches would include simulation, rank transformation, modified ANOVA procedures, and alternative developments in linear models, such as nonparametric factorial ANOVA.

This study investigated the interaction between proficiency in both mathematics and English on students' performance in the first-year level financial accounting course, The data were gathered on the results of first-year accounting major students at the recently established Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and analysed using regression analysis. The findings showed that a higher degree of proficiency in mathematics was associated with a higher level of performance in the financial accounting course for students who were more competent in English.Hong Kong, student performance, first-year accounting, mathematics and English language, two-way interaction,