There are few scholarly books about toys, and even fewer that consider toys within the context of culture and communication. Toys and Communication is an innovative collection that effectively showcases work by specialists who have sought to examine toys throughout history and in many cultures, including 1930's Europe, Morocco, India, Spanish art of the 16th-19th centuries. Psychologists stress the importance of the role of toys and play in children's language development and intellectual skills, and this book demonstrates the recurrent theme of the transmission of cultural norms through the portrayal, presentation and use of toys. The text establishes the role of toy and play park design in eliciting particular forms of play, as well as stressing the child's use of toys to 'become' more adult. It will be beneficial for courses in education, developmental psychology, communications, media studies, and toy design.

This book investigates the fundaments, standards, and protocols of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in the industrial transformation environment. It facilitates a fusion of both technologies in the creation of reliable and robust applications. Cyber-Physical Systems for Industrial Transformation: Fundamentals, Standards, and Protocols explores emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, data science, blockchain, robotic process automation, virtual reality, edge computing, and 5G technology to highlight current and future opportunities to transition CPS to become more robust and reliable. The book showcases the real-time sensing, processing, and actuation software and discusses fault-tolerant and cybersecurity as well. This book brings together undergraduates, postgraduates, academics, researchers, and industry individuals that are interested in exploring new ideas, techniques, and tools related to CPS and Industry 4.0.

Do you know
that black holes can affect time?
that Stonehenge is a giant calendar?
that the Oracle Bones of the North China Plain predict the phases of the moon?
that the Pyramids are giant compasses?
how Jonathan Swift knew that Mars had two moons when he wrote Gulliver's Travels?
that the effects of black holes are described in the story of Alice in Wonderland?
that an atomic reactor existed 2 billion years ago in Equatorial Africa?
that an electron on the other side of the galaxy can deflect a billiard ball?
that Schrodingers cat is both alive and dead?
Derek York fathoms these and many other mysteries of time and space in In Search of Lost Time. A reflection of York's obsession with time and its measurement, the book discusses the mind-bending universe of the special and general theories of relativity, the ghostly world of quantum mechanics, and the unpredictable haunts of chaos.
It explores the pyramids of Egypt, Stonehenge, and the South China plain; the universities of Cambridge, McGill, and Chicago; the Patent Office in Berne; and back to the Ethiopian desert on the banks of the Awash River. Companions to share and illuminate the path range from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland to J.B. Priestley's Dangerous Corner. It also presents the father of master-spy Kim Philby in the Empty Quarter of Arabia, the fantasist Velikovsky in the clouds, and Newton, Darwin, Rutherford, Einstein and the great Earth scientists of this century who fathomed the depths of lost time and discovered the age of the Earth.
Written in an engaging, nontechnical style, this book will delight and amaze all who encounter it."

Discusses smart and sustainable supply chain management concepts that will be analyzed in the Industry 4.0 perspective Explores green systems and smart applications under Industry 4.0 setting Presents the latest technological developments, including disruptive technologies and their impact on smart and sustainable supply chains in accordance with the triple bottom-line approach The economic, social, and environmental impact of the emerging technologies on supply chain management sustainability and smartness will be investigated thoroughly Each chapter will either include a case study or a related problem/numerical example along with the solution for easy reader comprehension

This unique volume explores the various aspects of human resources management and challenges that leaders, managers, and employees are facing in dealing with the new normal that is the result of changing workplace conditions and priorities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the outbreak of the pandemic and the resulting nationwide lockdowns, business across the globe came to an unexpected halt. This volume looks at the paradigm shift in the workplace ecosystem and how the world has changed in a big way. It discusses HR’s role in organizational growth strategies, employee well-being, and employee mental health during the economic downturn and offers coping strategies that aim to empower human resources through learning and resilience. This book explains strategies that will help in preserving healthy human resources, which are an important component of an organization’s effectiveness and growth. Chapters explain current trends in business and technology, the need for constant upskilling and digital dexterity, managing tech detox, and the way employees should work in the new normal. Chapters in Human Resource Management in a Post-Epidemic Global Environment: Roles, Strategies, and Implementations cover how the role of HR has changed with the pandemic; workplace communication strategies; challenges and opportunities of technology use in work-from-home scenarios; flexible work practices; effective employee retention; preserving employees’ well-being, mental health, and work-life balance; the effect on gender equity; HR challenges in the tourism sector; and much more. Organizations that adopt post-pandemic HR roles and strategies not only have the path to innovation but will also have a competitive landscape in the changing scenario. HR leadership and others at corporations and organizations—both large and small—will find this volume to be a useful resource for discussion, implementation, and innovation.

Shiba and Walden have significantly revised their classic, "A New American TQM," With new methodologies and case studies, this work is one of the most comprehensive studies of management theory and business success. The authors identify a comprehensive approach to management that goes beyond operations improvement to help executives and managers create unique organizational capabilities. They contend that organizations must develop skills in four major areas: customer focus, continuous improvement, total participation, and societal networking.

They present proven methods that enable dynamic implementation strategies, facilitate ongoing learning, and encourage continuous diffusion of evolving information and quality practices throughout an organization's entire network.

Techniques described have been instituted at Analog Devices, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Teradyne and many other companies. Numerous in-depth case studies from these and other companies illustrate actual implementations.

Shoji Shiba, formerly of MIT is one of the most respected business consultants in the world. Among his many accolades, he received the 2002 Deming Prize, one of the highest awards in management bestowed in Japan.

"Professor Shiba has been a source of inspiration, experience and knowledge to countless numbers of CQM members, MIT faculty and students and other organizations and companies around the world....The success of his publications, teaching and consulting proves that the principles of TQM are universal, applicable across all cultures and languages. Shiba is a truly great teacher, researcher and innovator ... ."

--Ray Stata, founder and chairman of both Analog Devices and CQM.

DavidWalden, is the retired senior vice president of Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., and former Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Business.

Both Shiba and Walden are well known for their contributions to the Center for Quality Management.

Project Management: Theory and Practice, Third Edition gives students a broad and real flavor of project management. Bringing project management to life, it avoids being too sterilely academic and too narrowly focused on a particular industry view. It takes a model-based approach towards project management commonly used in all industries. The textbook aligns with the latest version of the Project Management Institute's Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK (R)) Guide, which is considered to be the de facto standard for project management. However, it avoids that standard's verbiage and presents students with readable and understandable explanations. Core chapters align with the Project Management Institute's model as well as explain how this model fits real-world projects. The textbook can be used as companion to the standard technical model and help those studying for various project management certifications. The textbook takes an in-depth look at the following areas important to the standard model: Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) Earned Value Management (EVM) Enterprise project management Portfolio management (PPM) Professional responsibility and ethics Agile life cycle The text begins with a background section (Chapters 1-9) containing material outside of the standard model structure but necessary to prepare students for the 10 standard model knowledge areas covered in the chapters that follow. The text is rounded out by eight concluding chapters that explain advanced planning approaches models and projects' external environments. Recognizing that project management is an evolving field, the textbook includes section written by industry experts who share their insight and expertise on cutting-edge topics. It prepares students for upcoming trends and changes in project management while providing an overview of the project management environment today. In addition to guiding students through current models and standards, Project Management: Theory and Practice, Third Edition prepares students for the future by stimulating their thinking beyond the accepted pragmatic view.

The book explores the concepts and challenges in developing novel approaches using the Internet of Things, intelligent systems, machine intelligence systems, and data analytics in various industrial sectors such as manufacturing, smart agriculture, smart cities, food processing, environment, defense, stock market and healthcare. Further, it discusses the latest improvements in the industrial sectors using machine intelligence learning and intelligent systems techniques, especially robotics. Features: * Highlights case studies and solutions to industrial problems using machine learning and intelligent systems. * Covers applications in smart agriculture, smart healthcare, intelligent machines for disaster management, and smart manufacturing. * Provides the latest methodologies using machine intelligence systems in the early forecasting of weather. * Examines the research challenges and identifies the gaps in data collection and data analysis, especially imagery, signal, and speech. * Provides applications of digitization and smart processing using the Internet of Things and effective intelligent agent systems in manufacturing. * Discusses a systematic and exhaustive analysis of intelligent software effort estimation models. It will serve as an ideal reference text for graduate students, post-graduate students, IT Professionals, and academic researchers in the fields of electrical engineering, electronics and communication engineering, computer engineering, and information technology.

ReducedEffort (R) Changeover: The Lean Way to Quickly Reduce Changeover Downtime provides a step-by-step guide for conducting a Kaizen event that empowers the people who do the work to improve how that work is done. Packed with tips, tools, and examples, this practical guide begins with a clear description of the Lean principles underlying the ReducedEffort Changeover system. In addition, it explains how and why reducing the effort always reduces the time of converting a machine, line, or process from one product to another. In this book, you'll find everything you need to quickly and dramatically reduce the effort and time of any process using the ReducedEffort method. This is not another book about how to do SMED. Like SMED, ReducedEffort Changeover (REC) does reduce changeover time, but REC is not SMED. SMED, Single Minute (or digit) Exchange of Dies, developed by Dr. Shigeo Shingo, has been the process used for many years by countless manufacturing plants to reduce changeover time. The SMED process was used in Toyota to reduce the changeover of a 1,000-ton stamping press from four hours to three minutes. As a Lean-based process, the REC system focuses on reducing the labor, not the time, involved in changing over a machine to work on a different product. With REC, there are no Standard Operation Combination Sheets to fill out and no Problem Identification Sheets to complete, and it does not require the arduous chore of timing every task, as SMED does. Very little capital investment is required with REC. Unlike SMED, it does not require management-approved funding to achieve substantial results. Because REC is not capital-driven, management does not need to drive the process. The operators will drive the process because it reduces their labor. One of the biggest advantages of REC over SMED is that operators will readily accept the process, and more important, they will want to sustain it. The reason for this is quite simple and will become evident when the REC process is defined. REC takes SMED to a new level that is easier and faster both to implement and to deliver sustainable results.

This comprehensive guide offers authoritative answers on flow measurement from dozens of leading experts. Fully illustrated with diagrams, tables, and formulas, Flow Measurement covers virtually every type of flow meter in use today, including those for heat exchangers and gaseous fuels, and laminar, magnetic and mass flow meters. Valuable information on applications and selection criteria.

The Shingo Enterprise Excellence Prize Model (SEEM) has exerted global influence over the ways that exceptional organizations formulate/deploy strategy with its focus on processes, Lean thinking, continuous improvement, innovation, workforce development, and supplier strategies. This book details the SEEM, which lies at the heart of the Shingo Prize. It will link the theoretical underpinnings of the SEEM and their implications for practice. Case studies illustrate important points. Selected tools that support practical implementation of the model are discussed and their use illustrated. This book will deepen understanding of why the model works and how implementation can be accomplished.

This practical guide covers the steps necessary to sustain quality in a project from start to finish. The book shows how to identify risks at different processes, phases, and stages and offers directions on how to mitigate and reduce risks using analysis, evaluation, and monitoring. Risk Management Applications Used to Sustain Quality in Projects: A Practical Guide focuses on applying risk management principles to manage quality in all project management processes, stages, and phases. The book discusses the potential risks that may occur at the different phases of the project life cycle, their effects on projects, and how to prevent them. It explores all the process elements and activities of risk management and provides steps on how to make the project more qualitative, competitive, and economical. Risk management processes are discussed at each project management processes and project lifecycle phase/stage to help the reader understand how various risks can occur and how to mitigate and reduce them. The main audience for this book is project management professionals, quality managers, systems engineers, construction managers, and risk management professionals as well as industrial engineers, academics, and students.

Book, Text, Medium: Cross Sectional Reading for a Digital Age utilizes codex history, close reading, and language philosophy to assess the transformative arc between medieval books and today's e-books. It examines what happens to the reading experience in the twenty-first century when the original concept of a book is still held in the mind of a reader, if no longer in the reader's hand. Leading critic Garrett Stewart explores the play of mediation more generally, as the concept of book moves from a manufactured object to simply the language it puts into circulation. Framed by digital poetics, phonorobotics, and the rising popularity of audiobooks, this study sheds new light on both the history of reading and the negation of legible print in conceptual book art.

Currently, the prime focus for US business plans should not be on the manufacturing process design and delivery processes, but on greatly improving innovation leadership, design engineering capability, and sales and marketing innovation. These three areas have been sadly lacking significant performance improvement during the past 20 years. The magic word for US business is "simplification." Most of the books written to date focus on the solution development aspect of the Innovation System Cycle, which is less than 15% of the total innovative system. Focusing on solution development is only the start -- the rest of the innovation system cycle is what turns an idea into a profitable business. The techniques in this book are directed at key tasks across the innovative process, such as maximizing quality, productivity, maintainability, usability, and reliability, while focusing on reducing the product cycle time and costs within the innovative process. This book uses more than 50 different approaches/concepts, which leads the reader in a very simple method for understanding, establishing, and effectively using an innovative system to provide a significant marketing advantage. Previous books have focused on what to do; however, this book focuses on how to do it. It transforms a complicated complex system into easy-to-use and understand methodology.

This study examines findings from a 4-year-long ethnography of communication among a research university's community of scientists and engineers working in nanoscience and nanotechnology. It includes analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with scientists and engineers from 18 different disciplines self-identified as working in nanoscale science and engineering. Using multiple methods of inquiry, including fieldwork, interviews, and textual analysis, elements of a shared speech code are presented, each of which indicate culturally distinctive understandings of psychology, sociology and rhetoric. In particular, the interview data addresses questions such as "What kind of person is a scientist?" "What is the role of science in society?" and "What is the role of communication in science?" This book will appeal to readers interested in science and society, scientific communication, and ethnography of communication.

Transition Engineering: Building a Sustainable Future examines new strategies emerging in response to the mega-issues of global climate change, decline in world oil supply, scarcity of key industrial minerals, and local environmental constraints. These issues pose challenges for organizations, businesses, and communities, and engineers will need to begin developing ideas and projects to implement the transition of engineered systems. This work presents a methodology for shifting away from unsustainable activities. Teaching the Transition Engineering approach and methodology is the focus of the text, and the concept is presented in a way that engineers can begin applying it in their work.

This book helps participants in agile software development environments learn to become leaders. Facilitative leaders should be at every level of the organization, from individual contributor to informal team leader to managers of all stripes -- it takes much focus and intentionality from senior organizational leaders, who have special obligations in creating successful lean and agile development environments. But, beyond the principles of facilitative leadership for agility, People over Process provides tips and demonstrative scenes for the more important and common software meetings: architecture simulations, project planning, team configurations, retrospectives, and more. The author fully illustrates the principles and shares proven techniques for the most important leadership events in agile projects. While this book focuses on facilitating extraordinarily well-prepared meetings, it serves as a metaphor for leadership more broadly. The leader's obligation to help their team make rigorous fact-based decisions; to gain broad input and have participants aligned on the outcomes and next steps; and to do so in an efficient way that respects the time of the participants is as relevant to every-day leadership activity as it is to conducting meetings. The author mixes background and explanation with demonstration -- in this case, the story of an agile project at the fictitious Pacifica Bank. The scenario constructed at Pacifica illustrates the concepts of effective leadership and productive workplace environments. The book concentrates on the flow of software from understanding what is needed through design, development, testing, and deployment. Essentially, the author provides a simple and powerful model of leadership, examples, and tips. This is not a cookbook on how to lead -- It is a set of principles and examples. All leaders must find their own way for their team, their organization, and their unique challenges.

Many leaders and managers have led improvement initiatives in a variety of different industry sectors. Most believe that when they begin these efforts, they already have the tools they need in their improvement "backpack." Using these tools, they make substantial improvements to processes in a wide array of industry segments. As time passes, however, most realize that there is a missing link in their arsenal of tools for improvement. The author of this book faced this same predicament and he discovered what the missing link was in his improvement tool kit: Theory of Constraints (TOC). Once he learned the details of TOC, his ability to make major improvements jettisoned upward to levels he had not seen before. TOC is the common denominator in all the case studies presented in this book. This book opens with a chapter on what Theory of Constraints is and why it works so well in improvement efforts. The second and third chapters cover the important points related to Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma as well as key points related to variability. Chapter 4 demonstrates how to effectively combine these three components to achieve maximum improvement and the corresponding enhancement to your company's profitability. The remainder of this book is composed of true case studies from different industry segments, using this integrated improvement methodology. Essentially, this book lays the foundation for what most practitioners are just beginning to understand-this integrated improvement methodology is superior to the three components used in isolation from each other. This book presents a step-by-step method of how to combine the Theory of Constraints, Lean, and Six Sigma, and then demonstrates its effectiveness in a very diverse array of industries.

This book presents the design and manufacturing of microsystems as well as necessary key technologies developed within the Collaborative Research Center 516. The research efforts of this collaboration are focused on active micro systems which are based on the electromagnetic actuator principle. The travel of the investigated actuator systems is on the order of several millimeters. The total construction size of the actuator is on the range of several centimeters whereas essential structures being several micrometers. The methods and the production technologies that are investigated on the basis of various research models incorporate the fundamental process chains of microsystems.

Longcase clocks were invidually hand-made during the golden age of change that took place between the late seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Longcase clocks with their seventeenth century clock-making technology were innovative and incorporated an accurate pendulum clock within an attractive piece of domestic furnishing. This invaluable book is essential reading for all those who own and collect longcase clocks as well as clock repairers, horologists and conservationists.

This book fully details, as the title suggests, the real secret to maximizing an organization's profitability. While many companies have implemented improvement initiatives such as Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing, there is a missing link which, when discovered and implemented, will take these same companies to profit levels not seen before. This missing link is the Theory of Constraints, and when it's combined with Lean and Six Sigma, true transformational improvements are sure to follow. In this book, the author walks you through the step-by-step method on how to combine these three methodologies with the result being significant improvements to flow, major improvements in variation, substantial reductions in waste, superior on-time delivery, and ultimately, maximized profitability. He has been using this integrated methodology for many years and each time, the results realized were well beyond what the leadership teams had experienced previously. The genesis behind this combined improvement cycle is based upon many years of analysis of both failures and successes using Lean, Six Sigma, and the Theory of Constraints as stand-alone improvement initiatives. By integrating Lean, Six Sigma and the Theory of Constraints into a single improvement cycle, the author has developed a recipe that will maximize your return on investment, cash flow, and net profit. The Secret to Maximizing Profitability is both stimulating and thought provoking, but more importantly it will provide your organization with a roadmap for maximizing the use of your resources to achieve more bottom-line improvement than you ever imagined possible.

Dans L'art du livre en Asie centrale de la fin du XVIe au debut du XXe siecle, Marie Efthymiou met en lumiere les mutations des techniques de fabrication du livre et de ses usages en Asie centrale. In L'art du livre en Asie centrale de la fin du XVIe au debut du XXe siecle, Marie Efthymiou sheds light on the mutations of book making in Central Asia and on the manuscript social uses.

The 'long twelfth century' (1075-1225) was an era of seminal importance in the development of the book in medieval Europe and marked a high point in its construction and decoration. This comprehensive study takes the cultural changes that occurred during the 'twelfth-century Renaissance' as its point of departure to provide an overview of manuscript culture encompassing the whole of Western Europe. Written by senior scholars, chapters are divided into three sections: the technical aspects of making books; the processes and practices of reading and keeping books; and the transmission of texts in the disciplines that saw significant change in the period, including medicine, law, philosophy, liturgy, and theology. Richly illustrated, the volume provides the first in-depth account of book production as a European phenomenon.

What has fifteenth-century England to do with the Renaissance? By challenging accepted notions of 'medieval' and 'early modern' David Rundle proposes a new understanding of English engagement with the Renaissance. He does so by focussing on one central element of the humanist agenda - the reform of the script and of the book more generally - to demonstrate a tradition of engagement from the 1430s into the early sixteenth century. Introducing a cast-list of scribes and collectors who are not only English and Italian but also Scottish, Dutch and German, this study sheds light on the cosmopolitanism central to the success of the humanist agenda. Questioning accepted narratives of the slow spread of the Renaissance from Italy to other parts of Europe, Rundle suggests new possibilities for the fields of manuscript studies and the study of Renaissance humanism.

Validation of computer systems is the process that assures the formal assessment and report of quality and performance measures for all the life-cycle stages of software and system development, its implementation, qualification and acceptance, operation, modification, requalification, maintenance and retirement (PICS CSV PI 011-3). It is a process that demonstrates the compliance of computer systems functional and non-functional requirements, data integrity, regulated company procedures and safety requirements, industry standards, and applicable regulatory authority's requirements. Compliance is a state of being in adherence to application-related standards or conventions or regulations in laws and similar prescriptions. This book, which is relevant to the pharmaceutical and medical devices regulated operations, provides practical information to assist in the computer validation to production systems, while highlighting and efficiently integrating worldwide regulation into the subject. A practical approach is presented to increase efficiency and to ensure that the validation of computer systems is correctly achieved.