Machine loading problem in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) encompasses various types of flexibility aspects pertaining to part selection and operation assignments. The evolution of flexible manufacturing systems offers great potential for increasing flexibility by ensuring both cost-effectiveness and customized manufacturing at the same time. This paper proposes a linear mathematical prog...

Public sector agencies are an important front in the day-to-day battle for political supremacy between the executive and the legislature. The executive’s key agents in this conflict are his appointees, who frequently play one of two roles: Congressional allies, where they help Congress implement policy and Congressional adversaries, where they fight with Congress to shift policy strongly toward...

Most of the research in comparative corporate governance has, implicitly or explicitly, taken the US as benchmark. But recent corporate scandals, such as Enron and Worldcom, question this alleged supremacy. What went wrong? In this chapter we claim that the problem is not just lack of appropriate disclosure or legislation, but a more fundamental one: deficient incentives for the media to expose...

Cloud computing is a multi-billion business, with more than 100 cloud service providers [1] vying for supremacy. Businesses are overwhelmed with choices and tradeoffs. In this paper we offer a qualitative and quantitative assessment of leading cloud service providers (CSPs) to guide small and medium businesses (SMBs) in their choice of CSP. Our qualitative study of usability, reliability, and c...

Commonwealth Caribbean constitutions were famously likened by Francis Alexis to “birth certificates” – striking imagery that conveyed the paradigmatic shift occasioned at independence where written constitutions with entrenched Bills of Rights supposedly heralded the decline of parliamentary sovereignty. However, recent changes to Jamaica’s constitutional regime of fundamental rights, which ent...

This paper aims to show the centrality the concept of progress occupies explicitly and implicitly in social theory, in relation to the theorization and understanding of modernity; it also raises the question whether in times where Eurocentrism, logocentrism, and indeed almost every claim of supremacy are rightly viewed with suspicion, it is possible to think of modernity without relying on some...

subject in the following involved, not to say ungrammatical, sentence: " I may add that, as Surgeon to the Evelina Hospital for Children, these deformities of the body have occupied much of my thought and attention, with an earnest desire to erase from the chapter of accidents as many as possible of such unsightly disfigurements; so that in the inevitable struggle for supremacy, in after life, ...