As the science and study of medicine has continued to evolve over the last 30 years, the concept of physician performance has not only taken shape, but risen to the forefront of our daily practice. "Pay-for-performance," "quality," "audit" and "computerized-care" are terms we recognize and use ever more frequently. Yet, as we strive to improve our care, we have failed to identify a single or be...

Whenever a feature extracted from an image has a unimodal distribution, information about its covariance matrix can be exploited for content-based retrieval using as dissimilarity measure the Bhattacharyya distance. To reduce the amount of computations and the size of logical database entry, we approximate the Bhattacharyya distance taking into account that most of the energy in the feature spa...

Efficient logistics represents a crucial differentiating factor in the market. The distribution centre employee occupies a special role for reaching the goal of more efficient logistics. One approach is to increase the logistics performance by improving labour productivity due to increasing work motivation. The developed employee performance measurement and improvement system is a combination o...

The paper examines the relationship between Lean Construction and Performance Improvement programs in construction organizations. The authors argue that the structure and focus of existing performance improvement programs are a barrier to Lean Construction’s entry into the

A previously developed reciprocating air microcompressor having a 1-mm(0.04 in)-diameter piston, an inlet port that did not have a moving valve, and an outlet port equipped with a miniature reed valve, was capable of a maximum discharge pressure of 80 kPa (gage, 11.6 psig) at a piston frequency of 100 Hz. We have improved on this compressor performance, and have attained a maximum discharge pre...

It will bring about many problems for a Rl2 refrigerator compressor to use Rl34a as refrigerant directly, such as power increasing, capacity dropping, and noise rising up etc. In order to solve these problems, the mathematical model, optimization model and special test system were built up, many improvements were made by means of the calculating and the testing results. Finally, the performance...

Purpose: Important performance objectives manufacturers sought can be achieved through adopting the appropriate manufacturing practices. This paper presents a conceptual model proposing relationship between advanced quality practices, perceived manufacturing difficulties and manufacturing performances. Design/methodology/approach: A survey-based approach was adopted to test the hypotheses propo...

Acknowledgment I may never have undertaken without the enthusiastic encouragement from the person who became my advisor, Prof. Yasuhiko Yasuda. He often steered me in the right direction when I wasn't certain of which path to investigate. I acknowledge his significant contribution to my PhD studies. I would like to thank Prof. Fumio Takahata, Prof. Shigeki Goto and Prof. Jiro Katto for their ve...

This paper proposes an algorithm for offline recognition of handwritten characters, especially effective for large set characters such as Korean and Chinese characters. The algorithm is based on a template matching method which is easy to implement but suffers from low recognition performance. Two strategies has been developed to improve the performance of the template matching: one is multi-st...