Both central venous catheters (CVCs) and peripheral intravenous cannulas (PVCs) have changed the management of patient care in a hospital setting. However there is a significant risk of local and/or blood stream infection with both 1,2 . Indeed, every day the catheters remain in place increases the chances of developing a related blood stream infection 3 . Healthcare associated infections (HCAI...

A Heijunka Board is a Lean Production technique that helps to communicate a timed production plan to the factory floor. Lean advocates that production plans should be generated to level the volume and to level the mix. It is the mix levelling aspect of the Heijunka Board that we are concerned with. In particular, given that a number of products have to be produced on a production line, the orde...

T he turn of the millennium attracted levels of public attention and excitement that far surpassed those of previous New Year’s changeovers. Concern about the reliability of computer systems, terrorist attacks, and other possible doomsday scenarios contributed to a heightened sense of anticipation worldwide. In addition, the holiday and New Year’s season can be simultaneously stressful and joyo...

We present a problem in the current SCTP (RFC2960) specification that results in unnecessary retransmissions and “TCP-unfriendly” growth of the sender’s congestion window during certain changeover conditions. We first illustrate the problem using an example scenario. To gain insight into the ambient conditions under which cwnd overgrowth can be observed, we present an analytical model of this p...

In an edge-colored graph, a traversal cost occurs at a vertex along a path when consecutive edges with different colors are traversed. The value of the traversal cost depends only on the colors of the traversed edges. This concept leads to two global cost measures, namely the reload cost and the changeover cost, that have been studied in the literature and have various applications in telecommu...