Records on 65,536 Landrace pigs collected between 1985 and 1999 in herds on the National Swine Registry STAGES program were used to estimate additive genetic (animal), common environmental (litter), and residual variances and covariances for days to 250 lb, backfat, loin eye area, and lean growth rate. Analysis was by the REMLf90 program of I. Misztal using a multiple-trait animal model with fi...

In recent years, there has been significantly increasing interest in the application of continuous quality improvement (CQI) and total quality management (TQM) in the health care arena. This case analysis is designed to identify and assess the strategies and processes that led to the successful implementation of CQI in the Emergency Care Center at St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Rapids, MI.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of the analysis was to examine the temporal course of improvement in symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorder among women in outpatient substance abuse treatment. METHOD Participants were 353 women randomly assigned to 12 sessions of either trauma-focused or health education group treatment. PTSD and substance use assessments were condu...

Does competitive pressure foster innovation? In addressing this important question, prior studies ignored a distinction between discrete innovation aiming at entirely new technology and continuous improvement consisting of numerous incremental improvements and modifications made upon the existing technology. This paper shows that distinguishing between these two types of innovation will lead to...

There is a need for an appropriate culture to support the scope of Total Quality Management (TQM). Customer focus, systems approach, teamwork, involved management and continuous improvement are the aspects of TQM that facilitate improved organisational success, growth, and competitiveness. Many companies are now complementing continuous improvement with innovation, which is seen as the successf...

Effective motion-compensated prediction is the key to high-performance video coding. To ensure continuous improvement of video coders, emerging motion-compensation technologies will need to be successfully integrated into future standards. Higher order elastic motion models and geometry-adaptive block partitioning are such advanced techniques that are good candidates for integration into future...

The paper identifies and discusses what is considered to be the three most critical points, both up-stream and down-stream to Enterprise Modeling, for ensuring the usefulness and use of EM results in the continuous improvement of organizations. The model type that is targeted in the cases discussed in the paper is the process model, but other related model types, e.g. goal models and concepts m...

In Local Area Networks (LAN) connected together by bridges, flow control and smooth traffic in the network is very important. However, congestion at bridges can cause intensive loss of received frames. In addition, the received frames are thrown away and have to be retransmitted by the source station, which causes more congestion and massive reduction in the overall network throughput. The netw...

This paper presents a multiobjective continuous covering location problem in fuzzy environment. Because of uncertain covering radius, possibility of covering concept is introduced.Since, the uncertainty may cause risk of uncovering customers; the problemis formulated as a risk management model. The presented model is an extension of the discrete covering location models tocontinuous space. Two ...