Production leveling is an essential element of the Toyota Production System. It aims at balancing production volume as well as production mix to reduce waste, overburden, and unevenness. The application of conventional leveling approaches is limited by the requested product diversity. Because of this production leveling is predominantly used in high volume production. Nevertheless it can be imp...

The Meertens Institute in Amsterdam was founded in 1930 under the name ‘Dialect Bureau’ (Dialectenbureau), and became an official institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in 1952. In 1979, it was named after its first director, P.J. Meertens (1899-1985), a student of 17th century Dutch literature. Currently it comprises two departments, one of Dutch Ethnology and o...

While populations may wax and wane, it is rare for an entire population to be replaced by a completely different set of individuals. We document the large-scale relocation of cultural groups of sperm whale off the Galápagos Islands, in which two sympatric vocal clans were entirely replaced by two different ones. Between 1985 and 1999, whales from two clans (called Regular and Plus-One) defined ...

lakish dialect in darrehshahr belongs to kurdish language (southern kurdish) and is the common dialect of people who live in darrehshehr town of ilam county that is situated in the west part of iran which is highly changing under the influence of standard persian. the present article surveys linguistic relativity with the emphasis on kinship words of the lakish dialect in darrehshahr. firstly, ...

tati dialect of northern khorasan is one of the oldest dialects of ancient iran which has structural differences with its other variations. sharing common words with the other tati dialects, especially those of azerbaijan and ghazvin, shows that tati dialect of northern khorasan, like others, is one of the dialects existing in pre-islamic era. this dialect is also one of those dialects in which...

In this work, the thermal stabilities of a series of polyethylene glycols (PEG 4000, 6000 and 10000) were investigated after compositing with different kinds of inorganic salts, such as ammonium molybdate tetrahydrate (AMT), NH4VO3, (NH4)2SO4, NH4NO3, Na2SO4, Na2MoO4. It was first observed that all the ammonium salts exerted leveling effects for the thermal stabilities of the PEGs. In other wor...

In an experiment spanning a week, American English speakers imitated a Glaswegian (Scottish) English speaker. The target sounds were allophones of /t/ and /r/, as the Glaswegian speaker aspirated word-medial /t/ but pronounced /r/ as a flap initially and medially. This experiment therefore explored (a) whether speakers could learn to reassign a sound they already produce (flap) to a different p...

Listeners can explicitly categorize unfamiliar talkers by regional dialect with above-chance performance under ideal listening conditions. However, the extent to which this important source of variation affects speech processing is largely unknown. In a series of four experiments, we examined the effects of dialect variation on speech intelligibility in noise and the effects of noise on percept...

Criminals may purposely try to hide their identity by using a voice disguise such as imitating another dialect. This paper empirically investigates the power of dialect as an attribute that listeners use when identifying voices and how a switch of dialect affects voice identification. In order to delimit the magnitude of the perceptual significance of dialect and the possible impact of dialect ...

this paper presents an efficient mechanism to convert sana’ani dialect to modern standard arabic. the mechanism is based on morphological rules related to sana’ani dialect as well as modern standard arabic. such rules facilitate the dialect conversion to its corresponding msa. the mechanism tokenizes the input dialect text and divides each token into stem and its affixes; such affixes can be ca...