There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

On robust estimation of the location parameter

In his Preface the author' says that he started out to review all the more important theories upon the topics ordinarily discussed under human motivation but soon found himself more and more limited to the presentation of his own point of view. This very well characterizes the book. It is a very personal product. It is an outline with some defense of the author's own thinking about instincts and appetites and sentiments and how they function in human behavior. And as the author draws so heavily upon James and McDougall, especially the latter, the book may well be looked upon as a sort of sequel to their efforts. There is a thought-provoking distinction presented between instinct and appetite. An instinct is said to be aroused always by something in the external situation; and, correspondingly, an appetite is said to be aroused by sensations from within the body itself. This places, of course, a heavy emphasis upon the cognitive factor in all instinctive behaviors; and the author prefers to use the cognitive factor, especially the knowledge of that end-experience which will satisfy, as a means of differentiating one instinct from another. In this there is a recognized difference from McDougall who placed more emphasis for differentiation upon the emotional accompaniment. The list of instincts arrived at by this procedure is much like that of McDougall, although the author is forced by his criteria to present the possibility of food-seeking and sex and sleep operating both in the manner of an appetite and also as an instinct. The Shand-McDougall concept of sentiment is taken over and used in the explanation of moral motivation. There is the development within each personality of a sentiment for some moral principle. But this sentiment is not a very powerful motivating factor. It is reinforced by social pressures and by religion, which is treated as an effort of finite man to live in harmony with the infinite reality. Those whose psychological thinking is largely in terms of McDougall will doubtless find this volume a very satisfying expansion; but those who are at all inclined to support their psychological thinking by reference to experimental studies will not be so well pleased. The James-Lange theory, for example, is discussed without mention of the many experimental studies which it has provoked. Theoretical sources appear in general to be preferred to experimental investigations.

Human MotivationThe Mind in Action: A Study of Motives and Values. A. Campbell Garnett

Often in the study of behavioral ecology, and more widely in science, we require to statistically test whether the central tendencies (mean or median) of 2 groups are different from each other on the basis of samples of the 2 groups. In surveying recent issues of Behavioral Ecology (Volume 16, issues 1–5), I found that, of the 130 papers, 33 (25%) used at least one statistical comparison of this sort. Three different tests were used to make this comparison: Student’s t-test (67 occasions; 26 papers), Mann–Whitney U test (43 occasions; 21 papers), and the t-test for unequal variances (9 occasions; 4 papers). My aim in this forum article is to argue for the greater use of the last of these tests. The numbers just related suggest that this test is not commonly used. In my survey, I was able to identify tests described simply as ‘‘t-tests’’ with confidence as either a Student’s t-test or an unequal variance t-test because the calculation of degrees of freedom from the 2 sample sizes is different for the 2 tests (see below). Hence, the neglect of the unequal variance t-test illustrated above is a real phenomenon and can be explained in several (nonexclusive ways) ways: 1. Authors are unaware that Student’s t-test is unreliable

The unequal variance t-test is an underused alternative to Student's t-test and the Mann–Whitney U test

This article considers the problem of comparing two independent groups in terms of some measure of location. It is well known that with Student's two-independent-sample t test, the actual level of significance can be well above or below the nominal level, confidence intervals can have inaccurate probability coverage, and power can be low relative to other methods. A solution to deal with heterogeneity is Welch's (1938) test. Welch's test deals with heteroscedasticity but can have poor power under arbitrarily small departures from normality. Yuen (1974) generalized Welch's test to trimmed means; her method provides improved control over the probability of a Type I error, but problems remain. Transformations for skewness improve matters, but the probability of a Type I error remains unsatisfactory in some situations. We find that a transformation for skewness combined with a bootstrap method improves Type I error control and probability coverage even if sample sizes are small.

The New and Improved Two-Sample t Test

Purpose




The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of applying total quality management (TQM) on enhancing knowledge management processes. It also examine the relationship between knowledge management and innovation performance in the Malaysian manufacturing sector.




Design/methodology/approach




This study used a survey method to test the formulated hypotheses. Therefore, the adopted questionnaire was used as an instrument to collect the needed data. The population of the study consisted of 800 big and medium manufacturing companies listed in Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (2012).




Findings




The results of this paper support a positive and significant impact of TQM practice on knowledge management processes. Furthermore, the relationship between knowledge management and innovation performance has been a proved. However, further analysis on dimension level indicates that knowledge acquisition failed to show significant relationship with innovation performance.




Originality/value




This study addresses one of the recent issues within the Malaysian context of becoming a developed nation, which is innovation performance, specifically for manufacturing companies. To do so, the overlapping relationships among TQM practices, knowledge management, and innovation performance have been tested.

Does interaction between TQM practices and knowledge management processes enhance the innovation performance

Current development in the manufacturing of aircraft composite parts has greatly utilized the prepreg materials in the autoclave moulding process in producing exceptional quality of laminates. Nevertheless, several issues related to the manufacturing quality of the complex-shaped laminates are still found unresolved, where the thickness uniformity, resin distribution and fiber wrinkling have been mostly regarded as the critical issues that contribute to the reduced mechanical properties and life span of the structure. A review on the contribution of the processing parameters towards the manufacturing defects of the aircraft complex-shaped laminate is critically presented. The discussion included the effects of the parameters on the defect formation during the sub-processes involved. It was found that the defects occurring were substantially affected by various factors, including mould selection, material characteristics, bagging configuration, etc. Subsequently, the correlation between the processing parameters and the related defects was thoroughly investigated, in which several findings are decisively proposed.

A review on the manufacturing defects of complex-shaped laminate in aircraft composite structures

Researchers can adopt different measures of central tendency and test statistics to examine the effect of a treatment variable across groups (e.g., means, trimmed means, M-estimators, & medians. Recently developed statistics are compared with respect to their ability to control Type I errors when data were nonnormal, heterogeneous, and the design was unbalanced: (1) a preliminary test for symmetry which determines whether data should be trimmed symmetrically or asymmetrically, (2) two different transformations to eliminate skewness, (3) the accuracy of assessing statistical significance with a bootstrap methodology was examined, and (4) statistics that use a robust measure of the typical score that empirically determined whether data should be trimmed, and, if so, in which direction, and by what amount were examined. The 56 procedures considered were remarkably robust to extreme forms of heterogeneity and nonnormality. However, we recommend a number of Welch-James heteroscedastic statistics which are preceded by the Babu, Padmanaban, and Puri (1999) test for symmetry that either symmetrically trimmed 10% of the data per group, or asymmetrically trimmed 20% of the data per group, after which either Johnson's (1978) or Hall's (1992) transformation was applied to the statistic and where significance was assessed through bootstrapping. Close competitors to the best methods were found that did not involve a transformation.

/pdf/trimming-transforming-statistics-and-bootstrapping-htlgrzgd1d.pdf

Trimming, Transforming Statistics, And Bootstrapping: Circumventing the Biasing Effects Of Heterescedasticity And Nonnormality

In many statistical analyses, data need to be approximately normal or normally distributed. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Anderson-Darling test, Cramer-von Mises test, and Shapiro-Wilk test are four statistical tests that are widely used for checking normality. One of the factors that influence these tests is the sample size. Given any test of normality mentioned, this study determined the sample sizes at which the tests would indicate that the data is not normal. The performance of the tests was evaluated under various spectrums of non-normal distributions and different sample sizes. The results showed that the Shapiro-Wilk test is the best normality test because this test rejects the null hypothesis of normality test at the smallest sample size compared to the other tests, for all levels of skewness and kurtosis of these distributions.

/pdf/sensitivity-of-normality-tests-to-non-normal-data-2rimy1d3as.pdf

Abdul Rahim Othman

Papers

The New and Improved Two-Sample t Test

Does interaction between TQM practices and knowledge management processes enhance the innovation performance

A review on the manufacturing defects of complex-shaped laminate in aircraft composite structures

Trimming, Transforming Statistics, And Bootstrapping: Circumventing the Biasing Effects Of Heterescedasticity And Nonnormality

Sensitivity of normality tests to non-normal data