According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

The End of History and the Last Man

Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product.

In 1985, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) convened an ad hoc committee of experts who reviewed the current literature on lifting, recommend criteria for defining lifting capacity, and in 1991 developed a revised lifting equation. Subsequently, NIOSH developed the documentation for the equation and played a prominent role in recommending methods for interpreting the results of the equation. The 1991 equation reflects new findings and provides methods for evaluating asymmetrical lifting tasks, lifts of objects with less than optimal hand-container couplings, and also provides guidelines for a larger range of work durations and lifting frequencies than the 1981 equation. This paper provides the basis for selecting the three criteria (biomechanical, physiological, and psychophysical) that were used to define the 1991 equation, and describes the derivation of the individual components (Putz-Anderson and Waters 1991). The paper also describes the lifting index (LI), an index of relative physical stress, that can be used to identify hazardous lifting tasks. Although the 1991 equation has not been fully validated, the recommended weight limits derived from the revised equation are consistent with or lower than those generally reported in the literature. NIOSH believes that the revised 1991 lifting equation is more likely than the 1981 equation to protect most workers.

Revised NIOSH equation for the design and evaluation of manual lifting tasks

According to Fitts' law, human movement can be modeled by analogy to the transmission of information. Fitts' popular model has been widely adopted in numerous research areas, including kinematics, human factors, and (recently) human-computer interaction (HCI). The present study provides a historical and theoretical context for the model, including an analysis of problems that have emerged through the systematic deviation of observations from predictions. Refinements to the model are described, including a formulation for the index of task difficulty that is claimed to be more theoretically sound than Fitts' original formulation. The model's utility in predicting the time to position a cursor and select a target is explored through a review of six Fitts' law studies employing devices such as the mouse, trackball, joystick, touchpad, helmet-mounted sight, and eye tracker. An analysis of the performance measures reveals tremendous inconsistencies, making across-study comparisons difficult. Sources of experimental variation are identified to reconcile these differences.

Fitts' law as a research and design tool in human-computer interaction

One component in the successful use of automated systems is the extent to which people trust the automation to perform effectively. In order to understand the relationship between trust in computerized systems and the use of those systems, we need to be able to effectively measure trust. Although questionnaires regarding trust have been used in prior studies, these questionnaires were theoretically rather than empirically generated and did not distinguish between three potentially different types of trust: human-human trust, human-machine trust, and trust in general. A 3-phased experiment, comprising a word elicitation study, a questionnaire study, and a paired comparison study, was performed to better understand similarities and differences in the concepts of trust and distrust, and among the different types of trust. Results indicated that trust and distrust can be considered opposites, rather than different concepts. Components of trust, in terms of words related to trust, were similar across the three...

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA395339.pdf

Foundations for an Empirically Determined Scale of Trust in Automated Systems

We conducted a classification analysis to identify factors associated with sitting comfort and discomfort. The objective was to investigate the possible multidimensional nature of comfort and discomfort. Descriptors of feelings of comfort and discomfort were solicited from office workers and validated in a questionnaire study. From this study, 43 descriptors emerged. The 42 participants rated the similarity of all 903 pairs of descriptors, and we subjected the resulting similarity matrix to multidimensional scaling, factor analysis, and cluster analysis. Two main factors emerged, which were interpreted as comfort and discomfort. Based on these findings, we postulate a hypothetical model for perception of comfort and discomfort. Comfort and discomfort need to be treated as different and complementary entities in ergonomic investigations.

Identifying factors of comfort and discomfort in sitting.

Improvements in workplace, working posture, and discomfort need to be justified in terms of improvements in performance. Previously, a visual inspection task has been investigated. The objective of the current study was to demonstrate the interactions between workplace, work duration, discomfort, working posture, as well as performance in a 2-h typing task. Three levels of keyboard heights were used to change working posture (e.g. joint angles and postural shifts), and thus presumably discomfort (e.g. rating of perceived discomfort and body part discomfort), and performance (e.g. typing speed, error rate and error correction rate). The results indicated that the hypothesized posture-comfort-performance interrelationships were partially supported. Keyboard height had effects on working posture adopted. As in previous studies, the rate of postural shift was a good indication of discomfort in a VDT task. Discomfort and postural shift rate had adverse effects on performance (e.g. error rate). However, these effects on error rate may not be strong.

Posture, discomfort and performance in a VDT task.

In a search task, area of search field, density of background characters, and number of background characters are not independent Many authors have found increases in search times with each of these factors but have not adequately controlled all three together In this experiment, eight subjects searched a set of search fields covering combinations of all three variables Search time was found to depend most heavily on number of background characters, but there were significant effects due to the other two variables For a constant number of background characters, search time decreases as density increases Direct visual lobe measurements confirmed these findings, which could have importance in visual inspection tasks

The effect of area, density, and number of background characters on visual search

In order to justify the costs of using ergonomically designed workplaces, it is necessary to relate improved posture to improved performance. This experiment used twelve subjects, four in each of t...

Colin G. Drury

Papers

Foundations for an Empirically Determined Scale of Trust in Automated Systems

Identifying factors of comfort and discomfort in sitting.

Posture, discomfort and performance in a VDT task.

The effect of area, density, and number of background characters on visual search

Posture, Postural Discomfort, and Performance: