The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) is an independent organization devoted to the development of standards.

American Society for Testing and Materials

(1991). Applied Linear Regression Models. Journal of Quality Technology: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 76-77.

Applied Linear Regression Models

Why are a select few service firms better at what they do - year in and year out - than their competitors? For most senior managers, the profusion of anecdotal "service excellence" books fails to address this key question. In this pathbreaking book, world-renowned Harvard Business School service firm experts James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr. and Leonard A. Schlesinger reveal that leading companies stay on top by managing the service profit chain. Based on five years of painstaking research, the authors show how managers at American Express, Southwest Airlines, Banc One, Waste Management, USAA, MBNA, Intuit, British Airways, Taco Bell, Fairfield Inns, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the Merry Maids subsidiary of ServiceMaster employ a quantifiable set of relationships that directly links profit and growth to not only customer loyalty and satisfaction, but to employee loyalty, satisfaction, and productivity. The strongest relationships the authors discovered are those between (1) profit and customer loyalty; (2) employee loyalty and customer loyalty; and (3) employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Moreover, these relationships are mutually reinforcing; that is, satisfied customers contribute to employee satisfaction and vice versa. Here, finally, is the foundation for a powerful strategic service vision, a model on which any manager can build more focused operations and marketing capabilities. For example, the authors demonstrate how, in Banc One's operating divisions, a direct relationship between customer loyalty measured by the "depth" of a relationship, the number of banking services a customer utilizes, and profitability led the bank to encourage existing customers to further extend the bank services they use. Taco Bell has found that their stores in the top quadrant of customer satisfaction ratings outperform their other stores on all measures. At American Express Travel Services, offices that ticket quickly and accurately are more profitable than those which don't. With hundreds of examples like these, the authors show how to manage the customer-employee "satisfaction mirror" and the customer value equation to achieve a "customer's eye view" of goods and services. They describe how companies in any service industry can (1) measure service profit chain relationships across operating units; (2) communicate the resulting self-appraisal; (3) develop a "balanced scorecard" of performance; (4) develop a recognitions and rewards system tied to established measures; (5) communicate results company-wide; (6) develop an internal "best practice" information exchange; and (7) improve overall service profit chain performance. What difference can service profit chain management make? A lot. Between 1986 and 1995, the common stock prices of the companies studied by the authors increased 147%, nearly twice as fast as the price of the stocks of their closest competitors. The proven success and high-yielding results from these high-achieving companies will make The Service Profit Chain required reading for senior, division, and business unit managers in all service companies, as well as for students of service management.

The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value (Цепочка создания прибыли в сфере услуг: как ведущие компании связывают прибыль и рост с лояльностью, удовлетворением и ценностью)

Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age.

Metrics and Models in Software Quality Engineering

A comprehensive review of ejector design, performance, and applications

Background
In recent years there has been a growing appreciation of the issues of career preference in medicine as it may affect student learning and academic performance. However, no such studies have been undertaken in medical schools in Jordan. Therefore, we carried out this study to investigate the career preferences of medical students at Jordan University of Science and Technology and determine factors that might influence their career decisions.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186%2F1472-6920-8-32.pdf

Factors affecting medical students in formulating their specialty preferences in Jordan.

The resilient modulus of the materials used in various pavement layers has been used extensively as an important material property in structural design of pavement. The state of stress and moisture content of cohesive soils have been observed to exert significant effects on the measured resilient modulus. Since the moisture content in the cohesive subgrade soils underneath the pavement undergoes seasonal changes due to infiltration of precipitations and since characterization of moisture and stress dependent resilient modulus of cohesive soils is a demanding and tedious task, there is a practical need for a predictive equation for the resilient modulus as a function of stress states and moisture content. This paper presents a new predictive equation for the resilient modulus of cohesive soils using the concept of soil suction. The accuracy of the proposed model is validated against experimental data of A-4 and A-6 soils conducted by the writers as well as by other data available in the literature. The proposed model provides advantages over the existing predictive equations by reducing the number of tests and soil specimens needed for determining the regression coefficients in the equation. The proposed predictive equation compares well with the empirical equation in the new mechanistic empirical pavement design guide (MEPDG) in predicting the effect of moisture content variation on the resilient modulus. The proposed model provides an advantage over the MEPDG empirical equation in taking into account the effects of both the stress state and moisture content on the resilient modulus of cohesive soils.

Predicting Moisture-Dependent Resilient Modulus of Cohesive Soils Using Soil Suction Concept

The goal of this study is to check the validity of using the waste vegetable oil as an additive to the asphalt cement, to be used later in the construction of flexible pavements. This will be considered as a proper and legal method of disposing this waste material. In this study, 1%, 2%, 4%, 6%, and 8% of waste vegetable oil by volume of the asphalt cement were used. Several laboratory tests were performed on the original and waste vegetable oil-modified asphalt cements. It was found that choosing the appropriate amount of waste vegetable oil will improve most of the tested properties. Therefore, it can be concluded that using the suitable amount of waste vegetable oil as a cement modifier is feasible, and can be considered as a proper and legal method for disposing the waste vegetable oil.

Mohammad Ali Khasawneh

Papers

A comprehensive review of ejector design, performance, and applications

Factors affecting medical students in formulating their specialty preferences in Jordan.

Predicting Moisture-Dependent Resilient Modulus of Cohesive Soils Using Soil Suction Concept

Laboratory characterization of asphalt binders modified with waste vegetable oil using SuperPave specifications

Investigation of the use of nano-refrigerants to enhance the performance of an ejector refrigeration system