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This paper develops a model that allows consideration of not only the total maintenance costs but also the overall probability of a system breakdown when determining the time intervals between preventive maintenance activities. Using the model, which assumes that component failures follow a Weibull distribution, managers can determine the required preventive maintenance interval to achieve a desired probability of system failure, and they can calculate the total expected costs of both breakdowns and maintenance actions. The model’s application is illustrated using the impact of four different maintenance policies. The model assures top management that the unavailable system time due to equipment breakdown will be within a specified limit.

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of an industry-funded qualitative interdisciplinary research project that has produced a new approach to motorway noise management called “noise transformation”.

Four iterative design tests guided by listening as methodology. These included field recordings, laboratory tests and two field tests. Field tests were conducted in combination with ethnographers, who verified community responses to field-based transformations.

Transformation requires an audible perception of both background and introduced sounds in all instances. Transformation creates a 1–2 dB increase in background sound levels, making it counterintuitive to traditional noise attenuation approaches. Noise transformation is an electroacoustic soundscape design method that treats noise as a “design material”. When listening to motorway noise transformations, participants were actually experiencing another rendering of a sound that they had already acquired a degree of attunement to. Thus, they experienced transformations as somehow familiar or normal and easy to feel comfortable with.

Noise transformation is a new approach to noise management. Typically, noise management focusses on reduction in dB levels. Noise transformation focusses on changing the perceptual impact of noise to make it less annoying. It brings together urban design, composition and ethnography as a means to think about the future design of outdoor environments affected by motorway traffic noise, and should be of interests to planners, designers and artists. The authors have structured the paper around listening as methodology, through which both design and ethnography outcomes were achieved.

To share information about the American Society for Engineering Education Engineering (ASEE) Engineering Libraries Division (ELD) Annual Conference on instruction, training and support for engineering education. A conference report that touches on disciplines of engineering, technology education and engineering librarianship.

Conference report.

The paper provided a review of programs and technology presentations by engineering librarians of interest to libraries and information professionals.

The purpose is: first to review the marketing segmentation literature and its antecedents; second, to evaluate the organizational practice of marketing segmentation in a specific commercial context noted for its dynamism and complexity, fashion retailing; third, to assess theoretical and practical implications; and finally to identify an agenda for future research.

Through the analysis of an instrumental case study examining practice in fashion retailing this paper makes a contribution to current market segmentation debates. Sensemaking properties are used as a disciplined structure in which to report the case and make sense of segmentation.

This research demonstrates that the definition and scope of market segmentation is broader than the current marketing literature suggests. In practice, based on evidence from this research, contemporary segmentation solutions include implicit assumptions, judgement and compressed experience, which are latent within the modelling processes.

Further research needs to be extended to different organizational settings in order to develop further our understanding of the tacit and intuitive aspects of segmentation decisions.

Intuitive decision‐making processes and tacit knowledge employed in them are difficult to replicate and make explicit. However, a better understanding of these intuitive processes would offer practitioners an opportunity to systematically improve the quality of decision‐making.

This research broadens normative theoretical perspectives on market segmentation by highlighting intuitive and tacit dimensions. Combining sensemaking within the case study analysis has helped structure thought trials to provide a rare qualitative insight into the managerial construction of segmentation.