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DURING 1990 the Hyde Group of Companies will be making a substantial investment in enlarging resources and capabilities that will add factory and office space as well as acquiring plant and computers. The 18 member companies which are concentrated in a relatively small area of Manchester, will benefit from this expansion which is to meet a constantly increasing demand from the aerospace and off road vehicle market sectors in addition to other commitments in the nuclear and general engineering fields.

Within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which administers the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), a NIST technical division has initiated a Baldrige‐based effort to increase the effectiveness of its research and services. The Precision Engineering Division is responsible for providing US industry with practical access to the international and national standards of length and for conducting a diverse program of R&D and services in measurements and standards. These measurements and standards relate to industrial control of dimensional tolerances on features of manufactured goods. The start‐up of this Baldrige‐based effort reported factors such as has involved: introductory training of all staff on the basic concepts of the MBNQA and team processes; training on leading and facilitating teams and site visits to other agencies and industry organizations carrying out TQM‐type programs. This paper reports on employee‐identified successes and failures, managerial lessons learned, and some potential next steps in the start‐up effort’s further development.

The knowledge and practice that are known as accounting are little more than a complex series of conventions. The accounting historian, or researcher, or practitioner, cannot turn to any original authoritative source for confirmation or clarification on basic points of principle. To the financially untrained observer all talk of an unstructured and flexible foundation to accounting must seem to be at odds with the precision and authority with which he sees financial statements being presented to the reader, be he shareholder, banker or manager. Profit and loss accounts and balance sheets look so beautifully cut and dried, so obviously “right”. Well of course they are, but that is only because accountants have adopted and refined conventional procedures to produce such tidy statements. There is nothing unarguable or sacrosanct about accounts—absolutely nothing.

The concept of buildability is an approach to architectural design which relates to the awareness of the designer for the method of construction of the building. It is the taking into consideration of the process of construction to a high degree in the construction of the building. The opposite of this approach could be loosely called an ‘artistic’ method, where the designer hands a concept drawing to somebody else and says ‘build that’, with little concern for how the design should be built (definition contributed by James Harrison, Senior Lecturer, Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore). In addition to this design orientation, buildability, as viewed by the building industry, is the ease with which the building can be built. Yet these definitions seem to lack precision when placed into operation in the design environment. To understand the notion of buildability further, a study of concrete construction techniques, pre‐cast or in situ, were used to evaluate the extent to which buildability techniques were employed by the designers and the effectiveness of the approaches. The methodology used followed existing approaches to studying buildability but expanded and focused on two case study buildings. In this way, a more holistic picture of the influence of the construction system and its buildability could be gained.

Investigates the use of computer analysis tools in design; including information on speed or torque probes, and the use of fine element analysis and the Cosmos/M analysis system for design and verification of probes—stressing speed and simplicity of operation. Outlines the nature and time‐saving advantages of simultaneous engineering; reporting on a visit to see simultaneous engineering at work on a current project relating to aircraft passenger door assembly.

This study aims to establish the laser links between satellites among large-scale distributed satellite systems; a combined attitude control strategy containing two stages is proposed in this paper.

These two stages are: one is the attitude initial pointing control to change the attitude of satellite pointing to the other satellite based on the position information of each satellite; the other one is the high precision attitude tracking control to scan the uncertainty cone because the initial pointing control accuracy is not enough to establish the laser link. At the initial pointing control stage, a method to determine the target attitude of each satellite is presented based on the position information of each satellite, and the fuzzy adaptive control algorithm is used to control the satellites to its calculated attitude. Then, at the high precision attitude tracking control stage, a strategy for laser link acquisition and scanning the uncertainty cone by the lasers of the spacecraft is proposed, and an angular velocity tracking scanning controller is designed while the convergence of the attitude tracking error is ensured through Lyapunov–Krasovskii theory.

Simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm, and the laser link for a large-scale distributed satellite system with super long distance is achieved through a combined attitude control strategy.

A combined attitude control strategy is valid for a large-scale distributed satellite system with super long distance.

A combined attitude control strategy can be used to achieve laser link acquisition for a large-scale distributed satellite system like space gravitational wave detection.

A combined attitude control strategy can provide a way to solve the typical problem that pointing control accuracy is not enough to establish the laser link for a large-scale distributed satellite system.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate gender differences in mathematics performance and in self‐regulated learning (SRL) in Malta.

A representative sample of 400 Grade 11 students (aged 14‐15) attending Maltese mixed‐ability schools undertook a mathematics test and responded to a questionnaire. The resulting performance and SRL measures were used to answer four questions empirically.

Girls performed significantly better than boys (r = 0.2) and this difference is mainly owing to the weaker performance of low‐achieving boys. While all SRL components identified by factor analysis (self‐efficacy, intrinsic value, test anxiety and SRL strategy use) produced a significant main effect on performance, girls reported greater use of SRL strategies, boys claimed to be more self‐efficacious and intrinsically motivated while no significant gender difference was reported for test anxiety. Finally, the students' use of SRL strategies accounts for the differential performance in mathematics of Maltese boys and girls.

This empirical study confirms that gender differences constitute a potentially important source of variation in students' mathematics performance and in their SRL. The issue of increasing the students' use of SRL strategies emerges as a possible strategy aimed at combating gender differences in mathematics performance as well as the underachievement of students, particularly that of the low‐achieving boys in Maltese secondary schools.

As intervention science develops, researchers are increasingly attending to the long-term effects of interventions in academic settings. Currently, however, there is no common taxonomy for understanding the complex processes through which interventions can produce long-lasting effects. The lack of a common framework results in a number of challenges that limit the ability of intervention scientists to effectively work toward their goal of preparing students to effectively navigate a changing and uncertain world. A comprehensive framework is presented to aid understanding of how interventions that target motivational processes in education produce downstream effects years after implementation. This framework distinguishes between three types of processes through which interventions may produce long-term effects: recursive processes (feedback loops by which positive effects can build on themselves over time), nonrecursive chains of effects (“domino effects” in which proximal outcomes affect distinct distal outcomes), and latent intrapersonal effects (changed habits, knowledge, or perceptions that affect how students respond in different situations in the future). The framework is applied to intervention research that has reported long-term effects of motivation interventions, evidence for the processes described in this framework is evaluated, and suggestions are presented for how researchers can use the framework to improve intervention design. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the application of this framework can help intervention scientists to achieve their goal of positively influencing students’ lifelong trajectories, especially in times of change and uncertainty.