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The essay builds a timeline of the friendship and intellectual intercourse between Sraffa and Wittgenstein with data from both their Cambridge Pocket Diaries (CPDs) and their correspondence and biography. The timeline distinguishes five phases: their first meetings until June 1930, the time in which their weekly conversations run uninterrupted (October 1930–June 1933); the period in which the enchantment of their previous meetings was broken (October 1933–July 1936); the following decade in which their meetings were in some years intense, in others nearly inexistent, until Sraffa decided to put an end to their conversations; and finally the years preceding Wittgenstein’s death. The meetings between Sraffa and Wittgenstein from their CPDs are listed in the Appendix.

Providing operational approach to end-users' motivational tendencies in housing facilitates user-centered approach enhancing person-environment congruence. The operational approach is highly critical in case of inaccessibility of end-users in decision making, i.e. mass housing. Therefore, this study aims at explaining end-users' housing motivations from their housing attributes preferences, through a theoretical framework developed based on Maslow's theory. The investigation was carried out by using a self-administered questionnaire conducted on 127 Iranian postgraduate students of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, and their spouse who lived alongside them. They were selected from those who lived more than one year in mass housing apartments in Malaysia. Using exploratory factor analysis, the housing attributes preferences were analyzed to underlie the latent structure and relations among them; the extracted factors were also labeled based on the different level of needs. Then, conducting one sample t-test hierarchical tendencies among the different motivational factors were identified. Referring to Maslow's theory to explain the concept and characteristics of housing needs results in identification of two different categories of housing attributes in association with the different level of needs. Accordingly, primary levels of needs that associate with relatively tangible and concrete attributes are more likely to be content-specific and predictable. The higher levels of needs that associate with relatively complicated and abstract attributes are more likely to be problematical, confusing, and non-predictable.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the customer satisfaction by offering online personalized recommendation system.

By employing an innovative associative classification method, this paper is able to predict a customer’s pleasure during the online while-recommending process. Consumers can make an active decision to recommended products. Based on customer’s characteristics, a product will be recommended to the potential buyer if the model predicts that he/she will click to view the product. That is, he/she is satisfied with the recommended product. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed recommendation system is validated through a Taobao shop.

The results of the experimental study clearly show that the online personalized recommendation system maximizes the customer’s satisfaction during the online while-recommending process based on an innovative associative classification method on the basis of consumer initiative decision.

Conventionally, customers are considered as passive recipients of the recommendation system. However, customers are tired of the recommendation system, and they can do nothing sometimes. This paper designs a new recommendation system on the basis of consumer initiative decision. The proposed recommendation system maximizes the customer’s satisfaction during the online while-recommending process.

The aim of this study is to investigate the perceived benefits offered by integrated management system (IMS) in the readymade garments (RMG) sector in Bangladesh and the respective linkage with corporate social responsibility (CSR) to promote sustainable development. This study presents a list of IMS benefits composed of different international management standards according to ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2015, OSHAS 18001: 2007 and SA 8000:2014.

To identify the possible benefits of IMS, a systematic literature review was conducted from 2009 to 2019, namely, in the database of Elsevier, Emerald and John Wiley. A questionnaire survey was developed with the purpose of examining the perceived main benefits of IMS. The questionnaire was e-mailed to 355 representatives of 15 RMG sectors in Bangladesh. A total of 256 complete and useable responses were received, constituting the base of this work. Subsequently, statistical analysis was conducted using SPSS 20 software.

The main findings of the present study show that the most important five benefits of IMS in RMG sector in Bangladesh are better capacity to achieve organization’s objectives, optimum use of various resources, business sustainability, synergies of different management policies and reduction of duplication efforts.

Two major limitations of the study are as follows: first, it is not a longitudinal study; second, IMS benefits were examined in the national sector context. The present study has both theoretical and practical implications. The study presents a comprehensive list of IMS benefits that contribute to the existing literature from a theoretical point of view. On the other hand and from a practical point of view, this study encourages managers to implement IMS in their organizations.

This study helps in understanding the contribution of IMS benefits to cleaner production and CSR in Bangladesh. The focus on the benefits of IMS in the RMG sector in Bangladesh is another significant aspect of this study because it promotes the development of environmental policies linked to CSR with stakeholder engagement, as a driver to sustainable development.

This study examines a sharp decline of school attendance among white children in the Southern US after the Civil War. According to Census data, the school-attendance rate among whites in the Confederate states declined by almost half from 1860 to 1870, whereas the rate in Northern states was approximately stable. This shock left the South approximately three decades behind its antebellum trend. We account for little of this drop with household variables plausibly affected by the War. However, a select few county-level variables (notably the drop in wealth) explains around half of the decline, which suggests a systemic explanation. We adopt a model-based approach to decomposing the decline in schooling into demand versus supply factors. On the supply side, the region saw a decline in wealth and public resources, but we observe a stable relationship between time in school and literacy or adult occupation, which is not consistent with a contracting constraint on school quantity or quality. Nevertheless, further research is required to determine how much the contraction in school access affected attendance. On the demand-side, we present suggestive evidence of a decline in the return to school (measured by the relative wage of engineers to laborers). Relatedly, we see a “brain drain”: in longitudinally linked census samples, educated Southerners were more likely to migrate out of the South after the War.

Uses a rigid viscoplastic formulation to simulate hot and cold forging processes. The finite element solution uses mixed methods in which the independent variables can be velocities, pressures and deviatoric stresses. Uses interface elements both in the mechanical and the thermal analysis, to take into account the effects of contact and friction, thermal conductivity of lubricants and heat generated by friction. The code developed includes an adaptive mesh refinement, triggered by an error estimator based on energy norms evaluated from nodal stress values, recovered from a local continuous polynomial expansion, and those given by the numerical solution. Assesses the code developed, using experimental results.

Associating robot manipulators with industrial welding operations is common and maybe one of the most successful applications of industrial robots. Nevertheless, it is far from being a solved technological process, mainly because the welding process is not fully understood but also because robots are still at an early satge of development, being difficult to use and program by regular operators. This is also true for Human Machine Interfaces (HMI), which are not intuitive to use and are therefore unsatisfactory. In this paper we discuss these problems and present a system designed with the double objective of serving our R&D efforts on welding applications, but also our need to assist industrial partners working with welding setups. Frequently industrial partners are not happy with available commercial systems, requiring tailored solutions that could be adapted to several robots and robot controllers. The developed system is explained in some detail, and demonstrated using two test cases which reproduce two situations very common in industry: multi‐layer butt welding (used on big structures requiring very strong welds) and multi‐point fillet welding (used for example on structural pieces for the construction industry).

This study aims to improve the reception and positioning of materials in the warehouse, as well as the internal logistics of a bus manufacturing company by acting upon the processes of supply line management.

This study is based on the action research methodology which, through a practical approach, intends to generate transferrable knowledge to other organizations whose situations are similar to that of this study. The practical actions and the knowledge acquired co-create the changes needed for the improvement processes.

Through these improvements, it is possible to standardize supply and eliminate the retention of picking carts on the line, simplify the management of materials provided in supermarket boxes, improve the control of materials and facilitate the process of picking and materials storage. A kanban card-based supply system was also expanded to the bus assembly line, allowing more control over valuable materials.

This study has demonstrated how the implementation of lean techniques on a bus assembly line can lead to increased consistency of supply to the line and improved working conditions, both in the production and warehouse areas. Furthermore, it has set a new standard of the internal logistics processes and the inclusion of process recording in the working instructions.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of a maintenance philosophy, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), on the operational performance of the Portuguese industry, identifying how it enables the systematic reduction of waste in maintenance.

A structured questionnaire was constructed and sent to 472 Portuguese enterprises, having obtained a sample constituted of 84 valid answers. With a five-point Likert scale, it was possible to assess the impact of the TPM on five operational performance dimensions, being them: quality, flexibility, productivity, safety and costs.

It was found that the planned maintenance, together with education and training are the practices with the highest degree of implementation in the Portuguese industry, exceeding 70% for both. The productivity is the dimension with a higher degree of impact from the implementation of TPM and costs the dimension that suffered a lesser impact.

This paper shows and analyses the current state of TPM implementation in the Portuguese industry and it will be useful for maintenance professionals, researchers and others concerned with maintenance, in order to understand the effects of TPM implementation on the operational performance of the Portuguese industries.

The findings from this paper will be valuable for professionals who desire and are looking forward to implement an effective maintenance approach in the maintenance management system, in order to achieve the excellence in maintenance.

Succeeding in export markets remains a challenging task for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) operating in developing countries. Empirical studies from these regions on SMEs’ internationalisation remain scarce bringing contrasting evidence to those emerging from developed countries. To increase understanding on these issues, the present study adopts a novel fuzzy-set comparative analysis technique to investigate the combination(s) of different resource factors driving Algerian SMEs’ export performance. Using a sample of 103 exporters, the study identifies two distinct resource configurations likely to boost SMEs export performance. The present study holds important implications for the internationalisation literature and the export promotion organisations in developing countries.