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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the dependent competing failure reliability of harmonic drive (HD) with strength failure and degradation failure.

Based on life tests and stiffness degradation experiments, Wiener process is used to establish the accelerated performance degradation model of HD. Model parameter distribution is estimated by Bayesian inference and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and stiffness degradation failure samples are obtained by a three-step sampling method. Combined with strength failure samples of HD, copula function is used to describe the dependence between strength failure and stiffness degradation failure.

Strength failure occurred earlier than degradation failure under high level accelerated condition; degradation failure occurred earlier than strength failure under medium- or low-level accelerated condition. Gumbel copula is the optimum copula function for dependence modeling of strength failure and stiffness degradation failure. Dependent competing failure reliability of HD is larger than independent competing failure reliability.

The reliability evaluation method of dependent competing failure of HD with strength failure and degradation failure is first proposed. Performance degradation experiments during accelerated life test (ALT), step-down ALT and life test under rated condition are conducted for Wiener process based step-down accelerated performance degradation modeling.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the performance of a turbine structure of the oil and gas Egyptian company in terms of reliability, mean time to failure (MTTF), mean time to repair (MTTR) and mean time between failures (MTBF) under fuzzy environment and working criteria. This paper examines the impact of the failure of various components on the complete turbine structure of the oil and gas system.

To overcome the problem of uncertain behavior of available data for various components, the right triangular generalized fuzzy number (RTrGFN) is proposed to be taken into the account to express the uncertainty which attains some tolerance in data. Furthermore, reliability indices are calculated with the help of the Lambda Tau method and the arithmetic operations on right generalized triangular fuzzy numbers (RTrGFN).

This paper explores the reliability of a repairable 3 out of 4 structure of turbines and along with the other parameters namely MTTF, MTTR and MTBF; under a fuzzy environment. Failure rates and repair times are expected to be exponential. The ranking of components of the structure is being found to decide the priority for maintenance.

This paper investigates the performance of the system with different spread/tolerance like 15%, 25% and 50% of crisp data. It helps to predict realistic results in the range value. To enhance the system's performance, the most important item of the system requires greater attention. For this, the authors find the sensitive part by ranking. For ranking, an extended approach has been developed to find the sensitive unit of the system by using the right triangular generalized fuzzy number. This paper explores the most and least sensitive component of the system, which helps the maintenance department to plan the maintenance action.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

This exploratory study examined the qualitative and quantitative financial measures that best describe the patterns, predictors, or degree of success for vision driven organizations. A framework was developed within the methodology to qualitatively partition and link the financial contributions of the organizational and strategic factors within visionary organizations. The qualitative measures were identified utilizing content analysis within the literature stream. Five financial indicators were chosen to represent the respective quantitative measures from 57 visionary organizations over a 16‐year period. The inferential test results from two multiple discriminant analyses and verifying MANOVA tests show the accuracy for predicting the level of a visionary organization at 84 percent. The results of this research suggest that group membership, either visionary or average visionary, can be predicted reliably from a set of financial indicators. This research further suggests that organizations can enhance their opportunities for sustained competitive advantage and supernormal profits by focusing on the alignment of ten core elements of vision driven strategies identified from within the research stream.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors affecting budget implementation among local governments in Indonesia, where rules are relatively strict and risks of facing corruption charges are high.

This study employs regression analyses using a sample of 1,151 local government-years.

This study finds that the level of budget implementation is affected by the leadership factors (i.e. mayors’ term, tenure and age) and the proportion of capital expenditures. The level of budget implementation is relatively lower when the mayor is in the second term, is in the early years of the five-year tenure and is over 60 years old. Higher proportion of capital expenditures also reduces the level of budget implementation.

This study contributes to the literature by presenting empirical evidence as to what factors explain the variations in the level of budget implementation among local governments especially under strict rules and a risky environment.

THERE have been official links for the past twelve years between the Institute of Incorporated Work Study Technologists and Time and Motion Study. Many of its members have been valued contributors to our pages and the Institute has had editorial space for its news.

This study aims to explore the underlying issues related to the development of socially responsible investment (SRI) sukuk in Malaysia. It identifies factors attracting investors and issuers, as well as challenges for the development of SRI sukuk (Islamic bond) in Malaysia.

This study conducted semi-structured interviews to collect data from the institutional investors, SRI sukuk issuers and arrangers, as well as researchers. A total of 19 experts were approached in which 10 participated in the interview. The thematic analysis technique is used to report the findings.

This study uncovers that social contribution through business activities (i.e. investment in the education sector) is the key motivational drivers for the investors and issuers. Besides, investment risks, lack of performance measurement standards, high transaction costs, risks of return, shortage of enough Islamic bonds, investors’ confidence and lack of awareness are the major challenges for the development of SRI sukuk instruments.

Due to the challenges in finding experts on this subject matter, this study was able to manage only 10 interviews from the participants, which is a small sample size. However, the findings of this study cannot be ignored. Future research should carry out with a large sample size (i.e. at least 30 interviews) to validate the current findings.

This study is among the pioneer in Malaysia, which explores the influencing factors of selecting Islamic bonds as an investment option. This paper provides some valuable implications for investors through discovering the challenges for the growth of SRI sukuk in Malaysia, which can also be applicable in a global setting.

Anthropologists have long discussed the ways in which their discipline has been entangled, consciously and unconsciously, with the colonized populations they study. A foundational text in this regard was Michel Leiris' Phantom Africa (L'Afrique fantôme; Leiris, 1934), which described an African ethnographic expedition led by Marcel Griaule as a form of colonial plunder. Leiris criticized anthropologists' focus on the most isolated, rural, and traditional cultures, which could more easily be described as untouched by European influences, and he saw this as a way of disavowing the very existence of colonialism. In 1950, Leiris challenged Europeans' ability even to understand the colonized, writing that “ethnography is closely linked to the colonial fact, whether ethnographers like it or not. In general they work in the colonial or semi-colonial territories dependent on their country of origin, and even if they receive no direct support from the local representatives of their government, they are tolerated by them and more or less identified, by the people they study, as agents of the administration” (Leiris, 1950, p. 358). Similar ideas were discussed by French social scientists throughout the 1950s. Maxime Rodinson argued in the Année sociologique that “colonial conditions make even the most technically sophisticated sociological research singularly unsatisfying, from the standpoint of the desiderata of a scientific sociology” (Rodinson, 1955, p. 373). In a rejoinder to Leiris, Pierre Bourdieu acknowledged in Work and Workers in Algeria (Travail et travailleurs en Algérie) that “no behavior, attitude or ideology can be explained objectively without reference to the existential situation of the colonized as it is determined by the action of economic and social forces characteristic of the colonial system,” but he insisted that the “problems of science” needed to be separated from “the anxieties of conscience” (2003, pp. 13–14). Since Bourdieu had been involved in a study of an incredibly violent redistribution of Algerians by the French colonial army at the height of the anticolonial revolutionary war, he had good reason to be sensitive to Leiris' criticisms (Bourdieu & Sayad, 1964). Rodinson called Bourdieu's critique of Leiris' thesis “excellent’ (1965, p. 360), but Bourdieu later revised his views, noting that the works that had been available to him at the time of his research in Algeria tended “to justify the colonial order” (1990, p. 3). At the 1974 colloquium that gave rise to a book on the connections between anthropology and colonialism, Le mal de voir, Bourdieu called for an analysis of the relatively autonomous field of colonial science (1993a, p. 51). A parallel discussion took place in American anthropology somewhat later, during the 1960s. At the 1965 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Marshall Sahlins criticized the “enlistment of scholars” in “cold war projects such as Camelot” as “servants of power in a gendarmerie relationship to the Third World.” This constituted a “sycophantic relation to the state unbefitting science or citizenship” (Sahlins, 1967, pp. 72, 76). Sahlins underscored the connections between “scientific functionalism and the natural interest of a leading world power in the status quo” and called attention to the language of contagion and disease in the documents of “Project Camelot,” adding that “waiting on call is the doctor, the US Army, fully prepared for its self-appointed ‘important mission in the positive and constructive aspects of nation-building’” a mission accompanied by “insurgency prophylaxis” (1967, pp. 77–78). At the end of the decade, Current Anthropology published a series of articles on anthropologists’ “social responsibilities,” and Human Organization published a symposium entitled “Decolonizing Applied Social Sciences.” British anthropologists followed suit, as evidenced by Talal Asad's 1973 collection Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. During the 1980s, authors such as Gothsch (1983) began to address the question of German anthropology's involvement in colonialism. The most recent revival of this discussion was in response to the Pentagon's deployment of “embedded anthropologists” in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. The “Network of Concerned Anthropologists” in the AAA asked “researchers to sign an online pledge not to work with the military,” arguing that they “are not all necessarily opposed to other forms of anthropological consulting for the state, or for the military, especially when such cooperation contributes to generally accepted humanitarian objectives … However, work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another violates professional standards” (“Embedded Anthropologists” 2007).³ Other disciplines, notably geography, economics, area studies, and political science, have also started to examine the involvement of their fields with empire.⁴