Blood on the Ground: Canada and the Southern Campaign in Afghanistan

For the Americans, it's no longer just “boots on the ground”: it's blood on the ground that counts.

Joel J. Sokolsky

     

Application of dirichlet integrals for curtailment problems in sampling inspection

The standard problem in sampling inspection is to consider plans with and without curtailment. Curtailment causes difficulty and authors rarely give exact results (i.e., exact OC and ASN functions) for curtailed procedures. In this article we regard curtailment as an inverse sampling procedure and use Dirichlet integrals to obtain exact formulas for the OC, the ASN, and also the variance of the number of observations required under three types of plans: no curtailment, semicurtailment (for rejection only) and two-sided curtailment. Different sections of the article deal with the single sample, the two-stage, and the multiple-stage sampling problems. New tables for carrying out the single-sample procedure are included in the article. The authors feel that this article presents new directions and new ways of dealing with problems associated with quality control.     

Measuring newness

This article deals with “newness,” an important characteristic of research-and-development (R&D) projects. Newness consumes resources and provides effectiveness or profit, and is mainly considered to be of a qualitative nature yielding only to an expert's intuition. This article is focused on a numerical measure of newness and the closely connected concept of technological advance. The measure is described in a technical parameter space against a set of analogous objects, presented by its center, eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Specific features and behavior of the selected measure of newness are analyzed. A numerical example is also included. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.