Aacounting Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Aacounting - Assignment Example From the analysis of the working capital, one can make a conclusion that the company is doing well because the working capital position of the company has improved from the 2005 to 2006. The current ratio is a measure that is used to show the ability of a company to clear its short term debts by the use of current assets. The preferred current ratio is usually 2:1 or 1.5: 1 depending on the industry that the company is found. The company is improving in performance and that shows that the company will be able to cater for its short term obligations. However, in comparison with the industry’s average, the company is performing the average. That means that the company has potential that it can exploit so as to be in the same level as the industry players and that would contribute to the success of the company because more investors would be attracted. The acid test ratio is used to show the ability of a company to clear its short term debts with the use of current assets but excluding inventory. Inventory may at times not be liquid and that means that it cannot be f much help in a short duration of necessity. The ratios also signify the ability of the company to cater for its short term obligation using current assts. The acid test ratio for the company is also not within the industry’s average. However, the company has made significant progress and that implies that if the trend continues, the company will be able to match the industry’s average. The return on equity is the rate at which the company is able to utilize the shareholders funds. The rate should be favorable so as to ensure that the company shareholders get a reason to always do business with the company. It shows the amount of net income that is usually returned as a percentage of the equity contributed by shareholders. The ratio is useful in the measurements of the profitability of a company because it

Critical summaries (language, culture& society) (langustics Essay

Critical summaries (language, culture& society) (langustics department) - Essay Example Starting from 60s, researchers indicated inequalities among students who attend Universities. At that time 80% were white students and only 10% were black students (Francis, Kelly and Bell, 1994). The main focus of this article is the role linguistic speech codes play in students’ performance. Bernstein differentiates between ‘restricted speech code’ of low class of students and ‘elaborated code’ which refers to students from higher class. Thus, a set of words used by the latter group of students is more flexible and meets the requirements of academic education. A further discussion refers to Deconstruction theory, which relates texts of the world as being reflected in our consciousness. The authors of the article make an attempt to argue to the existent scientific canon of approaches to relation of students’ performance and language codes. They claim about a necessity to develop heterogeneous students’ body set in the limits of â€Å"p eople's history and experience situated in geography of other identities, peoples, cultures, and then to study how, despite their differences, they have overlapped one another, and are mixed together† (Francis, Kelly and Bell, 1994). This article is a modern perspective on pedagogical challenge on a new role language plays in the education process. It is not an indicator of socio-cultural differences, but a facilitator to overcome these differences and to integrate them. Language and development   In the article â€Å"Model Standards for English Language Development: National trends and a Local Response† by Terrence G. Wiley and Elizabeth Hartung-Cole, current tendencies in English learning for non-native speakers of English are discussed. On the one hand, English standards developed on the international level take into account the issue of language diversity. On the other hand, this is not enough and it is relevant to develop standards especially for non-native speak ers of English. The issue of what language standard really means has been discussed by researchers for a long period of time. Nevertheless, a crucial importance of language standard can’t be questioned. The authors introduce a concept of ‘over-prespecification’ between the curriculum and learning process (Wiley and Hartung-Cole, 2002). This concept implies a necessity to take into account external knowledge and abilities of students. Current development of English standard should be conducted in a socio-cultural context. Therefore, the authors agree with the fact that administrative training of teachers and gaining proper background knowledge about non-native speakers of English are crucial for further development of English standards on national and on local levels. Not individual students and the level of their performance should be concernd, but heterogeneous body of students. These tendencies are caused by the world’s tendencies for globalization and o verall integration. Consequently, it is relevant to develop universal model standard efficient for native and non-native speakers of English. Multilingualism and Bilingualism   The article â€Å"Bilingualism, Cultural Transmutation, and Fields of Coexistence: California's Spanish Language Legacy† by Sara Garcia is of high relevance nowadays. Different nations tend to integration and successful coexistence. On the example of English Only programs in California a national attitude to bilinguals in America is discussed. A language behavior of Spanish/English bilinguals is developed under the

Curriculum Development for Small Group Esl Essay Example for Free

Curriculum Development for Small Group Esl Essay I. Description of Learners This private tutoring course has been developed for three elementary school girls, ages 8 11. They are sisters, recent immigrants from Saudi Arabia, who will be living and attending school in the U.S. for approximately two years. These students have been assigned a private English language tutor by Cartus Intercultural Language Solutions on behalf of Chevron Corporation, as part of their family’s transfer package. The students have a language background in Arabic, which is the primary language spoken in their home. They each attend a small, private, international school, where their teachers allow them certain â€Å"ESL modifications†. Information gathered from these students’ needs assessment evaluations (to be discussed in section three) showed them to be in the early production stage of English language development. They have limited listening and speaking proficiency, a firm grasp of the Latin alphabet, and the ability to read and write at about a kindergarten level. The students were very hesitant to speak English initially, which made assessment difficult. II. Course Rationale Cartus’ language trainers develop individualized programs to meet the needs of each participant, based on the results of the initial needs assessment process. Language trainers design programs for such practical applications as function-specific skills and vocabulary and conversational proficiency in order to increase your participant’s competency and confidence. Every aspect of the training program is customized. Considering this scenario, there is no standardized curriculum. Once students’ needs have been assessed, and reachable goals have been determined, then materials must be purchased in order to meet course objectives. The primary stakeholder is the children’s father, the students themselves are the secondary stakeholders, and their elementary teachers could be considered as tertiary stakeholders. III. Needs Analysis Cartus leaves analysis and evaluation up to the individual language instructor. An interview was conducted with the father over the phone to determine his goals for each child. During this conversation he also provided insight into each child’s personality and individual English proficiency. It was then discovered that a previous trainer had conducted an English language assessment while the children were still in Saudi Arabia. This assessment can be seen in Appendix 1. Considering the results of the previous assessment, the instructor conducted one on one interviews with each child trying to gauge their levels of proficiency in the following areas: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The instructor sought to identify any gaps between what students are able to do and what they are required to do at school. Low beginning level questions, such as the ones listed below, were asked in order to define both preliteracy and literacy skills the students possessed. These initial questions were asked orally. How many brothers do you have? How many sisters do you have? What is the name of your teacher? What is the name of your baby sister? How many fingers do you have? What is your favorite toy? In addition, during the course of the program, one of the children’s teachers was consulted in order to identify more specific goals. IV. Goals and Objectives The students’ father is the primary determiner of their educational goals. He stated, â€Å"They each need to be able to read passages at a faster rate and be able to speak and conversate.† (sic) In order to achieve these goals, the instructor took into account the students’ needs and abilities and set the following objectives to meet the father’s fairly broad goal: * Know the names and sounds of all the consonants and vowels * Understand phonics concepts such as consonant combinations * Follow along, reading, and summarizing simple stories with pictures * Demonstrate understanding of everyday vocabulary * Follow simple oral instructions * Demonstrate understanding of the most fundamental, specialized vocabulary in content areas (e.g., shapes, colors, alphabet, numerals, animals) * Understand nouns, verbs, and punctuation * Understand singular and plural * Understand common and proper nouns * Understand simple past, present, and future tenses. V. Course content Lessons are conducted in the students’ home for three hours four days a week. The instructor has purchased all study materials and supplies to be used for the program. The materials are kept at the students’ home for them to use on their own over the weekend. Occasionally a student will have a homework assignment that needs to be addressed by the language instructor. In those instances the subject matter is incorporated into the curriculum and each student will learn key aspects of the material in a situational capacity. Although the students are of varying ages, due to their intimacy and language background, lessons are often conducted as a small group. It has been established that they challenge one another to speak English and are competitive when it comes to reading and responding to questions in English. They have a positive effect on one another, so the occasional situational content can be either elaborated upon or simplified as needed. Over the first months of the program, lessons were focused on advancing the students from the silent period to initial stages of speech. The students were introduced to concepts of consonants, vowels, and phonics before additional topics were explored. Once students began to speak and read with increasing frequency, they began reading sentences and discussing stories. Recently they have been able to volunteer information about themselves, their day at school, and other activities. Below are examples of lessons on vowel sounds, consonant blends, rhyming, and reading VI. MaterialsThe instructor has purchased compatible study materials to be used and shared by all of the girls. There is no one overaching core book, rather many workbooks, puzzles, games, and story books are used throughout the lessons. In addition to some of the worksheets shown above, those materials include the following: This book introduces consonant combinations such as â€Å"sl†, â€Å"st†, and â€Å"sk†. Students read the instructions and follow the instructions to fill in the blank, match sentences to corresponding pictures, and fill in crossword puzzles. This book introduces consonant combinations such as â€Å"sl†, â€Å"st†, and â€Å"sk†. Students read the instructions and follow the instructions to fill in the blank, match sentences to corresponding pictures, and fill in crossword puzzles. This phonetic puzzle reinforces students’ understanding of long and short vowel sounds, and is also used to increase vocabulary. This phonetic puzzle reinforces students’ understanding of long and short vowel sounds, and is also used to increase vocabulary. This pack of cards is used to refresh student’s memory of past lessons, and also to make short sentences or phrases. This pack of cards is used to refresh student’s memory of past lessons, and also to make short sentences or phrases. These beginning reading books provide pictoral cues to accompany the sentences. Students are able to recognize animals and food in the books and learn their English names. They are also able to practice phonetic reading skills. These beginning reading books provide pictoral cues to accompany the sentences. Students are able to recognize animals and food in the books and learn their English names. They are also able to practice phonetic reading skills. Magnetic letters are used to create words and fascilitate reading phonetically. Students make rhyming words and create new words by adding â€Å"sneaky silent e† to the ends of short vowel sound words. Magnetic letters are used to create words and fascilitate reading phonetically. Students make rhyming words and create new words by adding â€Å"sneaky silent e† to the ends of short vowel sound words. VII. AssessmentBecause these students are not graded or scored, their knowledge and ability must be assessed in less structured, more organic ways. The students attend English language school every day and have certain anxieties in regard to tests and quizzes. Assessment is performed during every lesson to determine what tools and materials are meeting the students’ needs, as well as how the students respond to the materials. The students’ father, as well as comments from classroom teachers provide vital information that the language instructor uses to assess the students, to inform future lesson content, and to raise the bar for students’ objectives.Students are on a break for the holidays, but during their last lesson they were asked some of the following questions:What is a noun?Can you each name three common nouns?What is a proper n oun? How do you write a proper noun?If one is a â€Å"fox†, what are two called?If one is a â€Å"foot†, what are two called?Can you name three words that rhyme with â€Å"cat†?Can you name three words that start with â€Å"sk† like â€Å"skip†?The word â€Å"dime†, does it have a short or long vowel sound?What gives it that sound?How much is a dime worth?What is the opposite of â€Å"up†?What is the opposite of â€Å"hot†?If your body needs food you are _______If your body needs water you are _______Their answers were used to set homework assignments and to establish new goals once lessons resume in January.Observation and interview results have indicated that the students are progressing well into â€Å"high beginner proficiency† and are beginning to understand language and use it in a limited capacity. Typically, they memorize words and phrases and can comprehend and utilize language that they havebeen taught. The curriculum focuses on applying literacy skills to the development of new knowledge. In second language acquisition, social language usually precedes academic language development.Appendix 1. References Dept. of Education, State of Tennessee. 2005. ESL Curriculum Standards: Proficiency Levels. Retrieved December 22, 2012, from http://www.fentress.k12tn.net/ESL Cartus, 2012 Intercultural and Language Training Worldwide. Retrieved December 22, 2012, from www.cartus.comFerlazzo, L., and K. Hull Sypnieski. 2012. The ESL/ELL Teacher’s Survival Guide. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.FlashKids Editors, 2010. Phonics Blends. U.S. FlashKids Books.Magnetic Letters, 2012, Lakeshore Learning Materials.Richards, J.C. 2001. Curriculum development in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Sight Words, 2012, Lakeshore Learning MaterialsWho Lives at the Pond? Parents. Minibook. Activities: Science Nature: Ages 3-6. Retrieved December 22, 2012 from www.scholastic.com Worksheets for Young ESL Learners. Retrieved December 22 from 2012,www.bogglesworldesl.com Vowel Sounds Match Ups,

Workforce Obsolescence

Workforce Obsolescence The loss of critical skills, i.e., the disappearance of non-replaceable workforce, is a problem faced by many product sectors tasked with supporting critical systems. This problem is common for organizations that must manage the DMSMS-type obsolescence problems for hardware, software and materials discussed in the other chapters of this book. For some products, the loss of worker skills and experience can be mitigated by simply adjusting hiring rates and instituting training of younger workers, however, in other sectors experience can be very difficult to replace. This chapter focuses on the loss of critical skills that are either non-replaceable or take prohibitively long times to reconstitute. 13.1 Defining Workforce Obsolescence Mismatches between the skills possessed by the workforce and the skills needed by employers create a number of issues that complicate the long-term manufacturing and sustainment of systems. These mismatches have been classified into the following three general categories: skills obsolescence, skill shortage, and critical skills loss. Skills obsolescence (also referred to as human capital obsolescence) describes situations in which workers lack the skills needed to either become employed or remain employed, (De Grip and Van Loo, 2002). This often includes the segment of the workforce that have skills, but those skills are obsolete requiring retraining of the worker. Where obsolete skills refer to skills that are no longer needed. Skill shortage describes situations where there are insufficient available skill competences to fill the needs of an organization, e.g., (Green et al., 1998). Skills shortage articulates the need to identify, train and retain the workforce to fill current and expected future skill needs. Skills shortage has many causes including the speed of technology advancement, e.g., (Duan et al., 2002), training and education gaps (Skinner et al., 2004), and can also be the result of an organizations inability or failure to protect its core skill competencies over long periods of time or during economic downturns (Melymuka, 2002). Critical skills loss is relevant to this book and is the focus of this chapter. Critical skills loss refers to the loss of skills that either cannot be replaced or require a prohibitively long time to reconstitute, (Sandborn and Prabhakar, 2015). In this case reconstitution of the skills may require many years if possible at all. Critical skills loss is a special case of organizational forgetting, i.e., the loss of knowledge gained through learning-by-doing. Organizational forgetting can be caused by labor turnover, periods of inactivity, and/or failure of an organization to institutionalize tacit knowledge (Brsanko et al., 2010). Critical skills loss is a permanent and involuntary form of organizational forgetting that may be unrecoverable. Critical skills loss (in the context of legacy system support) is the result of long-term (20+ years) of workforce attrition where highly-skilled workers retire without a sufficient number of younger workers to learn their skills and take their p lace.[1] Critical skills loss is not necessarily the result of poor planning or lack of foresight (and although activity is light, it is not nonexistent); rather it is an inevitable outcome of the organizations dependence on a highly-specialized highly-critical skill set for which there is small, but non-zero, demand, (Sandborn and Prabhakar, 2015). It should be stressed that critical skills loss is a long-term phenomenon it occurs gradually over 20+ years, i.e., over the span of several generations of management coupled with mergers, acquisitions, and product line changes, critical skills often diffuse and eventually disappear. In the context of this book, the salient issue that defines workforce obsolescence for legacy mission-, infrastructure-, and safety-critical systems is critical skills loss. 13.2 How Critical Skills Loss Impacts Systems and Where it Comes From Critical skills loss is rarely a problem in high-volume low-skill manufacturing applications, e.g., assembly-line workers. For these applications, an appropriate workforce nearly always exists or can be readily constructed through training programs. However, managing human skills obsolescence is becoming a significant problem for organizations tasked with supporting legacy systems. These support organizations need to be able to understand, forecast and manage a highly-specialized workforce with potentially irreplaceable skill sets. The system support and management challenges created by the loss of critical human skills have been reported in many industry sectors including: healthcare (Waldman, 2004), nuclear power (Nuclear Workforce Planning, 2008), aerospace (Testimony of Elliot Pulham, 2002), and other enterprises(Leibold and Voelpel, 2002). In the IT industry, the shortage of mainframe application programmers experienced in legacy applications is very problematic, (Goodridge and McGee, 2002) and (Hilson, 2001); in this case the necessary skills are no longer being taught because demand has dropped and younger workers interests are elsewhere. The loss of critical skills is most troublesome for organizations that must provide long-term support for legacy systems. For example, for defense systems, the loss of critical skills is potentially devastating: Even a 1-year delay in funding for CVN-76 [aircraft carrier] will result in the loss of critical skills which will take up to 5 years to reconstitute through ne w hires and training. A longer delay could cause a permanent loss in the skills necessary to maintain our carrier force. (Congressional Record, 1994). The causes of critical skills loss include: education and training declines (e.g., universities no longer educate engineers in the programming languages that are used in many legacy systems, (Shead, 2013); younger workers may perceive that certain occupations are in decline, e.g., nuclear power (Nuclear Workforce Planning, 2008) and are therefore discouraged from entering them; similarly younger workers may perceive certain occupations as not cutting-edge and therefore not enter them (Ahrens et al., 1995) (Adolph, 1996); younger workers may leave jobs supporting legacy systems to pursue other positions that appear to be more lucrative and exciting (Figure 13-2 in Section 13.3.3 shows an exit age distribution for a legacy control system); the shrinkage of feeder occupations, e.g., historically the U.S. Navy has provided highly-skilled workers to the nuclear power industry (Nuclear Workforce Planning, 2008); older workers protecting their jobs by not passing knowledge along to younger workers, e.g., (AndolÃ…Â ¡ek, 2011); and fundamental differences between young and old workers regarding job perceptions (i.e., social and cultural influences) (Goodridge and McGee, 2002). 13.3 Quantifying the Impact of Critical Skills Loss Critical skills loss impacts the sustainment of mission-, infrastructure- and safety-critical systems. As the human capital that possesses the skills to support a system shrinks, the time that the system is down (non-operational) when the system requires support will increase. Downtime increases lead to increased business interrupt time, which results in a loss of revenue for manufacturing systems. Increases in downtime in the transportation, defense and service industries decreases system availability, which can lead to a loss of revenue, safety compromises, property damage, and loss of life (e.g., emergency vehicle unavailability). In this section, we briefly review the applicability of some existing models to quantifying the impact of critical skills loss and then describe one modeling approach that estimates the financial impact of the problem. 13.3.1 Existing Approaches Nearly all of the existing modeling and quantitative treatments address the problem of skills obsolescence, which is a different problem than the critical skills loss problem addressed in this chapter. Most skills obsolescence treatments assume that workers skills become outdated or are otherwise no longer useful, possibly as a result of automation and other advances in technology. These works focus on the mitigation of skill decay in a workforce over time. The only existing work applicable to critical skills loss focuses on knowledge preservation, i.e., the capture of non-replenishable knowledge, (Joe and Yoong, 2004) (Hailey and Hailey). Some applicable work has also been done on retirement wave planning (Friel, 2002); however, this work focuses on head count rather than skill content. The modeling performed by Bohlander and Snell (2010) addresses a situation that is similar to critical skills loss, however, worker attrition and the costs associated the unavailability of the workers is not considered. In Bordoloi (1999), a model for different skill level workers that enter and exit a company is developed; the model takes into account the rate at which the company gains and loses workers. However, the model in(Bordoloi, 1999) does not estimate workers experience as a function of time and therefore does not determine the impact of critical skills loss on supporting systems. In the planning model developed by Huang et al.(2009) the goal is the determination of an ideal hiring rate using differing worker skill levels. While this model uses workforce simulation and determines the ideal hiring rate, the model does not take into account the costs incurred by the unavailability of workers. The basis for most workforce planning models is the physical sum of people employed, (Holt, 2011). However, the model developed by Holt, however, does not consider the aging of individual workers over time. There are models that have some applicability to critical skills loss in the maintenance workforce planning literature, e.g., (Koochaki et al., 2013) (Martorell et al., 2010) (Ait-Kaki, et al. 2011) and (Ahire et al., 2000). These models focus on optimizing maintenance scheduling and resource allocation. Maintenance policies have the goal of maximizing plant or process line availability while concurrently minimizing cost through the timely presence (and appropriate skill set) of maintenance workers. Koochaki et al., 2013) points out that maintenance workers are usually highly skilled and therefore difficult to recruit and that the efficient and effective use of a scarce maintenance workforce is very important. The model in (Koochaki et al., 2013) addresses the impact of limited ma intenance workers (i.e., maintenance resource constraints) on the grouping of maintenance activities while comparing age-based replacement and condition-based maintenance (CBM). In (Ahire et al., 2000), the makespan (which is the total length of the schedule) is minimized for a groups of preventive maintenance tasks constrained by workforce availability. Other papers treat the influence of CBM on maintenance scheduling and workforce planning, for examples see (Koochaki et al., 2013) and the references contained therein. In general these references focus on the determination of the optimum size maintenance workforce. 13.3.2 Modeling Human Skills Loss A detailed model for the loss of non-replinishable maintenance resources has been developed in (Sandborn and Prabhakar, 2015) and (Sandborn and Williams, 2016). The technical development of the model is briefly summarized here, see (Sandborn and Prabhakar, 2015) and (Sandborn and Williams, 2016) for more detail. The model uses historical workforce data to forecast the size and experience of the workforce pool as a function of time. The workforce experience pool is then used to determine the cost of supporting (sustaining) a system as a function of time. The model was created to address the questions: what will todays skills pool look like in the future? and what impact will the future skills pool have on the organizations ability to continue to support the system? A key assumption in this model is that sufficient experience exists today to adequately support the system, and we wish to forecast the future workforce skills pools experience relative to todays skills pool. The model has four primary inputs: a current age distribution (fC), a hiring age distribution (fH), an exit age distribution (fL) and the hiring rate (H). Assuming a stationary analysis, the distribution of exit ages (fL) and the distribution of hiring ages (fH) and are constant. This does not mean that the same number of people are hired each year, but rather that the hired peoples ages are always distributed equivalently. The same assumption is made for fL. The distribution of current ages (fC) is used as an initial condition. To assess workforce pool size and experience over time, we must project the experience of the workers in the pool into the future. This projection starts with the initial conditions in the pool and accounts for age related loss and subsequent hiring. The level of experience within the skills pool changes over time and can be determined from: 1) the new hires added to the skills pool; 2) the attrition (loss) rate of skilled workers; and 3) the varying skill levels of the workers in the pool and how those skill levels (experience) increase as workers remain in the pool. The net frequency of people in the pool of age a during year i relative to year 0 is given by, (13-1) where, i is the number of years from the start of the analysis, a is age, and Hi is the fraction of new hires per year (fraction of the pool size at the start of the analysis period i = 0). The first term in the brackets in Equation 13-1 is the current workforce pool size (relative to year 0), the second term in the brackets in Equation 13-1 is the number of new hires (relative to year 0), and the multiplier accounts for the retention rate. Note, Equation 13-1 assumes that the hiring rate, Hi is the same for all ages, a. The initial condition for the model is that the fraction of people of age a relative to year 0 in year 0 is given by,. The cumulative net frequency of people in the skills pool, NNET, in year i is determined by summing Ni(a) over all the ages (y = youngest to r = retirement), (13-2) Calculating the size of the workforce pool (head count) over time is necessary but not sufficient to capture an organizations future ability to support a system because workers have different levels of experience. Because of the varying experience, not all workers provide an equivalent level of value to the support of the system. In this model, experience is defined as the length of time that a worker has spent in a particular position. The cumulative experience in the workforce pool in year i, Ei, is calculated using, (13-3) where, RE and IE map age to the experience measured in years (RE and IE are determined using a parametric model from actual data). Note, while experience has the units of time, Ei, which is used in this model, represents the cumulative experience relative to the initial condition. The time to perform maintenance in year i is found from the cumulative experience using, (13-4) where, is the time to perform a maintenance activity with a skills pool having E0 experience at i = 0. In Equation 13-4 the time required to perform maintenance increases as experience decreases due to the following factors: 1) less-experienced workers require more time to perform maintenance (learning curve effects), and/or 2) if the pool of workers capable of performing the required maintenance task shrinks, appropriate workers may not be available at every site and may have to travel from a different location, which takes time. The most significant impact of the loss of critical human skills for legacy systems is the ability to perform system support (corrective maintenance) in a timely manner. Corrective maintenance costs consist of: spare parts, labor, downtime, overhead, consumables/handling, and equipment/facilities. When a corrective maintenance event occurs, the cost of performing the required maintenance action is, (13-5) where is the fraction of the maintenance events of severity level j that result in a business interrupt, is the cost of replacement parts (if replacement parts are needed) in year i,is the cost of labor (per unit time) in year i (with appropriate overhead applied), and is the cost of business interrupt (per unit time) in year i. , and are assumed to be discounted using an appropriate discount rate. 13.3.3 Example System Support Case Study A detailed case study was previously published in (Sandborn and Prabhakar, 2015) and (Sandborn and Williams, 2016). In this section we only provide a few highlights from that case study. The case study considered the support of a legacy control system for a chemical product manufacturing company (the system was originally developed and deployed in the 1970s) and has over 2000 instances (plants) installed and currently operating and supported worldwide. In this case, because the process line availability is very important, unscheduled downtime cannot be tolerated. The model overviewed in Section 13.3.2 requires three distribution inputs: the current age distribution (fC), the distribution of hiring age (fH) and the distribution of exit age (fL). Two of these distribution inputs are readily available from organizations field data: the hiring age (fH) and a current age distribution (fC), Figure 13-1. The current age distribution (in Figure 13-1b) has a mode of 55 years, which is very close to the early retirement age in the organization, thereby demonstrating the issue that this chapter is focused on. The exit age distribution (fL) shown in Figure 13-2 for this case study was synthesized using the distributions for fH(a) and fC(a) in Figure 13-1 along with the assumption of a stationary process. Figure 13-2 is a bathtub curve. It indicates that workers either exit early or exit late (but few exit between ages 45 and 60. The younger workers exit because they are changing jobs within the company. The company modeled in this case study, has had difficulty retaining young workers (engineers) to support the legacy system. The younger engineers have a tendency to relocate to other job opportunities within the company that they perceive as having better long-term career prospects. Above age 60 the workers are retiring. Figure 13-2 supports the critical skills loss observation made in Section 13.2 that younger workers leave legacy system support jobs (presumably for other positions). The number of workers (pool size) is shown in Figures 13-1 and 13-2, but the experience contained within the pool is not reflected in these distributions. To get from pool size to the workforce pool experience, the mapping from age to applicable experience is needed. The parameters for the mapping function in Equation 13-3 were generated from the years of experience (on the control system) and the years of service to the company. The net pool size (number of workers) over time as a fraction of the pool size in 2010, NNET, is shown in Figure 13-3a. Figure 13-3b shows the experience relative to 2010, and Figure 13-3c shows the average age of the workers in the pool. The results in Figure 13-3 assume no hiring, H = 0. Figures 13-3a and 13-3b indicate that although a 10% drop in head count occurs in the first 6 years, the experience remains approximately constant (existing workers are gaining enough on-the-job experience to offset the drop in head count). After 2016, the experience drops as the oldest and most experienced workers leave and are not being sufficiently replenished. Assuming that the lost skills are replenishable (they are not for the real company treated in this case study), we can estimate what the future hiring rate, Hi, would have to be to preserve the initial level of experience, E0, in the skills pool. Equation 13-1 is used to determine the annual hiring rate, Hi, that is required to replenish the cumulative experience lost as a result of attrition and retirement. Figure 13-4 shows results for hiring rate, Hi, relative to the initial pool size P0as a function of the number of years from the start of the analysis. Figure 13-4 shows that no hiring is required in the first five years (we are not allowing hiring to drop below 0, a hiring rate below 0 would reflect a layoff situation). A hiring rate of over 6% is required starting in 2017 for 9 years and then settles to 2-5% for all the years thereafter. When H is greater than zero in (4), the hiring rate is applied to the entire hiring age distribution, fH. The required hiring rate solved for in Figure 13-4 accounts for both the time required for new workers to learn the skills necessary to support the system and the exit age distribution in Figure 13-1. Figure 13-5 shows the annual cost of supporting the legacy control system through year 2040 (all 2000+ instances of the system are costed here). The cost modeling is performed using a stochastic discrete-event simulator that samples time-to-failure distributions for the components of the control system to obtain maintenance events (determining the maintenance event dates and the components that need replacement). Subsystem-specific (and severity category specific[2]) failure distributions are sampled to obtain failure dates for the system. At each maintenance event, maintenance resources are drawn and a cost is estimated using Equation 13-5. Most of the maintenance events do not result in business interrupt time because they only impact one of the two parallel control systems and = 0, however, a small fraction (the most severe events) result in dual control system failures where > 0. The risk of dual failures and the resulting business interrupt is captured by the differing severit y categories. The specific data associated with the system count, the subsystem/severity category reliabilities, and the cost of business interrupt time is proprietary to the customer and therefore not included here. For this case study, was determined to be 0.54, meaning that when the number of people in the pool drops below 54% of the number that are in the pool initially (in 2010), the extra maintenance time penalty (modeled by (15)) is applied. Figure 13-5 shows two support cost results. The results demonstrate that there is minimal effect of skills loss prior to 2030. In year 2028 existing lifetime buys of spares parts (hardware) start to run out resulting in the cost step between 2028 and 2030. We obtain the lower curve in Figure 13-5 when there is no skills loss, Ei/E0 = 1 for all i in Equation 13-4. In this case there is still an annual cost increase caused by part obsolescence that is mitigated via lifetime buys of parts (these buys commit significant capital to the pre-purchase of spare parts and long-term holding costs). The higher cost curve in Figure 13-5 is the case where no replenishment of lost skills is possible (H = 0), this is close to reality for the company considered in this case study. 13.4 Discussion Workforce planning means ensuring that you have the right number of people, with the right skills sets, in the right jobs, at the right time. This chapter presents a model that enables workforce planning in cases where the workforce is non-replenishable. The model developed estimates both the number of skilled employees (workforce pool size) and the cumulative experience in the workforce pool. This information is used to determine the resources available to maintain a system as a function of time. Cumulative experience dictates the time (and the resultant cost) required for workers to perform the maintenance activities necessary to support the system. Because of the prohibitively large cost of legacy system replacement, these systems are rarely replaced unless a catastrophic failure occurs or their support costs become impractical. The model can potentially be used by companies to support the development of business cases for system replacement, see (Sandborn and Prabhakar, 2015). Numerous important assumptions were made in the development of the model. In the solution presented here, we assume that years on the job is the only way workers can gain experience. We have not accounted for methods that could be used to accelerate the rate at which workers become more experienced, e.g., capturing older workers knowledge in knowledge bases [29,30] could accelerate experience. We have performed a discrete-time analysis because the input data that was available to us only exists annually. A continuous-time solution could also be developed, but one must be careful to match the model to the form of the input data. There are several indirect consequences of the loss of critical skills that we have not addressed, and which would be challenging to quantify in terms of cost. The workers that are maintaining systems (particularly engineers) are likely to be performing other beneficial tasks in addition to corrective maintenance. Besides corrective maintenance, they may also perform: preventative maintenance, projects intended to upgrade the reliability and/or performance of the system, and knowledge transfer activities. As workforce resources decrease, it is reasonable to assume that all tasks, except corrective maintenance, would decrease. Even if sufficient resources remain available for corrective maintenance tasks, an inability to perform the other tasks that the engineers might do results in a loss of: maintenance efficiency improvements, system reliability improvements that could decrease future maintenance requirements, and system performance. Further, if the job satisfaction amongst the eng ineers that are forced to only perform maintenance decreases then their retention may be negatively impacted. There are other factors that may modify the case study presented herein. These factors include location (culture certainly impacts the likelihood that highly-skilled workers remain in system support jobs), gender, the product sector, etc. These effects could be analyzed with the presented in this chapter model if sufficient data existed. [1] For many types of legacy systems, 5 or more years of on-the-job experience may be required to become competent. [2] The level of maintenance required (which dictates the maintenance resources required) and the degree of business interrupt associated with the maintenance event are governed by the severity categories. See From (Sandborn and Williams, 2016) for details.

Should the Drinking Age be Lowered? Essay -- Law, Sociology

Although exceptions to every generality exist, alcohol is usually present in most gathering where adults are also in attendance. If one really examines the idea, alcohol is usually at every social event even if adults are not. At this point it would probably be important to know who actually is considered to be an adult. From country to country the answer varies but in the United States of America anyone of the age of eighteen is liable and treated just like adults of any age. Consequently, one could say that the previous statement is technically, in the majority of circumstances, incorrect in that when alcohol is around so are adults. When mentioned in such a way, nothing seems to be out of place except that in the United States the legal alcohol consumption age is twenty-one. There are not many sides one may take when contemplating this alcohol consumption law, one is either for it or against it. Many believe that if the drinking age is lowered it should rightfully be lowered to eighteen. These individuals have a number of reasons to support their ideology. John McCardell Jr. is one of those individuals and actually developed a complete organization in 2006 known as Choose Responsibility that promotes his philosophy (Cloud). McCardell Jr. is the head of Middlebury College and believes eighteen to twenty year olds should be eligible to consume alcoholic beverages as long as they are licensed (Cloud). To receive this license one must first complete a course that is around forty-two hours long and consists of the explanations of the chemistry, history, psychology, and sociology of alcohol that may include AA, alcoholics anonymous, meetings (Cloud). McCardell Jr., along with others, also believes that if one is considered an a... ...at can be done to minimize all the problems alcohol provides; I think the first step in assimilating a similar attitude is by education and through example from older adults to young adults. Maybe McCardell’s forty-two hour course of everything one should know to fully understand the results of consuming alcohol would be beneficial for the general public. With that being said the age should still remain twenty-one and adults should not be one-hundred percent intolerable towards teens that might have slipped some alcohol by, after all who has not broken a rule here and there? I believe if a little ignorance is given to the provocation it will disappear. Works Cited Cloud, John. "Should the Drinking Age Be Lowered?" Time.com. Time US, 06 June 2008. Web. 05 Feb. 2012. Scrivo, Karen Lee. "Drinking on Campus." CQ Researcher 20 Mar. 1998: 241-64. Web. 5 Feb. 2012.

Charles Dickens :: GCSE English Literature Coursework

Charles "David Copperfield" Dickens (1812 - 1870) Charles John Huffam1 Dickens was born 7 February 1812, second child of John and Elizabeth Dickens. The family would eventually number seven children, plus a son who died in infancy, and since neither parent seemed able to economize, things were generally very hard financially for the family. Charles attended school for a time in Kent, where the happiest days of his childhood were spent, but when the family moved to London in 1822, Charles was simply never re-enrolled in school, and was left to wander London largely unattended2. When the oldest child, Fanny, was sent to the Royal Academy of Music for training as a pianist, Charles, then 12, was deemed old enough to work to help pay the family expenses. So, for six months, he worked in a factory pasting labels onto containers of shoe polish. While there, John Dickens was thrown into debtor's prison, and released a few months later under the Insolvency Act3. It was a feud between John Dickens and the factory owner that eventually got Charles out of the factory and back in school, though Elizabeth tried her best to make him go back, which Charles never quite forgave her for. The factory experience will show up again and again in Charles' novels, and it also left him with something of a phobia about being dirty. In 1827, Charles left school again, more voluntarily this time, and took work as a law clerk, and then a parliamentary reporter. Though he also toyed with the idea of taking the stage (he loved amateur theatricals all his life), he eventually starts writing sketches for two of the London newspapers4, publishing them under the name 'Boz'. In 1835, now quite well-established in his sketch-writing, Charles proposed to Catherine Hogarth, daughter of George Hogarth, who had been advisor to Sir Walter Scott. They married in April of 18365, and the sweet-tempered Catherine generally allowed Charles to take charge of everything, including even the eventual naming of their children. That same year, Charles's began writing The Pickwick Papers, and suddenly he was famous. Imitations of Pickwick appeared everywhere. The now firmly upper-middle-class Charles still has many family problems, however. His father is still in debt more often than not, even going so far as to try to borrow money using his son's name, and Charles ends up paying most of John's debts.

Novel Object Recognition Test

The novel object recognition (NOR) test was used to determine working and spatial memory. In this study 75cm Ãâ€" 50cm Ãâ€" 30cm transparent box was used. Three days prior to the habituation sessions, the rats were exposed to the box to familiarize with the environment. On the test day, they were exposed to identical objects to acclimatize with for 5min thereafter, the rats were then returned into their home cage with food and water. Thirty minutes later, the probe test was conducted, each rat was placed inside the box with one of the object replaced by a novel one for 5 min. It is important that (a) the objects have a â€Å"neutral† shape in terms of its significance to the animal, (b) be devoid of any marked characteristics, such as odor and movement, for instance (Li et al., 2011). The total time spent exploring the two objects was recorded. â€Å"Object exploration† is defined as directing the nose and vibrissae to the object at a distance of less than 2 cm, as if â€Å"smelling† it with caution, while bumping, turning around or sitting upon the object were not considered. Discrimination ratio, which is the difference in exploration time, expressed as the ratio of total exploration time with both objects in the choice phase (this ratio allows to adjust for individual or group differences in the total amount of exploration time) was calculated as percentage memory index as shown below:Time spent with new object X 100Memory index (%) = Total time spent with both old and new object (Ogundele et al., 2014).Morris Water MazeThe Morris water maze (MWM) is another apparatus designed to examine the memory impairment in rodents, thus it is highly specific for hippocampal function. This study was carried out as earlier described by Barnhart et al (2015). Each trial began by placing the rat on the platform for 20 s in a bid to allow orientation to extramaze cues found around the apparatus. After orientation, rats were gently lowered into the pool by facing the wall at one of 3 positions (i.e., each at the center of the wall of a different quadrant not housing the platform). After the rat was released into the pool, the observer had to retreat away from the pool to a constant position within the room, such that he served as an additional distal visual cue. Maximum swim time was set at 60 s. Any rat that locates the platform before 60 s was removed from the pool immediately, while the rats that are unable to locate the platform after 60 s of swimming were gently guided to the platform and allowed to re-orient to the distal visual cues for an additional 20 s before being eventually removed from the pool. After removal from the pool, each rat was manually dried with a terrycloth towel and placed in a plastic cage with wood shavings for at least 5 min before returning to the home cage. Each rat was trained twice a day for 2 days with an inter-trial interval of approximately 30 min. Training was conducted at roughly the same time every day in bid to minimize variability in performance due to time of day (Morris, 1984). To examine spatial reference memory, a probe test was administered 24 h after the last training session. During the probe test, the platform was removed from the pool and the rat was allowed to swim freely for 1 min. The rationale of this task was to determine number of time the initial location of the platform was crossed/visited.