The impact of modern education in the Ouramant region of Iranian Kurdistan: a grounded study

Ouraman Takht is a rural, highly mountainous and dry region located in the southwest Kurdistan province of Iran. Traditionally, the socio-economic structure of the region was based on limited farming, herding, gardening, and manual labor. Recently, modern education has been introduced to the region. The purpose of this study was to explore, from the Ouraman perspective, the impact that modern educational practices have had on the Ouraman traditional way of life. Data were collected over a period of 6 months using ethnographic methods including observation, interview, videotaping, and photography. Data were analyzed using Grounded Theory Methodology. Enabling/Constraining was the concept constructed from data to explain the impact that modern education has on the Ouramat region. The people of Ouraman perceived modern education as increasing the economic stability and growth of the region while simultaneously threatening cultural beliefs and the traditional way of life. In addition to the “core” category of “Enabling/Constraining, 13 other major categories were derived from data. These included: job necessity, Providing Economic Prosperity, empowerment, increasing public knowledge, positive notion, concerns about religious beliefs, emphasis on children’s education, religious justifications, modernism requirements, traditional concerns, education for girls, expression of satisfaction, and public embracement. The results are presented in a paradigm model consisting of conditions, interactions and consequences around the core category and can be used to understand the impact of change from the introduction of modern education can have on a traditional society.     

AFT regression-adjusted monitoring of reliability data in cascade processes

Today’s competitive market has witnessed a growing interest in improving the reliability of products in both service and industrial operations. A large number of monitoring schemes have been introduced to effectively control the reliability-related quality characteristics. These methods have focused on single-stage processes or considered quality variables which are independent. However, the main feature of multistage processes is the cascade property which needs to be justified for the sake of optimal process monitoring. The problem becomes complicated when the presence of censored observations is pronounced. Therefore, both the effects of influential covariates and censored data must be taken into account while presenting a monitoring scheme. In this paper, the accelerated failure time models are used and two regression-adjusted control schemes based on Cox-Snell residuals are devised. Two different scenarios with censored and non-censored data are considered respectively. The competing control charts are compared in terms of zero-state and steady-state average run length criteria using Markov chain approach. The comparison study reveals that the cumulative sum based monitoring procedure is superior and more effective. It should be noted that the application of the proposed monitoring schemes are not restricted to manufacturing processes and thus service operations such as healthcare systems can benefit from them.     

Location-allocation problem for intra-transportation system in a big company by using meta-heuristic algorithm

This paper presents the location-allocation problem of parking facilities in Mobarakeh Steel Company. The aim is to find the optimal location for the parking facilities and allocate travels between departments to each parking facility. To optimize the cost and facing the transportation demands of all departments, a mathematical model is designed and solved by a commercial software package. Also, the number of vehicles allocated to each parking facility is determined. A hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm combining a genetic algorithm with parallel simulated annealing is developed which can be used even in more complicated structure of the problem. The results show that this hybrid algorithm is highly efficient in solving this kind of problems.     

On the monitoring of multi-attributes high-quality production processes

Over the last decade, there have been an increasing interest in the techniques of process monitoring of high-quality processes. Based upon the cumulative counts of conforming (CCC) items, Geometric distribution is particularly useful in these cases. Nonetheless, in some processes the number of one or more types of defects on a nonconforming observation is also of great importance and must be monitored simultaneously. However, there usually exist some correlations between these two measures, which obligate the use of multi-attribute process monitoring. In the literature, by assuming independence between the two measures and for the cases in which there is only one type of defect in nonconforming items, the generalized Poisson distribution is proposed to model such a problem and the simultaneous use of two separate control charts (CCC & C chats) is recommended. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to monitor multi-attribute high-quality processes in which not only there exist more than one type of defects on the observed nonconforming item but also there is a dependence structure between the two measures. To do this, first we transform multi-attribute data in a way that their marginal probability distributions have almost zero skewnesses. Then, we estimate the transformed mean vector and covariance matrix and apply the well-known χ² control chart. In order to illustrate the proposed method and evaluate its performance, we use two numerical examples by simulation and compare the results. The results of the simulation studies are encouraging.     

A qualitative investigation of the intersection of leisure and identity among high school students: application of grounded theory

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine leisure as a context for identity formation among the high school students in Shiraz, Iran. Twenty male students (3rd grade of secondary school) from different high schools participated in this study. Data analysis using qualitative grounded theory methodology yielded eight categories and a core category. The categories led to the conclusion that post-traditional context and resource of leisure time culminated in reflexivity in the participants’ identity.