Paul M.E. Shutler

Total quality management in education: problems and issues for the classroom teacher

Total quality management (TQM), a management philosophy developed for industrial purposes, is now attracting increasing attention in the field of education. Different interpretations of TQM in industry, however, may result in contrasting outcomes when TQM is applied in schools. Briefly reviews how TQM operates in the industrial context and clarifies how the philosophy of TQM may be translated into the context of education. Examines one inter‐pretation of TQM which aims at improving the quality of the production system in order to produce a quality product with “zero defects”. This may lead to a teaching and learning process which focusses exclusively on achieving good examination results. This is contrasted with a second interpretation of TQM as a never‐ending cycle of improvement in the system of production. In the context of education, this may lead to continually improving the quality of instruction in order to encourage students to become critical and creative thinkers in a fast‐changing technological world.

The challenge of ISO 9000 certification in higher education

Addresses the question of how ISO 9000, the international standard for quality management systems, may best be applied to higher education. Begins with a concise but systematic description of the requirements of ISO 9000 for industry in terms of a simplified model of a factory. Argues that the product of higher education must be the actual learning of the students and not merely the provision of learning opportunities. Hence shows how the requirements of ISO 9000 for higher education may be interpreted in terms of a simplified model of a university. Highlights the key educational management issues raised and reviews how they are currently being addressed in practice.

Coded aperture imaging of fusion source in a plasma focus operated with pure D2 and a D2-Kr gas admixture

The coded aperture imaging (CAI) technique has been used to investigate the spatial distribution of DD fusion in a 1.6 kJ plasma focus (PF) device operated in, alternatively, pure deuterium or deuterium-krypton admixture. The coded mask pattern is based on a singer cyclic difference set with 25% open fraction and positioned close to 90° to the plasma focus axis, with CR-39 detectors used to register tracks of protons from the D(d, p)T reaction. Comparing the coded aperture imaging proton images for pure D2 and D2-Kr admixture operation reveals clear differences in size, density, and shape between the fusion sources for these two cases.

A priority list based heuristic for the job shop problem

A priority list for the job shop scheduling problem is defined to be any permutation of a set of symbols where the symbol for each job appears as many times as the number of its operations. Every priority list can be associated in a natural way with a feasible schedule, and every feasible schedule arises in this way. Priority lists are therefore a representation of feasible schedules that avoid the problems normally associated with schedule infeasibility. As a result, the three ingredients of local search heuristics, namely picking initial starting schedules, constructing search neighbourhoods and computing makespans, become faster and easier when performed in the space of priority lists rather than in the space of feasible schedules. As an illustration of their usefulness, a priority list based simulated annealing heuristic is presented, which, although simple, is competitive with the current leading schedule based simulated annealing and tabu search heuristics.

A priority list based heuristic for the job shop problem: part 2 tabu search

Following a recent paper by the same author, a priority list-based tabu search heuristic is compared with the leading schedule-based tabu search heuristic of Nowicki and Smutnicki. More search neighbourhoods are required to achieve a given average makespan, but each priority list neighbourhood is searched much faster than the corresponding neighbourhood in the space of feasible schedules. Priority list-based tabu search therefore outperforms schedule-based tabu search in terms of elapsed CPU time.

An improved branching rule for the symmetric travelling salesman problem

This paper presents an improvement to an existing branch and bound algorithm for solving the symmetric travelling salesman problem. The lower bound used is the standard one obtained from the sequence of minimal spanning 1-trees computed via subgradient optimization, but the branching rule is new. Rather than selecting for inclusion or exclusion those edges which violate the tour constraints in the final 1-tree of the sequence, we consider edges which are present in roughly half of the final few 1-trees. This results in a decision tree whose number of nodes grows by powers of two rather than three, hence significantly reducing the total number of decision nodes required to solve the problem.

Analysis of Linear Time Sorting Algorithms

We derive CPU time formulae for the two simplest linear time-sorting algorithms, linear probing sort and bucket sort, as a function of the load factor, and show agreement with experimentally measured CPU times. This allows us to compute optimal load factors for each algorithm, whose values have previously been identified only approximately in the literature. We also present a simple model of cache latency and apply it not only to linear probing sort and bucket sort, where the bulk of the latency is due to random access, but also to the log–linear algorithm quicksort, where the access is primarily sequential, and again show agreement with experimental CPU times. With minor modifications, our model also fits CPU times previously reported by LaMarca and Ladner for radix sort, and by Rahman and Raman for most significant digit radix sort, Flashsort1, and memory tuned quicksort.

Mean free path of the hard spheres gas

We show how to modify the classical Enskog factor for the mean free path of the hard spheres gas in the microcanonical ensemble to take account of the effect of the boundary. We also present computer simulation results for the mean free path of the hard spheres gas across all densities and for a number of particles from 2 to 1000. The excellent agreement between theory and data should allow this topic, which has been neglected in the past in favour of the molecular dynamics ensemble, to be included in undergraduate physics laboratories.

Applying Boltzmann's definition of entropy

Boltzmann defined entropy by the formula where is the volume of phase space occupied by a thermodynamic system in a given state. He postulated that is proportional to the probability of the state, and deduced that a system is in its equilibrium state when entropy is a maximum. This paper attempts to compute directly in a number of interesting and practical cases by adopting a more mathematical viewpoint than is conventional. This allows the student a firmer grasp of the concept of entropy without losing sight of the physical interpretation. By maximizing the entropy, the following results are deduced: the equation of state of an ideal monatomic gas, the exponential decay of atmospheric pressure with height, and a known but not widely appreciated generalization of Troutons rule governing the equilibrium of a liquid with its vapour.

Fusion reactions in a plasma focus operated with 3He-D2 and 4He-D2 gas mixtures

A 3 kJ plasma focus (PF) device was operated with two different gas mixtures: 3He-D2 and 4He-D2, both having He/D atomic ratios of 1 : 1. For the 3He-D2 mixture, the fusion reactions D(3He,p)4He and D(d,p)3H were measured simultaneously using CR-39 nuclear track detectors located inside a pinhole camera positioned on the forward PF axis. A double-layer arrangement of two 1000 μm thick CR-39 detectors permitted the separate registration of protons from the D(3He,p)4He and D(d,p)3H reactions. For the 4He-D2 mixture, the D(d,p)3H protons were registered by a single CR-39 layer. Radial track density distributions were obtained for each series of experiments. For the 3He-D2 mixture, it was found that D(3He,p)4He and D(d,p)3H fusion yields were of similar magnitude, but the D(3He,p)4He fusion is concentrated close to the pinch column, whereas the D(d,p)3H fusion occurred relatively far from the pinch. The results for D(d,p)3H fusion in the 4He-D2 mixture enabled an informative comparison to bemade with the corresponding 3He-D2 data.