Word: idea
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...organizing philosophy behind TPS is popularly ascribed to a concept called kaizen - Japanese for "continuous improvement." In practice, it's the idea of empowering those people closest to a work process so they can participate in designing and improving it, rather than, say, spending every shift merely whacking four bolts to secure the front seat as each car moves down the line. Continuous improvement constantly squeezes excess labor and material out of the manufacturing process: people and parts meet at the optimal moment. Kaizen is also about spreading what you've learned throughout the system. And then repeating...
...That was the idea. But the fact that Toyota has produced so many imperfect cars is evidence that its system developed faults. Management experts like John Paul MacDuffie, a co-director of the International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, place the blame on the company's headlong growth in the past 10 years. In 2000, Toyota produced 5.2 million cars; last year it had the capacity to make 10 million. Since 2000, when Toyota had 58 production sites, it has added 17. In that time, in other words, Toyota has added the capacity...
...kinds of social phenomena. The theories are not straightforwardly linked to the gender, class, or ethnicity of their creators. For example, when reading Marx, students learn about how ideologies sometimes take the form of statements that appear universal, but hide interests or points of view. Anyone can use this idea to perform an ideology critique of ideas or points of view that present themselves as universal. Isn’t Lee’s editorial an attempt at an ideology critique of the Social Studies curriculum? Is Lee, by using this technique, unwittingly reproducing the straight male perspective of Karl...
...characters, fiction and nonfiction, care passionately about deep questions. I think the dichotomy between thinking and the passions is a false one. The idea that often comes across in novels of these dry, sterile thinkers who need some little woman to come and teach them about feelings and all that—that’s bullshit. It’s just not true. Thinking is a passion itself...
...some experts say the inherent ambiguity of DSDs makes the idea of treatment problematic. For instance, one sex development disorder, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, causes females to produce abnormal amounts of male sex hormones and is treated by administering steroids to normalize hormone levels. Panel participant Dr. Eric Vilain, professor of human genetics, pediatrics and urology at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, points out that there is tremendous variation in hormone levels even in typical females, which makes determining a baseline virtually impossible. More important, Vilain says, is the ethical question of whether physicians should artificially alter hormone levels...