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April 5th, 2008 by 
Manufacturing Business
R.I. Loses 500 More Manufacturing Jobs.
More manufacturing jobs are leaving the state of Rhode Island. KIK Custom Products, a Canadian company, announced Monday it will close its Cumberland plant, which employs 400 people, sometime this year. In Bristol, a division of Saint Gobain Performance Plastics is eliminating one of its plastics product lines and about 90 jobs. According to the company, the production of the product is moving to Mexico. The Bristol plant will keep only about 70 jobs in Rhode Island. ‘We expect this move to improve the overall efficiency of our operations,’ said Susan Lindsey, a company spokeswoman. Since the beginning of the year, Rhode Island has lost nearly 3,000 jobs with most being lost in the manufacturing industry. ‘Individuals, companies are struggling. Not just here in Rhode Island. This is happening around the country.
(2007), pp. 120-123.
Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 33, No. 1. (1995), pp. 132-163.
Geographical Review, Vol. 76, No. 1. (1986), pp. 20-34.
The National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 was a response to concern about environmental deterioration. Much state legislation duplicated provisions about information disclosure in environmental impact statements and about the use of open hearings in the approval process. Successful location of many projects now depends on public acceptance and citizen influence on permitting agencies. Environmental protection remains a nationwide concern, a situation that may be the most important legacy of the federal and state policy legislation.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 75, No. 2. (1985), pp. 227-240.
The National Environmental Policy Act and the pollution control powers of environmental protection agencies present a potentially significant new influence on the location of economic activity within the United States. This study examines whether traditional factors such as markets, labor, and materials remain predominant in manufacturing-location decision making, despite the recently added dimension of environmental regulations. Personal interviews and mailed questionnaires were used to identify the factors that were most important in the location of 162 new branch plants of large U.S. corporations. For most of the locational decisions investigated, environmental regulations did not rank among the most important factors considered; when such regulations were of some significance, uncertainties about when the necessary permits would be obtained were more important than spatial variations in direct costs. The results indicate that environmental regulations have had no consistent effect on the size of the search area, the number of sites considered, the sizes of facilities built, or the decision to expand existing plants versus building new plants. Environmental regulations will not lead to major shifts in the location of industry within the U.S. for the traditional location factors remain predominant.
Regional Science and Urban Economics, Vol. 34, No. 1. (January 2004), pp. 71-100.
This paper provides some recent evidence on the distribution of manufacturing activity across cities in the US. For overall manufacturing, the number of establishments increases more than proportionally with city population, total employment increases in proportion to city population, and the employee size of an establishment is stochastically decreasing as city population increases. While these results are partly driven by the differences in industry composition across cities, for many industries larger cities tend to accommodate more employment through an expansion in the number of establishments, but not necessarily through an increase in average establishment size.
(1998)
Manufacturing enterprises are now moving towards open architectures for integrating their activities with those of their suppliers and customers within wide supply chain networks. Traditional knowledge engineering approaches with large scale or very large scale knowledge bases are not suited for such widely distributed systems. Agent-based technology provides a natural way for resolving this problem. This paper presents a hybrid agent-oriented infrastructure for modeling manufacturing…
Semiconductor Manufacturing, IEEE Transactions on, Vol. 9, No. 2. (1996), pp. 182-190.
One of the outstanding problems of photolithography is the measurement of development parameters, particularly in one’s own manufacturing line. We present an inexpensive practical method for obtaining values of development parameters for use in photolithography modeling. The method utilizes the actual production equipment used in the fab, as well as the computer modeling package for which the development parameters are being collected. In addressing experimental geometries with which one may carry out such data collection, we discuss the critical issue of standing waves and their impact on measurement accuracy. Two techniques are presented for solving the problem of standing waves and their extreme impact on the quality of collected data. One involves creating a photoactive component latent image in which there are no standing waves. The other is a means by which development parameters may still be obtained for situations such as photolithography of thin film magnetic recording heads, where the standing waves may not necessarily be deconvolved from the development process or data collection. Development parameters using 1.15 ?m of AZ 4110 resist on a NiFe substrate were measured using the latter technique
While customizing their products, manufacturers attempt to fulfill specific requirements of the customers within the constraints dictated by the manufacturing (design, planning and production) environment, and by the economical necessity of earning prot. This paper offers a generic framework that captures more technical features of this problem than the marketing models: in addition to customer welfare and prot maximization considerations, engineering aspects are made operational, too. Driven…
(1990), pp. 35-47.
Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 177, No. 2. (2000), pp. 277-296.
Agent-based computing represents an exciting new synthesis both for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, more generally, Computer Science. It has the potential to significantly improve the theory and the practice of modeling, designing, and implementing computer systems. Yet, to date, there has been little systematic analysis of what makes the agent-based approach such an appealing and powerful computational model. Moreover, even less effort has been devoted to discussing the inherent…
(1999)
Many potential applications for artificial intelligence (AI) in manufacturing extend classical AI in two ways. First, they go beyond modeling a single decision-maker to incorporate the interactions of multiple “agents.” Second, instead of fitting a “problem solving” rubric that seeks to reach achievement goals, they are more aptly cast as “going concerns” that support maintenance goals in the face of continual disruption. The first extension is the focus of active research in multi-agent…
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The Conference on Business Ethics is to be held on April 24th, 2008 from 7:45 a.m. - 2:00 p.m. at the Doubletree Hotel, 201 E. MacArthur Blvd, Santa Ana, CA. This conference is to learn more about ethical principals and moral dilemmas that can arise in the business environment. 
Philatron International
Things are back to normal this week sans guest, but there’s plenty to talk about. We get a little discouraged by this week’s news — between the apparent demise of Plasmas, the number of HDTV owners that actually have HD, and the poor customer service that plagues our industry; there isn’t much to be excited about. But alas, we still love us some HD, as we discuss the IRL’s new HD goodness and our lack of love for ESPNews HD. As for the format war, there hasn’t been much to talk about, but we discuss Home Media Magazine’s new Blu-ray vs DVD pie chart as well as the end of HD DVD at Best Buy.
The Hamster Plus is now available at a new lower price. With a suggested retail price of $89, the Hamster Plus combines the high quality that SecuGen has long been known for with improved performance and an extremely competitive price structure.
