April 30th, 2010 by John
The reality is that there is still a long way to go in Tibet but things have improved dramatically since I first visited. During my first visit when I visited the Potala, Norbulinka, Jpkhang, Tashilhunpo, Palkhor Choide, Drepeng and Ganden monasteries, the number of monks seen at each place varied considerably from 50 or 60 at Ganden to just a handful. This time I saw more monks in the Potala Palace alone than in all of the other temples in 1992. As well, as mentioned above, the Potala was full of tourists and there were queues for every ladder or stairs going from one site to another. Everywhere on the streets, people were walking with prayer wheels and prostrating themselves in prayer. Most of the people wore Tibetan dress, clear evidence that Tibetan people have freedom of choice in clothing. Claims are made that Tibetans were forced to limit the number of children they have. This is demonstrably nonsense as anyone prepared to open their eyes and look would see that many families have between four and seven children. Of course, there are many Han people in Lhasa, involved in the administration and development of Tibet and training Tibetans. However, the majority of the population in Lhasa is still visibly Tibetan, and evidence is lacking to support the contention that Han people are migrating to Tibet in large numbers. There appeared to be more army barracks and many more army vehicles than in 1992. An army presence is not difficult to understand as Tibet shares borders with Bhutan, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Myanmar. With India and Pakistan recently becoming nuclear powers and continuing conflicts in Kashmir, China would be irresponsible in terms of its national security if it did not maintain some military presence in Tibet. It is sometimes claimed that Tibet is a police state. I saw nothing that would provide evidence to substantiate the claim. There were no checkpoints on highways, no roadblocks on the streets and certainly, no machine guns deployed on the roofs of buildings lining the Barkhor. In general, Tibetan society appeared to be more relaxed and free than seven years ago. If you follow the same logic, people could say that the Americans were oppressing the Japanese because of the US troops stationed at Okinawa.Posted in Articles
April 29th, 2010 by John
It is my great pleasure to write this letter to support Mr. Li Di feng's application for a postdoctoral position in your program. Li was our medical student from 1981 to 1986. He was award bachelor degree in medicine in 1986. Mr. Li was admitted to our medical school when he was only was the youngest student at that time. Although so young, he ran third in the 1981 class of 560 students. During his five years of set at our medical school, his grades were excellent in every subject This was especially true in such difficult subjects as chemistry, t chemistry, physiology and path physiology. He graduated in 191 as one of the top five students in our school and was accepted a resident in the Internal Medicine Department of our university. Based on his excellent academic performance, we highly recommend Mr. Li to your program without any reservation. Should you he any further questions, please contact me. Sincerely,Posted in Articles
April 28th, 2010 by John
In 1929,' three years after his flight over the North Pole, the American explorer, R. E. Byrd, successfully flew over the South Pole for the first time. Though, at first, Byrd and his men were able to take a great many photographs of the mountains that lay below, they soon ran into serious trouble. At one point, it seemed certain that their plane would crash. It could only get over the mountains if it rose to 10,000 feet. Byrd at once ordered flew over the South Pole his men to throw out two heavy food sacks. The plane was then able to rise and it cleared the mountains by 400 feet. Byrd now knew that he would be able to reach the South Pole which was 300 miles away, for there were no more mountains in sight. The aircraft was able to fly over the endless white plains without difficulty.Posted in Articles
April 27th, 2010 by John
There are three immediate problems, however, dial must concern us deeply, for if they are not effectively addressed they can irreparably damage the United Nations as a mechanism for progress. First, the safety and integrity of United Nations personnel in the field must he respected. When lightly armed peace-keepers or unarmed aid workers on a humanitarian mission are threatened, taken hostage, harmed or even killed, the world must act to prevent such intolerable behaviour. The credibility of all United Nations peace operations is at stake; to preserve it, personnel must be protected as they carry out the duties the international community has sent them to accomplish. Secondly, the financial situation of the Organization must be placed on an adequate and sustainable fixing. Calls for ever-greater United Nations effectiveness under conditions of financial penury make no sense. It is as though the town fire department were being dispatched to put out fires raging in several places at once while a collection was being taken to raise money for the fire-fighting equipment. The deterioration of the Organization's financial position must be reversed. And, lastly, funds for development are drying up. This is a sequence of the end of the CV)ld-War contest, of the competing demands of peace-keeping and development for scarce resources, and of donor fatigue over the time and difficulty of creating progress on the ground. The willingness to spend money to try to contain conflicts around (he world, while necessary and admirable, is not enough. Unless development is funded as well, the world can expect only the continuation of cycles marked by the alternation of terrible strife, uneasy stand-off and strife1 once again. To break this downward spiral, sustainable human development must be instituted everywhere. A new vision of development, and a universal commitment to it, are indispensable for the world progress all peoples seek. During the past year we have seen far many innocent civilians, especially women ant] children, losing their lives or being condemned carry on under appalling conditions. We continue to witness scenes of refugees deprived of their most basic rights and struggling desperately to survive. And hundreds of millions of people live in poverty so dire as to render them incapable of taking effective action to improve their own condition. Thus the existence of a true international community has yet to be demonstrated. Nothing could do more to bring such an instrument of human solidarity into being than a commitment undertaken now to ensure that all the countries of the world are set firmly on the path of development as we enter the next century. Such an achievement would bring an end to degradation and despair for a huge proportion of our fellow human beings and would represent one' of history's most dramatic chapters of progress. We have before us an oprutrtunity to combine the ongoing, reform with a comprehensive vision of the future. The legacy of the founders at this half-century mark should be inspiration as we step forward with pride to meet this challenge.Posted in Articles
April 26th, 2010 by John
One phenomenon associated with Internet trading is home shopping. Home shopping has been around for many years in the shape of catalogue and television selling. What is new is the scale and scope of the growth in this area. Furniture and white goods have traditionally been delivered to customers' homes because of their bulky nature and difficulty in installation. Many famous department stores deliver customers purchases to their homes, regardless of the size of the item, as part of their overall customer service package. The mail order catalogue companies have been delivering direct to their customers and collecting unwanted items for many years. It is important to differentiate between home shopping and home delivery. Home shopping refers to the different ways of shopping for and ordering products from home. This includes mail order catalogues and also the use of Internet shopping. Home delivery refers to the physical delivery of the product to home. Now, more often than not, goods are ordered from home are indeed delivered directly to the home. There are, however, many occasions when goods are viewed and ordered in shops but are then delivered to the home — - some department store purchases, white good and brown goods, furniture and frozen foods can fall into this category.Posted in Articles
April 23rd, 2010 by John
To establish an effective system for cost and performance monitoring and control there is a need to identify some overall guidelines or aims that the system is designed to fulfill. These are likely to reflect major business objectives as well as more detailed operational requirements. Thus it is important to be aware of the role of logistics within the context of the company’s own corporate objective. It is also essential that the control system reflects the integrated nature of logistics within an organization. Typical aims might be: • To enable the achievement of current and future business objective where these are directly linked to associated logistics objectives. • To facilitate the effective and efficient provision of logistics services, thus enabling checks to he made that the distribution operation is appropriate for the overall objectives, and also that the distribution operation is run as well as it can be. • To support the planning and control of an operation, so that any information can be fed back to the process of planning and management. • To provide measures that focus on the real outputs of the business- this enables actions to be taken when the operations are not performing satisfactorily or when potential improvement to the operation can be identified. This will generally be linked to some form of productivity improvement or better use of resources. In addition, some fairly specific objectives need to be identified that relate to the logistics operation itself. A major feature is likely to be to measure actual progress against a plan. Typically this will be to monitor the budget in a way that identifies if some change from plan has taken place but also to provide a us-able indication of why actual performance or achievement does not reflect what was originally planned. Another feature may well be to highlight specific aspects or components of the system that need particular attention.Posted in Articles
April 22nd, 2010 by John
The prices a logistician must pay for transportation services are keyed to the cost characteristics of each type of service. Just and reasonable transportation rates tend to follow the costs of producing the service. Because each service has different cost characteristics, under any given set of circumstances there will be potential rate advantages one mode that cannot be effectively matched by other services. Variable and fixed costs A transportation service incurs a number of costs, such as labor, fuel, maintenance, terminal, roadway, administrative, and others. This cost mix can he arbitrarily divided into those costs that vary with services or volume and those that do not. Of course, all costs are variable if a long enough time period and a great enough volume are considered. For purposes of transport pricing, however, it is useful to consider costs that are constant over the "normal" operating volume of the carrier as fixed. All other costs are treated as variable. Specially, fixed costs are those for roadway acquisition and maintenance, terminal facilities, transport equipment, and carrier administration. Variable costs usually include line—haul costs such as fuel and labor, equipment maintenance, handling, and pick —up and delivery. This is not a precise allocation between fixed and variable costs, as there are significant cost differences between transportation modes, and there are different allocations depending on the dimension being examined. All costs are partly fixed and partly variable, and allocation of cost elements into one class or the other is a matter of individual perspective. Line- haul transportation rates are based on two important dimensions: distance and shipper volume. In each case, what is considered a fixed and a variable cost is slightly different. To illustrate, consider the cost characteristics of railroad.Posted in Articles
April 21st, 2010 by John
This chapter sets out a general procedure for the design of warehouse systems, starting from the definition of system requirements and any constraints on the design, and working through to an evaluated preferred design. The key points of emphasis include: • defining and agreeing terms of reference; • obtaining accurate and relevant data (usually very time - consuming) and validating the data; • checking the forecast stock and business levels on which the design is to be based; • explaining and justifying any assumptions that have been used; • involvement of all relevant management and staff as early as possible in the design process, and external bookings such as planning authority, local fire officer and insurance company. Finally, the aim of a design should always be to get the right design and technology to meet the given requirements. Whatever level of technology is used, whether fairly basic or a very sophistically automated or robotic system, effective information and communication system, probably computer-based, should always be incorporated into the operational design.Posted in Articles
April 20th, 2010 by John
There are various approaches to "dynamic picking". The concept essentially is to keep no separate picking stock but to have an open picking area. Incoming orders, for say, four hours' worth of picking, are batched and bulk - picked from stock in whole pallet quantities, and transferred to the picking area. Picking of individual orders then occurs. Any residual items remaining on the pallets can be returned to stock before the next wave of picking, or if required in the next wave can be left in the picking area.Posted in Uncategorized
April 20th, 2010 by John
In some situations it may be appropriate to make use of a combination of two or more of the above picking regimes within one picking system. A typical warehouse order will require just one or two slow — moving products, but a large quantity of fast - moving popular products. In this situation the picking area may be laid out with popular products near the dispatch area to minimize movement, with the less popular products, which require fewer picking visits, further away. If consignee picking is used because of order size, the slow - moving products could add significantly to the distance traveled by the pickers. In this situation, the possibility of consignee picking for the most popular products could be considered, with less popular slow — moving products for a group of orders batch - picked.Posted in Articles
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