The authors have been working on establishment of a knowledge structure for process improvement (PI) at “Japan SPI Consortium”. Our objective is to store useful knowledge, to provide mechanisms for their usage, and to encourage creation of new knowledge. During our efforts to extract, categorize and consolidate knowledge from the presentation materials at our conferences, we saw problems with respect to the coverage of knowledge expressed in the experiences. To solve this issue, we devised a knowledge model that consists of seven information elements as a representation, and then introduced a standard template to be used when submitting a proposal to the conference. As a result, statistically significant change in the knowledge coverage was observed, and the amount of information has increased for items such as causal analysis, verification and validation of process improvement over the successive conferences. Positive feedback was obtained from proposal reviewers and conference participants for improved understandability. Percentage of successful stories has also increased among the presentations.
Nishisato’s Dual Scaling Method for successive categories data has been revised in order to apply it to quantitative structure–activity relationships. The revised version can give category values of successive categories, even though the original one can give only boundary values between two adjacent successive categories. The new version can be applied to an analysis of the antimicrobial activities of polymethylene bi(pyridineamine) derivatives, which are potential agents for controlling and/or preventing the formation of dental plaque. The results show that the proper molecular length of the agents leads to the maximum antimicrobial activity.
Spiral growth patterns were found on the crystals of (+)d-and (−)d-[Co(ox)(en)2]Cl·4H2O. The handedness of the spirals was statistically counted on each enantiomeric complex crystal. No stereoselectivity of the handedness suggests that the visible spirals do not arise from the molecular or crystal structural origin, but more macroscopic one.
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