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Lean in higher education, often abbreviated as LHE, has grown in interest over the past 20 years. The application of lean principles has been observed in higher education institutions throughout the world. Many researchers have investigated both the success and the failure of lean in higher education. Although lean originated in the automotive industry, and both the automotive industry and higher education report success and failure, there is no comparison of the factors between these groups. Culture is cited quite frequently in the literature as a barrier to success. Thus, there is a need for investigation into the cultural differences between higher education and the automotive industry as they relate to lean. This paper uses Schein's three elements of culture to evaluate the differences in culture between higher education and the automotive industry. It concludes with recommendations on how to best deploy the practices of lean in higher education given the cultural differences and challenges between the two sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Aviad Heifetz (a), Chris Shannon (b), Yossi Spiegel (c) Abstract: The assumption that decision makers choose actions to maximize their preferences is a central tenet in economics, often justified formally or informally by appealing to evolutionary arguments. In contrast, we show that in almost every game and for almost every family of distortions of a player's actual payoffs, some degree of this distortion is beneficial to the player, and will not be driven out by any evolutionary process involving payoff-monotonic selection dynamics. Consequently, under any such selection dynamics the population will not converge to payoff-maximizing behavior. We also show that payoff-maximizing behavior need not prevail when preferences are imperfectly observed. Author Affiliation: (a) The Economics and Management Department, The Open University of Israel, Israel (b) Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, USA (c) The Faculty of Management, Tel Aviv University, Israel Article History: Received 25 November 2003; Revised 17 May 2005

An analysis of monotonicity in comparative statics reveals that there are sufficient conditions where strict monotone comparative statics conclusions in optimization problems may be drawn with and without binding constraints. Imposing a stronger differential version of the single crossing property and arguing first-order conditions would enable the results to be extended to the Lattice-theoretic results of Milgrom and Shannon. These results are of particular importance in holdup problems, output decisions, optimal tax problems and modern manufacturing.

The notions of regular points and values for nonsmooth functions were used in the analysis of the degree theory, a valuable tool used in solving systems of equations in economic problems. The analysis aims to correlate the results of regular points and values with the sensitivity results for problems involving nonsmooth functions. It also shows the change in the number of equilibria from smooth regular exchange economies to nonsmooth exchange economies.

The angiopoietin-like protein (ANGPTL) family represents a promising therapeutic target for dyslipidemia, which is a feature of obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2DM). The aim of the present study was to determine the metabolic role of ANGPTL8 and to investigate its nutritional, hormonal, and molecular regulation in key metabolic tissues. The regulation of Angptl8 gene expression by insulin and glucose was quantified using a combination of in vivo insulin clamp experiments in mice and in vitro experiments in primary and cultured hepatocytes and adipocytes. The role of AMPK signaling was examined, and the transcriptional control of Angptl8 was determined using bioinformatic and luciferase reporter approaches. The metabolism of Angptl8 knockout mice (ANGPTL8-/-) was examined following chow and high-fat diets (HFD). Insulin acutely increased Angptl8 expression in liver and adipose tissue, which involved the CCAAT/enhancer-binding protein (C/EBPβ) transcription factor. In insulin clamp experiments, glucose further enhanced Angptl8 expression in the presence of insulin in adipose tissue. The activation of AMPK signaling antagonized the effect of insulin on Angptl8 expression in hepatocytes and adipocytes. The ANGPTL8-/- mice had improved glucose tolerance and displayed reduced fed and fasted plasma triglycerides. However, there was no change in body weight or steatosis in ANGPTL8-/- mice after the HFD. These data show that ANGPTL8 plays important metabolic roles in mice that extend beyond triglyceride metabolism. The finding that insulin, glucose, and AMPK signaling regulate Angptl8 expression may provide important clues about the distinct function of ANGPTL8 in these tissues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gene encoding for transcription factor 7-like 2 (TCF7L2) is the strongest type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) candidate gene discovered to date. The TCF7L2 protein is a key transcriptional effector of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway, which is an important developmental pathway that negatively regulates adipogenesis. However, the precise role that TCF7L2 plays in the development and function of adipocytes remains largely unknown. Using a combination of in vitro approaches, we first show that TCF7L2 protein is increased during adipogenesis in 3T3-L1 cells and primary adipocyte stem cells and that TCF7L2 expression is required for the regulation of Wnt signaling during adipogenesis. Inactivation of TCF7L2 protein by removing the high-mobility group (HMG)-box DNA binding domain in mature adipocytes in vivo leads to whole-body glucose intolerance and hepatic insulin resistance. This phenotype is associated with increased subcutaneous adipose tissue mass, adipocyte hypertrophy, and inflammation. Finally, we demonstrate that TCF7L2 mRNA expression is downregulated in humans with impaired glucose tolerance and adipocyte insulin resistance, highlighting the translational potential of these findings. In summary, our data indicate that TCF7L2 has key roles in adipose tissue development and function that may reveal, at least in part, how TCF7L2 contributes to the pathophysiology of T2DM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several abstracts which were presented at the 2011 annual conference of the Society of Orthopaedic Medicine, including abstracts on groin imaging in athletes, the treatment of hip and groin problems and the management of hip joint injections.

This paper considers a general equilibrium model in which the distinction between uncertainty and risk is formalized by assuming agents have incomplete preferences over state-contingent consumption bundles, as in Bewley (1986). Without completeness, individual decision making depends on a set of probability distributions over the state space. A bundle is preferred to another if and only if it has larger expected utility for all probabilities in this set. When preferences are complete this set is a singleton, and the model reduces to standard expected utility. In this setting, we characterize Pareto optima and equilibria, and show that the presence of uncertainty generates robust indeterminacies in equilibrium prices and allocations for any specification of initial endowments. We derive comparative statics results linking the degree of uncertainty with changes in equilibria. Despite the presence of robust indeterminacies, we show that equilibrium prices and allocations vary continuously with underlying fundamentals. Equilibria in a standard risk economy are thus robust to adding small degrees of uncertainty. Finally, we give conditions under which some assets are not traded due to uncertainty aversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]