Emerging production systems and industrial relations: Confusion,diffusion, and exclusion?

Although there is debate about emerging production systems, there is little analysis of their direct impact on traditional industrial relations. In this article the authors begin with an exploration of the literature on production systems and argue that there is confusion between the characteristics of, and distinctions between, emerging production systems. As companies diffuse their own production systems, there arises not only a great variety of models, but also a convergence of the principle characteristics of these production models. These are identified as teams, multiskilled workers, and management-initiated employee participation programs. These “new” production models might best be generically termed “lean team” systems, and the consequences for labor and unions are potentially significant. Drawing on research in Colgate-Palmolive, a multinational manufacturing company operating in Australia, one such production model is examined. It would appear that the consequences of the new production system for the union are complex and potentially responsible for their exclusion. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Operation “Zachod”: Sex,lies, and ciphers

The article discusses a Cold War offensive operation conducted in the 1960s and 1970s by communist Polish military counterintelligence (WSW) against U.S. military intelligence in Europe and North America. Double agents, including Romeo spies, were deployed by Polish WSW in West Germany and the United States to lure U.S. intelligence into a trap. The text emphasizes secret communications and codebreaking issues, including the ciphers and secret writing techniques developed by U.S. party for use by their assets. The operation involved significant communications intelligence and codebreaking efforts by the Cold War Poles.     

Fingerprint matching,spoof and liveness detection:classification and literature review

Fingerprint matching,spoof mitigation and liveness detection are the trendiest biometric techniques,mostly because of their stability through life,uniqueness and their least risk of invasion.In recent decade,several techniques are presented to address these challenges over well-known data-sets.This study provides a comprehensive review on the fingerprint algorithms and techniques which have been published in the last few decades.It divides the research on fingerprint into nine different approaches including feature based,fuzzy logic,holistic,image enhancement,latent,conventional machine learning,deep learning,template matching and miscellaneous tech-niques.Among these,deep learning approach has outperformed other approaches and gained significant attention for future research.By reviewing fingerprint literature,it is historically divided into four eras based on 106 referred papers and their cumulative citations.     

Design for manufacture and design for ‘X’: concepts,applications, and perspectives

The implementations of design for assembly and design for manufacture (DFM) led to enormous benefits including simplification of products, reduction of assembly and manufacturing costs, improvement of quality, and reduction of time to market. More recently, environmental concerns required that disassembly and recycling issues should be considered during the design stages. The effort to reduce total life-cycle costs for a product through design innovation is becoming an essential part of the current manufacturing industry. Therefore, researchers begin to focus their attention on design for environment, design for recyclability, design for life-cycle (DFLC), etc. These studies are sometimes referred to as Design for X (DFX). Since the late 1990s, hundreds of papers have been published pertaining to DFX applications in manufacturing. Most of them are widely distributed over many different disciplines and publications. This makes it very difficult for one to locate all the information necessary for the application of DFX in manufacturing. A paper that can help researchers and practitioners applying this emerging technology is highly desirable. The objective of this paper is to present the concepts, applications, and perspectives of ‘DFX’ in manufacturing, thus providing some guidelines and references for future research and implementation.     

Brain–computer interfaces and dualism: a problem of brain,mind, and body

The brain–computer interface (BCI) has made remarkable progress in the bridging the divide between the brain and the external environment to assist persons with severe disabilities caused by brain impairments. There is also continuing philosophical interest in BCIs which emerges from thoughtful reflection on computers, machines, and artificial intelligence. This article seeks to apply BCI perspectives to examine, challenge, and work towards a possible resolution to a persistent problem in the mind–body relationship, namely dualism. The original humanitarian goals of BCIs and the technological inventiveness result in BCIs being surprisingly useful. We begin from the neurologically impaired person, the problems encountered, and some pioneering responses from computers and machines. Secondly, the interface of mind and brain is explored via two points of clarification: direct and indirect BCIs, and the nature of thoughts. Thirdly, dualism is beset by mind–body interaction difficulties and is further questioned by the phenomena of intentions, interactions, and technology. Fourthly, animal minds and robots are explored in BCI settings again with relevance for dualism. After a brief look at other BCIs, we conclude by outlining a future BCI philosophy of brain and mind, which might appear ominous and could be possible.     

“Extra-Ordinary” Ergonomics: How to Accommodate Small and Big Persons,the Disabled and Elderly,Expectant Mothers,and Children

Abstract

Data from a previous study of soldier driving postures and seating positions were analysed to develop statistical models for defining accommodation of driver seating positions in military vehicles. Regression models were created for seating accommodation applicable to driver positions with a fixed heel point and a range of steering wheel locations in typical tactical vehicles. The models predict the driver-selected seat position as a function of population anthropometry and vehicle layout. These models are the first driver accommodation models considering the effects of body armor and body-borne gear. The obtained results can benefit the design of military vehicles, and the methods can also be extended to be utilised in the development of seating accommodation models for other driving environments where protective equipment affects driver seating posture, such as vehicles used by law-enforcement officers and firefighters.

Practitioner Summary: A large-scale laboratory study of soldier driving posture and seating position was designed to focus on tactical vehicle (truck) designs. Regression techniques are utilised to develop accommodation models suitable for tactical vehicles. These are the first seating accommodation models based on soldier data to consider the effects of personal protective equipment and body-borne gear.     

ADRC in output and error form: connection, equivalence, performance

In this work, we investigate two specific linear ADRC structures, namely output- and error-based. The former is considered a “standard” version of ADRC, a title obtained primarily thanks to its simplicity and effectiveness, which have spurred its adoption across multiple industries. The latter is found to be especially appealing to practitioners as its feedback error-driven structure bares similarities to conventional control solutions, like PI and PID. In this paper, we describe newly found connections between the two considered ADRC structures, which allowed us to formally establish conditions for their equivalence. Furthermore, the conducted comprehensive performance comparison between output- and error-based ADRCs has facilitated the identification of specific modules within them, which can now be conveniently used as building blocks, thus aiding the control designers in customizing ADRC-based solutions and making them most suitable for their applications.     

Flying Probe Tester : Architecture, Principle and Implementation

1 IntroductionThere are mainly three kinds of circuit faults:components' fault, PCB' s (Printed Circuit Board)fault and assemblage fault. Among them, PCB' s faultaccounts for half of all. Generally speaking, PCB' sfault comes into being in the manufacturing process andthe most common forms of the fault include the short ofconductors in different nets and the open of conductorsin the same net. There will be economy loss if we solderthe electron components on a PCB with fault. So, it isve…     

Concurrency Paradigms: Competitive,Coordinated, and Collaborative: Which Control Mechanisms are Appropriate?

Concurrent computation has been with us for over 50 years, and has become essential today. Concurrency paradigms affect the way we think about parallelism, the programs we try to write, the algorithms we choose, the performance we achieve, the errors we make, and the support mechanisms we need. The paradigms are not equivalent. Although each paradigm can usually be simulated in environments designed for a different paradigm, such a “Turing machine style” proof of computational equivalency does not establish equivalency in terms of the effort required to program solutions, the proclivity for solutions to be error-prone, or the comparable effectiveness of solutions. Two classic concurrency paradigms are reviewed. A third (not so widely recognized) concurrency paradigm is then discussed.     

Proactive human–robot collaboration: Mutual-cognitive,predictable, and self-organising perspectives

Human–Robot Collaboration (HRC) has a pivotal role in smart manufacturing for strict requirements of human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience. However, existing HRC development mainly undertakes either a human-dominant or robot-dominant manner, where human and robotic agents reactively perform operations by following pre-defined instructions, thus far from an efficient integration of robotic automation and human cognition. The stiff human–robot relations fail to be qualified for complex manufacturing tasks and cannot ease the physical and psychological load of human operators. In response to these realistic needs, this paper presents our arguments on the obvious trend, concept, systematic architecture, and enabling technologies of Proactive HRC, serving as a prospective vision and research topic for future work in the human-centric smart manufacturing era. Human–robot symbiotic relation is evolving with a 5C intelligence — from Connection, Coordination, Cyber, Cognition to Coevolution, and finally embracing mutual-cognitive, predictable, and self-organising intelligent capabilities, i.e., the Proactive HRC. With proactive robot control, multiple human and robotic agents collaboratively operate manufacturing tasks, considering each others’ operation needs, desired resources, and qualified complementary capabilities. This paper also highlights current challenges and future research directions, which deserve more research efforts for real-world applications of Proactive HRC. It is hoped that this work can attract more open discussions and provide useful insights to both academic and industrial practitioners in their exploration of human–robot flexible production.     

PnP: sequential, external memory, and parallel iceberg cube computation

We present “Pipe ’n Prune” (PnP), a new hybrid method for iceberg-cube query computation. The novelty of our method is that it achieves a tight integration of top-down piping for data aggregation with bottom-up a priori data pruning. A particular strength of PnP is that it is efficient for all of the following scenarios: (1) Sequential iceberg-cube queries, (2) External memory iceberg-cube queries, and (3) Parallel iceberg-cube queries on shared-nothing PC clusters with multiple disks. We performed an extensive performance analysis of PnP for the above scenarios with the following main results: In the first scenario PnP performs very well for both dense and sparse data sets, providing an interesting alternative to BUC and Star-Cubing. In the second scenario PnP shows a surprisingly efficient handling of disk I/O, with an external memory running time that is less than twice the running time for full in-memory computation of the same iceberg-cube query. In the third scenario PnP scales very well, providing near linear speedup for a larger number of processors and thereby solving the scalability problem observed for the parallel iceberg-cubes proposed by Ng et al. Research partially supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. A preliminary version of this work appeared in the International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE’05).     

“I plan to be a 10”: Online literacy and lesbian,gay, bisexual,and transgender students

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people use computer mediated communication (CMC) in a variety of ways as they come to understand their sexual identity and begin to identify with larger communities. A Web-based survey gathered 75 responses from Web users who supplied information about their online experiences as LGBT people. They report using online resources to serve many functions in the coming out process: They gather information, try out new ways of self-expression, and an find audience of like-minded people with whom they interact. Online resources were reported as most useful for obtaining basic information, for offering the ability to express oneself on LGBT issues and as a LGBT person, and for connecting with a larger LGBT community. The ways people find, use, and interact with these resources are examples of online literacy, a set of skills that may parallel traditional academic literacies but which may be used in different ways and to different ends.