A hierarchical—multilevel approach to the development and ranking of systems in the tanning industry

Large-scale, complex systems arise in the design, modeling and planning of many resource allocation problems in the areas of water resources management, energy production and distribution, industrial production, health delivery and landscaping of new cities, to mention a few. This paper applies a hierarchical—multilevel approach to the design and modeling of plant operations in the tanning industry; the decomposition of the overall system into “independent” subsystems that address plant operations, hide collection itineraries, and waste water treatment options; the development of alternative regional plant systems and the selection of a preferred system. Each system is evaluated with regards to specified multiple criteria and compared with the other candidate systems as the preferences of a decision-maker are brought into the analysis.     

A spatial–temporal analysis of impacts from human development on the Shih-men Reservoir watershed,Taiwan

Human activity such as the development of slope land around watersheds has dramatically affected the ecological environment in Taiwan. This situation has been aggravated by heavy precipitation from typhoons in the summertime. The results include serious soil erosion and mass movement in the Shih-men Reservoir watershed. In order to identify the most fragile areas and seek the triggering factors of landslide changes that can cause turbid currents in the Shih-men Reservoir watershed, this study integrates different types of satellite imagery and geographic information system data to determine changes in land cover and vegetation cover since the early 1970s. Results from spatial regression models indicate road and land uses are the main factors that lead to slope failure along roads and contribute to a large number of landslides in environmental hotspots like the Baishih River sub-watershed. Soil erosion estimates indicate a positive relationship between the increases in landslide and soil loss areas and the road system development. Therefore, human development has a significant negative influence both on sensitive mountainous watersheds and on critical environmental hotspots.     

A standard on human response to vibration — one of a new breed?

Human response to vibration is used as an example for consideration of the requirements of standards in the human factors field. It is suggested that standards relating to people may be concerned primarily with the design of equipment for optimum satisfaction of users, and that this demands a different approach to standards if they are to be effective. It is argued that a clear distinction should be made between standards intended to protect people from harmful conditions, standards intended to minimise the risk of people being harmed, and standards intended to give advice and information. In the case of human response to vibration it is suggested that standards should relate to agreed methods of measurement and assessment, limitations to preserve health, limitations to be applied in specific situations in order to prevent the risk of accidents, together with a data base for designers to work from.     

A study on facility location–allocation problem in mixed environment of randomness and fuzziness

In logistics system, facility location–allocation problem, which can be used to determine the mode, the structure and the form of the whole logistics system, is a very important decision problem in the logistics network. It involves locating plants and distribution centers, and determining the best strategy for allocation the product from the plants to the distribution centers and from the distribution centers to the customers. Often uncertainty may be associated with demand, supply or various relevant costs. In many cases, randomness and fuzziness simultaneously appear in a system, in order to describe this phenomenon; we introduce the concept of hybrid variable and propose a mixed-integer programming model for random fuzzy facility location–allocation problem. By expected value and chance constraint programming technique, this model is reduced to a deterministic model. Furthermore, a priority-based genetic algorithm is designed for solving the proposed programming model and the efficacy and the efficiency of this method and algorithm are demonstrated by a numerical example. Till now, few has formulated or attacked the FLA problems in the above manner. Furthermore, the techniques illustrated in this paper can easily be applied to other SCN problems. Therefore, these techniques are the appropriate tools to tackle other supply chain network problems in realistic environments.     

A value-driven approach to the design of service-oriented information systems—making use of conceptual models

We explain the importance of conceptual models for process design with service-oriented architectures (SOA) and illustrate how these models can be used to evaluate the value of SOA. To do so, a methodology is introduced, which comprises both the configuration and the implementation of processes by services and IT components. The approach presented here, makes it possible to evaluate the monetary and objective potentials of SOA, as well as to enhance SOA implementation by providing guidelines. The requirements analysis from an online-mail order company serves as a case study. The results show that up to now, economic aspects were ascribed too little importance in the SOA discussion.     

A knowledge-based approach to mapping degraded meadows on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau,China

The spatially unique properties of degraded meadows (heitutan) on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau offer an excellent opportunity in assessing the utility and effectiveness of various knowledge in their automatic and accurate mapping from satellite imagery. After a Landsat Operational Land Imager image was K-means clustered to produce a degradation severity map, it was also used to generate a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) map that was subsequently converted to a degradation severity map, as well. Both maps were further refined with spatial knowledge derived from topographic data and the image via onscreen digitization. It is found that elevation is a more useful knowledge than channel in refining the image-derived results. It can reduce the area of K-means clustering results by 37% through exclusion of non-genuine heitutan at a very high elevation. This knowledge is especially beneficial to severe and slight heitutan. Channel knowledge is less effective by reducing the mapped heitutan by 15%, with a similar pace of reduction across all three classes of degradation severity. However, it is more useful in refining the NDVI-derived results than with the K-means results as all sparsely vegetated areas were indiscriminately lumped together. Both K-means clustering and NDVI produced drastically different results, but they converge closely with each other with a disparity of only 6% between them after the application of the spatial knowledge. Both methods achieved a similar overall mapping accuracy around 70%. Slope gradient and aspect are of limited use to the mapping due to lack of distinction between degraded heitutan and intact meadows. More research should focus on the universality of the knowledge and the impact of scale on the findings.     

Solvers’ participation in crowdsourcing platforms: Examining the impacts of trust,and benefit and cost factors

Organizations are increasingly crowdsourcing their tasks to unknown individual workers, i.e., solvers. Solvers' participation is critical to the success of crowdsourcing activities. However, challenges exist in attracting solvers to participate in crowdsourcing. In this regard, prior research has mainly investigated the influences of benefit factors on solvers’ intention to participate in crowdsourcing. Thus, there is a lack of understanding of the cost factors that influence actual participation behavior, in conjunction with the benefits. Additionally, the role of trust in the cost-benefit analysis remains to be explored. Motivated thus, based on social exchange theory and context-related literature, we develop a model to explain the impacts of benefit and cost factors as well as trust on solver participation behavior in crowdsourcing. The model was tested using survey and archival data from 156 solvers on a large crowdsourcing platform. As hypothesized, monetary reward, skill enhancement, work autonomy, enjoyment, and trust were found to positively affect solvers’ participation in crowdsourcing, while cognitive effort negatively affects their participation. In addition, it was found that monetary reward positively affects trust (trust partially mediates its effect on participation behavior), while loss of knowledge power negatively affects trust. The theoretical contributions and practical implications of the study are discussed.     

A rebuttal to Whigham,Dick, and Maclaurin by one of the inventors of Grammatical Evolution: Commentary on “On the Mapping of Genotype to Phenotype in Evolutionary Algorithms” by Peter A. Whigham,Grant Dick,and James Maclaurin

The authors present a thinly veiled attack on the popular Grammatical Evolution (GE) system, the second in the space of year. The paper presents itself as a philosophical discussion on a framework they present, based on a handful of Sterelny’s guidelines. However, it quickly degenerates into an assault on GE, initially by attributing assumptions to the inventors, and latterly by the use of misleading claims. This rebuttal addresses both of these.     

A new approach to acoustic analysis of two British regional accents—Birmingham and Liverpool accents

Accent is a reflection of an individual speaker??s regional affiliation and is shaped by the speaker??s community background. This study investigated the acoustic characteristics of two British regional accents??the Birmingham and Liverpool accents??and their correlations from a different approach. In contrast to previous accent-related research, where the databases are formed from large groups of single-accent speakers, this study uses data from an individual who can speak in two accents, thus removing the effects of inter-speaker variability and facilitating efficient identification and analysis of the accent acoustic features. Acoustic features such as formant frequencies, pitch slope, intensity and phone duration have been used to investigate the prominent features of each accent. The acoustic analysis was based on nine monophthongal vowels and three diphthongal vowels. In addition, an analysis of variance of formant frequencies along the time dimension was performed to study the perceived effects of vocal tract shape changes as the speaker switches between the two accents. The results of the analysis indicate that the formant frequencies, pitch slope, the intensity and the phone duration all vary between the two accents. Classification testing using linear discriminant analysis showed that intensity had the strongest effect on differentiating between the two accents followed by F3, vowel duration, F2 and pitch slope.     

The secretome of the working human skeletal muscle—A promising opportunity to combat the metabolic disaster?

Recent years have provided clear evidence for the skeletal muscle as an endocrine organ. Muscle contraction during physical activity has emerged as an important activator of the release of the proteins and peptides called “myokines." Diverse proteomic profiling approaches were applied to rodent and human skeletal muscle cells to characterize the complete secretome, to study the regulation of the secretome during cell differentiation or the release of myokines upon contractile activity of myotubes. Several of the exercise-regulated factors have the potency to mediate an interorgan crosstalk. The paracrine function of the secreted peptides and proteins to regulate muscle regeneration, tissue remodeling, and trainability can have direct effects on whole-body glucose disposal and oxygen consumption. The overall composition and dynamic of the myokinome are still incompletely characterized. Recent advantages in metabolomics and lipidomics will add metabolites and lipids with autocrine, paracrine, or endocrine function to the contraction-induced secretome of the skeletal muscle. The identification of these metabolites will lead to a more comprehensive view described by a new myo(metabo)kinome consisting of peptides, proteins, and metabolites.     

Nomadicity and the Care of Place—on the Aesthetic and Affective Organization of Space in Freelance Creative Work

While information and communication technology enables freelancers to work “anytime anywhere”, it has become apparent that not all places seem to be equally suitable for their work. Drawing from CSCW literature on the practical accomplishment of mobile work and theoretical literature on creativity, insights from ethnographic studies in New York, Berlin and Wiesbaden are discussed. The paper follows workers in their everyday attempts to seek out and enact work environments, which enable them to be creative and productive. In these processes, mobility features both as a problem and a resource. The search for the right place makes these workers restless, but sometimes restlessness and nomadicity can inspire creativity. Similarly, new mobile, social and collaborative technologies allow a new balancing of solitude and sociality. I call this emerging nexus of practices which entails aesthetic, affective, social and socio-political dimensions the care of place. A conjoint theoretical and empirical analysis aims to draw attention to everyday lived practices of nomadicity and the care of place in a wider discursive and socio-political context to inform CSCW design.     

Robust Control: A Note on the Response of the Control to Changes in the “Free” Parameter Conditional on the Character of Nature

In this paper an analytical framework similar to a robust control problem was developed for the one-state, one-control variable model to examine the response of the control to changes in the free parameter. However, in contrast to Gonzalez and Rodriguez (2003), the sign multiplying the free parameter in the criterion function of the min–max problem is positive. We find that this set up corresponds to the case where nature is benevolent while the problem posed by Gonzalez and Rodriguez (2003) corresponds to a malevolent nature. We show that for the benevolent case, the solution is a minimum giving way to an ordinary control problem. In addition, the left side of the discontinuity in Gonzalez and Rodriguez (2003) corresponds to the benevolent case.The opinions contained in this note are exclusively of the authors and do not represent either those of the Sociedad Hipotecaria Federal or Bank of Mexico.     

The ‘Wheel of Misfortune’: a taxonomic approach to human factors in accident investigation and analysis in aviation and other complex systems

The analysis and reporting of the human factors aspects of accidents in aviation and other complex systems continues to present difficulties for investigators and analysts alike. Reason's ‘latent conditions’ model has had a major impact on the way accidents are conceptualized but it has proven difficult to apply as a practical tool. Recent attempts to overcome these difficulties are discussed and an alternative conceptualization is proposed. This conceptualization is based on a blend of several well-supported theoretical models in cognitive engineering and can be used to formulate a parsimonious analysis system for the investigation and reporting of the human factors aspects of accidents. Two well-known examples of transportation disasters are briefly described and related to the proposed conceptual framework. The proposed framework serves three important functions in accident investigation and analysis: a heuristic function, an investigative function, and an integrative function.     

Modeling, run-time optimization and execution of distributed workflow applications in the JEE-based BeesyCluster environment

The paper presents a complete solution for modeling scientific and business workflow applications, static and just-in-time QoS selection of services and workflow execution in a real environment. The workflow application is modeled as an acyclic directed graph where nodes denote tasks and edges denote dependencies between the tasks. The BeesyCluster middleware is used to allow providers to publish services from sequential or parallel applications, from their servers or clusters. Optimization algorithms are proposed to select a capable service for each task so that a global criterion is optimized such as a product of workflow execution time and cost, a linear combination of those or minimization of the time with a cost constraint. The paper presents implementation details of the multithreaded workflow execution engine implemented in JEE. Several tests were performed for three different optimization goals for two business and scientific workflow applications. Finally, the overhead of the solution is presented.     

Barriers to plant transparency,barriers to plant rigidity — A sketch of the problems posed by the radical changes in work forms in the machine-building industry

This article deals with the contradiction which became prominent with new market requirements for more flexibility and qualified products, on the one hand, and increased automatisation and informatisation of production and work processes, on the other. The new situation forces companies, especially small batch production, machine factories with their still qualified work and organisation, to build up more flexibility to stabilize and reinforce their market power. But their very technical answer shows that this management-strategy can, and in many cases will, lead to the opposite: growing inflexibility. Regarding this problem from a political-theoretical perspective and less from an economic-emperical one, the extending technical autonomy of the production process makes feasible extensive technical control by management over the working process and over the workers, too. But unlimited use of technical control by the computer-systems will not lead to more flexibility, on the contrary it hinders it and in addition to this it will be confronted with a barrier of productive innovation coming from the shop floor. Considering this, the author ventures the thesis that: as long as human work is needed in production processes, self regulation and control can be taken out of the qualification of the workers and be moved out of the organisation only at the risk of inflexibility and at the price of loss of social productivity and innovation. In order to prevent this, more care must be taken by using and designing technology for the interfaces between man-machine-system: differentiate the differences among them and do not mix or even convert them. A productive system also controlled by the workers who work in and with the system, and not only by management, shows that the question of more flexibility, productivity and innovation is tightly woven with the internal power structure in the organisation.     

A network approach to the French system of legal codes—part I: analysis of a dense network

We explore one aspect of the structure of a codified legal system at the national level using a new type of representation to understand the strong or weak dependencies between the various fields of law. In Part I of this study, we analyze the graph associated with the network in which each French legal code is a vertex and an edge is produced between two vertices when a code cites another code at least one time. We show that this network distinguishes from many other real networks from a high density, giving it a particular structure that we call concentrated world and that differentiates a national legal system (as considered with a resolution at the code level) from small-world graphs identified in many social networks. Our analysis then shows that a few communities (groups of highly wired vertices) of codes covering large domains of regulation are structuring the whole system. Indeed we mainly find a central group of influent codes, a group of codes related to social issues and a group of codes dealing with territories and natural resources. The study of this codified legal system is also of interest in the field of the analysis of real networks. In particular we examine the impact of the high density on the structural characteristics of the graph and on the ways communities are searched for. Finally we provide an original visualization of this graph on an hemicyle-like plot, this representation being based on a statistical reduction of dissimilarity measures between vertices. In Part II (a following paper) we show how the consideration of the weights attributed to each edge in the network in proportion to the number of citations between two vertices (codes) allows deepening the analysis of the French legal system.     

On the controllability of the parameterized state matrix in “a continuation approach to eigenvalue assignment” by Harris,DeCarlo and Richter

This paper will investigate the controllability properties for systems parameterized as in Harns et al. (1983, Automatica, 19, 551–555). It will be shown that for systems of low dimensions this parameterization must be done carefully to guarantee that the system is controllable over the parameterization. The controllability property is key to the algorithms developed in Lefebvre et al. (1985, Int. J. Control, 41, 1273–1292), Richter and DeCarlo (1984, IEEE Trans. Aut. Control, AC-29), Harris et al. (1983, Automatica, 19, 551–555), Richter et al. (1981, Proc. 1981 Joint Aut. Control Conf.), Harris and DeCarlo (1982, Purdue School of EE, TR-EE 82-11) and Sebok and DeCarlo (1984, Proc. Allerton Conf. Communication, Control and Computing).