Pressures and procedures for the design of safe consumer products

An assessment is provided of the current position regarding changes in UK or EEC civil law under which injured parties can obtain redress in respect of injuries caused by defective products. One effect of proposed systems of strict liability in tort will be to shift some of the burden of proof from the injured party on to the producer of the product claimed to have caused injury. It is argued that this is a just and logical change, given the unfairness and anomalies in present systems and the relative abilities of consumers and producers to avoid such incidents and to bear or to offset the cost of the consequences. Cases of apparent misuse of a product by a consumer may frequently be induced by the design of that product and could thus be prevented by more thoughtful design. In order that producers can ensure their own viability and satisfy the consumer market, their products must be safe, efficient, comfortable and satisfying to use, as well as durable, serviceable and realistically priced. One requirement for achieving this has been said to be the input of accident and ergonomics data early in the product development process; the present paper examines this proposition. Evidence is provided by research into the design and manufacture of consumer products for the UK market, carried out at Birmingham University. Examined in particular are the extent to which formal development processes and design safety review procedures are used, and the degree of utilisation of accident, ergonomics, user testing and market feedback data, identifying barriers to the widespread use of these. Safe and ergonomic design of products must aim to be seen as a positive business activity, rather than as a cost-centre. The benefits to a company of a comprehensive design safety programme will more than outweigh the costs given the pressures identified earlier.     

Geoadditive expectile regression

Quantile regression has emerged as one of the standard tools for regression analysis that enables a proper assessment of the complete conditional distribution of responses even in the presence of heteroscedastic errors. Quantile regression estimates are obtained by minimising an asymmetrically weighted sum of absolute deviations from the regression line, a decision theoretic formulation of the estimation problem that avoids a full specification of the error term distribution. Recent advances in mean regression have concentrated on making the regression structure more flexible by including nonlinear effects of continuous covariates, random effects or spatial effects. These extensions often rely on penalised least squares or penalised likelihood estimation with quadratic penalties and may therefore be difficult to combine with the linear programming approaches often considered in quantile regression. As a consequence, geoadditive expectile regression based on minimising an asymmetrically weighted sum of squared residuals is introduced. Different estimation procedures are presented including least asymmetrically weighted squares, boosting and restricted expectile regression. The properties of these procedures are investigated in a simulation study and an analysis on rental fees in Munich is provided where the geoadditive specification allows for an analysis of nonlinear effects of the size of flats or the year of construction and the spatial distribution of rents simultaneously.     

关于IV-(∈,∈Ⅴq)模糊格蕴涵子代数

运用区间值模糊集的思想对IV-(∈,∈Ⅴq)-模糊格蕴涵子代数概念作进一步研究。给出了IV-(∈,∈Ⅴq)-模糊格蕴涵子代数的若干新的性质与刻画;获得了IV-(∈,∈Ⅴq)-模糊格蕴涵子代数的象与原象成为IV-(∈,∈Ⅴq)-模糊格蕴涵子代数的条件;讨论了IV-(∈,∈Ⅴq)-模糊格蕴涵子代数的直积特征。     

正数和与积的对偶不等式

给出了在个数相同的两组正数之积相等的情形下,判定这两组正数之和大小的一个充分条件,由此得出了正数和最大值存在的链式条件．应用这一链式条件解决了将,nl个正数分成等个数的n个数组后,每组之积的和与每组之和的积的最值问题．对于正数积的最小值问题,证明了与正数和最大值类似的结果,且相应的定理之间互为对偶定理．     

大坝监测分析中的时间序列叠合模型

叙述了用时间序列叠合模型建立大坝监测预报模型的2种基本方法:统计-时间序列模型和确定性时序叠合模型。通过统计软件SPSS实现2种时序叠合模型的实例表明，在环境量记录完整的情况下，统计-时间序列模型比单纯的统计回归模型精度要高;在缺少环境量监测或与环境量的因果关系不明显的情况下，用确定性叠合模型分析和预报大坝监测效应量的测值，精度也很高，并能够分离出趋势性分量、周期分量和随机平稳分量，分析的结果简单明了，是大坝监测分析中一种比较好的方法。     

带有区间约束的产品设计参数模糊推理法及其在继电器智能设计中的应用

在产品设计规则和计算式中,常存在一些只能在某一范围内取值的待定系数(设为a,且a∈[aL,aH]).a的取值通常受到多种因素的影响和约束,而这种约束往往带有模糊性.为此,首先根据设计规则中各种影响因素对a的模糊约束关系,分别构造两者的备择集以及备择集元素在其论域上的模糊集合,然后基于模糊综合决策方法来确定a.本方法剔除了以往在解决这一问题时,由人来决定a取值的主观性,适用于产品的智能化设计.     

大洋多金属结核的非冶金加工应用

基于大洋多金属结核具有的特殊物理化学性质,本文重点介绍国内外开展的大洋多金属结核非冶金加工利用的研究情况。     

钛在汽车工业中的应用及降低钛材成本的工艺

叙述了钛在减轻汽车自重、节约燃油、保护环境、降低噪声、提高汽车性能方面的优势和应用领域及趋势。介绍并评价了几种降低海绵钛与钛材成本的工艺技术。     

营养型发酵软饮料的研究

研究利用稻加工大米的副产品碎米为主要原料 ,加入麦芽、加酶 ,进行液化、糖化、发酵等工艺 ,研制出一种发酵营养型软饮料。本产品与啤酒相比 ,可减少原料总用量的 17% ,减少麦芽用量的 2 8.6%。     

SABUL: A Transport Protocol for Grid Computing

This paper describes SABUL, an application-level data transfer protocol for data-intensive applications over high bandwidth-delay product networks. SABUL is designed for reliability, high performance, fairness and stability. It uses UDP to transfer data and TCP to return control messages. A rate-based congestion control that tunes the inter-packet transmission time helps achieve both efficiency and fairness. In order to remove the fairness bias between flows with different network delays, SABUL adjusts its sending rate at uniform intervals, instead of at intervals determined by round trip time. This protocol has demonstrated its efficiency and fairness in both experimental and practical applications. SABUL has been implemented as an open source C++ library, which has been successfully used in several Grid computing applications.