Participation in Urban Interaction Design for Civic Engagement

The future of civic engagement is characterised by both technological innovation as well as new technological user practices that are fuelled by trends towards mobile, personal devices; broadband connectivity; open data; urban interfaces; and cloud computing. These technology trends are progressing at a rapid pace, and have led global technology vendors to package and sell the “Smart City” as a centralised service delivery platform predicted to optimise and enhance cities’ key performance indicators – and generate a profitable market. The top-down deployment of these large and proprietary technology platforms have helped sectors such as energy, transport, and healthcare to increase efficiencies. However, an increasing number of scholars and commentators warn of another “IT bubble” emerging. Along with some city leaders, they argue that the top-down approach does not fit the governance dynamics and values of a liberal democracy when applied across sectors. A thorough understanding is required, of the socio-cultural nuances of how people work, live, play across different environments, and how they employ social media and mobile devices to interact with, engage in, and constitute public realms. Although the term “slacktivism” is sometimes used to denote a watered down version of civic engagement and activism that is reduced to clicking a “Like” button and signing online petitions, we believe that we are far from witnessing another Biedermeier period that saw people focus on the domestic and the non-political. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, such as post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, the Occupy movements in New York, Hong Kong and elsewhere, the Arab Spring, Stuttgart 21, Fukushima, the Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul, and the Vinegar Movement in Brazil in 2013. These examples of civic action shape the dynamics of governments, and in turn, call for new processes to be incorporated into governance structures. Participatory research into these new processes across the triad of people, place and technology is a significant and timely investment to foster productive, sustainable, and liveable human habitats. With this article, we want to reframe the current debates in academia and priorities in industry and government to allow citizens and civic actors to take their rightful centrepiece place in civic movements. This calls for new participatory approaches for co-inquiry and co-design. It is an evolving process with an explicit agenda to facilitate change, and we propose participatory action research (PAR) as an indispensable component in the journey to develop new governance infrastructures and practices for civic engagement. We do not limit our definition of civic technologies to tools specifically designed to simply enhance government and governance, such as renewing your car registration online or casting your vote electronically on election day. Rather, we are interested in civic media and technologies that foster citizen engagement in the widest sense, and particularly the participatory design of such civic technologies that strive to involve citizens in political debate and action as well as question conventional approaches to political issues. The rationale for this approach is an alternative to smart cities in a “perpetual tomorrow,” based on many weak and strong signals of civic actions revolving around technology seen today. It seeks to emphasise and direct attention to active citizenry over passive consumerism, human actors over human factors, culture over infrastructure, and prosperity over efficiency. First, we will have a look at some fundamental issues arising from applying simplistic smart city visions to the kind of a problem a city poses. We focus on the touch points between “the city” and its civic body, the citizens. In order to provide for meaningful civic engagement, the city must provide appropriate interfaces.

Application of an evolutionary fuzzy system for the estimation of workforce deployment and cross-training in an assembly environment

Owing to the increased customer demands for make-to-order products and smaller product life-cycles, today assembly lines are designed to ensure a quick switch-over from one product model to another for companies' survival in market place. The complexity associated with the decisions pertaining to the type of training and number of workers and their exposition to the different tasks especially in the current era of customized production is a serious problem that the managers and the HRD gurus are facing in industry. This paper aims to determine the amount of cross-training and dynamic deployment policy caused by workforce flexibility for a make-to-order assembly. The aforementioned issues have been dealt with by adopting the concept of evolutionary fuzzy system because of the linguistic nature of the attributes associated with product variety and task complexity. A fuzzy system-based methodology is proposed to determine the amount of cross-training and dynamic deployment policy. The proposed methodology is tested on 10 sample products of varying complexities and the results obtained are in line with the conclusions drawn by previous researchers.

Game theoretic analysis of collusions in nonneutral networks

This paper studies the impact of exclusive contracts between a content provider (CP) and an internet service provider (ISP) in a nonneutral network. We consider a simple linear demand function for the CPs. We studywhen an exclusive contract is benefcial to the colluding pair and evaluate its impact on the noncolluding players at equilibrium. For the case of two CPs and one ISP we show that collusion may not always be benefcial. We derive an explicit condition in terms of the advertisement revenues of the CPs that tells when a collusion is proftable to the colluding entities.

NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON LIQUID-SOLID FLOW IN A HYDROCYCLONE

Hydrocyclones are widely used in industry, of which the geometrical design using CFD techniques is gaining more popularity in recent years. In this study, the Euler-Euler approach and the Reynolds stress model are applied to simulate the liquid-solid flowfield in a hydrocyclone. The methodology is validated by a good agreement between experimental data and numerical results. Within the research range, the simulation indicates that the liquid-solid separation mainly occurs in the conical segment, and increasing conical height or decreasing cylindrical height helps to improve the grade efficiencies of solid particles. Based on these results, two of the same hydrocyclones are designed and installed in series to establish a liquid-solid separation system. Many experiments are then conducted under different conditions, in which the effects of the water cut and the second hydrocyclone on the separation are investigated. The results also confirm that smaller solid particles are more susceptible to the inlet conditions, and the second hydrocyclone plays a more important role as the water cut reduces.

A percepção sobre os incentivos fiscais para as PME do setor têxtil: o caso da região serrana do estado do Rio de Janeiro

As micro, pequenas e médias empresas geram cerca de 20% do PIB brasileiro. Estima-se que, atualmente, 60% dos postos de trabalho e cerca de 85% dos novos empregos no Brasil são gerados por micro, pequenas e médias empresas. Nesse sentido, a implementação de políticas públicas destinadas as micro, pequenas e médias empresas possuem a dupla dimensão de favorecer tanto o crescimento econômico como a melhoria de indicadores sociais como a distribuição desigual da renda ou a desigualdade regional. Entretanto, um importante debate amadurece no país a respeito da efetividade e dos retornos gerados pelas concessões de incentivos fiscais. Alinhados a este cenário, o objetivo do presente estudo é analisar o impacto dos incentivos fiscais do setor têxtil das pequenas e médias empresas da região serrana do estado do Rio de Janeiro através da visão de seus gestores e dos indicadores econômicos. Foi realizado um estudo de campo no qual os gestores das PME do setor têxtil da região serrana do estado do Rio de Janeiro responderam um questionário composto por dezoito perguntas. As respostas foram comparadas a um cálculo de estimativa de renuncia entre o Lucro Presumido e o SIMPLES Nacional. Como resultados verificou-se a não efetividade dos incentivos fiscais no seu principal papel de geração de emprego e renda e uma sensação de insuficiência, desconhecimento e, consequentemente, falta de transparência em relação aos incentivos fiscais disponíveis e concedidos especificamente para o setor ou região, na percepção dos gestores das PME.

Modelling information requirements in complex engineering services

Services based around complex engineering equipment and systems provide substantial challenges in both the long-term management of the equipment and the need for guaranteed delivery of the related service. One of the challenges for an organisation providing these services is the management of the information that is required to design, deliver and subsequently assess the success of the service. To assist in this process this paper develops a model for capturing, organising and assessing information requirements for these Complex Engineering Services in which information required to support key decisions in the life cycle of the service is identified. The model – referred to as The 12-Box Model for Service Information Requirements – is embedded in a three-phase procedure for providing an assessment of information requirements of a service contract which also provides insight into the capabilities of available information systems in supporting the contract. An illustrative example examining service information in an aircraft availability contract is used to demonstrate the use of the 12-Box Model and associated assessment procedure.

Classifying data quality problems in asset management

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. Making sound asset management decisions, such as whether to replace or maintain an ageing underground water pipe, are critical to ensure that organisations maximise the performance of their assets. These decisions are only as good as the data that supports them, and hence many asset management organisations are in desperate need to improve the quality of their data. This chapter reviews the key academic research on data quality (DQ) and Information Quality (IQ) (used interchangeably in this chapter) in asset management, combines this with the current DQ problems faced by asset management organisations in various business sectors, and presents a classification of the most important DQ problems that need to be tackled by asset management organisations. In this research, eleven semi structured interviews were carried out with asset management professionals in a range of business sectors in the UK. The problems described in the academic literature were cross checked against the problems found in industry. In order to support asset management professionals in solving these problems, we categorised them into seven different DQ dimensions, used in the academic literature, so that it is clear how these problems fit within the standard frameworks for assessing and improving data quality. Asset management professionals can therefore now use these frameworks to underpin their DQ improvement initiatives while focussing on the most critical DQ problems.

CSR: Constrained Selfish Routing in Ad-hoc Networks

Routing protocols for ad-hoc networks assume that the nodes forming the network are either under a single authority, or else that they would be altruistically forwarding data for other nodes with no expectation of a return. These assumptions are unrealistic since in ad-hoc networks, nodes are likely to be autonomous and rational (selfish), and thus unwilling to help unless they have an incentive to do so. Providing such incentives is an important aspect that should be considered when designing ad-hoc routing protocols. In this paper, we propose a dynamic, decentralized routing protocol for ad-hoc networks that provides incentives in the form of payments to intermediate nodes used to forward data for others. In our Constrained Selfish Routing (CSR) protocol, game-theoretic approaches are used to calculate payments (incentives) that ensure both the truthfulness of participating nodes and the fairness of the CSR protocol. We show through simulations that CSR is an energy efficient protocol and that it provides lower communication overhead in the best and average cases compared to existing approaches.

A pll based frequency synthesizer in 0.13 um sige bicmos for mb-ofdm uwb systems

With the growing demand for high-speed and high-quality short-range communication, multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing ultra-wide band (MB-OFDM UWB) systems have recently garnered considerable interest in industry and in academia. To achieve a low-cost solution, highly integrated transceivers with small die area and minimum power consumption are required. The key building block of the transceiver is the frequency synthesizer. A frequency synthesizer comprised of two PLLs and one multiplexer is presented in this thesis. Ring oscillators are adopted for PLL implementation in order to drastically reduce the die area of the frequency synthesizer. The poor spectral purity appearing in the frequency synthesizers involving mixers is greatly improved in this design. Based on the specifications derived from application standards, a design methodology is presented to obtain the parameters of building blocks. As well, the simulation results are provided to verify the performance of proposed design.