The "human factor" in DFM

With a focus on understanding the overall effect of DFM on human factors aspects, DFM/DFA literature was systematically searched, reviewed and critically assessed. The influence of DFM on work organization is analysed using examples from literature, with the aim of quantifying consequences on work performance, job satisfaction and human work load where possible. It is also shown that job enlargement through DFM tasks increases the workload for the Product Designer, who is on the critical path of the engineering process. Without taking measures to counterbalance this higher workload of the Product Designer, DFM projects in complex engineering environments are likely to fail.

Multiple iterations : mapping the trace

This paper explores the concept that individual dancers leave traces in a choreographer’s body of work and similarly, that dancers carry forward residue of embodied choreographies into other working processes. This presentation will be grounded in a study of the multiple iterations of a programme of solo works commissioned in 2008 from choreographers John Jasperse, Jodi Melnick, Liz Roche and Rosemary Butcher and danced by the author. This includes an exploration of the development by John Jasperse of themes from his solo into the pieces PURE (2008) and Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking and Flat Out Lies (2009); an adaptation of the solo Business of the Bloom by Jodi Melnick in 2008 and a further adaptation of Business of the Bloom by this author in 2012. It will map some of the developments that occurred through a number of further performances over five years of the solo Shared Material on Dying by Liz Roche and the working process of the (uncompleted) solo Episodes of Flight by Rosemary Butcher. The purpose is to reflect back on authorship in dance, an art form in which lineages of influence can often be clearly observed. Normally, once a choreographic work is created and performed, it is archived through video recording, notation and/or reviews. The dancer is no longer called upon to represent the dance piece within the archive and thus her/his lived presence and experiential perspective disappears. The author will draw on the different traces still inhabiting her body as pathways towards understanding how choreographic movement circulates beyond this moment of performance. This will include the interrogation of ownership of choreographic movement, as once it becomes integrated in the body of the dancer, who owns the dance? Furthermore, certain dancers, through their individual physical characteristics and moving identities, can deeply influence the formation of choreographic signatures, a proposition that challenges the sole authorship role of the choreographer in dance production. This paper will be delivered in a presentation format that will bleed into movement demonstrations alongside video footage of the works and auto-ethnographic accounts of dancing experience. A further source of knowledge will be drawn from extracts of interviews with other dancers including Sara Rudner, Rebecca Hilton and Catherine Bennett.

High performance VLSI architecture design for H.264 CAVLC decoder

H.264 video standard achieves high quality video along with high data compression when compared to other existing video standards. H.264 uses context-based adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) to code residual data in Baseline profile. In this paper we describe a novel architecture for CAVLC decoder including coeff-token decoder, level decoder total-zeros decoder and run-before decoder UMC library in 0.13 mu CMOS technology is used to synthesize the proposed design. The proposed design reduces chip area and improves critical path performance of CAVLC decoder in comparison with [1]. Macroblock level (including luma and chroma) pipeline processing for CAVLC is implemented with an average of 141 cycles (including pipeline buffering) per macroblock at 250MHz clock frequency. To compare our results with [1] clock frequency is constrained to 125MHz. The area required for the proposed architecture is 17586 gates, which is 22.1% improvement in comparison to [1]. We obtain a throughput of 1.73 * 10(6) macroblocks/second, which is 28% higher than that reported in [1]. The proposed design meets the processing requirement of 1080HD [5] video at 30frames/seconds.

Design of a manual press for the production of compacted stabilized soil blocks

In this paper, we discuss the design of a manually operated soil compaction machine that is being used to manufacture stabilized soil blocks (SSB). A case study of manufacturing more than three million blocks in a housing project using manually operated machines is illustrated. The paper is focussed on the design, development, and evaluation of a manually operated soil compaction machine for the production of SSB. It also details the machine design philosophy, compaction characteristics of soils, employment generation potential of small-scale stabilized soil block productions systems, and embodied energy. Static compaction of partially saturated soils was performed to generate force-displacement curves in a confined compaction process were generated. Based on the soil compaction data engineering design aspects of a toggle press are illustrated. The results of time and motion study on block production operations using manual machines are discussed. Critical path network diagrams were used for small-scale SSB production systems. Such production systems generate employment at a very low capital cost.

The design structure system - A method for managing the design of complex systems

Systems design involves the determination of interdependent variables. Thus the precedence ordering for the tasks of determining these variables involves circuits. Circuits require planning decisions abut how to iterate and where to use estimates. Conventional planning techniques, such as critical path, do not deal with these problems. Techniques are shown in this paper which acknowledge these circuits in the design of systems. These techniques can be used to develop an effective engineering plan, showing where estimates are to be used, how design iterations and reviews are handled, and how information flows during the design work.

可重构装配系统开放式组织结构的研究

为了克服传统装配线的不足,在基于功能对象的产品族建模基础上,提出了主干线和装配模块相结合的可重构装配系统开放式组织结构。这种分形相似的组织结构具有能力柔性、鲁棒性、功能扩展能力等特点,并能通过模块的局部调整快速响应市场的需求。利用网络法,针对鲁棒性和增容性问题,提出了相应的重构优化算法。

Michel Foucault and Dorothy Smith in Case File Research: Strange Bedfellows or Complimentary Thinkers?

The aim of this article is to provide an exploration how the work of two theorists with notably different stances could be used effectively to enhance critical research methods in relation to the history of child welfare social work. The design and implementation of child welfare policies, practices and discourses could considerably benefit from a more historically well grounded scholarship that enables actors to connect their present concerns with the broader historical dynamics of social regulation. The article reports on how the work of Michel Foucault and Dorothy E. Smith might be considered in parallel as two different perspectives to the same scene in time and place. The differences and similarities in their approaches are explored with an emphasis on concepts most relevant to researching child welfare archives including discourse, text, the subject and power-knowledge. The article concludes with a commentary on further development to take forward this methodological analysis.

Berryman, Sexton and the Possibilities of Poetic Language

This paper examines a select number of poems by Middle Generation poets John Berryman and Anne Sexton in relation to questions of death, silence and the task that literature sets itself as understood in key works by Blanchot, Heidegger, and Levinas. Rather than recourse to the overtrodden critical path of confessional interpretations of their work, this paper connects Berryman’s The Dream Songs (1969) and two Sexton poems (‘Oh’ and ‘The Silence’) to the philosophical determinations of what it is language can say and what demands literature makes of the writer prepared to risk their own being in answer to its call. Central issues such as suicide and the originating silence of the work of art are intricately interwoven with Berryman’s and Sexton’s work. Leaving aside their biographies, and by approaching suicide as a philosophical problem with which their poetry wrestles, a restructured approach to their work becomes available. The impulse to suicide and the mental processes involved in considering and committing the act are instincts and responses located within an individual’s own psychology. For these writers particularly such issues are sited within a philosophical debate about language, what it can and cannot represent. If poetry articulates language’s argument about its own capability, it is the ideal forum for philosophical confrontations with the possibilities of existence as represented by the grave decision to take one’s own life. © The Author 2013.

Design of interlock-free combined allocators for Networks-on-Chip

This paper presents a thorough investigation of the combined allocator design for Networks-on-Chip (NoC). Particularly, we discuss the interlock of the combined NoC allocator, which is caused by the lock mechanism of priority updating between the local and global arbiters. Architectures and implementations of three interlock-free combined allocators are presented in detail. Their cost, critical path, as well as network level performance are demonstrated based on 65-nm standard cell technology.

A Unified Scheduler for Recursive and Task Dataflow Parallelism

Task dataflow languages simplify the specification of parallel programs by dynamically detecting and enforcing dependencies between tasks. These languages are, however, often restricted to a single level of parallelism. This language design is reflected in the runtime system, where a master thread explicitly generates a task graph and worker threads execute ready tasks and wake-up their dependents. Such an approach is incompatible with state-of-the-art schedulers such as the Cilk scheduler, that minimize the creation of idle tasks (work-first principle) and place all task creation and scheduling off the critical path. This paper proposes an extension to the Cilk scheduler in order to reconcile task dependencies with the work-first principle. We discuss the impact of task dependencies on the properties of the Cilk scheduler. Furthermore, we propose a low-overhead ticket-based technique for dependency tracking and enforcement at the object level. Our scheduler also supports renaming of objects in order to increase task-level parallelism. Renaming is implemented using versioned objects, a new type of hyper object. Experimental evaluation shows that the unified scheduler is as efficient as the Cilk scheduler when tasks have no dependencies. Moreover, the unified scheduler is more efficient than SMPSS, a particular implementation of a task dataflow language.

An Investigation towards colossal success of Larsen and Toubro Limited: Human resource management perspective

Larsen and Toubro (L&T) Limited is India’s largest construction conglomerate. L&T’s expertise is harnessed to execute high value projects that demand adherence to stringent timelines in a scenario where disparate disciplines of engineering are required to be coordinated on a critical path. However, no company can acquire such a feat without systematic management of its human resource. An investigation on the human resource management practices in orienting L&T’s success can help to identify some of the ethical human resource practices, especially in the context of Indian market. Accordingly, a well-designed employee satisfaction survey was conducted for assessment of the HRM practices being followed in L&T. Unlike other companies, L&T aims to meet the long-term needs of its employees rather than short-term needs. There were however few areas of concerns, such as yearly appraisal system and equality to treat the employees. It is postulated that the inequality to treat the male and female employees is primarily a typical stereotype due to the fact that construction is conventionally believed to be a male dominant activity. A periodic survey intended to provide 360° feedback system can help to avoid such irregularities. This study is thus expected to provide healthy practices of HRM to nurture the young talents of India. This may help them to evaluate their decisions by analyzing the complex relationship between HRM practices and output of an organization.

Secure Implementation in Production Economies

This paper shows that, in production economies, the generalized serial social choice functions defined by Shenker (1992) are securely implementable (in the sense of Saijo et al., 2007) and that they include the well-known fixed path social choice functions.

The impact of global routing on the performance of NoCs in FPGAs

With the over-provisioned routing resource on FPGA, the topology choice for NoC implementation on FPGA is more flexible than on ASIC. However, it is well understood that the global wire routing impacts the performance of NoC on FPGA because the topology is routed by using fixed routing fabric. An important question that arises is: will the benefit of diameter reduction by using a highly connective topology outweigh the impact of global routing? To answer this question, we investigate FPGA based packet switched NoC implementations with different sizes and topologies, and quantitatively measure the impact of global routing to each of these networks. The result shows that with sufficient routing resources on modern FPGA, the global routing is not on the critical path of the system, and thus is not a dominating factor for the performance of practical multi-hop NoC system. © 2011 IEEE.

Low-Power Process-Variation Tolerant Arithmetic Units Using Input-Based Elastic Clocking

In this paper we propose a design methodology for low-power high-performance, process-variation tolerant architecture for arithmetic units. The novelty of our approach lies in the fact that possible delay failures due to process variations and/or voltage scaling are predicted in advance and addressed by employing an elastic clocking technique. The prediction mechanism exploits the dependence of delay of arithmetic units upon input data patterns and identifies specific inputs that activate the critical path. Under iso-yield conditions, the proposed design operates at a lower scaled down Vdd without any performance degradation, while it ensures a superlative yield under a design style employing nominal supply and transistor threshold voltage. Simulation results show power savings of upto 29%, energy per computation savings of upto 25.5% and yield enhancement of upto 11.1% compared to the conventional adders and multipliers implemented in the 70nm BPTM technology. We incorporated the proposed modules in the execution unit of a five stage DLX pipeline to measure performance using SPEC2000 benchmarks [9]. Maximum area and throughput penalty obtained were 10% and 3% respectively.

A multi-capability sensor for hydrocarbons, synthetic-based fluids and heavy metals:Applications for environmental monitoring during removal of drill cuttings piles

As part of any drilling cuttings pile removal process the requirement for monitoring the release of contaminants into the marine environment will be critical. Traditional methods for such monitoring involve taking samples for laboratory analysis. This process is time consuming and only provides data on spot samples taken from a limited number of locations and time frames. Such processes, therefore, offer very restricted information. The need for improved marine sensors for monitoring contaminants is established. We report here the development and application of a multi-capability optical sensor for the real-time in situ monitoring of three key marine environmental and offshore/oil parameters: hydrocarbons, synthetic-based fluids and heavy metal concentrations. The use of these sensors will be a useful tool for real-time in situ environmental monitoring during the process of decommissioning offshore structures. Multi-capability array sensors could also provide information on the dispersion of contamination from drill cuttings piles either while they are in situ or during their removal.