Manufacturing at double the speed

The speed of manufacturing processes today depends on a trade-off between the physical processes of production, the wider system that allows these processes to operate and the co-ordination of a supply chain in the pursuit of meeting customer needs. Could the speed of this activity be doubled? This paper explores this hypothetical question, starting with examination of a diverse set of case studies spanning the activities of manufacturing. This reveals that the constraints on increasing manufacturing speed have some common themes, and several of these are examined in more detail, to identify absolute limits to performance. The physical processes of production are constrained by factors such as machine stiffness, actuator acceleration, heat transfer and the delivery of fluids, and for each of these, a simplified model is used to analyse the gap between current and limiting performance. The wider systems of production require the co-ordination of resources and push at the limits of human biophysical and cognitive limits. Evidence about these is explored and related to current practice. Out of this discussion, five promising innovations are explored to show examples of how manufacturing speed is increasing—with line arrays of point actuators, parallel tools, tailored application of precision, hybridisation and task taxonomies. The paper addresses a broad question which could be pursued by a wider community and in greater depth, but even this first examination suggests the possibility of unanticipated innovations in current manufacturing practices.

Characteristics, complications, and gaps in evidence-based interventions in rheumatic heart disease: the Global Rheumatic Heart Disease Registry (the REMEDY study)

AIMS: Rheumatic heart disease (RHD) accounts for over a million premature deaths annually; however, there is little contemporary information on presentation, complications, and treatment.

METHODS AND RESULTS: This prospective registry enrolled 3343 patients (median age 28 years, 66.2% female) presenting with RHD at 25 hospitals in 12 African countries, India, and Yemen between January 2010 and November 2012. The majority (63.9%) had moderate-to-severe multivalvular disease complicated by congestive heart failure (33.4%), pulmonary hypertension (28.8%), atrial fibrillation (AF) (21.8%), stroke (7.1%), infective endocarditis (4%), and major bleeding (2.7%). One-quarter of adults and 5.3% of children had decreased left ventricular (LV) systolic function; 23% of adults and 14.1% of children had dilated LVs. Fifty-five percent (n = 1761) of patients were on secondary antibiotic prophylaxis. Oral anti-coagulants were prescribed in 69.5% (n = 946) of patients with mechanical valves (n = 501), AF (n = 397), and high-risk mitral stenosis in sinus rhythm (n = 48). However, only 28.3% (n = 269) had a therapeutic international normalized ratio. Among 1825 women of childbearing age (12-51 years), only 3.6% (n = 65) were on contraception. The utilization of valvuloplasty and valve surgery was higher in upper-middle compared with lower-income countries.

CONCLUSION: Rheumatic heart disease patients were young, predominantly female, and had high prevalence of major cardiovascular complications. There is suboptimal utilization of secondary antibiotic prophylaxis, oral anti-coagulation, and contraception, and variations in the use of percutaneous and surgical interventions by country income level.

Praying for Salvation: A Map of Relatedness

This article attempts to push Mauss’ work on the sociality of prayer (1909) to its fullest conclusion by arguing that prayer can be viewed anthropologically as providing a map for social and emotional relatedness. Based on fieldwork among deep-sea fisher families living in Gamrie, North-East Scotland (home to 700 people and six Protestant churches), the author takes as his primary ethnographic departure the ritual of the ‘mid-week prayer meeting’. Among the self-proclaimed ‘fundamentalists’ of Gamrie’s Brethren and Presbyterian churches, attending the prayer meeting means praying for salvation. Yet, contrary to the stereotype of Protestant soteriology as highly individualist, in the context of Gamrie, salvation is not principally focused upon the self, but is instead sought on behalf of the ‘unconverted’ other. Locally, this ‘other’ is made sense of with reference to three different categories of relatedness: the family, the village and the nation. The author’s argument is that each category of relatedness carries with it a different affective quality: anguish for one’s family, resentment toward one’s village, and resignation towards one’s nation. As such, prayers for salvation establish and maintain not only vertical – human-divine – relatedness, but also horizontal relatedness between persons, while also giving them their emotional tenor. In ‘fundamentalist’ Gamrie, these human relationships, and crucially their affective asymmetries, may be mapped, therefore, by treating prayers as social phenomena that seek to engage with a world dichotomised into vice and virtue, rebellion and submission, and, ultimately, damnation and salvation.

Whose sins do the Brethren confess? The problem of sin as the problem of expiation

Among Brethren fisher families in Gamrie, northeast Scotland, professional clergy and written liturgy are held to be blasphemous denials of the true workings of the Holy Spirit. God, I was told, chooses to speak through all born-again (male) persons, unrestricted by the vain repetitions of lettered clerics and their prayer books. In this context, confession of one’s own sin is a private and pointedly interior affair. In Gamrie, not only did every man seek to be his own skipper, but also his own priest. Yet, much of Brethren worship is given over to ritualised acts of confession. So whose sins do the Brethren confess, and to what end? This article argues that among the Brethren of Gamrie, such acts involve confessing not one’s own sin, but the sins of a ‘sick’ and ‘fallen’ world. More than this, by attending to the sociological (as opposed to theological) processes of confessing the sins of another, we see a collapse in the distinction between confiteor and credo that has so dogged anthropological studies of Christianity. In Brethren prayer and bible study, as well as in everyday gossip, the “I confess” of the confiteor and the “I believe” of credo co-constitute one another in and through evidences of the ‘lostness’ of ‘this present age’. But how, if at all, does this solve ‘the problem of sin’? This article suggests that, with the ritual gaze of confession turned radically outward, Brethren announcements of global wickedness enact (in a deliberate tautology) both a totalising call for repentance from sin, and a millenarian creed of the imminent apocalypse. Here, the problem of ritual can be understood as the problem of (partially failed) expiation.

Modelling of Evaporator in Waste Heat Recovery System using Finite Volume Method and Fuzzy Technique

The evaporator is an important component in the Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC)-based Waste Heat Recovery (WHR) system since the effective heat transfer of this device reflects on the efficiency of the system. When the WHR system operates under supercritical conditions, the heat transfer mechanism in the evaporator is unpredictable due to the change of thermo-physical properties of the fluid with temperature. Although the conventional finite volume model can successfully capture those changes in the evaporator of the WHR process, the computation time for this method is high. To reduce the computation time, this paper develops a new fuzzy based evaporator model and compares its performance with the finite volume method. The results show that the fuzzy technique can be applied to predict the output of the supercritical evaporator in the waste heat recovery system and can significantly reduce the required computation time. The proposed model, therefore, has the potential to be used in real time control applications.

Enhancing Security Requirements Engineering by Organisational Learning

More and more software projects today are security-related in one way or the other. Requirements engineers often fail to recognise indicators for security problems which is a major source of security problems in practice. Identifying security-relevant requirements is labour-intensive and errorprone. In order to facilitate the security requirements elicitation process, we present an approach supporting organisational learning on security requirements by establishing company-wide experience resources, and a socio-technical network to benefit from them. The approach is based on modelling the flow of requirements and related experiences. Based on those models, we enable people to exchange experiences about security-requirements while they write and discuss project requirements. At the same time, the approach enables participating stakeholders to learn while they write requirements. This can increase security awareness and facilitate learning on both individual and organisational levels. As a basis for our approach, we introduce heuristic assistant tools which support reuse of existing security-related experiences. In particular, they include Bayesian classifiers which issue a warning automatically when new requirements seem to be security-relevant. Our results indicate that this is feasible, in particular if the classifier is trained with domain specific data and documents from previous projects. We show how the ability to identify security-relevant requirements can be improved using this approach. We illustrate our approach by providing a step-by-step example of how we improved the security requirements engineering process at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and report on experiences made in this application.

Eliciting Security Requirements and Tracing them to Design: An Integration of Common Criteria, Heuristics, and UMLsec

Building secure systems is difficult for many reasons. This paper deals with two of the main challenges: (i) the lack of security expertise in development teams, and (ii) the inadequacy of existing methodologies to support developers who are not security experts. The security standard ISO 14508 (Common Criteria) together with secure design techniques such as UMLsec can provide the security expertise, knowledge, and guidelines that are needed. However, security expertise and guidelines are not stated explicitly in the Common Criteria. They are rather phrased in security domain terminology and difficult to understand for developers. This means that some general security and secure design expertise are required to fully take advantage of the Common Criteria and UMLsec. In addition, there is the problem of tracing security requirements and objectives into solution design,which is needed for proof of requirements fulfilment. This paper describes a security requirements engineering methodology called SecReq. SecReq combines three techniques: the Common Criteria, the heuristic requirements editorHeRA, andUMLsec. SecReqmakes systematic use of the security engineering knowledge contained in the Common Criteria and UMLsec, as well as security-related heuristics in the HeRA tool. The integrated SecReq method supports early detection of security-related issues (HeRA), their systematic refinement guided by the Common Criteria, and the ability to trace security requirements into UML design models. A feedback loop helps reusing experiencewithin SecReq and turns the approach into an iterative process for the secure system life-cycle, also in the presence of system evolution.

Life after Stroke: Coping mechanisms among African Caribbean Women

In the UK stroke is the third most common cause of death for women and the incidence in African Caribbean women is higher than the general population. Stroke burden has major consequences for the physical, mental and social health of African Caribbean women. In order to adjust to life after stroke individuals affected employ a range of strategies which may include personal, religious (church) or spiritual support (i.e. prayer), individual motivation, or resignation to life with a disability. This study explored these areas through the coping mechanisms that African Caribbean women utilised post stroke in the context of stroke recovery and lifestyle modification efforts needed to promote healthy living post stroke. A qualitative approach using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was adopted. Eight women were recruited into the study. Semi structured in-depth interviews were audio recorded and were transcribed verbatim. Data were analysed using a four-stage framework: familiarisation, sense making, developing themes and data refinement and analysis. Three main themes on coping emerged: the need to follow medical rules to manage stroke, strength and determination, and the use of religion and faith to cope with life after stroke. These findings illustrate both a tension between religious beliefs and the medical approach to stroke and highlight the potential benefits that religion and the church can play in stroke recovery. Implications for practice include acknowledgement and inclusion of religion and church based health promotion in post stroke recovery.

Uncovering Dependence Clusters and Linchpin Functions

Dependence clusters are (maximal) collections of mutually dependent source code entities according to some dependence relation. Their presence in software complicates many maintenance activities including testing, refactoring, and feature extraction. Despite several studies finding them common in production code, their formation, identification, and overall structure are not well understood, partly because of challenges in approximating true dependences between program entities. Previous research has considered two approximate dependence relations: a fine-grained statement-level relation using control and data dependences from a program’s System Dependence Graph and a coarser relation based on function-level controlflow reachability. In principal, the first is more expensive and more precise than the second. Using a collection of twenty programs, we present an empirical investigation of the clusters identified by these two approaches. In support of the analysis, we consider hybrid cluster types that works at the coarser function-level but is based on the higher-precision statement-level dependences. The three types of clusters are compared based on their slice sets using two clustering metrics. We also perform extensive analysis of the programs to identify linchpin functions – functions primarily responsible for holding a cluster together. Results include evidence that the less expensive, coarser approaches can often be used as e�ective proxies for the more expensive, finer-grained approaches. Finally, the linchpin analysis shows that linchpin functions can be e�ectively and automatically identified.

ORBS and the limits of static slicing

Observation-based slicing is a recently-introduced, language-independent, slicing technique based on the dependencies observable from program behaviour. Due to the wellknown limits of dynamic analysis, we may only compute an under-approximation of the true observation-based slice. However, because the observation-based slice captures all possible dependence that can be observed, even such approximations can yield insight into the limitations of static slicing. For example, a static slice, S that is strictly smaller than the corresponding observation based slice is guaranteed to be unsafe. We present the results of three sets of experiments on 12 different programs, including benchmarks and larger programs, which investigate the relationship between static and observation-based slicing. We show that, in extreme cases, observation-based slices can find the true static minimal slice, where static techniques cannot. For more typical cases, our results illustrate the potential for observation-based slicing to highlight unsafe static slices. Finally, we report on the sensitivity of observation-based slicing to test quality.

Religiöse Symbole im öffentlichen Raum

Abhandlung über Symbole verschiedener Religionen und deren mögliches Konfliktpotential (auch in Gerichtsverfahren in Deutschland). Außerdem findet sich eine Beschreibung von Räumen der Stille, welche, abhängig von ihrer Gestaltung und Ausrichtung, symbol-frei und daher offen für alle Religionen gestaltet sein können.

What is poetic attention

Tese de doutoramento, Estudos de Literatura e de Cultura (Teoria da Literatura), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2014