A Global Approach for Solving Edge-Matching Puzzles

We consider apictorial edge-matching puzzles, in which the goal is to arrange a collection of puzzle pieces with colored edges so that the colors match along the edges of adjacent pieces. We devise an algebraic representation for this problem and provide conditions under which it exactly characterizes a puzzle. Using the new representation, we recast the combinatorial, discrete problem of solving puzzles as a global, polynomial system of equations with continuous variables. We further propose new algorithms for generating approximate solutions to the continuous problem by solving a sequence of convex relaxations

Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 153)

This bibliography lists 175 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in March 1976

Design of disassembly systems : a systematic approach

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Design and financial aspects of the end-of-life management of telecommunications products

As a result of legislation the electronics industry faces product takeback and recycling. It is therefore important to understand the environmental burden caused by discarded consumer electronics and also how to better manage raw materials. The thesis begins with a review of current environmental issues from the viewpoint of the electronics industry. This shows that there are many complex interactions to be considered within any environmental framework particularly those between legislation, technology and business. Consideration of the drivers indicates that work should focus on the design understanding required to allow product life extension as well as current strategies addressing the reprocessing of used products. The body of the thesis therefore has two themes, both of which use telecommunications products, telephones, as their exemplar. The first theme, the design issues related to the end-of-life management is explored via a benchmarking study of eight telephones from European (UK and Germany) and Far Eastern suppliers (China and Malaysia). This study allowed the generation of design rules for such products. The work also examined the impact of design changes to improve end-of-life practices on manufacturing costs in Europe and the Pacific Rim to indicate the constraints of labour and investment costs. The second theme links the business and technological issues faced in the endof- life (EOL) management of electronic products. The EOL options considered are: resale, remanufacturing, recycling, disposal and to a limited extent, upgrading. Building on the technological understanding generated in the first theme accurate economic models are derived, based on commercial data, for exemplar telephone products that reflect the activities within each option. The potential revenue from each option indicates preferred design strategies and the models can therefore help resolve some of the uncertainties faced by decision makers. The thesis closes by identifying that the design rules and financial models are particularly appropriate for mature products such as the telephones used as exemplars, further research is therefore necessary to extend the existing work to high added value products

The Datafied Society. Studying Culture through Data

As more and more aspects of everyday life are turned into machine-readable data, researchers are provided with rich resources for researching society. The novel methods and innovative tools to work with this data not only require new knowledge and skills, but also raise issues concerning the practices of investigation and publication. This book critically reflects on the role of data in academia and society and challenges overly optimistic expectations considering data practices as means for understanding social reality. It introduces its readers to the practices and methods for data analysis and visualization and raises questions not only about the politics of data tools, but also about the ethics in collecting, sifting through data, and presenting data research. AUP S17 Catalogue text As machine-readable data comes to play an increasingly important role in everyday life, researchers find themselves with rich resources for studying society. The novel methods and tools needed to work with such data require not only new knowledge and skills, but also a new way of thinking about best research practices. This book critically reflects on the role and usefulness of big data, challenging overly optimistic expectations about what such information can reveal, introducing practices and methods for its analysis and visualization, and raising important political and ethical questions regarding its collection, handling, and presentation

The major and the minor on political aesthetics in the control society

This thesis examines the crucial diagnostic and productive roles that the concepts of minor and major practice, two interrelated modes of cultural production set out by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka: toward a Minor Literature (1975), have to play in the present era of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics that Deleuze himself has influentially described as the control society. In first establishing the conditions of majority and majority, Deleuze and Guattari’s historical focus in Kafka is the early twentieth century period of Franz Kafka’s writing, a period which, for Deleuze, marks the start of a transition between two types of society – the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and the control society that is set apart by its distribution, indifferent technical processes and the replacement of the individual with the dividual in social and political thought. Because of their unique conceptual location, at the transition between societies, the concepts of majority and minority present an essential framework for understanding the impact of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics on cultural production in the twentieth century and beyond. In order to determine the conditions of contemporary major and minor practice across the transition from disciplinary to control societies, the thesis is comprised of two interconnecting threads corresponding to majority and minority respectively. Drawing on the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari, Friedrich Kittler and Fredric Jameson alongside pioneering figures in the historical development of computation and informatics (Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and others), material observation on the technical function of digital machines, and the close examination of emblematic cultural forms, I determine the specific conditions of majority that emerge through the development of the contemporary control era. Alongside this delineation of the conditions of majority I examine the prospective tactics, corresponding to the characteristics of minority set out by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka, which emerge as a contemporary counter-practice within the control-era. This is carried out through the close observation of key examples of cultural production in the fields of literature, film, video, television and the videogame that manifest prospective tactics for a control-era minor practice within the overarching technical characteristics of the control-era major. Through an examination of these interrelated threads the thesis presents a framework for both addressing the significant political and cultural changes that ubiquitous computation effects in constituting the contemporary control society and determining the ways in which these changes can be addressed and countered through cultural production