The practical experience of technical writing, or, Everything you wanted to know about a technical writing internship but were afraid to ask

Includes bibliographical references.This paper is a report on a technical writing internship during the summer of 1988 in the Computing and Telecommunications Division at Argonne National Laboratory. It consists of five parts: introduction, narrative, analysis and evaluation, comments, and appendix. The introduction describes the setting for the internship and how it related to the laboratory as a whole. The narrative section consists of a daily journal the author kept from May 31 to August 1. The analysis and evaluation section discusses and criticizes the documents produced on the job. The report concludes with a comment on the value of internships for liberal arts students and samples of all the documents edited or written, as well as other relevant documents.B.A. (Bachelor of Arts

Integración de las funciones de programación de máquinas herramientas de control numérico mediante una aplicación orientada a objetos

Dentro de un entorno integrado de fabricación asistida por computador, el intercambio de información de fabricación entre los distintos sistemas CAX y los sistemas CNC presenta una serie de aspectos problemáticos: 1. En su gran mayoría, los sistemas CAX actuales no han sido diseñados para compartir información, por lo que disponen de una estructura de datos específica y cerrada. 2. Los distintos tipos de sistemas CAX operan sobre niveles de abstracción de información de producto y procesos distintos. 3. El intercambio de información de fabricación se realiza a nivel de trayectoria, y principalmente en código ISO. 4. Adicionalmente a las palabras APT, existe un grupo de palabras de postprocesador normalizadas que permiten traducir ciertas operaciones de mecanizado (operaciones de taladrado) a código ISO. Sin embargo, la implementación de estas palabras de postprocesador depende de cada sistema CAM, y adicionalmente, los patrones geométricos de localización y las operaciones de fresado no son soportadas. 5. Existe una carencia en la estandarización de las operaciones básicas de mecanizado. Dicha estandarización debería permitir el desarrollo de un protocolo para el intercambio de información a nivel de operaciones. Este protocolo sería la base para el intercambio de información de operaciones entre distintos sistemas CAM, y entre sistemas CAM y sistemas CNC, conduciendo a una mejora en la programación automática de las MHCN. Con objeto de mejorar estos aspectos problemáticos, en la Tesis se ha desarrollado un modelo de información a nivel de operaciones para procesos de taladrado y fresado. En el desarrollo de dicho modelo se ha adoptado la norma para representación e intercambio de información de producto ISO 10303-STEP. El modelo de información define una estructura de datos que se emplea posteriormente en el desarrollo de una aplicación orientada a objetos para la programación automática de MHCN a nivel de operaciones en formato STEP. La aplicación tiene como entrada información geométrica (vía ficheros STEP) e información tecnológica de los procesos (vía ficheros de procesos ASCII). La generación de estos ficheros se realiza en un sistema CAD/CAM comercial. XVII In the computer aided manufacturing integrated environment, some problematic issues arise in tiie exchange of manufacturing information between the different CAD/CAM systems and the CNC systems: 1. Currently, most of the CAX systems have not been developed to share information, due to that, these systems have a proprietary and specific data structure. 2. The current CAX systems operate on different levels of abstraction of the product and processes information. 3. The manufacturing information exchange is carried out at the toolpath level, and mainly in the ISO code. 4. In addition to the APT words, there is a group of standardized postprocessor words which allow to translate some machining operations (drilling ones) into ISO code. However, the implementation of these postprocessor words depends on each CAM system, and besides that the milling operations and the machining location patterns are not completely supported. 5. There is a lack in the standardization of the basic machining operations. Such standardization should allow to define a consistent protocol for the exchange of information at the machining operation level. This protocol should allow to exchange and share manufacturing processes information between dissimilar CAM systems, and between CAM systems and CNC systems as well. This way should led to an improvement in the CNC machine tool automatic programming. In order to improve these problematic issues, an information model on the operation level for drilling and milling processes has been developed in the Thesis. The standard ISO 10303-STEP for representation and exchange of product information has been adopted in the model development. This information model defines a data structure which is the basis for the later development of an object-oriented STEP based application. This prototype application can be used for the automatic programming of CNC machine tools in the operation level. The inputs to the application are STEP geometry files for the geometric information, and ASCII process files for the process technological information. These files are generated in a commercial CAD/CAM system

Untangling the Web: A Guide To Internet Research

[Excerpt] Untangling the Web for 2007 is the twelfth edition of a book that started as a small handout. After more than a decade of researching, reading about, using, and trying to understand the Internet, I have come to accept that it is indeed a Sisyphean task. Sometimes I feel that all I can do is to push the rock up to the top of that virtual hill, then stand back and watch as it rolls down again. The Internet—in all its glory of information and misinformation—is for all practical purposes limitless, which of course means we can never know it all, see it all, understand it all, or even imagine all it is and will be. The more we know about the Internet, the more acute is our awareness of what we do not know. The Internet emphasizes the depth of our ignorance because our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite. My hope is that Untangling the Web will add to our knowledge of the Internet and the world while recognizing that the rock will always roll back down the hill at the end of the day