48 research outputs found
Rationale for the use of subassemblies in production systems : a comparative look at sequential and arborescent systems
Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1989.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 153-159).by Guillaume Pierre Amblard.M.S
Advancing Cost-Effective Readiness by Improving the Supply Chain Management of Sparse, Intermittently-Demanded Parts
Many firms generate revenue by successfully operating machines such as welding robots, rental cars, aircraft, hotel rooms, amusement park attractions, etc. It is critical that these revenue-generating machines be operational according to the firm s target or requirement; thus, assuring sustained revenue generation for the firm. Machines can and do fail, and in many cases, restoring the downed machine requires spare part(s), which are typically managed by the supply chain. The scope of this research is on the supply chain management of the very sparse, intermittently-demanded spare parts. These parts are especially difficult to manage because they have little to no lead time demand; thus, modeling via a Poisson process is not viable. The first area of our research develops two new frameworks to improve the supply chain manager s stock policy on these parts. The stock polices are tested via case studies on the A-10C attack aircraft and B1 bomber fleets. Results show the AF could save $10M/year on the A10 and improve support to the B1 without increasing inventory. The second area of our research develops a framework to integrate the supply chain processes that generate these service parts. With the integrated framework, we establish two new forward-looking metrics. We show examples how these forward-looking metrics can advance the supply chain manager s desire to know what proactive decisions to make to improve his/her supply chain for the good of the firm
Passionate destruction, passionate creation: art and anarchy in the work of Dennis Cooper
The subject of this thesis is the life and work of the American writer Dennis Cooper. It is the first book-length appraisal of his career, which regards his poetry, prose, and innovative employment of new media from the perspective of his avowed anarchism. Situating his work within the context of American and French literary history and traditions of anarchist thought, I identify and pursue a dialectic that recurs in his work between, on the one hand, a commitment to subjective experience and individuality and, on the other, a desire for community and communion with others.
Comprising five chapters, the work is roughly chronological in organization. I begin with an examination of Cooperâs early poetry collection Idols, in order to establish the basic features of an outlook that is hospitable to anarchist thought. I next consider Cooperâs attempts at microcommunity-building in Los Angeles and show that his efforts brought together a vibrant community of young poets off the Venice Beach boardwalk in the late 1970s. Staying on the West Coast, the third chapter compares Cooperâs work with that of San Francisco New Narrativists Robert GlĂŒck and Bruce Boone, in order to examine radical and reformist approaches to writing homosexuality in the wake of Gay Liberation. The penultimate chapter is devoted to Cooperâs most famous work, the five-novel series called the George Miles cycle: I uncover the intricate systems he uses to structure the cycle and ask what his experiments might mean for anarchist writing. Finally, I turn to Cooperâs largest project to date, his blog, and argue that he uses its simple apparatus to produce ideal conditions for the ephemeral appearance of an anarchist cyber-network
Double/Cross: Erasure in Theory and Poetry
This dissertation investigates the implications of overt textual erasure on literary and philosophical meaning, especially with reference to the poststructuralist phenomenological tradition culminating in the work of Jacques Derrida. Responding both to the emergence of âerasure poetryâ as a recognizable genre of experimental literature and to the relative paucity of serious scholarship on Derridaâs âwriting under erasure,â I focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and philosophical works in which visible evidence of erasure is an intended component of the finished (i.e., printed and disseminated) document. Erasure, I argue, performs a complex doubling or double/crossing of meaning according to two asymmetrically mobilized aspects of the text: textual thickness and responsibility. On one hand, erasure ensures that texts are doubled both within themselves and throughout their various contexts; thus, textual meaning is dispersed, branched, or thickened across multiple dimensions as texts are constituted in space and time. On the other hand, this sprawling, decentralized thickness is persistently juxtaposed with the fact of particular individualsâ responsibility for the concrete texts they write. In the course of developing my argument, I analyze Martin Heideggerâs striking out of âBeingâ in The Question of Being, Derridaâs use of strikethroughs in his early philosophical works, John Cage and Jackson Mac Lowâs incorporation of erasure into their poetry of âchance operations,â Jean-Luc Marionâs negative theology, William S. Burroughsâs cut-up method, Tom Phillipsâs erasure-based artistâs book A Humument, and contemporary erasures including Ronald Johnsonâs Radi os, M. NourbeSe Philipâs Zong!, and Jordan Abelâs The Place of Scraps. I conclude by discussing some of my own creative explorations using the erasure technique
Tragedy of Confusion: The Political Economy of Truth in the modern history of Iran (A novel framework for the analysis of the enigma of socio-economic underdevelopment in the modern history of Iran)
This study entails a theoretical reading of the Iranian modern history and follows an interdisciplinary agenda at the intersection of philosophy, economics, and politics and intends to offer a novel framework for the analysis of socio-economic underdevelopment in Iran in the modern era. A brief review of Iranian modern history from the constitutional revolution, to the oil nationalization movement, the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the recent Reformist and Green movements demonstrates that Iranian people travelled full circle. This historical experience of socio-economic underdevelopment revolving around the bitter question of âwhy are we backward?â and its manifestation in perpetual socio-political instability and violence is the subject matter of this study. Foucaultâs conceived relation between the production of truth and production of wealth captures the essence of hypothesis offered in this study. Michel Foucault (1980: 93-4) maintains that âIn the last analysis, we must produce truth as we must produce wealth, indeed we must produce truth in order to produce wealth in the first placeâ. Based on a hybrid methodology combining hermeneutics of understanding and hermeneutics of suspicion, this study proposes that the failure to produce wealth has had particular roots in the failure in the production of truth. At the heart of the proposed theoretical model is the following formula: The Iranian daseinâs confused preference structure culminates in the formation of unstable coalitions which in turn leads to institutional failure, creating a chaotic social order and a turbulent history as experienced by the Iranian nation in the modern era. The following set of interrelated propositions elaborate further on the core formula of the model: Each and every Iranian person and her subjectivity and preference structure is the site of three distinct warring regimes of truth and identity choice sets (identity markers) related to the ancient Persian empire (Persianism), Islam, and modernity. These three historical a priori and regimes of truth act as conditions of possibility for social interactions, and are unities in multiplicities. They, in their perpetual state of tension and conflict, constitute the mutually exclusive, contradictory, and confused dimensions of the prism of the Iranian dasein. The confused preference structure prevents Iranian people from organizing themselves in stable coalitions required for collective action to achieve the desired socio-economic change. The complex interplay between the state of inbetweenness and the state of belatedness makes it impossible to form stable coalitions in any areas of life, work, and language to achieve the desired social transformations, turning Iran into a country of unstable coalitions and alliances in macro, meso and micro levels. This in turn leads to failure in the construction of stable institutions (a social order based on rule of law or any other stable institutional structure becomes impossible) due to perpetual tension between alternative regimes of truth manifested in warring discursive formations, relations of power, and techniques of subjectification and their associated economies of affectivity. This in turn culminates in relations of power in all micro, meso, and macro levels to become discretionary, atomic, and unpredictable, producing perpetual tensions and social violence in almost all sites of social interactions, and generating small and large social earthquakes (crises, movements, and revolutions) as experienced by the Iranian people in their modern history. As such, the society oscillates between the chaotic states of socio-political anarchy emanating from irreconcilable differences between and within social assemblages and their affiliated hybrid forms of regimes of truth in the springs of freedom and repressive states of order in the winters of discontent. Each time, after the experience of chaos, the order is restored based on the emergence of a final arbiter (Iranian leviathan) as the evolved coping strategy for achieving conflict resolution. This highly volatile truth cycle produces the experience of socio-economic backwardness. The explanatory power of the theoretical framework offered in the study exploring the relation between the production of truth, trust and wealth is tested on three strong events of Iranian modern history: the Constitutional Revolution, the Oil-Nationalization Movement and the Islamic Revolution. The significant policy implications of the model are explored
Urban-Architectural Design After Exile: Communities in Search of a Minor Architecture
This dissertation analogically applies a framework of minor literary analysis to uniquely political units of the built environment. As urbanism is conventionally understood to be executed per the greatest utility of established communal objectives, an underlying politicization is inherent as such forms must adhere to dominant norms of development which potentially marginalize those who practice cultural methods outside normative standards. Employing a uniquely architectural method of environmental justice advocacy, select communities facing disenfranchisement react by self-producing urban-architectural forms ("UAFs") to protect threatened cultural values from marginalization. Installed to subvert the existing power dynamic, such UAFs are potential exhibitions of minor architecture.
Adopting the analytical standards established by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari for evaluating Franz Kafka's literature, this paper tests six UAFs to discover if a minor architecture is possible under contemporary globalization. Employing an enumerated framework of minor production characteristics, an interpretive-historical analysis is the primary method of judgment regarding each unit's execution of minor architecture. Two secondary tests are undertaken to validate the primary findings, the first of which is a physio-logical evaluation that characterizes and measures urban resource utility as per collective minority aims. Second, a newspaper correlation test is undertaken so as to judge the enunciative effectiveness of each community per issues of minority politics.
Of the six cases examined, two have their source in cinema including "Bartertown" of MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME (1985) and the "House on Paper Street" of FIGHT CLUB (1999). The four remaining cases include the Tibetan Government-in-Exile of Dharamsala, India; Student Bonfire of Robertson County, Texas; Isla Vista Recreation & Park District of Santa Barbara County, California; and the Emergent Cannabis Community of Arcata, California. Of all the cases studied, only the Tibetan Government-in-Exile met both the conditions of minor architecture and was validated in terms of practiced urban resource use as well as effective representation in mainstream newsprint. Both cinematic cases failed as minor productions of the built environment. Although they did not find full validation, the three remaining real-world UAFs each were found on a course of minor architectural expression at varying stages of execution
Sustainability in design: now! Challenges and opportunities for design research, education and practice in the XXI century
Copyright @ 2010 Greenleaf PublicationsLeNS project funded by the Asia Link Programme, EuropeAid, European Commission
Diagnostic distribué de systÚmes respectant la confidentialité
Dans cette thĂšse, nous nous intĂ©ressons Ă diagnostiquer des systĂšmes intrinsĂšquement distribuĂ©s (comme les systĂšmes pairs-Ă -pairs) oĂč chaque pair n'a accĂšs qu'Ă une sous partie de la description d'un systĂšme global. De plus, en raison d'une politique d'accĂšs trop restrictive, il sera pourra qu'aucun pair ne puisse expliquer le comportement du systĂšme global. Dans ce contexte, le challenge du diagnostic distribuĂ© est le suivant: expliquer le comportement global d'un systĂšme distribuĂ© par un ensemble de pairs ayant chacun une vision limitĂ©e, tout comme l'aurait fait un unique pair diagnostiqueur ayant, lui, une vision globale du systĂšme.D'un point de vue thĂ©orique, nous montrons que tout nouveau systĂšme, logiquement Ă©quivalent au systĂšme pair-Ă -pairs initialement observĂ©, garantit que tout diagnostic local d'un pair pourra ĂȘtre prolongĂ© par un diagnostic global (dans ce cas, le nouveau systĂšme est dit correct pour le diagnostic distribuĂ©).Nous montrons aussi que si ce nouveau systĂšme est structurĂ© (c-Ă -d: il contient un arbre couvrant pour lequel tous les pairs contenant une mĂȘme variable forme un graphe connectĂ©) alors il garantit que tout diagnostic global pourra ĂȘtre retrouvĂ© Ă travers un ensemble de diagnostics locaux des pairs (dans ce cas le nouveau systĂšme est dit complet pour le diagnostic distribuĂ©).Dans un souci de reprĂ©sentation succincte et afin de respecter la politique de confidentialitĂ© du vocabulaire de chacun des pairs, nous prĂ©sentons un nouvel algorithme Token Elimination (TE), qui dĂ©compose le systĂšme de pairs initial vers un systĂšme structurĂ©.Nous montrons expĂ©rimentalement que TE produit des dĂ©compositions de meilleurs qualitĂ© (c-Ă -d: de plus petites largeurs arborescentes) que les mĂ©thodes envisagĂ©es dans un contexte distribuĂ©. Ă partir du systĂšme structurĂ© construit par TE, nous transformons chaque description locale en une Forme Normale Disjonctive (FND) globalement cohĂ©rente.Nous montrons que ce dernier systĂšme garantit effectivement un diagnostic distribuĂ© correct et complet. En plus, nous exhibons un algorithme capable de vĂ©rifier efficacement que tout diagnostic local fait partie d'un diagnostic minimal global, faisant du systĂšme structurĂ© de FNDs un systĂšme compilĂ© pour le diagnostic distribuĂ©.In this thesis, we focus on diagnosing inherently distributed systems such as peer-to-peer, where each peer has access to only a sub-part of the description of an overall system.In addition, due to a too restrictive access control policy, it can be possible that neither peer nor supervisor is able to explain the behaviour of the overall system.The goal of distributed diagnosis is to explain the behaviour of a distributed system by a set of peers (each having a limited local view) as a single diagnosis engine having a global view of the overall system.First, we show that any new system logically equivalent to the initially observed peer-to-peer setting ensures that all diagnosis of a peer may be extended to a global diagnosis (in this case the new system ensures correctness of the distributed diagnosis).Moreover, we prove that if the new system is structured (i.e.it contains a spanning tree for which all peers containing the same variable form a connected graph) then it ensures that any global diagnosis can be found through a set of local diagnoses (in this case the new system ensures the completeness of the distributed diagnoses).For a succinct representation and in order to comply with the privacy policy of the vocabulary of each peer, we present a new algorithm Token Elimination (TE), which decomposes the original peer system to a structured one.We experimentally show that TE produces better quality decompositions (i.e. smaller tree widths) than proposed methods in a distributed context.From the structured system built by TE, we transform each local description into globally consistent DNF.We demonstrate that the latter system is correct and complete for the distributed diagnosis.Finally, we present an algorithm that can effectively check that any local diagnosis is part of a global minimal diagnosis, turning the structured system of DNFs into a compiled system for distributed diagnosis.PARIS11-SCD-Bib. Ă©lectronique (914719901) / SudocSudocFranceF