Barriers to the effective use of finite element analysis in industry

This workshop represents the first step in a comprehensive and wideranging pan-European information gathering exercise on a topic that is at the heart of the FENET project. The following three categories of industrial organisation have been identified and all have a valuable input to the workshop. The FENET world-wide survey, which sought to establish the significance of barriers to the effective use of finite element analysis across a range of industry sectors, including Aerospace, Land Transport, Biomedical, Civil Construction, Consumer Goods, Marine and Offshore, Power and Pressure Systems and Process & Manufacture, ran from November 2002 - July 2003. The survey, consisting of over 450 questions, included a wide range of issues covering education and awareness, the staffing of FE projects, the cost of FE products; support-related matters in the widest sense, and an extensive list of functionality-related matters, including integration of the analysis function. Particular emphasis was placed on the topics of multi-physics & analysis technology, life extension & durability and product & system optimization, as these are identified themes within the FENet project

Subject Specific Information Literacy Curriculum and Assessment

Academic libraries have been changing the traditional instructional framework of library instruction teaching modules to information literacy teaching modules. National standards for information literacy increased the possibility to unify such efforts throughout the country and clarify for librarians, administrators, and faculty the desired student learning outcomes. This paper presents findings of a quantitative research study developed to provide documentation for a regional accrediting body, college administration, and faculty on the efficacy of a subject specific information literacy curriculum and assessment instrument. The study took place within a seminary and began with an initial needs assessment. A previously developed instrument, B-TILED, which had been through a rigorous process of reliability and validity testing was applied to conduct the needs assessment. The findings of the needs assessment indicated a requirement for intervention which led to the development and implementation of a formal course of instruction in information literacy. The course was developed and taught by the researcher in the fall of 2010. All incoming 1st year students were required to take, complete, and pass a one-unit class in information literacy. In order to assess the effectiveness of the course, and to provide supportive documented data to the accrediting body, pretests and posttests were administered. The instrument used, B-TILED, was the same as that used in the needs assessment study

The latent potential of YouTube - Will it become the 21st Century lecturer's film archive?

YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) is an online, public-access video-sharing site that allows users to post short streaming-video submissions for open viewing. Along with Google, MySpace, Facebook, etc. it is one of the great success stories of the Internet, and is widely used by many of today's undergraduate students. The higher education sector has recently realised the potential of YouTube for presenting teaching resources/material to students, and publicising research. This article considers another potential use for online video archiving websites such as YouTube and GoogleVideo in higher education - as an online video archive providing thousands of hours of video footage for use in lectures. In this article I will discuss why this might be useful, present some examples that demonstrate the potential for YouTube as a teaching resource, and highlight some of the copyright and legal issues that currently impact on the effective use of new online video websites, such as YouTube, for use as a teaching resource.Comment: To be published in October 2008 issue of CAL-laborate (http://science.uniserve.edu.au/pubs/callab/index.html

Why is Open Access Development so Successful? Stigmergic organization and the economics of information

The explosive development of "free" or "open source" information goods contravenes the conventional wisdom that markets and commercial organizations are necessary to efficiently supply products. This paper proposes a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon, using concepts from economics and theories of self-organization. Once available on the Internet, information is intrinsically not a scarce good, as it can be replicated virtually without cost. Moreover, freely distributing information is profitable to its creator, since it improves the quality of the information, and enhances the creator's reputation. This provides a sufficient incentive for people to contribute to open access projects. Unlike traditional organizations, open access communities are open, distributed and self-organizing. Coordination is achieved through stigmergy: listings of "work-in-progress" direct potential contributors to the tasks where their contribution is most likely to be fruitful. This obviates the need both for centralized planning and for the "invisible hand" of the market

Open Science in Software Engineering

Open science describes the movement of making any research artefact available to the public and includes, but is not limited to, open access, open data, and open source. While open science is becoming generally accepted as a norm in other scientific disciplines, in software engineering, we are still struggling in adapting open science to the particularities of our discipline, rendering progress in our scientific community cumbersome. In this chapter, we reflect upon the essentials in open science for software engineering including what open science is, why we should engage in it, and how we should do it. We particularly draw from our experiences made as conference chairs implementing open science initiatives and as researchers actively engaging in open science to critically discuss challenges and pitfalls, and to address more advanced topics such as how and under which conditions to share preprints, what infrastructure and licence model to cover, or how do it within the limitations of different reviewing models, such as double-blind reviewing. Our hope is to help establishing a common ground and to contribute to make open science a norm also in software engineering.Comment: Camera-Ready Version of a Chapter published in the book on Contemporary Empirical Methods in Software Engineering; fixed layout issue with side-note

Notes on Cloud computing principles

This letter provides a review of fundamental distributed systems and economic Cloud computing principles. These principles are frequently deployed in their respective fields, but their inter-dependencies are often neglected. Given that Cloud Computing first and foremost is a new business model, a new model to sell computational resources, the understanding of these concepts is facilitated by treating them in unison. Here, we review some of the most important concepts and how they relate to each other

Utilizing Online Software for Surveys

In institutions where assessment is part of our everyday vocabulary, we are always looking for ways to collect the data that we need in a more efficient manner. Online surveys may be one answer. There are some major advantages in using online surveys but there are also some critical disadvantages especially concerning representative population samples. In order to make an informed decision, we need to determine if and how these advantages and disadvantages affect our situation. We also need to understand what features are offered in these programs so that we can select a program that meets our own needs and budgets

JISC Preservation of Web Resources (PoWR) Handbook

Handbook of Web Preservation produced by the JISC-PoWR project which ran from April to November 2008. The handbook specifically addresses digital preservation issues that are relevant to the UK HE/FE web management community”. The project was undertaken jointly by UKOLN at the University of Bath and ULCC Digital Archives department