Naval Ship Maintenance: An Analysis of the Dutch Shipbuilding Industry Using the Knowledge Value Added, Systems Dynamics, and Integrated Risk Management Methodologies

Sponsored Report (for Acquisition Research Program)Initiatives to reduce the cost of ship maintenance have not yet realized the normal cost-reduction learning curve improvements. One explanation is the lack of recommended technologies. Damen, a Dutch shipbuilding and service firm, has incorporated similar technologies and is developing others to improve its operations. The research team collected data on Dutch ship maintenance operations and used them to build three types of computer simulation models of ship maintenance and technology adoption. The results were analyzed and compared with previously developed modeling results of U.S. Navy ship maintenance and technology adoption. Adopting 3D PDF alone improves ROI significantly more than adopting a logistics package alone and adding both technologies improves ROI more than adding either technology alone. Adoption of the technologies would provide cost benefits far in excess of not using the technologies and there were marginal benefits in sequentially implementing the technologies over immediately implementing them. There are a number of issues in comparing the results with previous research but the potential benefits of using the technologies are very high in both cases. Implications for acquisition practice include the need for careful analysis and selection from among a variety of available information technologies and the recommendation for a phased development and implementation approach to manage uncertainty.Acquisition Research Progra

AN ANALYSIS OF INDUSTRIAL DISTRICTS AND TRIPLE HELIX OF INNOVATION – A REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT EXPERIENCE IN THE SOUTH OF THE STATE OF RIO DE JANEIRO

This work consolidates a research effort to analyze 70 years of economic development in the region of the Paraíba do Sul River, in the south of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The paper follows the trajectory of the leader company, steelmaker Companhia Siderúrgica National, and its relations with other local actors, such as government and universities. The research question investigates if the steel market is still the company’s core business and its evolution in the competitive global production network. This work introduces a different exploratory approach, analyzing productive networks using an industrial district typology and the linkages based on the Triple Helix of university–industry–government. The literature review and case study show the first transition, after the privatization process in the nineties, transforming a state-owned company with a focus in the national market into a transnational corporation with business on four continents. The second transition, from the steel market to a globally integrated production chain of mining and steel is underway. The region’s configuration migrated from a company town in a statecentered model to a central-radial arrangement. The second migration to a satellite platform is in progress. Regarding technology development, the company’s strategy changed from in-house research and development to buying technology. There is a recent effort to recreate interaction space with universities

Advances in Intelligent Robotics and Collaborative Automation

This book provides an overview of a series of advanced research lines in robotics as well as of design and development methodologies for intelligent robots and their intelligent components. It represents a selection of extended versions of the best papers presented at the Seventh IEEE International Workshop on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications IDAACS 2013 that were related to these topics. Its contents integrate state of the art computational intelligence based techniques for automatic robot control to novel distributed sensing and data integration methodologies that can be applied to intelligent robotics and automation systems. The objective of the text was to provide an overview of some of the problems in the field of robotic systems and intelligent automation and the approaches and techniques that relevant research groups within this area are employing to try to solve them.The contributions of the different authors have been grouped into four main sections:• Robots• Control and Intelligence• Sensing• Collaborative automationThe chapters have been structured to provide an easy to follow introduction to the topics that are addressed, including the most relevant references, so that anyone interested in this field can get started in the area

Advances in Intelligent Robotics and Collaborative Automation

This book provides an overview of a series of advanced research lines in robotics as well as of design and development methodologies for intelligent robots and their intelligent components. It represents a selection of extended versions of the best papers presented at the Seventh IEEE International Workshop on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications IDAACS 2013 that were related to these topics. Its contents integrate state of the art computational intelligence based techniques for automatic robot control to novel distributed sensing and data integration methodologies that can be applied to intelligent robotics and automation systems. The objective of the text was to provide an overview of some of the problems in the field of robotic systems and intelligent automation and the approaches and techniques that relevant research groups within this area are employing to try to solve them.The contributions of the different authors have been grouped into four main sections:• Robots• Control and Intelligence• Sensing• Collaborative automationThe chapters have been structured to provide an easy to follow introduction to the topics that are addressed, including the most relevant references, so that anyone interested in this field can get started in the area

“Much improved of late”: ecogothic readings of improvement in American and British novels, 1798-1852

Until recent years ecocriticism has focused almost exclusively on nature-centered texts, heralding Henry David Thoreau’s Walden as its urtext. As scholars are broadening the field’s canonical and theoretical range, they are now recognizing Gothicism’s long-held concerns about ecology, and they have termed this new area of critical inquiry the ecogothic. Framing the ecogothic as a critical lens rather than a literary mode, this dissertation broadens the ecocritical range by considering how writers use Gothicism to contest environmentally harmful ideologies. It expands this subfield by examining what I define as principal characteristics of the Gothicization of nature—deformity, isolation, transgression, and sterility—and explores how this representation enables texts to challenge widely held improvement discourses. Specifically, it argues that from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century, Gothic texts deploy these characteristics to combat the idea of improvement, illustrating the devastating ecological and societal effects of its reliance on the nature-culture binary. This transnational dissertation considers four novels that represent improvement as catalyzing ruin. Wieland illuminates the culturally dysfunctional entanglement of women and nature and employs that link to criticize improved spaces as sites of early American patriarchal violence. Frankenstein demonstrates improvement’s negative consequences, and, deploying the nonbinary Creature, the novel challenges the improvement norm’s reliance on the nature-culture dichotomy. Jane Eyre depicts Jane as an object of improvement and demonstrates how such an emphasis continually fails her, meanwhile suggesting the ruinous effects of rejecting improvement outright. And The House of the Seven Gables emphasizes (female) Nature as culture’s improver to criticize the divisive binaries that uphold the idea of improvement. “Much improved of late” contributes to ecocriticism by considering how Gothicism enables writers to question and combat exploitive human engagements with the natural environment

Mapping poetry onto the visual arts : Carl Andre's Words

textAs innovative as his sculpture, Andre's visually oriented poetry, however, has yet to receive the same rigor of attention as his sculpture. His inventive use of poetic and visual form, which he described as poetry mapped onto the visual arts, provides a compelling example of the interrelationship of word and image, a practice, although often overlooked, that suffuses twentieth-century visual art and poetry. Whereas Andre produced approximately 1,500 poems over many decades, this project focuses on his Words installation, the largest permanently installed collection of Andre's poems in the world. In 1995, Andre gifted 465 pages of poetry to the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Andre's experiments with genre, including lyrics, autobiographies, novels, odes, and operas, push literary convention to the edge of irreconcilability. Despite the array of genres, I argue that all of the disparate kinds of writing found in Words demonstrate Andre's poetic sensibility. Until recently the critical discussion of Andre's poems proceeded as a one-sided discourse, which advanced the notion that this large body of work was best suited to enhancing the understanding of Andre's sculptural practice. To redress the one-sidedness of the discourse requires approaching Andre not only as a sculptor who made poems, but also as a poet deeply engaged in the visual qualities of his poetics. Engaging the spirit of the "make it new" sensibility of modernist poetics, Andre developed his own practice by "mapping language on the conventions and usages of 20thcentury abstract art."¹ Andre's poetry operates in the space between art and language. In this space we find Andre's engagement with poetic history, particularly the innovations of Ezra Pound, his relationship to important poetic developments such as fragmentation and quotation, and his experimentation with poetry as a visual medium. An examination of Andre's poetic oeuvre, the publication and exhibition history of his poems, and the manner of critical attention given to the poems from the 1960s onward contextualizes Andre's practice of mapping poetry onto the visual arts, while also bridging the gap in discourse between the fields of art and poetry.Art Histor