Analysis of runtime re-configuration systems

In recent years Programmable Logic Devices (PLD) and in particular Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have seen a tremendous increase in sales and applications in the area of embedded systems. The main advantage of FPGAs is the flexibility that they offer a designer in reconfiguring the hardware. The flexibility achieved through re-configuration of FPGAs usually incurs an overhead of extra execution time, data memory and also power dissipation; FPGAs provide an ideal template for run-time reconfigurable (RTR) designs. Only recently have RTR enabling design tools that bypass the traditional synthesis and bitstream generation process for FPGAs become available, JBits is one of them. With run-time reconfiguration of FPGAs, we can perform partial reconfiguration, which allows reconfiguration of a part of an FPGA while the other part is executing some functional computation. The partial reconfiguration of a function can be performed earlier than the time when the function is really needed. Such configuration pre-fetch can hide the reconfiguration overhead more effectively; This thesis will implement a reconfigurable system and study the effect of runtime reconfiguration using VERILOG and a new Java based tool JBITS. This work will provide pointers to high level synthesis tools targeting runtime re-configuration

‘Life in the Travelling Circus’: A Sociological Analysis of the Lives of Touring Professional Golfers

As sports become more professionalised and international in scope athletes increasingly migrate from one country to another. These individuals are required to adjust and adapt quickly when moving internationally. Literature on sports migration, however, tends to focus on routes and pathways rather than the effects of movement on the athletes themselves. The aim of this study, therefore, was to explore how the frequent workplace circulation inherent in the lives of highly skilled migrants affects their social selves. Using professional golf as a case study, this project includes an analysis of family issues, relationships between players, pay and conditions, and technical approaches to playing golf. Interviews were conducted with 20 male professional golfers and analysed from a figurational standpoint. As golf tournaments are increasingly staged in a myriad of different countries players are required to spend longer periods of time away from home and experience intense feelings of loneliness and isolation. It is argued that golfers are not isolated in terms of people who they have around them while on tour, but rather in terms of lack of contact with people who they have positive meaningful feelings towards, such as their family and friends. To help reduce this loneliness, golfers develop behaviours that foster temporary we-group alliances with other players they perceive to be similar to themselves. People in such groups are friends, characterised by bonds of togetherness, while also enemies showing evidence of conflicts as they are in direct competition for a share of the overall prize money. Indeed the monetary rewards available for top golfers continues to increase, however, such recompense is only available to small numbers and the majority fare poorly. It is argued that the prize money breakdown fosters internalised behaviour constraints whereby many players ‘gamble’ on pursuing golf as their main source of income despite the odds against them. This habitus is strengthened given the significant financial investments many players have made to fulfil their childhood dreams, which further blurs their ability to see the reality of their lives. The result is many golfers are constrained to develop networks with sponsors for financial reasons which leaves some with conflicting choices between regular income, and adhering to restrictive contractual agreements, or the freedom to choose between different brands. As such, overall the results of this study highlight the importance of considering the cultural and social adaptations required in the life of a transient migrant

Maximum risk reduction with a fixed budget in the railway industry

Decision-makers in safety-critical industries such as the railways are frequently faced with the complexity of selecting technological, procedural and operational solutions to minimise staff, passengers and third parties’ safety risks. In reality, the options for maximising risk reduction are limited by time and budget constraints as well as performance objectives. Maximising risk reduction is particularly necessary in the times of economic recession where critical services such as those on the UK rail network are not immune to budget cuts. This dilemma is further complicated by statutory frameworks stipulating ‘suitable and sufficient’ risk assessments and constraints such as ‘as low as reasonably practicable’. These significantly influence risk reduction option selection and influence their effective implementation. This thesis provides extensive research in this area and highlights the limitations of widely applied practices. These practices have limited significance on fundamental engineering principles and become impracticable when a constraint such as a fixed budget is applied – this is the current reality of UK rail network operations and risk management. This thesis identifies three main areas of weaknesses to achieving the desired objectives with current risk reduction methods as: Inaccurate, and unclear problem definition; Option evaluation and selection removed from implementation subsequently resulting in misrepresentation of risks and costs; Use of concepts and methods that are not based on fundamental engineering principles, not verifiable and with resultant sub-optimal solutions. Although not solely intended for a single industrial sector, this thesis focuses on guiding the railway risk decision-maker by providing clear categorisation of measures used on railways for risk reduction. This thesis establishes a novel understanding of risk reduction measures’ application limitations and respective strengths. This is achieved by applying ‘key generic engineering principles’ to measures employed for risk reduction. A comprehensive study of their preventive and protective capability in different configurations is presented. Subsequently, the fundamental understanding of risk reduction measures and their railway applications, the ‘cost-of-failure’ (CoF), ‘risk reduction readiness’ (RRR), ‘design-operationalprocedural-technical’ (DOPT) concepts are developed for rational and cost-effective risk reduction. These concepts are shown to be particularly relevant to cases where blind applications of economic and mathematical theories are misleading and detrimental to engineering risk management. The case for successfully implementing this framework for maximum risk reduction within a fixed budget is further strengthened by applying, for the first time in railway risk reduction applications, the dynamic programming technique based on practical railway examples

Equity and Introductory College Physics Labs

Labs have long been considered an important component of physics education. However, while there has been progress in transforming physics education in physics lecture classes to improve student learning, less progress has been made in introductory physics labs. At the same time, the physics community has come to recognize that there is a need to transform instruction in order to improve equity and inclusion in the discipline. Inequities may be manifested in the curriculum, the instruction or, especially, interactions between students. In physics labs, where students typically work collaboratively in groups of 2-4 students, some of these inequities may be especially salient. This dissertation addresses the question of equity in introductory physics labs by considering student interactions, curriculum, and professional development for lab instructors. I report on qualitative studies that sought to outline mechanisms by which inequities are perpetuated and exacerbated in introductory labs, such as gendered task division, isolation, and stereotype threat. I conducted quantitative analyses to assess the impact of task division and diversity on student performance. I performed case studies of two lab transformations, shedding light on what works, and what slips through the cracks, when lab instruction in transformed. I analyzed the impact of transformed labs on student attitudes toward experimental physics, and I advance a framework for designing lab curricula and lessons to improve student learning. I developed and analyzed an approach to providing professional development for graduate student teaching assistants (TAs) who served as lab instructors. Finally, I analyzed student reflections about the impact of the transition to online learning. Throughout this dissertation, I have focused on uncovering pedagogical advice for lab instructors. Some take-away messages include the importance of designing lab-work that requires students to share, not split, collaborative work; the need to avoid forming groups with isolated women students; the value of designing learning experiences with an expansive framing; and the effectiveness of role-playing in training TAs. It is my hope that this body of work may serve to help instructors transform physics lab learning to improve equity and inclusion in physics

Enabling Ubiquitous OLAP Analyses

An OLAP analysis session is carried out as a sequence of OLAP operations applied to multidimensional cubes. At each step of a session, an operation is applied to the result of the previous step in an incremental fashion. Due to its simplicity and flexibility, OLAP is the most adopted paradigm used to explore the data stored in data warehouses. With the goal of expanding the fruition of OLAP analyses, in this thesis we touch several critical topics. We first present our contributions to deal with data extractions from service-oriented sources, which are nowadays used to provide access to many databases and analytic platforms. By addressing data extraction from these sources we make a step towards the integration of external databases into the data warehouse, thus providing richer data that can be analyzed through OLAP sessions. The second topic that we study is that of visualization of multidimensional data, which we exploit to enable OLAP on devices with limited screen and bandwidth capabilities (i.e., mobile devices). Finally, we propose solutions to obtain multidimensional schemata from unconventional sources (e.g., sensor networks), which are crucial to perform multidimensional analyses

The Practice Facilitator Role: ‘The everything facilitator’ within pre- registration nurse education in practice

Background The importance of ensuring student nurses being well prepared to deliver healthcare in a constantly changing environment has been a policy priority. A new practice facilitator role was introduced in the early 2000s in response to specific national policy initiatives which aimed to enhance pre-registration nurse education. The literature demonstrated a few similar roles were introduced in the UK. Limited research has been undertaken in respect of these roles and none explored role development over time. Aim This study’s aim was to explore the way the practice facilitator role evolved in a real-world context over time and its impact on pre-registration nurse education. Methodology and methods A pragmatic epistemological perspective informed the research which used a qualitative, multiple case study methodology (Yin, 2009). Study participants (n= 57) comprised key actors engaging with the practice facilitator role (9 practice facilitators, 3 Trust education leads, 3 HEI heads of department, 26 mentors and 16 link lecturers). Data was collected through one-to-one semi-structured interviews (n = 15) and focus groups (4 mentor and 3 link lecturer). Data analysis The data was analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) model of thematic analysis. Results Three major themes and an overarching theme were identified which broadly reflect the way the practice facilitator role evolved over time. Firstly, in the frontline describes a managerial focus centred on establishing systems to control access to and management of practice resources. Secondly, everybody knows them and they know everybody whereby practice facilitators have assumed a critical frontline decision-making role influencing student outcomes and at the same time displacing the link lecturer role. Thirdly, de facto gatekeepers to the profession where practice facilitators have developed a close reciprocal relationship with mentors through whom they exercise a quality assurance function to ensure robust assessment of students’ practice and transition to qualified status. These were encapsulated in an overarching theme the everything facilitator. Discussion Lipsky’s (2010) concept of street-level bureaucrats provided an analytic framework to interpret the results where practice facilitators were found to possess the characteristics of street-level bureaucrats. Crucially, they were found to occupy a unique spatial location across, between and within the Trusts and HEI at frontline strategic and operational levels, conceptualised as interstitial spaces (Furnari, 2014). This allowed practice facilitators to have a significant impact on pre-registration nurse education. It is argued this is a development of Lipsky’s street-level bureaucracy. Conclusions The results indicate that practice facilitators function at both strategic and frontline operational levels, working uniquely within the ‘interstitial spaces’ (Furnari, 2014) of pre-registration nurse education. Their current way of working is significantly expanded from the original policy intentions. Moreover, the development of the role has been accumulative rather than sequential. The implementation of policy initiatives and the way the role has evolved is explained by the application and development of Lipsky's (2010) street-level bureaucracy with occupying the interstitial spaces (Furnari, 2014)