2,000 research outputs found

    Sustainable exhibit design: guidelines for designers of small scale interactive and travelling exhibits

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    This study was commissioned as part of Lincolnshire County Council’s FLOWS ‘2B’ Information and Symbols Project and UK match funding for this particular FLOWS Project has been provided by East Midlands Development Agency. The aim of FLOWS is to improve the sustainability of development in flood risk areas through development of ‘good practice’, by improved integration of flood risk information into decision-support systems for spatial planning and water management. FLOWS involves over 40 individual projects which are based in four Work Packages. Lincolnshire County Council is jointly leading Work Package 3 (Spatial Planning) and is also leading on Projects in Work Package 2 (Public Perception/Dissemination). This study has been produced as part of Lincolnshire County Council’s ‘FLOWS 2B Information and Symbols Project’ and in the wider context, is focussing on raising public awareness of flooding and flood risk by exploring innovative methods of disseminating information on the subject of flood risk to the public. This project involves the production of interactive exhibits aimed at raising the awareness of flood risk in Lincolnshire and is a partnership between Lincolnshire County Council and the School of Architecture at the University of Lincoln. A study focussing on creating sustainable exhibitions has been undertaken via the University of Lincoln that will directly inform the FLOWS exhibits. As detailed in the project brief, this study on Sustainable Exhibit Design will investigate best practice in sustainable exhibit design and produce a report setting out guidelines for designers of small interactive and travelling exhibits, guidelines which are directly applicable to the proposed FLOWS exhibit. The report will form a contribution to exhibition design knowledge through wider distribution via the University of Lincoln and FLOWS websites and a conference presentation

    Scaling ML Products At Startups: A Practitioner's Guide

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    How do you scale a machine learning product at a startup? In particular, how do you serve a greater volume, velocity, and variety of queries cost-effectively? We break down costs into variable costs-the cost of serving the model and performant-and fixed costs-the cost of developing and training new models. We propose a framework for conceptualizing these costs, breaking them into finer categories, and limn ways to reduce costs. Lastly, since in our experience, the most expensive fixed cost of a machine learning system is the cost of identifying the root causes of failures and driving continuous improvement, we present a way to conceptualize the issues and share our methodology for the same

    DevOps for Digital Leaders

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    DevOps; continuous delivery; software lifecycle; concurrent parallel testing; service management; ITIL; GRC; PaaS; containerization; API management; lean principles; technical debt; end-to-end automation; automatio

    DevOps for Digital Leaders

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    DevOps; continuous delivery; software lifecycle; concurrent parallel testing; service management; ITIL; GRC; PaaS; containerization; API management; lean principles; technical debt; end-to-end automation; automatio

    Taming nitrogen : recognizing N2O emissions in fertilization practice

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    Atmospheric nitrous oxide (N2O) is a greenhouse gas resulting from an imbalanced global nitrogen cycle. Although agricultural soils emit the majority of anthropogenic N2O, it is rarely considered in soil management practice. To understand why, this thesis explored the social constructs of nitrogen management through a case study contrasting practices and attitudes from three schools of thought with different approaches to soil fertility management: precision, organic, and no-till with cover crops; and from the perspective of different roles in agriculture from farming and advising to science and industry. Nitrogen management practices were compared using a model from organizational theory in which problems and solutions are inconsistently matched. All schools of thought had approaches to balance yield and nitrogen conservation, and a prominent best practice was maximizing nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) as much as possible within the limits of acceptable yield. By reducing nitrogen flux, this reduces N2O. A sense of minimizing entropy – nitrogen losses inherent in conversions and storage between its many chemical forms – could further reduce N2O emissions. Though how to accomplish this is technologically unclear at present, a future state can be developed from currently evolving fusions between a mainstreaming soil health movement, a maturing practice of intensive cover crops, supportive technologies of soil testing, sensing and modeling which increasingly capture nitrogen dynamics, and the emerging technology of precision nitrogen sensing and management.M-A

    The State of Fashion 2021

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    En este informe se profundiza en los principales temas que afectan a la economía de la moda y evalúa una variedad de posibles respuestas. Reflejando conversaciones con los líderes de la industria durante los últimos meses, examina las diez tendencias clave que probablemente darán forma al negocio durante el próximo año. Además, se presenta el índice global de moda que revela nuevos conocimientos sobre el desempeño de la empresa por categoría, segmento y región

    Doing Business across the Canada-United States Border: Gateway or Checkpoint

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    Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Strategic Corporate Research Report

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    [Excerpt] Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (hereinafter Wal-Mart) is the second-largest company in the world. It has more annual revenue than the GDP of Switzerland. It sells more DVDs, magazines, books, CDs, dog food, diapers, bicycles, toys, toothpaste, jewelry, and groceries than any other retailer does worldwide. It is the largest retailer in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the second-largest in the United Kingdom, and the third largest in Brazil, With its partners, it is the largest retailer in Central America. Wal-Mart is also the largest private employer in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and it has 1.8 million employees around the globe. Wal-Mart is so huge that it effectively sets the terms for large swaths of the global economy, from retail wages to apparel prices to transoceanic shipping rates to the location of toy factories. Indeed, if there is one single aspect to understand about the company, it is the fact that Wal-Mart is transforming the relations of production in virtually every product category it sells, through its relationships with suppliers. But its influence goes far beyond the economy. It sets social policy by refusing to sell certain types of birth control. Its construction of supercenters molds the landscape, shapes traffic patterns, and alters the local commercial mix. The retail goliath shapes culture by selling the music of patriotic country singer Garth Brooks but not the critical (and hilarious) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (the Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction. It influences politics by donating millions to conservative politicians and think tanks. Wal-Mart is, in short, one of the most powerful entities in the world. Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart has developed a long list of critics, including unions, human rights organizations, religious groups, environmental activists, community organizations, small business groups, academics, children’s rights groups, and even institutional investors. These groups have exposed the company’s illegal union-busting tactics, its many violations of overtime laws, its abuse of child labor, its egregious healthcare policies, its super-exploitation of immigrant workers, its rampant gender discrimination, the horrific labor conditions at its suppliers’ factories, and its unlawful environmental degradation. They have also chronicled the deleterious effect Wal-Mart has on the public coffers and the quality of community life. New Wal-Mart stores and distribution centers often swallow up government subsidies and tax breaks, take public land, create more congestion, reduce overall wages, destroy retail variety, and increase public outlays for healthcare. To its critics, Wal-Mart represents the worst aspects of 21st-eentury capitalism. Wal-Mart usually counters any criticism with two words: low prices. It is a powerful mantra in a consumerist world. The company does make more products affordable to more people, and that is nothing to sneeze at when wages are stagnant, jobs insecure, pensions disappearing, and health coverage shrinking. With low prices, Wal-Mart helps working men and women get more from their meager paychecks, more necessities like bread, and more luxuries, like roses, too. It is a brilliant and incontrovertible argument, and Wal-Mart’s most ardent defenders take it even farther. They say its obsession with low prices makes the entire economy more efficient and more productive. Suppliers and competitors have to produce more and better products with the same resources, and that redounds to everyone. In the micro, it means falling prices and rising product quality. In the macro, it means economic growth, more jobs, and higher tax revenues. To its defenders, Wal-Mart represents the best aspects of 21st-century capitalism. Despite their radical opposition, critics and defenders of the world’s largest corporation agree on one thing: Wal-Mart represents 21st-century capitalism. It symbolizes a system of increasing market penetration and decreasing social regulation, where more and more aspects of life around the world are subject to economic competition. Wal-Mart’s success rests upon the ongoing destruction of social power in favor of corporate power. It takes advantage of the conditions of the neo-liberal world, from the availability of instant and inexpensive global communication to the continuing collapse of agricultural employment around the world to the rapid diffusion of technological innovation to the oversupply of subjugated migrant labor in nearly every country to the continued existence of undemocratic and corporate-dominated governments. For some, this is as it should be, all part of capitalism’s natural and ultimately benign development. For the rest of us, Wal-Mart is at the heart of what is wrong with the world
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