Black-Swan Type Catastrophes and Antifragility/Supra-resilience of Urban Socio-Technical Infrastructures

This paper may be one of the first attempts dealing with the problem of creating, providing and maintaining antifragility of systems of interdependent urban critical infrastructures (CI) in the wake of black-swan type technological, ecological, economic or social catastrophes occurring in a municipality. A synonym is offered to describe antifragility from a positive psychology perspective, formulating the problem as the supraresilience problem. A brief description is given of the developed innovative approach for creating a supraresilient city/region using black-swan catastrophe and the antifragility concepts. Resilience metrics are formulated as well as methods of assessing damage, interdependence of infrastructures and convergent technologies and sciences needed for practical regional resilience and risk management of the system of systems (SoS) of interdependent urban critical infrastructures). © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd

The reduction of the shutdown maintenance cost, frequency and the loss in production by the proper assessment of the scope of shutdown maintenance work

The reduction of the shutdown maintenance cost, the shutdown maintenance frequency and the loss in production that occurs as a result of performing shutdown maintenance whilst maintaining shutdown maintenance purpose and without creating any operational, safety, or economic problems during normal operation represents one of the most important issues that supports the overall strategy in the continuous process industries. The importance of this issue stimulated the work in research to find ways and methods to reduce the cost and frequency of shutdown maintenance, in addition to, the loss in production without increasing the number of the unplanned shutdowns or creating interruptions to the production line. [Continues.

Designing Simplicity to Achieve Technological Improvement: The General Electric J79 Turbojet Engine; Innovations, Achievements and Effects

With the beginning of powered, manned flight, the piston engine drove a propeller or multiple propellers to provide the thrust for lift required to overcome the forces of drag and gravity for flight. As aircraft speeds gradually increased over time, the power needed to overcome the aerodynamic inefficiencies of the propeller to greater speeds and altitudes were quickly realized as a hindrance to the potential of aircraft. With the turbojet engine, this new mechanism and subsequent aerodynamic changes revolutionized aircraft to increased speeds and altitude never before achievable with a piston engine. The United States, after acquiring further and more extensive turbojet engine knowledge from the British during World War II, steadily developed the technology. In a relatively brief amount of time, the turbojet was able to power aircraft reliably beyond the speed of sound. The General Electric axial flow J79 turbojet engine generated a lasting technological innovation with the first use of production ready variable incidence stator vanes that allowed jet engines to begin to overcome compressor stall. Compressor stall can occur as air flows through the jet engines various air compressing guide and stator vanes with low air pressure building just behind a given blade. The low pressure air cell can cause damaged vanes; build to the point of causing a rotational stall which critically impedes the rotation of the engine, can migrate to the combustion chamber starving the fuel of oxygen needed for ignition, or cause the complete reversal of air flow within the engine. These events can cause minor to catastrophic engine damage or even complete engine failure. Variable incidence stator vanes were no longer static but were adjustable to allow the optimum angle of airflow around the various vanes and thus controlled the compressibility of the airflow through the engine reducing the likelihood of stalls. The use of the this variable stator design within the J79 turbojet allowed the engine to be smaller in diameter, removed complexity, and weighed considerably less than other competing turbojet engines of the time, laying the groundwork for a production run of over thirty years and speeds exceeding Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound. The purpose of this study is to analyze the General Electric J79 Turbojet engine as it relates to its contemporary turbojet engines, the aircraft it powered, and the effects for General Electric and the military powerplant industry. Additionally, the purpose of this study is to illustrate how the engine helped assist aircraft designers and their companies to satisfy Armed Forces proposals for increased speeds, payloads, systems and the missions to meet a national philosophy of deterrence of a newly perceived threat during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and her Warsaw Bloc allies

Social work with airports passengers

Social work at the airport is in to offer to passengers social services. The main methodological position is that people are under stress, which characterized by a particular set of characteristics in appearance and behavior. In such circumstances passenger attracts in his actions some attention. Only person whom he trusts can help him with the documents or psychologically

1995 BRAC Commission

Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division, Newport Detachment, New London, CT - Data Call 3. Box 184, L-116

An Exhibition of Women\u27s United States Air Force Uniforms

The new Women in the Air Force exhibit under development at the Hill Aerospace Museum, located at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, is long overdue. The exhibit is set to replace the existing display in order to more accurately and comprehensively represent women’s continuing legacy of service to our nation. The uniforms in the Hill Aerospace Museum collection constitute the focal point of the new exhibit. Material culture methodologies form the foundation of this exhibit work; seeking to provide greater understanding of women’s military experience and history through the analysis of their uniforms. This approach therefore utilizes uniforms, the museum’s greatest resource of service women’s primary source material, to learn more about female participation in the United States Air Force (USAF) in the 20th century. The development of this exhibit will provide a greater representation of Air Force women and their history in the USAF through their uniforms. This completed exhibit acknowledging the ever-present women of the United States Air Force will serve to inspire the next generation of female airmen and all who look upon the stories of these patriotic women

Break, Make, Retake: Interrogating the Social and Historical Dimensions of Making as a Design Practice

Making and digital fabrication technologies are the focus of bold promises. Among the most tempting are that these activities and processes require little initial skill, knowledge, and expertise. Instead, they enable their acquisition, opening them up to everyone. Makerspaces and fab labs would blur the identities between professional and amateur, designer and engineer, maker and hacker, ushering in a broad-based de-professionalization. Prototyping and digital fabrication would unite design and manufacturing in ways that resemble and revive traditional craftwork. These activities and processes promise the reindustrialization of places where manufacturing has disappeared. These promises deploy historical categories and conditionsexpertise, design, craft production, manufacturing, post- industrial urbanismwhile claiming to transform them. This dissertation demonstrates how these proposals and narratives rely on imaginaries in which countercultural practices become mainstream by presenting a threefold argument. First, making and digital fabrication sustain supportive environments that reconfigure contemporary design practice. Second, making and digital fabrication simultaneously reshape the categories of professional, amateur, work, leisure, and expertise; but not always in the ways its proponents suggest. Third, as making and digital fabrication propagate, they reproduce traditional practices and values, negating much of their countercultural and alternative capacities. The dissertation supports these claims through a multi-sited and multinational ethnographic investigation of the historical and social effects of making and digital fabrication on design practice and the people and places enacting. The study lies at the intersection of science and technology studies, human-computer interaction, and design research. In addressing the argument throughout this scholarship, it explores three central themes: (1) the idea that making and digital fabrication lead to instant materialization of design while re-uniting design with manufacturing; (2) the amount of skill and expertise expected for participation in these practices and how these are encoded in rhetoric and in practice; and (3) the material and social infrastructures that configure making as a design practice. The dissertation demonstrates that that the perceived marginality of making, maker cultures, digital fabrication allows for its bolder promises to thrive invisibly by concealing other social issues, while the societal contributions of this technoculture say something different on the surface

Fitting manifestations: epiphany in Alice Oswald, Kathleen Jamie, Liz Berry and Joanne Dixon

Epiphany in contemporary British poetry has received limited recent critical attention and is perceived reductively by some poets and critics as a uniform, coercive, teleological, and unchallenging literary mode. This thesis intervenes in current debates by asking how epiphany is presented on the page in my own poetry and in that of Alice Oswald, Kathleen Jamie and Liz Berry. Through new critical readings of recent collections published within a decade by these poets, I argue that contemporary poetry can engage with epiphanic modes that are more diverse than those typically suggested. Chapter 1 reviews scholarly definitions of epiphany and recent criticism, explains why Oswald, Jamie and Berry were selected for this study and outlines the creative-critical approach adopted. Chapter 2 analyses Oswald's collection, Woods etc., and demonstrates how individual poems present epiphanies that resist a teleological mode by engaging with uncertainty, the uncanny and liminality. Chapter 3 investigates how Jamie's attentiveness to the non-human world in The Overhaul, and the gap between that world and our own, produces epiphanies that embrace 'not knowing' and manifestations of consciousness. The analysis in Chapter 4 highlights how poems in Liz Berry's debut collection, Black Country, dissolve boundaries between the human and non-human realms and boundaries of poetic form, in contrast to readings which restrict epiphany to a straightforward and linear mode of writing. The close critical readings of the poems in these poet-centred chapters expand current thinking on epiphany; the concluding chapter then embodies this thinking. Chapter 5 is the creative conclusion to this thesis, comprising poems that engage with diverse epiphanies and are in dialogue with the different strands of the epiphanic mode explored throughout this thesis: creative, critical, historical and contemporary. The poems in Chapter 5 are not available via Nottingham Trent University's Institutional Repository (IRep); however, they will be published as a full collection, under the poet's name, Jo Dixon, in Autumn 2020 by Shoestring Press (http://www.shoestringpress.co.uk)