Virtual teams for new product development: an innovative experience for R&D engineers

New interaction tools such as internet allow companies to gain valuable input from research and development (R\&D) engineers via virtual teams. Consequently, engineers also get more expertise in diminutive time frames. Virtual R\&D teams present the key impetus to the technology acquisition process. The present knowledge-economy era is characterized by short product life-cycles. Virtual R&D teams may reduce time-to-market, make available a large pool of new product know-how and provide greater flexibilities, which are the key success factors in a competitive market. This comprehensive review contains almost 100 references and covers the recent literature with emphasis on the topic. The review has focused on authentic and reputed publications and extracts the results. This article presents the type of virtual teams and their main features and explains how virtual R&D team can play a prominent role in developing new products. The article is evolved future study guideline and also illustrates how to apply virtual interaction tools and integrate engineers into the innovation process. Management of virtual R&D teams in new product development (NPD) processes in an innovative, effective and efficient is of a high importance, but the issue has been poorly addressed in the previous studies. Findings show that virtual R&D team provides valuable input for new product development and R&D engineers are able to attain virtual experience

Virtual Teams for New Product Development – An Innovative Experience for R&D Engineers

New interaction tools such as internet allow companies to gain valuable input from research and development (R&D) engineers via virtual teams. Consequently, engineers also get more expertise in diminutive time frames. Virtual R&D teams present the key impetus to the technology acquisition process. The present knowledge-economy era is characterized by short product life-cycles. Virtual R&D teams may reduce time-to-market, make available a large pool of new product know-how and provide greater flexibilities, which are the key success factors in a competitive market. This comprehensive review contains almost 100 references and covers the recent literature with emphasis on the topic. The review has focused on authentic and reputed publications and extracts the results. This article presents the type of virtual teams and their main features and explains how virtual R&D team can play a prominent role in developing new products. The article is evolved future study guideline and also illustrates how to apply virtual interaction tools and integrate engineers into the innovation process. Management of virtual R&D teams in new product development (NPD) processes in an innovative, effective and efficient is of a high importance, but the issue has been poorly addressed in the previous studies. Findings show that virtual R&D team provides valuable input for new product development and R&D engineers are able to attain virtual experience.Virtual R&D Teams, New Product Development, Virtual Experience, R&D Engineers

Deformation and energy absorption capacity of steel structures in the inelastic range

This report summarizes the status of knowledge on the inelastic deformability of steel members and frames. It demonstrates that the inelastic response of planar beams, beamcolumns, connections and frames is well understood and can be adequately, though conservatively, predicted by theory provided the loading is static, proportional and monotonic, and adequate provisions are made to inhibit premature local and lateral-torsional instability. The report reviews the available theoretical work, and examines the experimental evidence. It shows that the inelastic rotation capacity, which defines also the ductility factor and the inelastic energy absorption capacity, is both predictable and large enough to meet the requirements of plastically designed frames. The report demonstrates that the knowledge of the behavior of members and frames subjected to non-proportional or reversible loading, which may be the result of dynamic phenomena, is not complete. Methods of frame analysis are available, but information needs to be generated on the inelastic behavior of individual structural components under reversed loading. This information is vital for the performance of a proper dynamic analysis. A similar need exists in the area of biaxially loaded structures. The report considers separately the available research on beams, beam-columns, connections and frames. Particular emphasis is placed on the inelastic deformability. Each section of the report contains specific suggestions for further research and study. Selected references appear at the end of the report. The large amount of research performed for the development of plastic design has relevance for the study of the behavior of structures subjected to earthquake motion or blast, because it provides information on basic behavior, and it defines methods of analysis and experimentation. This research does not, however, give all the answers, and some additional areas need to be investigated

Cultural and Media Identity Among Latvian Migrants in Germany

This chapter explores how transnational media and culture impacts on the identity formation of recent Latvian migrants in Germany. In the context of the EU, Germany opened its labour market to the new EU countries rather late, when compared to other ‘old’ EU countries. This has had an effect on the composition of the group of Latvian migrants going to Germany, and their identities. In the light of this, this chapter examines how Latvian migrants in Germany feel and experience their belonging to Latvia and its culture. It analyses the social and communicative practices crucial for the development of belonging, including the rootedness in the country where they live and the cultural references that are important for them. The evidence for the analysis in this chapter comes from in-depth interviews, open media diaries and network maps of Latvian migrants in Germany. The chapter situates the description of evidence in the framework of cultural identity concepts and discusses the role of culture and media in the process of building migrant identity. The chapter argues that culture is shaping the transnational self-perception of Latvian migrants in Germany – as it provides collective narratives of imagined common frames of references, and confirms feelings of belonging and distinction

The challenge of changing deeply-held student beliefs about the relativity of simultaneity

Previous research indicates that after standard instruction students at all academic levels often construct a conceptual framework in which the ideas of absolute simultaneity and the relativity of simultaneity co-exist. This article describes the development and assessment of instructional materials intended to improve student understanding of the concept of time in special relativity, the relativity of simultaneity, and the role of observers in inertial reference frames. Results from pretests and post-tests are presented to demonstrate the effect of the curriculum in helping students deepen their understanding of these topics. Excerpts from taped interviews and classroom interactions help illustrate the intense cognitive conflict that students encounter as they are led to confront the incompatibility of their deeply-held beliefs about simultaneity with the results of special relativity.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, 27 references; Accepted for publication in Physics Education Research Section, American Journal of Physics (2001

Lessons learned in a crisis situation : the Joplin Schools' story

Dissertation supervisor: Dr. Cynthia J. MacGregor.Includes vita.Natural disasters affect millions of lives each year, devastating educational institutions across the world (United States Agency for International Development, 2010). This qualitative study was designed using a case-study approach to understand one school district's leadership response to a catastrophic crisis in order to gain lessons learned that could prepare other non-profit, public educational intuitions in a future crisis. The study, using the framework of Bolman and Deal (2008), identified specific areas within each of the four frames: structural, human resource, political, and symbolic that should be considered when responding to a major disaster first-hand. The findings include several lessons learned that may guide other leaders in responding to a crisis.Includes bibliographical references

The cost of noise reduction for departure and arrival operations of commercial tilt rotor aircraft

February 1976Includes bibliographical references (p. 50-51)The relationship between direct operating cost (DOC) and noise annoyance due to a departure and an arrival operation was developed for commercial tilt rotor aircraft. This was accomplished by generating a series of tilt rotor aircraft designs to meet various noise goals at minimum DOC. These vehicles ranged across the spectrum of possible noise levels from completely unconstrained to the quietest vehicles that could be designed within the study ground rules. Optimization parameters were varied to find the minimum DOC. This basic variation was then extended to different aircraft sizes and technology time frames. It was concluded that reducing noise annoyance by designing for lower rotor tip speeds is a very promising avenue for future research and development. It appears that the cost of halving the annoyance compared to an unconstrained design is insignificant and the cost of halving the annoyance again is small.Prepared under contract for Ames Research Center, National Aeronautics and Space Administratio

The appropriation and mastery of cultural tools in computer supported collaborative literacy practices

The main focus of this thesis is how language is used to construct knowledge in social interaction. A more specific aim is the investigation of the strategies of British primary school children for constructing multimodal electronic documents, and in particular for constructing collaboratively WebPages in History. In the first part of the thesis the two themes are critically explored through a literature review of sociocultural theory, literacy, and lCT, and through two pilot studies. In the first study, I investigate how language use varies according to the difficulty of tasks. In the second study, I investigate how language use in situated literacy events relates to wider cultural practices for constructing e-mails and WebPages. Drawing on the result of these studies, I evaluate the relationship between the concepts of Zone of Proximal Development, scaffolding, exploratory talk, and Intermental Development Zone (IDZ), arguing in favour of the usefulness of IDZ for studies in social interaction. In the second part of the thesis, I explore different approaches to discourse analysis developing an analytic strategy for the main study. I identify the ethnography of communication as a starting point, choosing the 'communicative event' as the unit of analysis to investigate, using NVivo: how participants construct categories of meaning while constructing WebPages in History, and the categories of participants in relation to the activity frames of design, History, and group work. I conclude that, in contrast to a view of "effective use of language" linked to explicitness, participants demonstrated to be communicatively competent in managing deictic terms and intertextual references.> recognizing cultural patterns, and adjusting their efforts according to a division of labour, and the collaborative nature of meaning making. Finally, the notion of 'situated activity system' is enriched by illuminating how categories of participants, activity frames, and cultural tools are interrelated in such system

EMScore: Evaluating Video Captioning via Coarse-Grained and Fine-Grained Embedding Matching

Current metrics for video captioning are mostly based on the text-level comparison between reference and candidate captions. However, they have some insuperable drawbacks, e.g., they cannot handle videos without references, and they may result in biased evaluation due to the one-to-many nature of video-to-text and the neglect of visual relevance. From the human evaluator's viewpoint, a high-quality caption should be consistent with the provided video, but not necessarily be similar to the reference in literal or semantics. Inspired by human evaluation, we propose EMScore (Embedding Matching-based score), a novel reference-free metric for video captioning, which directly measures similarity between video and candidate captions. Benefit from the recent development of large-scale pre-training models, we exploit a well pre-trained vision-language model to extract visual and linguistic embeddings for computing EMScore. Specifically, EMScore combines matching scores of both coarse-grained (video and caption) and fine-grained (frames and words) levels, which takes the overall understanding and detailed characteristics of the video into account. Furthermore, considering the potential information gain, EMScore can be flexibly extended to the conditions where human-labeled references are available. Last but not least, we collect VATEX-EVAL and ActivityNet-FOIl datasets to systematically evaluate the existing metrics. VATEX-EVAL experiments demonstrate that EMScore has higher human correlation and lower reference dependency. ActivityNet-FOIL experiment verifies that EMScore can effectively identify "hallucinating" captions. The datasets will be released to facilitate the development of video captioning metrics. The code is available at: https://github.com/ShiYaya/emscore.Comment: cvpr202