4,238 research outputs found

    Modelling, Monitoring, Control and Optimization for Complex Industrial Processes

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    This reprint includes 22 research papers and an editorial, collected from the Special Issue "Modelling, Monitoring, Control and Optimization for Complex Industrial Processes", highlighting recent research advances and emerging research directions in complex industrial processes. This reprint aims to promote the research field and benefit the readers from both academic communities and industrial sectors

    A Decision Support System for Economic Viability and Environmental Impact Assessment of Vertical Farms

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    Vertical farming (VF) is the practice of growing crops or animals using the vertical dimension via multi-tier racks or vertically inclined surfaces. In this thesis, I focus on the emerging industry of plant-specific VF. Vertical plant farming (VPF) is a promising and relatively novel practice that can be conducted in buildings with environmental control and artificial lighting. However, the nascent sector has experienced challenges in economic viability, standardisation, and environmental sustainability. Practitioners and academics call for a comprehensive financial analysis of VPF, but efforts are stifled by a lack of valid and available data. A review of economic estimation and horticultural software identifies a need for a decision support system (DSS) that facilitates risk-empowered business planning for vertical farmers. This thesis proposes an open-source DSS framework to evaluate business sustainability through financial risk and environmental impact assessments. Data from the literature, alongside lessons learned from industry practitioners, would be centralised in the proposed DSS using imprecise data techniques. These techniques have been applied in engineering but are seldom used in financial forecasting. This could benefit complex sectors which only have scarce data to predict business viability. To begin the execution of the DSS framework, VPF practitioners were interviewed using a mixed-methods approach. Learnings from over 19 shuttered and operational VPF projects provide insights into the barriers inhibiting scalability and identifying risks to form a risk taxonomy. Labour was the most commonly reported top challenge. Therefore, research was conducted to explore lean principles to improve productivity. A probabilistic model representing a spectrum of variables and their associated uncertainty was built according to the DSS framework to evaluate the financial risk for VF projects. This enabled flexible computation without precise production or financial data to improve economic estimation accuracy. The model assessed two VPF cases (one in the UK and another in Japan), demonstrating the first risk and uncertainty quantification of VPF business models in the literature. The results highlighted measures to improve economic viability and the viability of the UK and Japan case. The environmental impact assessment model was developed, allowing VPF operators to evaluate their carbon footprint compared to traditional agriculture using life-cycle assessment. I explore strategies for net-zero carbon production through sensitivity analysis. Renewable energies, especially solar, geothermal, and tidal power, show promise for reducing the carbon emissions of indoor VPF. Results show that renewably-powered VPF can reduce carbon emissions compared to field-based agriculture when considering the land-use change. The drivers for DSS adoption have been researched, showing a pathway of compliance and design thinking to overcome the ‘problem of implementation’ and enable commercialisation. Further work is suggested to standardise VF equipment, collect benchmarking data, and characterise risks. This work will reduce risk and uncertainty and accelerate the sector’s emergence

    Academic integrity : a call to research and action

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    Originally published in French:L'urgence de l'intĂ©gritĂ© acadĂ©mique, Éditions EMS, Management & société, Caen, 2021 (ISBN 978-2-37687-472-0).The urgency of doing complements the urgency of knowing. Urgency here is not the inconsequential injunction of irrational immediacy. It arises in various contexts for good reasons, when there is a threat to the human existence and harms to others. Today, our knowledge based civilization is at risk both by new production models of knowledge and by the shamelessness of knowledge delinquents, exposing the greatest number to important risks. Swiftly, the editors respond to the diagnostic by setting up a reference tool for academic integrity. Across multiple dialogues between the twenty-five chapters and five major themes, the ethical response shapes pragmatic horizons for action, on a range of disciplinary competencies: from science to international diplomacy. An interdisciplinary work indispensable for teachers, students and university researchers and administrators

    Patenting Genetic Information

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    The U.S. biotechnology industry got its start and grew to maturity over roughly three decades, beginning in the 1980s. During this period genes were patentable, and many gene patents were granted. University researchers performed basic research— often funded by the government—and then patented the genes they discovered with the encouragement of the Bayh-Dole Act, which sought to encourage practical applications of basic research by allowing patents on federally funded inventions and discoveries. At that time, when a researcher discovered the function of a gene, she could patent it such that no one else could work with that gene in the laboratory without a license. She had no right, however, to control genes in nature, including in human bodies. Universities licensed their researchers’ patents to industry, which brought in significant revenue for further research. University researchers also used gene patents as the basis for obtaining funding for start-up enterprises spun out of university labs. It was in this environment that many of today’s biotechnology companies started. In 2013, the Supreme Court held that naturally occurring genes could no longer be patented. This followed a 2012 decision that disallowed patents on many diagnostic processes. These decisions significantly changed the intellectual property protections in the biotechnology industry. Nevertheless, the industry has continued to grow and thrive. This Article investigates two questions. First, if some form of exclusive rights still applied to genes, would the biotech industry be even more robust, with more new entrants in addition to thriving, well-established companies? Second, does the current lack of protection for gene discoveries incentivize keeping such discoveries secret for the many years that it can take to develop a therapeutic based thereon—to the detriment of patients who could benefit from knowledge of the genetic associations, even before a treatment is developed? The Article concludes by analyzing what protection for discovering genetic associations, if any, will most increase social welfare

    Organizational identity design: A multimodal discourse analysis of Australian university homepages

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    This thesis studies web homepages to understand the complex social practice of organizational identity communication on a digital medium. It examines how designs of web homepages realize discourses of identity through the mobilization and orchestration of various semiotic resources into multimodal ensembles, addressing critical organizational visual identity elements (‘logo,’ ‘corporate name,’ ‘color,’ ‘typography,’ ‘graphic shapes,’ and ‘images’), communicative content of the page, and navigation structures. By examining these three ‘strata’ of organizational identity communication, it investigates how a homepage uses formal design elements and more abstract principles of composition, such as spatial positioning and content ordering, as resources for making meaning. The data consists of three complementary sets drawn from thirty-nine web homepages of Australian university websites in 2020. Data set #1 includes four homepages for an in-depth study of organizational identity designs; data set #2 consists of 400 images from the ‘above the fold’ web area as the most strategic space on four homepages between the years 2015 and 2021; data set #3 is comprised of eight historical versions of a selected web homepage between the years 2000 and 2021, with three most representative designs for an in-depth investigation. Grounded in the discourse-analytic approach informed by multimodal social semiotics, the thesis adopts a mixed-method approach to data analysis. It applies multimodal discourse analysis combining the Genre and Multimodality model (Bateman, 2008; Bateman et al., 2017) to document the structural design patterns and social semiotic (metafunctional) approach to address the meaning potentials of the identified patterns; (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2021); content analysis (Bell, 2001; Rose, 2016) and visual social actor framework (van Leeuwen, 2008) to identify key representational tropes and visual personae. The study reveals the role of design as a mediating tool between the participants of discourse – the rhetor-institution/designer and envisaged audiences – and offers systematic insights into the uses of semiotic resources, both material (e.g., formal design elements and navigation structures) and nonmaterial (e.g., spatial considerations and content structuring), all contributing to the production of meanings and fostering identification with such meanings in the form of association with the university’s identity. Addressing the subtle differences and shifts in the form and function of key layout structures and strategies of viewer engagement, the study concludes that is plural – each university constantly revises semiotic choices and their multimodal composition to achieve specific rhetorical purposes. Together with several visual design choices, five identified strategies of viewer engagement – proximation, alignment, equalization, objectivation, and subjectivation – promote the university as a place of opportunity, achievement, sociality, and intellectual growth for a student as an individual and as a member of the community. The current research contributes to the emerging collaboration between multimodality, organization studies, and branding, recognizing the complexities and importance of multimodal communication in web-mediated texts amidst the critically increased roles of marketization and social presence in the current higher education landscape

    A model for improving quality of care in maternal health facilities in South Africa

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    Reducing maternal mortality ratios (MMRs) and neonatal mortality ratios (NMRs) remains a priority for improving the quality of care in various parts of the world, particularly in developing nations like South Africa. There has been no victory in reducing MMRs and NMRs in different models that were developed, tried, and tested. The study intended to develop a model for improving the quality of care in maternal health facilities in South Africa. The study was conducted in a selected public hospital in Libode in the Eastern Cape province. A purposive sample of fifteen women, five doctors and fifteen midwives was used to conduct in-depth face-to-face individual interviews. Colaizzi’s seven-step analysis framework was used to transcribe, code, and then extract and analyse key themes from the collected data. The main study findings revealed that obstacles to receiving prompt, adequate and quality of care were common problems encountered in a maternal health facility. Both direct and indirect as well as possible contributing factors to poor quality maternal and newborn care were also revealed. These practices increase the risk of maternal and related perinatal deaths. The study findings informed the development of a model for improving quality of care to advance health outcomes in women and newborns in the maternal health facilities in South Africa. The study findings further recommend the proposed model as an initiative to improve the quality of care in health care facilities and reduce maternal and neonatal deaths in the Eastern Cape province.Health StudiesPh. D. (Nursing

    CITIES: Energetic Efficiency, Sustainability; Infrastructures, Energy and the Environment; Mobility and IoT; Governance and Citizenship

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    This book collects important contributions on smart cities. This book was created in collaboration with the ICSC-CITIES2020, held in San José (Costa Rica) in 2020. This book collects articles on: energetic efficiency and sustainability; infrastructures, energy and the environment; mobility and IoT; governance and citizenship

    Publishing Sacrobosco’s De sphaera in Early Modern Europe

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    This open access volume focuses on the cultural background of the pivotal transformations of scientific knowledge in the early modern period. It investigates the rich edition history of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de sphaera, by far the most widely disseminated textbook on geocentric cosmology, from the unique standpoint of the many printers, publishers, and booksellers who steered this text from manuscript to print culture, and in doing so transformed it into an established platform of scientific learning. The corpus, constituted of 359 different editions featuring Sacrobosco’s treatise on cosmology and astronomy printed between 1472 and 1650, represents the scientific European shared knowledge concerned with the cosmological worldview of the early modern period until far after the publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543. The contributions to this volume show how the academic book trade influenced the process of homogenization of scientific knowledge. They also describe the material infrastructure through which such knowledge was disseminated, and thus define the premises for the foundation of modern scientific communities
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