Solving constraints within a graph based dependency model by digitising a new process of incrementally casting concrete structures

The mechanisation of incrementally casting concrete structures can reduce the economic and environmental cost of the formwork which produces them. Low-tech versions of these forms have been designed to produce structures with cross-sectional continuity, but the design and implementation of complex adaptable formworks remains untenable for smaller projects. Addressing these feasibility issues by digitally modelling these systems is problematic because constraint solvers are the obvious method of modelling the adaptable formwork, but cannot acknowledge the hierarchical relationships created by assembling multiple instances of the system. This thesis hypothesises that these opposing relationships may not be completely disparate and that simple dependency relationships can be used to solve constraints if the real procedure of constructing the system is replicated digitally. The behaviour of the digital model was correlated with the behaviour of physical prototypes of the system which were refined based on digital explorations of its possibilities. The generated output is assessed physically on the basis of its efficiency and ease of assembly and digitally on the basis that permutations can be simply described and potentially built in reality. One of the columns generated by the thesis will be cast by the redesigned system in Lyon at the first F2F (file to factory) continuum workshop

Practitioners' constructions of love in early childhood education and care

Love is rarely mentioned in Early Childhood Education and Care and there is no agreed definition for love in this context. In order to explore love in settings practitioner views on the topic should be sought. Unstructured interviews were carried out with senior practitioners in five contrasting settings. A range of qualitative methods were applied to the constructions over an extended period, and a thematic analysis was carried out at the last. Practitioners talked about wide-ranging aspects of practice in response to the narrative prompt about loving children, including the importance of showing to love through touch, familial and non-familial love, loving to be with children, and love as incorporating teaching lessons for the future. A definition of love is needed to facilitate professional discussions about love in settings, away from children’s own homes

The use of poetry in a spiral-patterned methodology for research about love in early childhood

Research about love in early childhood education and care is rare. Love is difficult topic to research and write about in scholarly contexts. In order to properly explore love in professional contexts, practitioner narratives on the topic were sought through individual, unstructured interviews. A spiral-patterned methodological approach was conceived of to convey the slow, recursive research process, with poetry-writing as a principle method of analysis. Other research activities took place as part of the process of making meaning, including mapping, reflective blogging, autobiographical compositions and thematic analysis. The topic of love was constructed as important in early childhood education and care. The spiral-patterned approach, with multiple methods and time to dwell on the data, was found to be a helpful concept in research about affective matters

Automatic Interface Generations From Grammar Specifications

This paper presents a method for automatically generating user interfaces to programs. All possible legal strings of input to a moderately interactive program, taken together, specify the input language of that program. A grammar for such a language is fundamentally knowledge about the language, and that knowledge can be used to assist the program\u27s user in constructing legal program input. The set of words which can appear next in an input sentence, the \u27Next set\u27, is defined and a technique for calculating it with a modified version of Prologs\u27s Definite Clause Grammar parser is given. One type of interface this method can generate is a menu-based front-end. The concept of menus is used very generally to include any method that allows a user to make a choice from among several options. The main difficulty with this technique is that menus may become very large (or may on occasion be infinite). This problem is overcome by the introduction of \u27pre-terminals\u27-- classes of language terminals defined by predicates. When a preterminal is chosen from a menu, the user is prompted to type a value, which is then verified against the predicate associated with the preterminal

Discrete representation strategies for foreign exchange prediction

This is an extended version of the paper presented at the 4th International Workshop NFMCP 2015 held in conjunction with ECML PKDD 2015. The initial version has been published in NFMCP 2015 conference proceedings as part of Springer Series. This paper presents a novel approach to financial times series (FTS) prediction by mapping hourly foreign exchange data to string representations and deriving simple trading strategies from them. To measure the degree of similarity in these market strings we apply familiar string kernels, bag of words and n-grams, whilst also introducing a new kernel, time-decay n-grams, that captures the temporal nature of FTS. In the process we propose a sequential Parzen windows algorithm based on discrete representations where trading decisions for each string are learned in an online manner and are thus subject to temporal fluctuations. We evaluate the strength of a number of representations using both the string version and its continuous counterpart, whilst also comparing the performance of different learning algorithms on these representations, namely support vector machines, Parzen windows and Fisher discriminant analysis. Our extensive experiments show that the simple string representation coupled with the sequential Parzen windows approach is capable of outperforming other more exotic approaches, supporting the idea that when it comes to working in high noise environments often the simplest approach is the most effective

A Graph Browser with Zoom and Roam for Allegro Common Lisp

This report describes an object-oriented tool that has been developed for viewing graphs on a Macintosh II computer using Allegro Common Lisp. The tool is useful for visualizing data which can be represented in tree or graph form. The graphs can be viewed for far away to get a global view, and from close up so that the labels on the vertices can be discerned. Scrolling can be performed at a nearly infinite number of resolutions, and a search feature makes it easy to find any node rapidly. Although the \u27information space\u27 on which the graph is logically plotted is 2-dimensional, nodes can be arbitrarily large or small, and this combined with the zooming feature gives somewhat the illusion of 3-dimensions. The tool is implemented using an object-oriented paradigm, in which the window containing the graph rendering is an object, and so are each of the vertices in the graph. Operations on vertices of the graph are implemented as messages to objects, so that specifics objects can choose to respond in individual ways to various events. This approach makes the tool useful for a wide range of tasks, including browsing the object system inheritance lattice of the lisp system itself, displaying dependency nets in a belief maintenance system, and browsing a hypertext network

The Visual Display of Temporal Information

The detection of temporal relationships among time-ordered patient data is an important, but difficult, clinical task. Large volumes of computer-stored clinical data offer the possibility of aiding in the early detection of subtle trends and states, but the presence of irrelevant data can obscure relevant findings and relationships. We present a formal system for representing complex temporal data as events on an abstract entity called a time limit. We define five time line operations, SLICE, FILTER, OVERLAY, NEW, and ADD. For each operation, we precisely define the operator\u27s effect on a time line, including exceptions and boundary conditions. IN addition to our time line, formalism, we describe an interactive environment designed specifically to help humans visualize temporal data. We have developed a database kernel and a graphical user interface that uses our time line formalism and operations to support temporal manipulations. Using our formal system and our visualization environment, we describe two issues in the display and manipulating of temporal data: (1) the temporal granularity problem, and (2) the calendar mapping problem

Investigating green supply chain management practices and performance: the moderating roles of supply chain ecocentricity and traceability

Sustainable supply chain management has become an increasingly important driver of business performance. Understanding the contingent nature of how performance is improved in this context is therefore a critical task for management. We explore the moderating effects of two practices unique to sustainable supply chain - ecocentricity and supply chain traceability - on a firm’s environmental and operating cost performance. Design: Survey data were collected from 248 UK manufacturing firms and analyzed using moderated hierarchical regression. Findings: The results suggest that green supply chain management practices are associated with improvements in both environmental and cost-based performance. Further, higher levels of ecocentricity and supply chain traceability are associated with stronger relationships between green supply chain management practices and cost performance. Contrary to expectations, high levels of supply chain traceability were found to negatively moderate the relationship between green supply chain management practices and environmental performance. Limitations: Our research design was survey-based and cross-sectional. Future studies would benefit from longitudinal research designs that capture the effects of GSCM practices on performance over an extended period. Our survey data is also perceptual; using secondary data to capture environmental performance outcomes, for example, would be another opportunity for future research. Practical Implications: We provide additional support to findings that green supply chain management practices benefit both environmental and cost performance dimensions. In this context, we show that investments by firms in working with a broader set of eco-system partners (ecocentricity) and building supply chain traceability and leads to improved environmental sustainability outcomes. We encourage managers to carefully consider how they conceptualize and monitor their supply chains. Not applicable. Originality: This paper offers several contributions to the research in this area. First, we develop and validate a measurement scale for ecocentricity and supply chain traceability. Second, we show how these two variables – unique to sustainable supply chains – can positively influence firm and environmental performance