Building a Common Ground – The Use of Design Representation Cards for Enhancing Collaboration between Industrial Designers and Engineering Designers

To achieve success in today’s commercial environment, manufacturers have progressively adopted collaboration strategies. Industrial design has been increasingly used with engineering design to enhance competitiveness. Research between the two fields has been limited and existing collaboration methods have not achieved desired results. This PhD research project investigated the level of collaboration between industrial designers and engineering designers. The aim is to develop an integration tool for enhanced collaboration, where a common language would improve communication and create shared knowledge. An empirical research using questionnaires and observations identified 61 issues between industrial designers and engineering designers. The results were grouped and coded based on recurrence and importance, outlining 3 distinct problem categories in collaborative activity: conflicts in values and principles, differences in design representation, and education differences. A taxonomy further helped categorise design representations into sketches, drawings, models and prototypes. This knowledge was indexed into cards to provide uniform definition of design representations with key information. They should benefit practitioners and educators by serving as a decision-making guide and support a collaborative working environment. A pilot study first refined the layout and improved information access. The final validation involving interviews with practitioners revealed most respondents to be convinced that the tool would provide a common ground in design representations, contributing to enhanced collaboration. Additional interviews were sought from groups of final-year industrial design and engineering design students working together. Following their inter-disciplinary experience, nearly all respondents were certain that the cards would provide mutual understanding for greater product success. Lastly, a case study approach tested the cards in an industry-based project. A design diary captured and analysed the researchers’ activities and observations on a daily basis. It revealed positive feedback, reinforcing the benefits of the cards for successful collaboration in a multi-disciplinary environment. Keywords Industrial Design, Engineering Design, Collaboration, Design Representation, New Product Development.</p

Understanding the Costs and Benefits of Deepwater Oil Drilling Regulation

The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for understanding how analysis of costs and benefits might be incorporated into an assessment of regulatory policies affecting deepwater drilling. We begin by providing a framework for analyzing the life-cycle impacts of oil drilling and its alternatives, including onshore drilling and importing oil from abroad. We then provide background estimates of the different sources of oil supplied in the United States, look at how other oil supply sources might respond to regulations on deepwater drilling, and consider the economic costs of these regulations. After providing a comprehensive description of the potential costs and benefits from various types of drilling—including, when possible, estimates of the magnitude of these benefits and costs—we discuss the extent to which these costs and benefits may already be taken into account (or reinforced) through the legal, regulatory, and tax systems and through market mechanisms. We conclude by presenting a framework and simple example of how a cost–benefit analysis might be used to inform regulation of deepwater drilling, and sum up the policy implications of our work.catastrophic oil spill, cost-benefit analysis, government regulation, liability

Variant interpretation through Bayesian fusion of frequency and genomic knowledge

Variant interpretation is a central challenge in genomic medicine. A recent study demonstrates the power of Bayesian statistical approaches to improve interpretation of variants in the context of specific genes and syndromes. Such Bayesian approaches combine frequency (in the form of observed genetic variation in cases and controls) with biological annotations to determine a probability of pathogenicity. These Bayesian approaches complement other efforts to catalog human variation

Cosmological 3-Brane Solutions

We analyze cosmological equations in the brane world scenario with one extra space-like dimension. We demonstrate that the cosmological equations can be reduced to the usual 4D Friedmann type if the bulk energy-momentum tensor is different from zero. We then generalize these equations to the case of a brane of finite thickness. We also demonstrate that when the bulk energy-momentum tensor is different from zero, the extra space-like dimension can be compactified with a single brane and show that the stability of the radius of compactification implies standard cosmology and vice versa. For a brane of finite thickness, we provide a solution such that the 4D Planck scale is related to the fundamental scale by the thickness of the brane. In this case, compactification of the extra dimension is unnecessary.Comment: 14 pages, Latex file, no figures, typos corrected, comments and references added, version to appear in Physics Letters

Investigation on standoff distance influence on kerf characteristics in abrasive water jet cutting of composite materials

The paper presents an experimental study on processing composite materials using abrasive water jet cutting (AWJC) process, analysing one of the main process parameter, standoff distance (SOD). Carbon Fibre Reinforced Plastics (CFRP) are used in a wide range of industrial applications, like aerospace and automotive. Cutting CFRP using AWJC involves several challenges like high dimensional accuracy and good surface quality. To produce precise parts by using this process must be understand the influence of the process parameters on quality characteristics. On this study was investigated the standoff distance influence on kerf characteristics. The characteristics of the cut surface (kerf geometry, surface roughness and topography) were analyzed

The impact of interpersonal relationships on rural doctors’ clinical courage

Introduction: Clinical courage occurs when rural doctors push themselves to the limits of their scope of practice to provide the medical care needed by patients in their community. This mental strength to venture, persevere and act out of concern for one’s patient, despite a lack of formally recognised expertise, becomes necessary for doctors who work in relative professional isolation. Previous research by the authors suggested that the clinical courage of rural doctors relies on the relationships around them. This article explores in more depth how relationships with others can impact on clinical courage. Methods: At an international rural medicine conference in 2017, doctors who practised rural/remote medicine were invited to participate in the study. Twenty-seven semistructured interviews were conducted exploring experiences of clinical courage. Initial analysis of the material, using a hermeneutic phenomenological frame, sought to understand the meaning of clinical courage. In the original analysis, an emic question arose: ‘How do interpersonal relationships impact on clinical courage’. The material was re-analysed to explore this question, using Wenger’s community of practice as a theoretical framework. Results: This study found that clinical courage was affected by the relationships rural doctors had with their communities and patients, with each other, with the local members of their healthcare team and with other colleagues and health leaders outside their immediate community of practice. Conclusion: As a collective, rural doctors can learn, use and strengthen clinical courage and support its development in new members of the discipline. Relationships with rural communities, rural patients and urban colleagues can support the clinical courage of rural doctors. When detractors challenge the value of clinical courage, it requires individual rural doctors and their community of practice to champion rural doctors’ way of working

Bed-load effects on hydrodynamics of rough-bed open-channel flows

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

An overview of emerging trends in pathogen reduction in the processing of fruit juices

Master of ScienceDepartment of Animal Sciences and Industry Food ScienceElizabeth BoyleUnpasteurized fruit juices have been implicated as the source of foodborne outbreaks due to pathogens such as Salmonella, Escherichia coli O157: H7 and Cryptosporidium parvum. The growth of pathogens can usually be slowed through freezing or largely eliminated through pasteurization. Although pasteurization is often effective in eliminating pathogens, it often yields undesirable flavors that are unlike those of fresh juice. Growing consumer trends towards “healthy” unpasteurized alternatives are fueling the development of alternative processing techniques. Several promising techniques for pathogen reduction in the processing of fruit juices are currently being developed. A new technique that is already being marketed worldwide is hyperbaric processing (HPP) which subjects the fruit juice to a high pressure of up to 1000 MPa. The high-pressure treatment results in up to a 7 log reduction kill in pathogens while preserving the naturally occurring flavor profile, sensory attributes and nutritional benefits. Pulsed electric fields (PEF) and ionizing radiation are also being widely explored as viable techniques to process unpasteurized fruit juices. PEF promises to be a commercially viable energy efficient alternative to pasteurization, adding only $0.03 –$0.05 per liter to final food costs. Although irradiation enjoys support for use in the processing of fruit juice by regulatory agencies, support in public opinion is lacking and hinders its growth as an alternative to pasteurization. Other experimental techniques are also present in the development pipeline. Ultrasonic radiation and high intensity pulsed light radiation are both experimental techniques that are being researched. A particularly exciting alternative is the use of plant-based antimicrobials. Several fruits and spices are known to be natural antimicrobials and are therefore being researched as alternatives to the traditional chemical preservatives

Sulfide saturation in evolving porphyry systems: El Abra porphyry Cu deposit, northern Chile, and the Grasberg-Ertsberg porphyry-skarn Cu-Au district, Papua, Indonesia

Sulfide saturation during the magmatic evolution of porphyry systems is emerging as an important control on chalcophile element fertility. Platinum group elements (PGE) have extreme sulfide melt-silicate melt partition coefficients that make them sensitive indicators of the timing of sulfide saturation in an evolving magmatic system. We report PGE and Re concentrations of intrusions from the Grasberg-Ertsberg porphyry-skarn Cu-Au district, Papua, Indonesia. Unaltered to weakly altered samples contain up to 0.023 ppb Rh, 5.5 ppb Pt, 11.6 ppb Pd and 162 ppb Re. The most altered and/or mineralized samples typically contain greater concentrations; up to 0.065 ppb Rh, 17.6 ppb Pt, 95 ppb Pd and 218 ppb Re. The results suggest that sulfide saturation did not occur during magmatic evolution of the intrusions, and so Cu, Au, and PGE were concentrated by fractional crystallization and partitioned into the mineralizing fluid. These findings contrast with the intrusions of the El Abra-Pajonal suite and porphyry Cu deposit, Chile, where a rapid drop in Pt and Pd abundance indicates that sulfide saturation started before ore-fluid saturation. However, at El Abra, a porphyry Cu deposit was still able to form because the amount of sulfide melt that formed was small, stripping the magma of most of its Au and PGE but little Cu. Sulfide saturation therefore has a governing control over both the availability of the chalcophile elements to partition into the hydrothermal ore-fluid phase and the type of porphyry mineralization that can form, i.e. Cu, Cu-Au, or Cu-Au-(Pd)