Risk across design domains

Design processes involve risk: to life and limb if the product is unsafe, to the financial health of the company if the product is late, unsuccessful or simply the wrong product, as well as to the emotions and careers of the designers. Many of the risks are shared universally by all designers, but each different industry and each different project faces its own spectrum of serious and minor risks. Different industries have put their methodological effort into finding ways to mitigate the risks they recognise as important. As part of the Across Design project exploring similarities and differences between design processes in different industries, this paper examines how risks are perceived and handled in different types of design process, and proposes that designers and managers can usefully look to other industries for ways to handle risks that are more central for those other industries

Epistemic Implications of Engineering Rhetoric

The texts (and talk) of engineers take different forms. In this essay, I present and critique several texts written for different purposes and audiences but all intended to convey to the reader the technical details of whatever they are about - whether a textbook passage describing the fundamental behavior of an electrical component, a journal article about a mathematical technique intended for use in design optimization, a memo to co-work- ers within a firm about a heat transfer analysis of a remotely sited building, or a general introduction to the field of ‘ergonomics’. My aim is to explore how the ways in which engineers describe and document their problems and projects frame what they accept, display and profess as useful knowledge. In this I am particu- larly interested in how engineers envision the 'users' of, or participants in, their productions. Like science, engineering texts are written as if they were timeless and untainted by socio-cultural features. A technical treatise is not devoid of metaphor or creative rendering of events; there is always a narrative within which worldly data and instrumental logic is embedded - but it is a story in which the passive voice prevails, history is irrelevant, and the human actor or agent is painted in quantitative parameters fitting the occasion. Whether this rhetoric can be sustained in the face of challenges to traditional ways of doing engineering is an open question

Types of Fireballs

International audienceThe good properties of Plotkin's call-by-value lambda-calculus crucially rely on the restriction to weak evaluation and closed terms. Open call-by-value is the more general setting where evaluation is weak but terms may be open. Such an extension is delicate, and the literature contains a number of proposals. Recently, Accattoli and Guerrieri provided detailed operational and implementative studies of these proposals, showing that they are equivalent from the point of view of termination, and also at the level of time cost models. This paper explores the denotational semantics of open call-by-value, adapting de Carvalho's analysis of call-by-name via multi types (aka non-idempotent intersection types). Our type system characterises nor-malisation and thus provides an adequate relational semantics. Moreover, type derivations carry quantitative information about the cost of evaluation: their size bounds the number of evaluation steps and the size of the normal form, and we also characterise derivations giving exact bounds. The study crucially relies on a new, refined presentation of the fireball calculus, the simplest proposal for open call-by-value, that is more apt to denotational investigations

Concepts in K-9 Computer Science Education

Contains fulltext : 155761.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)ITICSE '15 : Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Conference 2015 Vilnius, Lithuania — July 04 - 08, 201