Representation of ecodesign practice: International comparison of industrial design consultancies

Ecodesign offers significant potential to reduce the environmental impacts of products. Whilst some integration of environmental considerations into design occurs in progressive companies when engineering the product, this only represents a small share of the possible design interventions to improve the environmental performance of products. For example, developing new product concepts to fulfill needs in a less environmentally harmful way and considering user related aspects offers a large, currently under-realized potential. This paper identifies industrial design (ID) consultancies as potential agents to tackle this issue on a strategic and operational basis. The extent to which this potential is currently applied was assessed by conducting a content analysis of websites of ID consultancies in Australia, China, and Germany. How ID consultancies represent their ecodesign practice is country-specific. Despite the differences, some ID consultancies in all countries announce and/or show the capability to develop completely new concepts and to influence user related factors to improve environmental performance. This shows their potential to address current shortcomings in ecodesign practice. As ID consultancies embracing that potential still are a minority, further research should be directed to a deeper examination of barriers and stimuli for ID consultancies to take up ecodesign.© 2011 by the authors

Reconstructing the Topology on Monoids and Polymorphism Clones of the Rationals

We show how to reconstruct the topology on the monoid of endomorphisms of the rational numbers under the strict or reflexive order relation, and the polymorphism clone of the rational numbers under the reflexive relation. In addition we show how automatic homeomorphicity results can be lifted to polymorphism clones generated by monoids

GiViP: A Visual Profiler for Distributed Graph Processing Systems

Analyzing large-scale graphs provides valuable insights in different application scenarios. While many graph processing systems working on top of distributed infrastructures have been proposed to deal with big graphs, the tasks of profiling and debugging their massive computations remain time consuming and error-prone. This paper presents GiViP, a visual profiler for distributed graph processing systems based on a Pregel-like computation model. GiViP captures the huge amount of messages exchanged throughout a computation and provides an interactive user interface for the visual analysis of the collected data. We show how to take advantage of GiViP to detect anomalies related to the computation and to the infrastructure, such as slow computing units and anomalous message patterns.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017

Stability problem for the torque-free gyrostat by using algebraic methods

We apply an algebraic method for studying the stability with respect to a set of conserved quantities for the problem of torque-free gyrostat. If the conditions of this algebraic method are not fulfilled then the Lyapunov stability cannot be decided using the specified set of conserved quantities

Visual Causality: Investigating Graph Layouts for Understanding Causal Processes

Causal diagrams provide a graphical formalism indicating how statistical models can be used to study causal processes. Despite the extensive research on the efficacy of aesthetic graphic layouts, the causal inference domain has not benefited from the results of this research. In this paper, we investigate the performance of graph visualisations for supporting users’ understanding of causal graphs. Two studies were conducted to compare graph visualisations for understanding causation and identifying confounding variables in a causal graph. The first study results suggest that while adjacency matrix layouts are better for understanding direct causation, node-link diagrams are better for understanding mediated causation along causal paths. The second study revealed that node-link layouts, and in particular layouts created by a radial algorithm, are more effective for identifying confounder and collider variables

Energy spectrum of a 2D Dirac electron in the presence of a constant magnetic field

In this paper we obtain exact solutions of a 2D relativistic Dirac oscillator in the presence of a constant magnetic field. We compute the energy spectrum and discuss its dependence on the spin and magnetic field strength.Comment: 7 page