The importance of a new product development (NPD) process: getting started.

In order to achieve a successful new product, and certainly the successful implementation of a new product into a company, it is necessary to have a structured and documented approach to New Product Development (NPD), therefore providing a clear roadmap for the development of new products. This review highlights the NPD process, from concept to consumer, and what the key success drivers are, such as; the quest for real product superiority and success, and the need for cross-functional teams; in order for a company to succeed and use new products as a source for competitive advantage

Investing in development or investing in relief: Quantifying the poverty tradeoffs using Zimbabwe household panel data

This study examines the consequences of alternative relief and development interventions on the well being of households in rural Zimbabwe. It does so by: a) establishing a framework that links household resources to levels of poverty; b) validating the quantitative data with group wealth rankings by the households in the study; c) estimating key parameters within this framework, namely: the determinants of net crop income; the determinants of private transfers; and the links between increased incomes and the accumulation of capital stock; and d) conducting a counterfactual exercise in which relief assistance is reduced and reallocating these funds to improve access to agricultural extension and increased holdings of capital stock. Under these counterfactuals, the incidence and severity of poverty in non-drought years fall significantly. The best performing counterfactual, improving access to extension and increasing capital stock reduces the incidence of food poverty by 11 per cent. Under the most basic scenario, the increased income generated by transforming relief aid into agricultural capital is sufficient to fund an adequate diet for each person in each beneficiary household for six months. Further, such improvements in well being are achieved without households necessarily being made worse off during a drought year. These results suggest that for the households in this sample, there is a significant opportunity cost associated with the shift in external aid resources from development to emergency assistance.

GraphBLAST: A High-Performance Linear Algebra-based Graph Framework on the GPU

High-performance implementations of graph algorithms are challenging to implement on new parallel hardware such as GPUs because of three challenges: (1) the difficulty of coming up with graph building blocks, (2) load imbalance on parallel hardware, and (3) graph problems having low arithmetic intensity. To address some of these challenges, GraphBLAS is an innovative, on-going effort by the graph analytics community to propose building blocks based on sparse linear algebra, which will allow graph algorithms to be expressed in a performant, succinct, composable and portable manner. In this paper, we examine the performance challenges of a linear-algebra-based approach to building graph frameworks and describe new design principles for overcoming these bottlenecks. Among the new design principles is exploiting input sparsity, which allows users to write graph algorithms without specifying push and pull direction. Exploiting output sparsity allows users to tell the backend which values of the output in a single vectorized computation they do not want computed. Load-balancing is an important feature for balancing work amongst parallel workers. We describe the important load-balancing features for handling graphs with different characteristics. The design principles described in this paper have been implemented in "GraphBLAST", the first high-performance linear algebra-based graph framework on NVIDIA GPUs that is open-source. The results show that on a single GPU, GraphBLAST has on average at least an order of magnitude speedup over previous GraphBLAS implementations SuiteSparse and GBTL, comparable performance to the fastest GPU hardwired primitives and shared-memory graph frameworks Ligra and Gunrock, and better performance than any other GPU graph framework, while offering a simpler and more concise programming model.Comment: 50 pages, 14 figures, 14 table

Scalable Breadth-First Search on a GPU Cluster

On a GPU cluster, the ratio of high computing power to communication bandwidth makes scaling breadth-first search (BFS) on a scale-free graph extremely challenging. By separating high and low out-degree vertices, we present an implementation with scalable computation and a model for scalable communication for BFS and direction-optimized BFS. Our communication model uses global reduction for high-degree vertices, and point-to-point transmission for low-degree vertices. Leveraging the characteristics of degree separation, we reduce the graph size to one third of the conventional edge list representation. With several other optimizations, we observe linear weak scaling as we increase the number of GPUs, and achieve 259.8 GTEPS on a scale-33 Graph500 RMAT graph with 124 GPUs on the latest CORAL early access system.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figures. To appear at IPDPS 201

Why Health and Social Care Support for People with Long-Term Conditions Should be Oriented Towards Enabling Them to Live Well

This research was funded by The Health Foundation (a charity working to improve the quality of healthcare in the UK) via (a) a commission on conceptualising collaborative care, (b) an Open Insight initiative project on re-conceptualising support for self-management (reference 7209), and (c) a contribution towards salary funding for Alan Cribb. At the University of Aberdeen, Vikki Entwistle works within the Health Services Research Unit, which is core funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government’s Health and Social Care Directorates. Health Foundation and Scottish Government staff are among those who have participated in knowledge exchange events related to the two projects. The views expressed in the paper are those of the authors and are not necessarily shared by funders or workshop participants. The authors accept full responsibility for this paper. Open access via Springer Compact AgreementPeer reviewedPublisher PD

Spacelab system analysis Marshall Avionics System Testbed (MAST)

A synopsis of the visits to avionics test facilities is presented. A list of recommendaions for the MAST facility is also included

Spacelab system analysis: The modified free access protocol: An access protocol for communication systems with periodic and Poisson traffic

The protocol definition and terminal hardware for the modified free access protocol, a communications protocol similar to Ethernet, are developed. A MFA protocol simulator and a CSMA/CD math model are also developed. The protocol is tailored to communication systems where the total traffic may be divided into scheduled traffic and Poisson traffic. The scheduled traffic should occur on a periodic basis but may occur after a given event such as a request for data from a large number of stations. The Poisson traffic will include alarms and other random traffic. The purpose of the protocol is to guarantee that scheduled packets will be delivered without collision. This is required in many control and data collection systems. The protocol uses standard Ethernet hardware and software requiring minimum modifications to an existing system. The modification to the protocol only affects the Ethernet transmission privileges and does not effect the Ethernet receiver

Final Testimony on LR 141: Status of Nebraska Forest Service

Good morning, Chairman Wehrbein and members of the Appropriations Committee. I am John Owens, and I serve as Vice - President and Vice Chancellor of the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak with you regarding Legislative Resolution 141 on the Nebraska Forest Service

Rural Outreach

I think it comes as no surprise here when I say I am a very firm believer in the importance of engagement and outreach for Nebraska\u27s land-grant university. We have a proud tradition of teaching, research, and engagement and outreach at the University of Nebraska. And each day we build on that tradition

ABN Summer Meeting

We in the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources are so pleased you\u27re here with us today at our Agricultural Research and Development Center. We hope you enjoy the day as much as we enjoy having you here. Thank you for coming. Thanks, also, to everyone who has been involved in putting this day together. Your work is very much appreciated