The FENET plate/shell fabrication procedural benchmark and 'round robin' exercise

Plate and shell construction is common across many industrial sectors and covers components and structures that range from the relatively unimportant to safety-critical. The details used in plate/shell structures, in any industry sector, are no doubt a reflection of tradition, as well as market forces and regulation. As a result, for example, full penetration butt-welds will be more common in the nuclear industry, while fillet weld details will be more common in many 'every-day' fabricated structures, ranging from lamp posts to 'bin' lorries. As finite element technology has moved from the so-called 'right-first-time' sectors into general industry, today's powerful analysis and simulation technology is being adopted by more and more organisations, including SMEs, which generally do not have an 'analysis tradition'. In addition, coverage of the assumptions inherent in shell theory generally falls into the postgraduate educational domain. The staffing challenges facing SMEs in particular in this area are therefore significant. Furthermore, it is also argued that many of the details commonly found in fabricated plate/shell structures are often not subjected to widely recognised and commonly accepted cross-industry analysis procedures. The procedural benchmarks and 'round-robin' exercise, detailed herein, were seen as an excellent opportunity to examine such practice and to observe resulting educational and quality assurance related issues

Learning computing heritage through gaming – whilst teaching digital development through history

This paper analyses the potential of computer games and interactive projects within the learning programmes for cultural heritage institutions through our experiences working in partnership between higher education and a museum. Gamification is cited as a key disruptive technology for the business and enterprise community, and developments in games technology are also driving the expansion of digital media into all different screen spaces, and various platforms. Our research aims to take these as beneficial indicators for pedagogic development, using gaming to support knowledge transfer related to a museum setting, and using the museum as a key scenario for our students to support the practice of game development. Thus gamification is applied as both a topic and a methodology for educational purposes

Procedural benchmarks for common fabrication details in plate/shell structures

This report, presents outcomes from the Education and Dissemination Workshops held at Noordwijk and Palma on October 2003 and March 2004 respectively. The results from a 'round-robin' exercise, completed as part of this activity, are also documented. These workshops and the 'round-robin', examined the procedures used in various industry sectors for the modelling and assessment of common fabrication details in plate/shell construction. The primary aim of this exercise was to examine "best practice" in modelling and assessing such detail (with general shell elements) and to disseminate this to the FENET membership and beyond. However, the 'round-robin' was seem as an excellent opportunity to examine such practice and to observe resulting educational and quality assurance related issues

How roots do and don’t constrain the interpretation of Voice

A long-standing issue in syntactic theory, and argument structure in particular, involves the relationship between particular lexical items and the syntactic structures they are embedded in. Lexical roots seem to be choosy about the structures they are able to appear in, but are at they same time very flexible. Complicating the matter further, roots are in some cases able to appear in certain structures only with a certain special meaning. In this paper, I focus on the causative alternation in Icelandic, and propose that we can understand root distribution (the inability of certain roots to appear in certain structures) as a special case of root allosemy (the special interpretation of certain roots in certain structures). This allows for a model where roots have no formal features whatsoever, even if they appear to select for particular structural features, and offers an explanation for cases where it is shown that the putative features of a root cannot be responsible for the interpretation of external arguments directly

Microvariation in verbal rather

This paper uses survey results and interactive mapping tools to analyze correlations across different versions of the non-standard verbal use of the word rather, in particular with participial morphology, as in rathered. Across numerous possible instantiations of the construction, there appear to be in fact a quite limited number of grammars, which are generated by an implicational hierarchy of functional heads, along with the availability of a silent verb HAVE. The overall picture supports several broader conclusions. First, silent verbs can be licensed by head-moving to a modal head in the extended projection. This movement is freely available, but silence demands recoverability, which limits its application only to certain verbs, and certain uses/meanings of those verbs. Second, bare-infinitive–selecting verbs are nearly “closed class” because they have special syntactic properties that go beyond semantic or even syntactic selection: they must license the temporal verbal features of the embedded verb, or else provide a structural context for such licensing. Third, in addition to previously known configurations for building parasitic participle constructions, movement of a lower verb to a higher verb can extend the phase of the lower verb and lead to its silence. Fourth, the distribution of rather suggests that volitional meaning is not a primitive, but is constructed from smaller primitives. Finally, microvariation reveals a tight connection among logically distinct functional heads, suggesting that they are not acquired independently of each other, but interact in significant ways

The development of procedural benchmarks for modelling common fabrication details in plate/shell structures

Aims to examine the procedures used in the various FENET industry sectors, for the "routine" modelling and assessment of common fabrication details in plate/shell construction

Datives, Data and Dialect Syntax in American English

In this paper, we present a detailed case study of a number of dative constructions that vary across speakers of American English. We show how geographical maps of acceptability judgments can be used to shed light on the syntactic structures underlying those judgments. Those structures can then be used to refine our understanding of syntax more generally, in this case relating to the features of argument-introducing heads. We provide novel support for the low applicative analysis of the Personal Dative construction, on the grounds that this analysis falls in line with a general, somewhat surprising conclusion about Southern American English: that ApplP may occur not just as the complement of a verb, but also as the subject of a small clause or the complement of a preposition. We propose that this wider distribution follows from a featural difference between ApplP in Northern and Southern varieties: that low ApplP in Southern American English is not categorially distinct from ordinary DPs. We then show that even though Personal Datives have spread outside of the South, they have not taken this basic structure with them. Instead, Northern varieties adopting the Personal Dative have made a minimal modi cation to their existing Appl heads, to accommodate the Personal Dative without adopting the full range of dative constructions found in the South