The Personnel Problems of a Modern Laundry

It is the purpose of this thesis to aid owners of power laundries in the solution of the personnel problems which are confronting them daily

Classification of partial discharge signals by combining adaptive local iterative filtering and entropy features

Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI) is a measurement technique for Partial Discharge (PD) signals which arise in operating electrical machines, generators and other auxiliary equipment due to insulation degradation. Assessment of PD can help to reduce machine downtime and circumvent high replacement and maintenance costs. EMI signals can be complex to analyze due to their nonstationary nature. In this paper, a software condition-monitoring model is presented and a novel feature extraction technique, suitable for nonstationary EMI signals, is developed. This method maps multiple discharge sources signals, including PD, from the time domain to a feature space which aids interpretation of subsequent fault information. Results show excellent performance in classifying the different discharge sources

Green Guide to Composites: an environmental profiling system for composite materials and products

Products made from composite materials can offer significant environmental benefits because of their characteristically low weight, good mechanical properties and excellent resistance to corrosion. For example, composites used in cars can reduce the overall weight of the car and so offer fuel savings through the lifetime of the vehicle. However, although the in-service environmental benefits of composites are known, there is far less understanding of the environmental and social implications associated with the manufacture of composite materials and products. Issues affecting the industry include health and safety, the emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), energy consumption and toxicity from manufacture. Alternative materials and technologies (such as closed mould processes, natural fibres and low-styrene resins) have been developed to address these problems, but to date there has still been confusion within the industry as to the detailed benefits of these alternatives. This guide has been created to enable the composites sector to understand the environmental and social impacts associated with composite production and assist with the decisions made about material and process choice. The materials and processes modelled are rated from A (good) through to E (poor). Twelve different environmental impacts are individually scored and totalled to give an overall environmental impact summary rating. Two social impact ratings are also given. When measuring environmental impact it is important to consider all the influences through the life of the product. This process is known as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and it has been used in this guide for environmental investigation. Because this guide concentrates on materials and manufacturing, as opposed to in-service performance, the impacts associated with products beyond the factory gate (the use, maintenance and disposal stages of the life cycle) have not been assessed. Within the system boundaries for the LCA, three typical product types have been chosen to reflect a range of different components commonly manufactured using composites: • A double curvature panel – this has a surface area of 1m2 with a panel stiffness equivalent to a 4mm thick chopped strand mat laminate. • A flat sandwich panel – measuring 1m x 8m with a 25mm thick core, having a panel bending stiffness equivalent to a sandwich panel with a 4mm thick chopped strand mat skin. • A complex moulded component – with a volume of 770cm3. Similarly, production processes and materials have been selected to provide a balance between systems that are commonly used across the majority of the composites industry and emerging materials with the potential to provide an environmental benefit. For this reason, materials such as hemp fibre and self-reinforced polypropylene have been included in the guide, but materials that are more specific to a single sector (eg aramid fibre) have not been included. Within each specific process there are still many processing variations (eg methods for mixing, curing and trimming) in addition to the material choice possibilities. To enable fair comparisons, a base case has been selected for each process. This is used throughout the guide to allow the merits of each process variation to be assessed

Waveless picking : managing the system and making the case for adoption and change

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division; and, (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management; in conjunction with the Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-66).Wave-based picking systems have been used as the standard for warehouse order fulfillment for many years. Waveless picking has emerged in recent years as an alternative pick scheduling system, with proponents touting the productivity and throughput gains within such a system. This paper analyzes in more depth the differences between these two types of systems, and offers insight into the comparative advantages and disadvantages of each. While a select few pieces of literature perform some analyses of wave vs. waveless picking, this paper uses a case-study of a waveless picking system in an Amazon.com fulfillment center as a model for how to manage a waveless system once it has been adopted. Optimization methods for decreasing chute-dwell time and increasing throughput by utilizing tote prioritization are also performed using discrete-simulation modeling. The analysis concludes that managing waveless picking warehouse flow by controlling the allowable quantity of partially picked orders to match downstream chute capacity can lead to reduced control over cycle times and customer experience. Suggestions are also made on possible future research for how to optimally implement a cycle-time controlled system.by G. Todd Bishop.M.B.A.S.M

Family and Consumer Sciences Extension Agent Receptiveness to Innovative Caregiving Programming

Communities can adapt to residents\u27 needs through innovative citizen-led initiatives. Extension can facilitate these innovation initiatives, but are Extension agents always receptive to such change? We conducted a study to examine the association between organizational change and personal factors and Extension family and consumer sciences agents\u27 innovativeness regarding caregiving programming. Respondents rated their receptiveness to change and answered questions regarding psychosocial health factors. We found that years in current position, leadership self-efficacy, interoffice support, and social support were significant predictors of innovativeness. Results suggest that personal factors rather than organizational change factors may be the more crucial mechanisms for driving agents\u27 innovativeness

Dehierarchizing Space: Performer-Audience Collaborations in Two Portuguese Performances of Shakespeare

This article addresses the key role of performance space in mediating between cultural locations. It discusses two Portuguese performances of Shakespeare where audiences were invited to become part of the performance and the ways in which this dehierarchization of the performance space framed a cross-cultural encounter between a globalized text and a localized performance context. In Teatro Oficina’s 2012 King Lear, both audience and performers sat around a large table in a production which reflected upon questions of individual and collective responsibility in Shakespearean tragedy and in the wider political sphere. In the middle of this performance space hung a large cube onto which the translated text was projected, setting up a spatial tension between text and performance that also foregrounded the translocation of the Shakespearean text to a Portuguese performance context. In Tiago Rodrigues’ 2013 By Heart, ten members of the audience were invited onstage to learn Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30 “by heart and not by brain.”1 In doing so, Rodrigues emphasized the cultural embeddedness of Shakespearean texts in a wider European cultural context and operated a subtle shift from texts to performance as a privileged repository for the cultural memory of Shakespeare. The article explores how these spatial shifts signaled the possibility of enabling cross-cultural identifications with Shakespeare through performance

Quantifying soil loss with in-situ cosmogenic 10Be and 14C depth-profiles

Conventional methods for the determination of past soil erosion provide only average rates of erosion of the sediment's source areas and are unable to determine the rate of at-a-site soil loss. In this study, we report in-situ produced cosmogenic 10Be, and 14C measurements from erratic boulders and two depth-profiles from Younger Dryas moraines in Scotland, and assess the extent to which these data allow the quantification of the amount and timing of site-specific Holocene soil erosion at these sites. The study focuses on two sites located on end moraines of the Loch Lomond Readvance (LLR): Wester Cameron and Inchie Farm, both near Glasgow. The site near Wester Cameron does not show any visible signs of soil disturbance and was selected in order to test (i) whether a cosmogenic nuclide depth profile in a sediment body of Holocene age can be reconstructed, and (ii) whether in situ10Be and 14C yield concordant results. Field evidence suggests that the site at Inchie Farm has undergone soil erosion and this site was selected to explore whether the technique can be applied to determine the broad timing of soil loss. The results of the cosmogenic 10Be and 14C analyses at Wester Cameron confirm that the cosmogenic nuclide depth-profile to be expected from a sediment body of Holocene age can be reconstructed. Moreover, the agreement between the total cosmogenic 10Be inventories in the erratics and the Wester Cameron soil/till samples indicate that there has been no erosion at the sample site since the deposition of the till/moraine. Further, the Wester Cameron depth profiles show minimal signs of homogenisation, as a result of bioturbation, and minimal cosmogenic nuclide inheritance from previous exposure periods. The results of the cosmogenic 10Be and 14C analyses at Inchie Farm show a clear departure from the zero-erosion cosmogenic nuclide depth profiles, suggesting that the soil/till at this site has undergone erosion since its stabilisation. The LLR moraine at the Inchie Farm site is characterised by the presence of a sharp break in slope, suggesting that the missing soil material was removed instantaneously by an erosion event rather than slowly by continuous erosion. The results of numerical simulations carried out to constrain the magnitude and timing of this erosion event suggest that the event was relatively recent and relatively shallow, resulting in the removal of circa 20–50 cm of soil at a maximum of ∼2000 years BP. Our analyses also show that the predicted magnitude and timing of the Inchie Farm erosion event are highly sensitive to the assumptions that are made about the background rate of continuous soil erosion at the site, the stabilisation age of the till, and the density of the sedimentary deposit. All three parameters can be independently determined a priori and so do not impede future applications to other localities. The results of the sensitivity analyses further show that the predicted erosion event magnitude and timing is very sensitive to the 14C production rate used and to assumptions about the contribution of muons to the total production rate of this nuclide. Thus, advances in this regard need to be made for the method presented in this study to be applicable with confidence to scenarios similar to the one presented her

Enemies Within: Redefining the insider threat in organizational security policy

The critical importance of electronic information exchanges in the daily operation of most large modern organizations is causing them to broaden their security provision to include the custodians of exchanged data – the insiders. The prevailing data loss threat model mainly focuses upon the criminal outsider and mainly regards the insider threat as ‘outsiders by proxy’, thus shaping the relationship between the worker and workplace in information security policy. A policy that increasingly takes the form of social policy for the information age as it acquires the power to include and exclude sections of society and potentially to re-stratify it? This article draws upon empirical sources to critically explore the insider threat in organizations. It looks at the prevailing threat model before deconstructing ‘the insider’ into various risk profiles, including the well-meaning insider, before drawing conclusions about what the building blocks of information security policy around the insider might be