Heartfelt - The possibilities for physical objects to act as mediators in emotional exchange and implications for the design process

This paper draws on practice centred research conducted within the field of contemporary jewellery. Its aim is to understand the process and dynamics by which objects create meaning, in particular that of an emotional nature. The key objective is to propose methods for researching this critical field of enquiry. The research itself focuses on the commissioning process which as evidence shows is increasingly relevant as a means of consumption. The research considers the micro dynamics of a situation through which a client's needs are communicated. The research draws on cultural theory and design to develop an appropriate hybrid conceptual model. Significant elements in the interpretation and identification of emotional dimensions are identified and observed. The analysis of the data questioned the relationship between the communication process and the interpretation of an object. The hybrid conceptual model used is summarised in the paper. There then follows an explanation of a method for analysing the communicative role of objects, which focuses specifically on the commissioning process. This research is directly relevant to the fields of the applied arts and design. However it is also relevant to other industries and could contribute to the meaningful development of mass customisation. Key words: Jewellery, Design, Commission, Emotion, Mediatio

Craft connexity: developing a sustainable model for future craft education.

Craft is an anachronism “ discuss ¦ Some twenty-five years ago, on applying for a place at a college of art to study ceramics, Julian was asked to write an essay on the above topic. Naturally he was keen to impress so he responded to the question by declaring his enthusiasm for the craft of the potter. As far as he can remember, he expounded on the importance of striving for standards of fitness and beauty derived from tradition, quoting Bernard Leach. All his essay did was confirm his lack of contemporary knowledge and his anachronistic view of what ceramics could be. In the intervening years, critics of the crafts might well have responded to the question in the following terms ¦ Todays craft represents an unsustainable model of practice. Craft workers survive on poverty wages and indulge in unsafe working practices “ often ecologically unsound, using potentially toxic materials and procedures, fundamentally inefficient, relying on extremely limited levels of output, unwilling to adopt new ways of working. Their designs are often lacking, using the excuse of a rustic aesthetic to justify poor levels of functionality. Modern craft workers are predominantly middle class individuals indulging in an expensive pastime producing vast amounts of unwanted objects dart ¦ This paper attempts to address the potentially damning criticism of contemporary craft expressed in the previous paragraph. If this criticism were correct it would be hard to justify continuing to educate new craft makers. The recent decline in single subject specialist craft courses in the UK may be explained if the perception of contemporary craft matches the criticism above. The paper defines craft connexity in terms of a networking of socially engaged contemporary craft practice. The concept of intelligent making is examined. It will propose new models of craft practice, operating through sustainable environmentally sensitive working methods and materials. The model describes craft makers who are aesthetically aware, IT literate, sometimes acting as social critics and capable of developing new design concepts. The paper sets out the essential ingredients for a modern craft curriculum, which includes research skills, sustainable design practice, collaborative design practice, critical awareness, IT skills and business management. The practice of craft has moved on since Julians first attempt to respond to the question of whether or not craft is an anachronism. It is now time to re-examine and challenge the value of craft education. The authors propose a more sustainable model of craft education and practice

Correcting the influence of an asymmetric line spread function in 2-degree Field spectrograph data

We investigate the role of asymmetries in the line spread function of the 2-degree field spectrograph and the variations in these asymmetries with the CCD, the plate, the time of observation and the fibre. A data-reduction pipeline is developed that takes these deformations into account for the calibration and cross-correlation of the spectra. We show that, using the emission lines of calibration lamp observations, we can fit the line spread function with the sum of two Gaussian functions representing the theoretical signal and a perturbation of the system. This model is then used to calibrate the spectra and generate templates by downgrading high resolution spectra. Thus, we can cross-correlate the observed spectra with templates degraded in the same way. Our reduction pipeline is tested on real observations and provides a significant improvement in the accuracy of the radial velocities obtained. In particular, the systematic errors that were as high as ~20 km/s when applying the AAO reduction package 2dfDR are now reduced to ~5 km/s. Even though the 2-degree Field spectrograph is to be decommissioned at the end of 2005, the analysis of archival data and previous studies could be improved by the reduction procedure we propose here.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, accepted to PASA, minor change

Measuring and Narrowing the Compositionality Gap in Language Models

We investigate the ability of language models to perform compositional reasoning tasks where the overall solution depends on correctly composing the answers to sub-problems. We measure how often models can correctly answer all sub-problems but not generate the overall solution, a ratio we call the compositionality gap. We evaluate this ratio by asking multi-hop questions with answers that require composing multiple facts unlikely to have been observed together during pretraining. In the GPT-3 family of models, as model size increases we show that the single-hop question answering performance improves faster than the multi-hop performance does, therefore the compositionality gap does not decrease. This surprising result suggests that while more powerful models memorize and recall more factual knowledge, they show no corresponding improvement in their ability to perform this kind of compositional reasoning. We then demonstrate how elicitive prompting (such as chain of thought) narrows the compositionality gap by reasoning explicitly instead of implicitly. We present a new method, self-ask, that further improves on chain of thought. In our method, the model explicitly asks itself (and then answers) follow-up questions before answering the initial question. We finally show that self-ask's structured prompting lets us easily plug in a search engine to answer the follow-up questions, which additionally improves accuracy

‘Design against crime’: awareness in design education

Whilst various social issues, such as ecological concerns, ageing and disability have received increasing attention within the design curriculum over recent years, crime and crime reduction issues have yet to be addressed to a similar extent. Informed design can be used effectively as a tool for reducing crime associated with environments, products and services through designing in crime reduction measures during the initial stages of the design process. This paper reports on research carried out as part of the Government's Crime Reduction Programme, looking at the topic of design against crime, assessing current awareness of crime amongst professional and student designers, and identifying methods to bring crime reduction more prominently into the design forum. The current awareness and inclusion of crime reduction in design education was explored by means of a questionnaire circulated to design course leaders, with follow-up in-depth interviews with key respondents. From the research gathered, ideas and recommendations are presented as to how crime reduction can be introduced as an integral part of design education

Waste Averted and Cleaner Energy: The Future of Telehealth at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center

Course Code: ENR/AEDE 4567This report seeks to assist the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in their goals to understand the amount of waste avoided due to increased telehealth due to COVID-19 and the feasibility of a renewable microgrid in their healthcare system. This report provides a waste assessment of the telehealth patient appointments and a formula to calculate the amount of waste avoided per telehealth appointment. This report also assesses the feasibility of a renewable microgrid at the Ackerman Data Center and outlines what the ideal business case for a renewable microgrid would be for WMC. The methods of this report include literature reviews, informational interviews, a policy analysis, and a cost-benefit analysis. Overall, this report provides the OSU WMC with tools and recommendations to move forward with assessing avoided waste and with considering the implementation of renewable microgrids.Academic Major: Environment, Economy, Development, and Sustainabilit

Solar energetic particle transport near a heliospheric current sheet

Solar energetic particles (SEPs), a major component of space weather, propagate through the interplanetary medium strongly guided by the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF). In this work, we analyze the implications that a flat Heliospheric Current Sheet (HCS) has on proton propagation from SEP release sites to the Earth. We simulate proton propagation by integrating fully 3D trajectories near an analytically defined flat current sheet, collecting comprehensive statistics into histograms, fluence maps, and virtual observer time profiles within an energy range of 1–800 MeV. We show that protons experience significant current sheet drift to distant longitudes, causing time profiles to exhibit multiple components, which are a potential source of confusing interpretations of observations. We find that variation of the current sheet thickness within a realistic parameter range has little effect on particle propagation. We show that the IMF configuration strongly affects the deceleration of protons. We show that in our model, the presence of a flat equatorial HCS in the inner heliosphere limits the crossing of protons into the opposite hemisphere