The Effect of Incorporating End-User Customization into Additive Manufacturing Designs

In the realm of additive manufacturing there is an increasing trend among makers to create designs that allow for end-users to alter them prior to printing an artifact. Online design repositories have tools that facilitate the creation of such artifacts. There are currently no rules for how to create a good customizable design or a way to measure the degree of customization within a design. This work defines three types of customizations found in additive manufacturing and presents three metrics to measure the degree of customization within designs based on the three types of customization. The goal of this work is to ultimately provide a consistent basis for which a customizable design can be evaluated in order to assist makers in the creation of new customizable designs that can better serve end-user. The types of customization were defined by doing a search of Thingiverse’s online data base of customizable designs and evaluating commonalities between designs. The three types of customization defined by this work are surface, structure, and personal customization. The associated metrics are used to quantify the adjustability of a set of online designs which are then plot against the daily use rate and each other on separate graphs. The use rate data used in this study is naturally biased towards hobbyists due to where the designs used to create the data resides. A preliminary analysis is done on the metrics to evaluate their correlation with design use rate as well as the dependency of the metrics in relation to each other. The trends between the metrics are examined for an idea of how best to provide customizable designs. This work provides a basis for measuring the degree of customization within additive manufacturing design and provides an initial framework for evaluating the usability of designs based on the measured degree of customization relative to the three types of defined customizations

Dying to Work: Death and Injury in the American Workplace

[Excerpt] In Dying to Work, Jonathan Karmel raises our awareness of unsafe working condidtions with accounts of workers who were needlessly injured or killed on the job. Based on heart-wrenching interviews Karmel conducted with injured workers and surviving family members across the country, the stories in this book are introduced in a way that helps place them in a historical and political context and represent a wide survey of the American workplace, including, among others, warehouse workers, grocery store clerks, hotel housekeepers, and river dredgers. Karmel’s examples are portraits of the lives and dreams cut short and reports of the workplace incidents that tragically changed the lives of everyone around them. Dying to Work includes incidents from industries and jobs that we do not commonly associate with injuries and fatalities and highlights the risks faced by workers who are hidden in plain view all around us. While exposing the failure of safety laws that leave millions of workers without compensation and employers without any meaningful incentive to protect their workers, Karmel offers the reader some hope in the form of policy suggestions that may make American workers safer and employers more accountable. This is a book for anyone interested in issues of worker health and safety, and it will also serve as the cornerstone for courses in public policy, community health, labor studies, business ethics, regulation and safety, and occupational and environmental health policy

Executive Power, Drone Executions, and the Due Process Rights of American Citizens

Few conflicts have tested the mettle of procedural due process more than the War on Terror. Although fiery military responses have insulated the United States from another 9/11, the Obama administration’s 2011 drone execution of a U.S. citizen allegedly associated with al-Qaeda without formal charges or prosecution sparked public outrage. Judicial recognition that this nonbattlefield execution presented a plausible procedural due process claim ignited questions which continue to smolder today: What are the limits of executive war power? What constitutional privileges do American citizens truly retain in the War on Terror? What if the executive erred in its judgment and mistakenly executed an innocent citizen? Currently, no legal regime provides answers or guards against the infringement of procedural due process the next time the executive determines that an American citizen must be executed to protect the borders of the United States. The executive remains free to unilaterally target and execute an American citizen via drone strike without the formal process that typically accompanies a death sentence under U.S. law. Protected under the aegis of national security, executive discretion has trumped the procedural due process rights of American citizens. To contextualize these issues of presidential power and procedural due process, this Note first surveys the modern War on Terror by examining the statutory authority enabling drone strikes and the scope of executive warmaking powers. Next, this Note employs the balancing test devised by the U.S. Supreme Court in Mathews v. Eldridge to assess the due process afforded a citizen targeted for extrajudicial drone execution under the executive’s unilateral methodology. Two potential safeguards—ex post and ex ante judicial review of drone strikes—are examined as possible defenses against the unjustified execution of an American citizen. After comparing these two systems of judicial review, this Note details and advocates for the congressional implementation of a narrowly tailored ex ante schema to provide an additional layer of process and reduce the risk of an unfounded drone execution. By lowering the likelihood of an erroneous execution, this precise ex ante legal regime strives to fulfill the procedural due process requirements delineated in Mathews v. Eldridge. This finely tailored ex ante regime mitigates executive discretion while still bending to meet the onerous demands of national security imposed in the modern age of terror

Static aeroelasticity of a composite oblique wing in transonic flows

One aircraft configuration that shows great promise in achieving high performance is that of an asymmetrically swept wing. When compared to conventional swept wings, these advantages include higher lift to drag ratios and reduced takeoff and landing speeds, which translate into greater performance in terms of fuel comsumption, loiter time, and range. However, the oblique wing has a number of disadvantages because of its asymmetric configuration. The question is how to best achieve maximum stability and roll equilibrium without compromising performance. Using aeroelastic tailoring to enhance aeroelastic stability and control has been demonstrated in several analyses, especially for the forward swept wing. The advantages and disadvantages for the oblique wing configuration are discussed

Some Pairs Problems

A common form of MapReduce application involves discovering relationships between certain pairs of inputs. Similarity joins serve as a good example of this type of problem, which we call a "some-pairs" problem. In the framework of Afrati et al. (VLDB 2013), algorithms are measured by the tradeoff between reducer size (maximum number of inputs a reducer can handle) and the replication rate (average number of reducers to which an input must be sent. There are two obvious approaches to solving some-pairs problems in general. We show that no general-purpose MapReduce algorithm can beat both of these two algorithms in the worst case. We then explore a recursive algorithm for solving some-pairs problems and heuristics for beating the lower bound on common instances of the some-pairs class of problems

Canard explosion in delayed equations with multiple timescales

We analyze canard explosions in delayed differential equations with a one-dimensional slow manifold. This study is applied to explore the dynamics of the van der Pol slow-fast system with delayed self-coupling. In the absence of delays, this system provides a canonical example of a canard explosion. We show that as the delay is increased a family of `classical' canard explosions ends as a Bogdanov-Takens bifurcation occurs at the folds points of the S-shaped critical manifold.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1404.584