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Technology discontinuation as a continuous process: diesel, sustainability, and the politics of delay
Get PDFThe discontinuation of technologies - such as combustion engines, coal and nuclear power generation, or certain types of plastics - has become central to debates on sustainability, public health, and safety. Much of the existing literature and policy discourse, however, treats discontinuation as a discrete, well-defined phase at the end of a technology\u27s lifecycle and as the implicit flipside of technology introduction. In this article, we propose conceptualizing discontinuation as a continuous process that unfolds throughout the entirety of a technology\u27s lifespan, playing a critical role in its long-term survival. Drawing on a longitudinal, in-depth case study of diesel cars in Europe, we analyze how significant discontinuation pressures have existed for decades, repeatedly challenging, destabilizing, reconfiguring, and ultimately re-stabilizing diesel as a socio-technical system. We present a framework that captures how discontinuation efforts emerge, gain credibility, evolve, or are dismissed in relation to broader, stable imaginaries of socially desirable futures. In the case of diesel, we find that discontinuation efforts and counter-efforts specifically engaged two competing imaginaries of sustainability - one focused on local air quality and the other on global climate change - which allowed actors to strategically frame and rationalize the technology in ways that served their interests. By viewing discontinuation controversies as an inherent and continuous feature of a technology\u27s durability, new policy options come to the fore. These include the need to shift the focus from the technology in question to what persists underneath, challenging the stability of underlying sustainability framings rather than merely reacting to moments of crisis. It also entails scrutinizing the politics of delay and the “technological neutrality”, which tend to favor continuation, and treating discontinuation policy more seriously as a form of innovation policy supported by long-term strategies, toolkits, and equivalent levels of funding
Influencing Factors on the Registration Accuracy of a Learned Feature Descriptor in Laparoscopic Liver Surgery
Get PDFThe effects of different shoe stack heights and running speeds on full-body running coordination: An uncontrolled manifold analysis
Get PDFStack height is a highly discussed key design feature of running shoes but its effects are not well understood. This study analyzed how shoe stack height and running speed influence full-body running coordination and motor variability structure using an uncontrolled manifold (UCM) analysis. The joint angle variability (i.e. elementary variables) was analyzed in terms of its effects on a synergy stabilizing the center of mass (CoM, i.e. performance variable). A total of 17 healthy experienced runners participated and ran at 10 and 15 km/h on a treadmill with three running shoes differing in stack height (H: 50 mm, M: 35 mm, L: 27 mm). The UCM components (UCM||, UCM Ʇ & UCMratio) were compared with statistical parametric mapping rmANOVAs for different shoes and speeds. The shoes did not show significant effects for the three UCM components. With increasing speed from 10 to 15 km/h, the joint angle coordination variability affecting the CoM (UCMꞱ) increased and UCMratio decreased independent of the shoe condition. This indicated that stack height did not influence the motor variability structure. However, independent of the shoes, the variability affecting CoM increased which led to a weakened synergy stabilizing CoM (UCMratio). It can be suggested that the variations in the tested running speeds had a greater impact on the running coordination than those of the tested shoes within the UCM framework
Local wellposedness of Maxwell systems with retarded material laws in low regularity
Get PDFWe develop a complete local wellposedness theory for a Maxwell system on and a large class of nonlinear material laws which are nonlocal in time. Such constitutive relations are typical for nonlinear optics. The problem was treated before in the Sobolev space for by means of energy methods. Using a recently shown Strichartz estimate, we can lower this level of regularity to . In this context ’charge-type’ terms would spoil the analysis. We avoid them by the Helmholtz projection for the divergence operator with coeffients, which requires mapping properties of the projection also in with
Investigation of different registration methods for TLS-based deformation analysis of hydroelectric dams – A case study
Get PDFIdentification of requirements for the transfer of creativity techniques in virtual environments by using TRIZ-Box
Get PDFDistributed teams are becoming a normality in nowadays product development. However certain activities pose additional challenges when carried out in a distributed setting. Activities involving creativity are some of them. To overcome these challenges support is needed that ensures the functioning of creativity techniques in distributed, i.e. virtual settings. To develop such support the challenges need to be identified exactly as well as the requirements for transferring Creativity Techniques (CTs) into virtual application. Therefore, a preliminary study in a LiveLab environment was carried out. The results are compared with the requirements found in the literature. The creativity technique TRIZ-Box which represents the 40 inventive principles in TRIZ as physical objects to assist the idea generation is the CT this contribution focuses on. With respect to the requirements, the TRIZ-Box is adapted for execution in Virtual Reality (VR). The resulting prototype is then validated by three teams of two experts for design method development that solve an example problem using the VR-TRIZ-Box. Conclusions on the first prototype of the VR-TRIZ-Box are drawn through the number of ideas generated with and without the CT and the observation of the participants during the process of applying the CT. Technical and procedural challenges are identified that require further development iterations, however, the VRTRIZ-Box proves itself as a successful virtual pendant to the real TRIZ-Box and shows possible implementation in future metaverse applications
Remote-sensing detectability of airborne Arctic dust
Get PDFRemote-sensing (RS)-based estimates of Arctic dust are oftentimes overestimated due to a failure in separating out the dust contribution from that of spatially homogeneous clouds or low-altitude cloud-like plumes. A variety of illustrations are given with a particular emphasis on questionable claims of using brightness temperature differences (BTDs) as a signature indicator of Arctic dust transported from mid-latitude deserts or generated by local Arctic sources. While there is little dispute about the presence of both Asian and local
dust across the Arctic, the direct RS detectability of airborne dust, as ascribed to satellite (MODIS and AVHRR) measurements of significantly negative brightness temperature differences at 11 and 12 μm (BTD), has been misrepresented in certain cases. While it is difficult to account for all examples of strongly negative BTD values in the Arctic, it is unlikely that airborne dust plays a significant role. One much more likely contributor would be water clouds in the Arctic inversion layer. The RS detectability of the impact of Arctic dust (notably due to Arctic dust from local sources) can, however,
be of significance. Sustained dust deposition can substantially decrease (visible to shortwave IR) snow and ice reflectance albedo (pan-chromatic reflectance) and the signal measured by satellite sensors. Significantly negative BTD11–12 values would, however, only represent a limited area near the drainage basin sources according to our event-level case studies. The enhanced ice-nucleating particle (INP) role of local Arctic dust can, for example, induce significant changes in the properties of low-level mixed-phase clouds (cloud optical depth changes < ∼ 1) that can readily be detected by active and passive RS instruments. It is critical that the distinction between the RS detectability of airborne Arctic dust versus the RS detectability of the impacts of that dust be understood if we are to appropriately parameterize, for example, the radiative forcing influence of dust in this climate-sensitive
region
A Classification Framework for Scientific Documents to Support Knowledge Graph Population
Get PDFResearch papers are a central communication medium to share new scientific insights and progress and are, nowadays, stored as PDF files. However, little effort is spent on reorganizing information with effective knowledge classification and comprehensive representation during the publication process. In terms of software engineering (SE), those papers are also aligned to software artifacts and research data. Aggregating knowledge and empirical evidence is done with systematic literature studies that tend to be very time-consuming and require a manual inspection of the respective research artifacts (paper-and data-wise). Research knowledge graphs like the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) aim to contribute to and rethink scholarly communication by providing formats while easing the processing of semantic information. Therefore, ORKG offers templates to summarize and structure a research artifact’s content, providing metadata as well. Based on this, researchers can connect similar papers, reuse replication artifacts, and generate literature studies more easily. However, adding papers to ORKG is still a tedious manual process. Moreover, selecting suitable template formats is challenging and can be highly domain-specific. To support the manual process, we aim to provide an automated classification framework for scientific papers, supporting the knowledge graph population. This framework intends to be flexible, allowing various input data and schemas, so it can be applied and trained in a multitude of research fields in SE. In this paper, we present the concept of the framework’s implementation, and an excerpt of the evaluation result in one of the research subfields in SE, namely software architecture and design