What determines the direction of technological change within an industry? In this presentation it is argued that technological exemplars play a key role. An exemplar is a design model or pattern to be built upon and imitated. Koen Frenken’s model of technological paradigm formation suggests that the selective construction of a design over time produces an exemplar with ‘locked-in’ core elements...

Using three soft-tissue analogs of variable compliances, four custom functional knee orthoses were evaluated for their abilities to control anterior tibial displacement (ATD) using an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL)-deficient surrogate knee model with applied forces from 25 to 250 N. These analogs had stiffnesses (compliance) ranging from 2.18 N/mm to 4.6 N/mm, simulating the range in the thig...

Industrial clusters have received considerable attention from economists and industrial analysts. The main purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the driving forces behind the growth of industrial clusters. Another core viewpoint anchored in this paper is that national competitive advantages can be achieved by industrial clusters. We examine the impacts of and determine ...

This paper studies online hierarchical scheduling on two uniform machines with the objective to minimize makespan. Machines are provided with different capability, i.e., the one with speed s can schedule all jobs, while the other one with speed 1 can only process partial jobs. Optimal algorithms for any 0 < s <∞ are given in the paper. For 0 < s < 1, it has a competitive ratio of min{1 + s,1 + ...

A strategy S solving a navigation task T is called competitive with ratio r if the cost of solving any instance t of T does not exceed r times the cost of solving t optimally. The competitive complexity of task T is the smallest possible value r any strategy S can achieve. We discuss this notion, and survey some tasks whose competitive complexities are known. Then we report on new results and o...

We consider the problem of nonclairvoyantly scheduling jobs, which arrive over time and have varying sizes and degrees of parallelizability, with the objective of minimizing the maximum flow. We give essentially tight bounds on the achievable competitiveness. More specifically we show that the competitive ratio of every deterministic nonclairvoyant algorithm is high, namely Ω( √ n). But there i...

We consider speed scaling problems where the objective is to minimize a linear combination of arbitrary scheduling objective S, and energy E . A natural conjecture is that there is an O(1)-competitive algorithm for S on a fixed speed processor if and only if there is an O(1)-competitive algorithm for S + E on a processor with an arbitrary power function. We give evidence to support this conject...