Reducing variation in the assembly of a vehicle body is a critical element in improving its quality. Assembly plants have dimensional-management teams, who monitor variation, respond to "variation crises," and continually reduce variation when there are no crises. These teams have, in the past, not kept archival records and have not shared solutions with other teams. This paper describes our pr...

Mass Spectrometry has become one of the most popular analysis techniques in Genomics and Systems Biology. We investigate a general framework that allows the alignment (or matching) of any two mass spectra. In particular, we examine the alignment of a reference mass spectrum generated in silico from a database, with a measured sample mass spectrum. In this context, we assess the significance of ...

In this paper, we propose a negative scenario framework along with a mitigation action model as the linkage between safety quality attribute and architecture definition. The scenario framework provides an effective means of formulating safety concerns. The mitigation action model facilitates exploitation and codification of existing safety-critical system design knowledge. Finally, we present a...

I explore the potential utility of visual imagery to engage viewers in connecting ways with dynamic social-ecological contexts. Constructing photographs in response to the mass stranding of birds (shearwaters) on the east coast of Australia in 2013, I demonstrate the potential of wildlife and landscape photography to represent the impacts of environmental change at personal, relational, spatial...

A wireless network (WLAN) provides unique challenges to system design. A WLAN uses a shared and highly unreliable medium, where protocols must rely on precise timing of requests and responses to detect submission errors and priorities among network nodes. In addition, WLAN stations are often embedded and have tight constraints on power, costs, and performance. To design WLAN nodes, precise esti...

My subtitle is not intended as a slighting reference to the current state of the art for validation and veriication of knowledge-based systems, but as a reminder that for many systems the important question concerning deployment is not \how well does it work?" but \how badly can it fail?" This is most obviously the case in safety-critical systems, but it can apply to any system where the conseq...

The land surface temperature (LST) represents a critical element in efforts to characterize global surface energy and water fluxes, as well as being an essential climate variable in its own right. Current satellite platforms provide a range of spatial and temporal resolution radiance data from which LST can be determined. One of the most complete records of data comes via the Landsat series of ...

Introduction Large-scale irrigation systems are central to the socio-economic development in developing countries. The systems not only support the livelihood of farmers who rely on them to water their crops, but also determine the amount of resources that the agricultural sector can generate to fuel industrial development in urban areas (Small and Svendsen 1992). In the last few decades, due t...

Developmental evaluation can often question the ethical basis of an intervention in terms of whether it’s ‘doing the right thing’ rather than merely ‘doing things right’. Drawing on ideas from critical systems thinking and critical systems heuristics, an evaluation framework with a pro-equity focus is suggested. The framework addresses issues of complexity. It invites theories of change associa...

Information systems consist of multiple mobile stations and xed stations communicating with each other. Mission critical applications are required to be executed fault-tolerantly in these systems. However, mobile stations support neither enough volume of storage and processing power nor enough capacity of battery to do reliable communication for a long period. Moreover, wireless communication c...