Reproducibility and Instruction Following in the Shop Floor Laboratory Work: The Case of a TMS Experiment

The article addresses the production of reproducibility as a topic that has become acutely relevant in the recent discussions on the replication crisis in science. It brings the ethnomethodological stance on reproducibility into the discussions, claiming that reproducibility is necessarily produced locally, on the shop floor, with methodological guidelines serving as references to already established practices rather than their origins. The article refers to this argument empirically, analyzing how a group of novice neuroscientists performs a series of measurements in a transcranial magnetic stimulation experiment. Based on ethnography and video analysis, the article traces a history of the local measurement procedure invented by the researchers in order to overcome the experimental uncertainty. The article aims to demonstrate (1) how reproducibility of the local procedure is achieved in the shop floor work of the practitioners and (2) how the procedure becomes normalized and questioned as incorrect in the course of experimental practice. It concludes that the difference between guidelines and practical actions is not problematic per se; what may be problematic is that researchers can be engaged in different working projects described by the same instruction.

An Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm for Cellular Manufacturing System

In this paper, an ant colony algorithm is used to solve the machine part cell formation problem based on the machine – index - based local procedure and part assignment rule for the better clustering of machines in to machine cells and parts in to part families. The main objective of this paper is to increase the grouping efficacy which is one of the good performance measures for the cell formation problem. The performance assessment of the ant colony algorithm was carried out by testing with the benchmark problems from the literature. From this assessment it clearly shows that this machine index based local procedure is capable to solve the machine part cell formation problem efficiently.

Multilayered Justice in Northern Uganda: ICC Intervention and Local Procedures of Accountability

In an effort to redress the effects of the civil war in Northern Uganda, local, state and international officials have begun to study the feasibility of re-adapting the procedures of local justice, including mato oput, a local procedure practiced by the Acholi tribe. This article examines this evolving multilayered project of justice in Northern Uganda. It addresses two features of this model: (1) the central features of local justice, in particular mato oput, and (2) the complementary relationship between mato oput, the state, and the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) victims’ unit and the victims’ trust fund. It argues that closer and more effective ties between the ICC and local procedures of justice can be developed. Not only does this relationship constitute an evolving framework for addressing the political realities of ICC intervention, but it also raises many important practical implications for reaching out to the local population.

THE LATTICE BOLTZMANN METHOD BASED ON QUADTREE MESH

A lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) based on nonuniform quadtree mesh is proposed. For the two steps in LBM, the collision step is a local procedure and can be implemented in the same way for both uniform and nonuniform mesh grids, while the streaming step is equivalent to solving several linear advection equations. On quadtree mesh (and some other nonuniform meshes), it is usually trivial to construct a first order interpolation scheme for the streaming step. Then the back and forth error compensation and correction (BFECC) method is employed to improve the accuracy order, such that a second order scheme is obtained in streaming step. Several numerical test cases are carried out to prove the accuracy and efficiency of our method.

Global-Local Hierarchical Analysis Techniques for Damaged Aircraft Fuselage Considering Bulging Deformation of Crack

In order to calculate the fracture parameters (Stress intensity factor) in a complicated 3- dimention aircraft model with damage in the aircraft panel, a new two steps global-local hierarchical analysis strategy is used. This paper primarily describes the development and application of advanced computational analysis techniques to determine stress intensity factors for the damaged panels based on the two steps hierarchical analysis strategy from global to 3-D local model, the bulging deformation of crack can be considered in the local model. A fracture parameter calculation programme based on automated global-local procedure to simulate cracked aircraft panel tests is developed for the hierarchical strategy. This programme may create models of two stages, transfer boundary conditions, calculate and obtain fracture parameter automatically. Finally, this paper presents some of the experimental data and the calculated fracture parameters are compared with the experimental results.

Investigation of a LOCAL Calibration Procedure for near Infrared Instruments

A new procedure (LOCAL) for local calibrations is presented. LOCAL selects spectra from a library of samples and computes a PLS calibration equation for each constituent of the sample. This study evaluated the performances of LOCAL on the prediction of ground corn grain and haylage using several different combinations of data transformations, wavelength segment reduction, number of PLS factors and samples used in calibration. LOCAL resulted in lower SEP values for all the constituents of corn and dry matter of haylage with improvements ranging between 6 to 13%. Global calibrations had only a small advantage over LOCAL (1–2%) in the prediction of acid detergent fibre and crude protein in haylage. The two most important variables controlling the accuracy of predictions were number of samples in the calibration and number of PLS factors in the solution. Best results were obtained using 150 to 225 samples and more than 20 PLS factors per calibration equation. The speed of the LOCAL procedure is 0.5–2 s per sample on a 90 MHz computer. With this speed and accuracy, LOCAL is now available for real-time routine operation on a Windows platform.

On the Local Regularization of Inverse Problems of Volterra Type

We consider a local regularization method for the solution of first-kind Volterra integral equations with convolution kernel. The local regularization is based on a splitting of the original Volterra operator into “local” and “global” parts, and a use of Tikhonov regularization to stabilize the inversion of the local operator only. The regularization parameters for the local procedure include the standard Tikhonov parameter, as well as a parameter that represents the length of the local regularization interval. We present a convergence theory for the infinite-dimensional regularization problem and show that the regularized solutions converge to the true solution as the regularization parameters go to zero (in a prescribed way). In addition, we show how numerical implementation of the ideas of local regularization can lead to the notion of “sequential Tikhonov regularization” for Volterra problems; this approach has been shown in (Lamm and Eldén, 1995) to be just as effective as Tikhonov regularization, but to be much more efficient computationally.