Maintenance Perspective Research Articles

Good moments in parents' spousal relationships: A daily relational maintenance perspective

This study examined positively experienced spousal moments among couples with young children. The diary data were gathered from 95 women and 55 men in 95 Finnish families over a seven-day period using an open-ended question. Seven kinds of activities were identified in the descriptions of moments: doings, conversations, presence, positivity, physical intimacy, support, and conflict management. Doings related to shared tasks and favors as well as conversations concerning catching up and family issues were more often mentioned by women than by men. Notably, positive spousal moments also often included children who were described as a landscape for the spousal relationship, as participants in family life, and as a shared responsibility. The results are discussed in the context of the relational maintenance literature.

There’s No Substitute for Belonging: Self-Affirmation Following Social and Nonsocial Threats

Feelings of belonging are closely linked to feelings of self-esteem. This article examines whether these feelings are regulated in a similar manner. Research on self-esteem maintenance shows that self-enhancement strategies are interchangeable; self-esteem threats in one domain instigate indirect self-affirmations in unrelated domains that effectively replace needs to directly address the original threats. From this perspective, when self-esteem threats arise from a lack of belonging, indirect self-affirmations should again be both preferred and effective. However, belonging regulation may be distinct from self-esteem regulation. From this belonging maintenance perspective, indirect affirmations that enhance esteem, but do not directly repair belonging, may be relatively less preferred and effective following belonging threats. Supporting the belonging maintenance perspective, four studies demonstrated that whereas intelligence threats tended to elicit indirect self-affirmations, belonging threats elicited relatively more direct self-affirmations. Furthermore, whereas indirect affirmation strategies effectively repaired intelligence threats they did not effectively repair belonging threats.

Change profiles of a reused class framework vs. two of its applications

Software reuse is expected to improve software productivity and quality. Although many empirical studies have investigated the benefits and challenges of software reuse from development viewpoints, few studies have explored reuse from the perspective of maintenance. This paper reports on a case study that compares software changes during the maintenance and evolution phases of a reused Java class framework with two applications that are reusing the framework. The results reveal that: (1) The reused framework is more stable, in terms of change density, than the two applications that are reusing it. (2) The reused framework has profiles for change types that are similar to those of the applications, where perfective changes dominate. (3) The maintenance and evolution lifecycle of both the reused framework and its applications is the same: initial development, followed by a stage with extending capabilities and functionality to meet user needs, then a stage in which only minor defect repairs are made, and finally, phase-out. However, the reused framework goes faster from the stage of extending capabilities to the stage in which only minor defect repairs are made than its applications. (4) We have validated that several factors, such as are functionalities, development practice, complexity, size, and age, have affected the change densities and change profiles of the framework and applications. Thus, all these factors must be considered to predict change profiles in the maintenance and evolution phase of software.

A reason maintenance perspective on relevant Ramsey conditionals

This paper presents a Ramsey account of conditionals within the framework of an implemented reason maintenance system. The reason maintenance system is built on top of a deductive reasoning engine based on relevance logic. Thus, the account of conditionals provided is not susceptible to the fallacies of relevance. In addition, it is shown that independently motivated requirements on practical relevant reason maintenance allow us to gracefully circumvent Gardenfors’s triviality result.

Ethical issues in relational maintenance via computer‐mediated communication

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore some of the influences that computer‐mediated communication (CMC) has and could have on the maintenance of interpersonal relationships. In doing this, ethical dilemmas and implications that arise from the technical affordances offered to CMC participants are discussed. Relational maintenance is integral to people's everyday lives. Yet, the ethical issues involve in using CMC to support this have not been explicitly explored.Design/methodology/approachThe concept of relational maintenance will be explored independently and as it relates to CMC and ethics. This paper will examine current literature and briefly discuss a pilot study relevant to these areas. The pilot study consisted of a survey distributed to undergraduate students in non‐platonic long distance and short distance relationships.FindingsThe exploration of prior literature and the findings of a pilot study support the notion that, with the increase of CMC use to maintain relationships follows the potential increase of unethical behavior in this medium. A number of ethical questions have risen that can be used to inform and direct future research.Originality/valueThis paper is original as it explores the concept of ethics from a relational maintenance perspective through electronic communication. It adds value by integrating these three areas and enhancing the understanding of this integration, while providing information of both theoretical and practical relevance.

“My Child Can Beat Your Child”: Toward a Measure of Parental Self-Evaluation Maintenance (PSEM)

From a self-evaluation maintenance (SEM) perspective, a parent's levels of allocentrism and collectivism were predicted to increase the parent's (a) self-protection from negative social comparison, (b) need for positive self-evaluation through “basking in reflected glory,” and (c) dependency on the child's performance to achieve (a) and (b).This study also aimed to identify messages parents communicate in order to maintain a positive self-evaluation through (a) favorable social comparison of their child's performances to the performances of a close other parent's child, and through (b) basking in reflected glory. In pursuing a test of SEM in a non-experimental context, a new set of measures of many of the components of the SEM model was developed for this study. The results reveal a reliable six-factor structure of regulative and reflective SEM strategies parents endorse in response to their child's performance. The data indicate that allocentric parents tend to engage in relationship-maintaining regulative behaviors, whereas collectivistic parents tend to engage in distancing and aggressing behaviors and no longer invest in their child in response to their child's outperformance by a close other parent's child.

Control and Regulation of Electrodes in an Electric Furnace from a FMEA

Some steelmakers companies use Electrical Arc Furnaces (also well-known as Fusion Furnaces) for the liquid steel fabrication, Sidor is one of them. The efficiency in the furnace will depend on how it is operated and also on the regulation processes during the calibration adjustment of the electrodes when they are moving up and down. The correct calibration control loops for the electrodes movement, helps to reduce its wear away, also reduce the wearing down of the refractory material and help to improve the use of the electrical energy. The overall contribution of these three aspects is to reduce manufacturing costs. From a maintenance perspective and starting with a FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis), a new regulation approach was developed to obtain a better control of the Sidor Furnace named 1, this was achieved establishing a regulation according to profiles and load regulation, from alternating electric current to impedance factor.

Chip Seal Maintenance

This study summarizes the research directed at identifying maintenance solutions for bleeding and flushed pavements surfaced with a chip seal. Factors that contribute to bleeding and flushed chip seals pertain to aggregates, binders, traffic, environment, and construction. No better advice exists for dealing with bleeding and flushed chip seals than to avoid the problem from the outset by employing a preventive maintenance perspective. Bleeding is an immediate maintenance problem that must be addressed; corrective maintenance, or in some cases emergency maintenance, would be done. Basic approaches to treat bleeding include bridging over the live asphalt by applying aggregate of various types and gradations, cooling off the pavement surface by applying water with or without additives, and removing the bleeding asphalt and rebuilding the pavement seal. Flushing, in contrast to bleeding, is typically not a maintenance problem that must be addressed immediately. Basic approaches to treat flushed chip seals are to retexture the existing surface or to add a new textured surface over the flushed pavement. Three promising areas for further research and implementation relative to bleeding and flushing solutions include the uses of lime water, ultrahigh pressure water cutting, and the racked-in seal at intersections.

Identification of Supplementary Metrics to Sustain Fleet Readiness from a Maintenance Perspective

AbstractA wide variety of programs and schemes are in place (and many programs are in continuous development by organizations such as the Office of Naval Research) that address the sustainability of the Navy's Fleet. Newly developed technologies are allowing for the continued design and development of much more complex ships with a host of innovative concepts and requirements. The cost of construction of these next‐generation ships, budgetary restraints, and other factors have also made it so necessary to maintain, adapt, and extend the life of the legacy fleet to meet operational requirements and maintain our maritime dominance. As we extend and adapt technology to become implemented across the wide variety of vessel platforms in existence in the legacy fleet, manning reductions are being implemented across the various ship‐type classes. As more and more maintenance is being shifted from the sailors on the ships to various off‐ship organizations, this brings into question the level of training necessary for ship's personnel in the maintenance area that is required when manning the ship from a tactical or operational perspective. Decision tools need to be developed for senior Navy management for use in evaluating and determining the optimal balance in manning ships from not only the operational perspective but also from the maintainability/survivability perspective. It is believed evaluation of the requirements, benchmarking, and the development of assessment metrics for determining the requirements of the Fleet for capable maintainers are of vital importance and will have far‐reaching impact on the Sea Warrior, Sea Trial, and Sea Enterprise programs in support of the “Sea Power 21” strategic concept of the Navy. This paper explores the necessity of benchmarking current ship's force capabilities, establishing manning requirement metrics, and evaluation of current maintenance policies.

Nutritional Management of Weight Regain After Bariatric Surgery

The aim of this study was to propose dietetic guidelines for the nutritional management of weight regain in Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) patients. Thirty patients more than 2 years after RYGB surgery were followed up once every 15 days for at least 3 months. We collected from the medical records weight before surgery, excess weight, minimum weight reached 2 years after surgery, and percent of body fat before the operation. Current weight and bioelectrical impedance analysis were assessed at every appointment. The prescribed diet had a low glycemic load with 45% of carbohydrates, 35% of protein (80 g for women and 100 g for men) and 20% of fat, three servings of dairy products, and a supplement of soluble fibers (15 g/day). The patients had a previous average weight regain of 8 kg (+/-19). Forty percent of the sample had an excess weight loss (EWL) of less than 50%. After the intervention, 86% of the patients lost weight. The mean weight lost was 1.8 kg in the first month, 1.2 kg in the second month, and 1.3 kg in the third. Half of the sample with unsuccessful weight loss achieved an EWL of at least 50%. The failure rate of the group dropped from 40% to 20%. The percentage of body fat declined from 36.2% to 34% (p < 0.001). Despite the short period of time, we observed that the nutritional counseling reduced the weight of patients with previous weight regain. There was also a reduction in body fat, which improves the perspective of weight maintenance in the future.

Story-driven approach to software evolution

From a maintenance perspective, only software that is well understood can evolve in a controlled and high-quality manner. Software evolution itself is a knowledge-driven process that requires the use and integration of different knowledge resources. The authors present a formal representation of an existing process model to support the evolution of software systems by representing knowledge resources and the process model using a common representation based on ontologies and description logics. This formal representation supports the use of reasoning services across different knowledge resources, allowing for the inference of explicit and implicit relations among them. Furthermore, an interactive story metaphor is introduced to guide maintainers during their software evolution activities and to model the interactions between the users, knowledge resources and process model.

Effects of Communication-Debilitating Illnesses and Injuries on Close Relationships: A Relational Maintenance Perspective

A communication-debilitating illness or injury (CDI) presents significant challenges for patients as well as for friends and family. In a qualitative study of the effects of a CDI on close relationships, 28 individuals with loved ones who had experienced a CDI were interviewed. Participants described adjustments in communication with the patient and explained what it is like to experience a relationship with a CDI patient. Themes that emerged transcended the type of illness and relationship. Recommendations are made for further research that focuses on patients' relationships with a variety of social network members, beyond primary caregivers.

Transmission of maize chromosome 9 rearrangements in oat–maize radiation hybrids

Oat-maize radiation hybrids are oat (Avena sativa L.) plants carrying radiation-induced subchromosome fragments of a given maize (Zea mays L.) chromosome. Since first-generation radiation hybrids contain various maize chromosome rearrangements in a hemizygous condition, variation might be expected in the transmission of these rearrangements to subsequent generations. The transmission and integrity of maize chromosome 9 rearrangements were evaluated in progenies of 30 oat-maize radiation hybrids by using a series of DNA-based markers and by genomic in situ hybridization. Maize chromosome 9 rearrangements were reisolated by self-fertilization in 24 of the 30 radiation hybrid lineages. Normal and deleted versions of maize chromosome 9 were transmitted at similar frequencies of 9.1% and 7.6%, respectively, while intergenomic translocations were transmitted at a significantly higher frequency of 47.6%. Most lines (93%) that inherited a rearrangement had it in the hemizygous condition. Lines with a rearrangement in the homozygous state (7%) were only identified in lineages with intergenomic translocations. Homozygous lines are more desirable from the perspective of stock maintenance, since they may stably transmit a given rearrangement to a subsequent generation. However, their isolation is not strictly required, since hemizygous lines can also be used for genome mapping studies.

Portals in libraries. Assessment and outcomes

Portals in libraries. Assessment and outcomes

Autonomic fault mitigation in embedded systems

Autonomy, particularly from a maintenance and fault-management perspective, is an increasingly desirable feature in embedded (and non-embedded) computer systems. The driving factors are several—including increasing pervasiveness of computer systems, cost of failures which could potentially be catastrophic in a wide variety of critical systems, and increasing cost and strain on resources in maintaining systems. A trigger system employed in real-time filtering of particle-collision data is a particularly challenging example of a class of large-scale real-time embedded systems that demand a high degree of fault resilience, due to the large cost of operating the facilities and the potential for loss of irreplaceable data. Traditional redundancy-based approaches are not available due to the limited fault-tolerance budget above the system cost. This paper presents an approach based on model integrated computing that provides a set of tools for the system developer to specify, simulate, and synthesize autonomous fault-mitigative behaviors. A hierarchical, role-based organization of fault managers cleanly delineates the data-processing interactions in the system from the fault-mitigative control interactions. The fault-mitigative behaviors, analogous to autonomous biological systems, are characterized as (1) reflex actions—highly autonomous, localized, and uncoordinated response emanating from a single fault manager at any level of hierarchy, and (2) healing actions—highly coordinated behavior implemented with a sequence of interactions between multiple fault managers. The strength of the approach lies in the specification of these behaviors as coordinated interacting hierarchical concurrent finite-state machines, which makes these behaviors formally analyzable.

Sexual compliance: Gender, motivational, and relationship perspectives

This paper provides a systematic review of research on sexual compliance in heterosexual relationships. Three perspectives shed light on which individuals are the most likely to comply with a sexually interested partner's desire for sex and why. A gender perspective highlights the common male‐female asymmetry in compliant sexual behavior and identifies factors that contribute to women's greater likelihood of being the sexually compliant partner. A motivational perspective distinguishes between approach and avoidance motives for compliance and considers the possible consequences of these motives for emotional reactions, sexual risk taking, and sexual violence. A relationship maintenance perspective views sexual compliance as illustrative of broader patterns of sacrifice in committed relationships. Each perspective suggests important new directions for empirical research.

An Empirically-Based Process for Software Architecture Evaluation

Software systems undergo constant change causing the architecture of the system to degenerate over time. Reversing system degeneration takes extra effort and delays the release of the next version. Improved architecture is intangible and does not translate into visible user features that can be marketed. Due to a lack of representative metrics, technical staff has problems arguing that stopping degeneration is indeed necessary and that the effort will result in an improved architecture that will pay off. We believe that architectural metrics would give technical staff better tools to demonstrate that the architecture has improved. This paper defines and uses a set of architectural metrics and outlines a process for analyzing architecture to support such an argument. The paper reports on a case study from a project where we restructured the architecture of an existing client-server system written in Java while adding new functionality. The modules of the existing version of the system were “library-oriented” and had a disorganized communication structure. The new architecture is based on components and utilizes the mediator design pattern. The goal of the study is to evaluate the new architecture from a maintainability perspective. The paper describes our evaluation process, the metrics used, and provides some preliminary results. The architectural evaluation shows that the components of the system are only loosely coupled to each other and that an architectural improvement has occurred from a maintenance perspective. The process used to evaluate the architecture is general and can be reused in other contexts.

Venture maintainability: a path to project success Why are some projects less successful than others and what can we do to improve?

Experience in the development and start‐up of new capital projects has shown that many of the difficulties encountered from an operations and maintenance perspective could have been mitigated or avoided through better scoping, planning and preparation of the appropriate organizational capability. Describes the history of development and packaging of a variety of principles, practices and methodologies designed to ensure that operations and maintenance issues are addressed early in the project and developed in parallel during the engineering design and construction phases. The objective is to ensure that at start‐up, all of the appropriate organizational systems, procedures and information requirements are in place and being used effectively by knowledgeable people working together in a safe and collaborative organizational environment. This allows the people to focus fully on the commissioning and on‐going sustainable operation of the new facilities to ensure productivity, cash flow and profitability of the new business.

Changeover improvement: A maintenance perspective

The current paper assesses on-machine maintenance in the context of recent work to improve changeover performance. It is argued that techniques employed to improve changeovers equally might be applied in maintenance situations. With brief reference to case studies from the authors’ research, it is further argued that focused maintenance activity can also directly influence changeover performance, particularly by ensuring that items involved during a changeover (change parts, product, fixed machine components and consumables) are in satisfactory condition. The role of design to improve either changeover or maintenance performance is also discussed. Design rules that might be employed are introduced.

National Nutrition Summit, May 30, 2000: Results of the Obesity Discussion Groups

National Nutrition Summit, May 30, 2000: Results of the Obesity Discussion Groups