Redundant Work Research Articles

Correlations between processing technology, microstructure and properties of a Ni-rich Ti–Ni shape memory alloy

A Ti-50.8Ni (at.%)/Ti-55.9Ni (wt.%) VIM processed ingot was rotary swaged and rolled in parallel, obtaining bars with a total Area Reduction above 90% (from forged/rolled raw state one). Throughout the successive stages, the microstructural evolution, thermal and mechanical properties were compared. Deformation bands, grain morphology, precipitates and oxidation were evaluated (by OM and SEM/EDS). An essentially (∼100%) austenitic phase was detected at room temperature (via XRD/Rietveld method), while the Martensitic Transformation temperatures occurred at negative temperatures (via DSC). The rolled bar got through the process more regularly, with homogeneous and refined structure. Typical defects such as superficial microcracks and creases were relevant in the last stages of the two-dies rotary swaging with inductive heating. The work hardening level (via Hardness Test) was similar in both metal forming processes, being 5–7% more pronounced at the edge area of the bars due to redundant work.

China’s CEO Pay Reform: An Analysis of the Financial Impact on Central State-Owned Enterprises (CSOEs)

China’s Central State-Owned Enterprises (CSOEs) are considered to be inefficient with major agency problems where the interests of management and shareholders are poorly aligned. Rather than making decisions that make the CSOE more profitable and to help grow the economy, management will choose to solve government problems such as social stability and low employment (retain redundant workers). As China grows its socialist market economy and lists its stocks on markets in New York and London, it has become increasingly more important to reduce agency problems to better align the interests of management and shareholders. At long last, China’s CEO pay reform is passed to reform executive compensation at CSOEs. This reform is driven by President Xi and the Central Politburo of the Communist Party of China. Using an event study methodology, we find CSOEs, on average, experience a 3.05 percent increase in market capitalization from China’s CEO pay reform. In dollar terms, the mean market capitalization increase was $89 million, and cumulatively, the twenty-four CSOEs in our sample gained $2.136 billion in market capitalization. We conclude that China’s CEO pay reform was highly successful, and the gains were a result of lower executive compensation expenses without increased perk consumption and tunneling activities.

A framework for implementing a Supplier Kanban System through an action research methodology

PurposeThe aim of this study is to develop a framework for the implementation of a Supplier Kanban System.Design/methodology/approachThe research was conducted within a factory focusing on the warehousing and supplier-related operations using an action research methodology.FindingsThe study period spanning over six years was aimed to reduce the inventory and the manpower required to manage this inventory. This initiative led to a substantial average savings of more than 500,000 Malaysian ringgit annually.Research limitations/implicationsThe focus of the study is on a framework for implementing a Supplier Kanban System in a small or medium-sized company within the automotive industry.Practical implicationsThis framework is designed to be self-sufficient such that the members of the organisation can use it without the help of external experts or consultants.Social implicationsReduction in inventory stored in the warehouse, the amount of redundant work carried out by the employees and other non-monetary improvements which are difficult to monetise resulted in a much better work environment and happier employees.Originality/valueThe change in the paradigm of the manufacturing value chain affects the Tier 1 and 2 suppliers in Malaysia. The lines and value chains posing challenges to the suppliers have brought the idea of the Supplier Kanban System. The Supplier Kanban System adopted the action research cycles and continuous learning cycles, and this process was documented and developed as the Framework for the Implementation of a Supplier Kanban System.

PREVAILING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY WITHIN AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE OF AMANDA GORMAN’S THE HILL WE CLIMB: STUART HALL’S AUDIENCE RECEPTION ANALYSIS

The appealing part of a literary work is to enable the audience to feel emotionally connected with a literary work, leading them to produce diverse interpretations. In this respect, the occurrence of Amanda Gorman’s poem of The Hill We Climb is capable of attracting American citizens’ attention to deliver their perception of the work. The intensity of American society’s reactions can be seen in how the audience expresses their responses on YouTube. Therefore, the writer decided to analyze the phenomenon further by applying Stuart Hall’s reception theory aimed to prevail on how American society perceives the poem. Finally, the result of the analysis shows that the majority of Americans perceived the work as encouragement in refining the principles of American democracy, which were categorized as dominant readings. On the other hand, several audiences who interpreted the poem as a form of hope are included as negotiated readings that deliver different opinions but align with the poet’s perception. The last is oppositional readings that interpret the poem as a redundant work, shown by the audience’s incapability to comprehend the poem comprehensively. Briefly, the variety of the audience’s interpretations is because of diverse perceptions possessed by the audience in perceiving the message of democracy within the poem, which is influenced by their backgrounds.

Hardening and Softening Behavior of Caliber-Rolled Wire.

The different behaviors of the mechanical properties of drawn and caliber-rolled wires with applied strain were investigated to determine the appropriate process between wire drawing and caliber rolling with consideration of materials and process conditions. Ferritic, pearlitic, and TWIP steels were drawn and caliber-rolled under the same process conditions. Caliber-rolled wires exhibited a hardening behavior in the early deformation stage and softening behavior in the later deformation stage compared with the drawn wires, regardless of the steel. The hardening behavior of the caliber-rolled wires was explained by the higher strain induced by caliber rolling compared with wire drawing, especially the higher amount of redundant work in caliber-rolled wire. The caliber-rolled wire had approximately 36% higher strain than the drawn wire and approximately 85% higher strain than nominal strain. The softening behavior of the caliber-rolled wire in later deformation stages was related to the Bauschinger effect or low-cycle fatigue effect caused by the roll geometries and loading conditions during caliber rolling. The different intersection points of the tensile strength between drawn and caliber-rolled wires with the steels were attributed to the different strain hardening rates of each steel. Between the options of the caliber rolling and wire drawing processes, the appropriate process should be selected according to the strain hardening rate of the material and the amount of plastic deformation. For instance, when the wires need to deform at high levels, wire drawing is the better process because of the appearance of the Bauschinger effect in caliber-rolled wire.

Design of automated database system for storage and management of reports on mycotoxins contaminated agricultural products in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper discusses the idea and the design of an automated system for storage and management of mycotoxins reports for decision making. Mycotoxins are poisonous chemical compounds produced by certain fungi. Mycotoxins are fungal secondary metabolites that contaminate various feedstuffs and agricultural crops. The contamination of food by mycotoxins can occur before production, during storage, processing, transportation or marketing of the food products. High temperature, moisture content and water activity are among the factors that facilitate the production of mycotoxins in food. The five major mycotoxins produced in food and feedstuffs are Aflatoxins, ochratoxins, fumonisins, deoxynivalenol and zearalenone. In Africa, mycotoxin contamination is considered to be a major problem with implications that causes human and animal health hazards and poor economy. Aflatoxin-related hepatic diseases are reported in many African countries. Ochratoxin and fumonisin toxicity in humans and animals is widespread in Africa. The available and updated information on the incidence of mycotoxin is not collectively vivid for policy making. A complete automated system allows to monitor the statistical report of mycotoxins stored in agricultural products. This study involves analytical Service conducted on Mycotoxins such as Mold Culture and Identification and Chemical Analysis which involves microbiological Culturing; Microscopic or biochemical identification, enzyme linked Immunosorbent (ELISA), tin layer Chromatography (TLC), high Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), and gas Chromatography /Mass Spectroscopy. The design and development of Mycotoxins Automated Database System (MADAS) makes provision for easy access and acknowledgment of mycotoxins in different grains, fruits, vegetables and foods in Sub-Saharan Africa. It also enhances robust data collection, management, and analysis, a secure and protected data environment, error reduction and data storage to facilitate regulatory compliance, improved maintainability, standardization, control, predictability, and traceability of data and lower costs due to automation of labor intensive tasks and elimination of redundant work.

General Industrial Environment and Health Design Software Using a Small Data-Driven Neural Network Model.

The developed enterprise intellectual brain neural network platform for industrial environment and health design driven by small data converts the wisdom knowledge of enterprise designers into data and helps enterprises retain design experience, accumulate design knowledge results, sort out the design process, and shorten the design cycle. The goal of this project is to combine artificial intelligence, big data, the Internet of things, parameterization, and other computer technologies with the industrial environment and health design and development process of manufacturing enterprises to solve pain points for businesses and designers, as well as to develop and create a large-scale product-level general parameter intelligent design software. The development of this software project can greatly improve the work efficiency of designers, save the time spent by designers on low-end repetitive labor, and in turn promote designers to engage in more valuable creative work and realize the digitization of entire product life cycle. It can also improve the inefficient and redundant work efficiency of designers, and designers can switch between multiple roles. At the same time, a design think tank is formed through the accumulation of enterprise design knowledge through data, and the neural network platform development of big data drives the design brain, that is, an efficient and intelligent industrial environment and health design expert system is generated, just like the enterprise brain, including expert think tanks, internal technical data encryption of enterprises interface, enterprise core technology think tank, enterprise production resources, risk control standard library, etc.

An Approach to Determining the Need for Integrating Quality Management into Industrial PLM Implementation

In practice, companies use different tools and systems to plan and manage product and process quality. Most of these tools and systems are disconnected from product data/information management systems. The downside of disconnected tools for quality management is that the repeating issues that appear in multiple systems can obscure root cause investigations by isolating related data elements, with no means to understand relationships among them. Redundant work identifying and resolving quality issues can happen in multiple tools without an automated way to communicate knowledge learnt to other teams. This leads to inconsistent and incomplete problem resolutions that impede, not improve, product and process quality. In the recent development of new technologies, many IT tools have become available on the market and among them are the PLM systems proving very popular among companies which enable the creation and maintenance of complex industrial products. A comprehensive solution in the PLM Platform is presented in this paper that aims to link quality to product design, manufacturing planning, and business-critical processes such as change management. The approach provides cross-disciplinary teams and the extended supply chain with powerful closed-loop capabilities to identify and manage risk, improve quality, meet customer requirements, and attain environmental, safety, and information management compliance.

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Query co-planning for shared execution in key-value stores

Key-value stores propose a straightforward yet powerful data model. Data is modeled using key-value pairs where values can be arbitrary objects and written/read using the key associated with it. In addition to their simple interface, such data stores also provide read operations such as full and range scans. However, due to the simplicity of its interface, trying to optimize data accesses becomes challenging. This work aims to enable the shared execution of concurrent range and point queries on key-value stores. Thus, reducing the overall data movement when executing a complete workload. To accomplish this, we analyze different possible data structures and propose our variation of a segment tree, Updatable Interval Tree. Our data structure helps us co-planning and co-executing multiple range queries together and reduces redundant work. This results in executing workloads more efficiently and overall increased throughput, as we show in our evaluation.

Magnetic random walk algorithm and its application in the distributary channel system reservoir modeling

Random walk algorithms have unique advantages in reservoir modelling of distributary channel systems (DCS). However, the existing random walk algorithms often face several shortcomings, and typically do not perform adequately in complex scenarios. To overcome this problem, this paper introduces our recent development and application of magnetic random walk algorithm. The algorithm absorbs the concept of attraction and repulsion in the magnetic field and allows the walking seeds to wander randomly in a magnetic field composed of "channel well" observations and "non-channel well" observations, based on magnetic force. After post-processing of the walking trajectories, a DCS reservoir can be reconstructed. In a case study, the magnetic random walk algorithm efficiently completed the reservoir modelling, and parallels the manually drawn version completed by experienced geologists. This algorithm can effectively overcome several of the shortcomings of the existing methods and reduce manpower to a great extent in solving redundant work, which has a great application prospect. • Magnetic random walk is an efficient way dealing with channel/non-channel wells. • Magnetic random walk algorithm has good performance in DCS reservoir modeling. • The results of this algorithm have high similarity with manually drawn ones.

REMOTE WORK. PROS AND CONS

The text is about remote work analyzed mainly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that took over the world in 2020 and, what is worse, is still ongoing, baffling by new mutations of this virus. Hence, research on remote work in this context is in statu nascendi. Therefore, the reflection on this subject are presented here in a form of an essay, based mainly on hermeneutics, empirical data, but to a large extent also on intuition. Thanks to the research we can find out that an especially important issue is an analysis of remote work in the context of redundant work, bullshit jobs syndrome, but also in the context of – growing in the modern world – loneliness syndrome. Therefore, these issues are presented against the background of the explosion of remote work, characteristic of the pandemic year 2020, and taking into account technological basis for its development. In addition, the views of employees and employers on this topic are presented. According to these opinions, remote work, to a much greater extent than before the pandemic, will become permanent in practice. This is mainly due to economic, social and environmental values of remote work. They are analyzed, but at the same time the analyzes show that such work is not free from various manifestations of degeneration. Hence optimizing proportion between remote and non-remote work is of fundamental importance. This is a difficult challenge mostly (but not only) for economists. It requires interdisciplinary knowledge and a holistic and non-extrapolative approach.

Impact of Die Radius in a Streamlined Die during Wire Drawing

The effects of die radius in a streamlined die on design factors, such as the distribution of strain, stress, temperature, damage, and drawing force of a wire, were investigated during wire drawing for a better understanding of streamlined die and improvement in drawing quality of the wire. A numerical simulation was performed with the die radius of the streamlined die. The behavior of the design factors of the drawn wire fabricated by the streamlined die was different from that of the conventional die and was highly dependent on the die radius. The different behaviors of the design factors with the die radius can be explained by the frictional work and redundant work of the wire with die angle. The temperature rise and drawing force were high at a greater die radius because of the great frictional stress and heating effect stemming from the high contact length of the wire and die. Meanwhile, the higher redundant work at the surface area with decreasing die radius led to higher strain inhomogeneity, effective stress, damage value, temperature rise, and drawing force due to the abrupt change in the metal flow of the wire stemming from the high die angle. After the optimization of several design factors with die radius, it was concluded that the optimum IDR values ranged from 0.14 to 0.18, indicating that a streamlined die with a radius of 70 to 90 mm was the most suitable in the present process condition. In particular, the damage value of the wire was reduced in this range of die radii compared to the conventional die.

Unemployment prevention: The role of Human Resource Management in job-to-job transitions in the event of redundancy

In downsizing organisations, redundant workers suffer from insecurities about work and income. Social security provides income security to the unemployed in the event of job loss. The role played by employers in unemployment prevention for redundant workers, and the effects on unemployment spells and transitions on the labour market, are neglected in both the social policy and HRM literatures. This article addresses the following question: Which factors play a role in the decision to offer job-to-job support and in determining its effect? This article provides the context for the theoretical assumptions regarding why employers initiate job-to-job measures for redundant employees and distinguishes the different types of measures based on a literature review. Secondly, this article contributes to empirical knowledge in the field of unemployment prevention among employers and the effects of job-to-job activities facilitated by employers on redundant workers’ unemployment spells. A two-wave study was conducted on a sample of 2,258 Dutch redundant workers. The study shows that age, breadwinner status and gender are important predictors of unemployment duration after involuntary dismissal. The findings show that investing in the human capital of redundant workers by providing training and education and individual coaching, for example, are associated with a reduced unemployment spell. In our model, in which we controlled for other variables, we found that when one received training, education or individual coaching shortly before or after the dismissal, one was unemployed for an average of almost three months less.

Assessment of Algorithms for Estimating Chlorophyll-a Concentration in Inland Waters: A Round-Robin Scoring Method Based on the Optically Fuzzy Clustering

Recently, numerous bio-optical algorithms have been proposed to estimate chlorophyll-a (Chla) concentration in global surface waters. The surge of algorithms is mainly due to the heterogeneity of waters, especially in inland systems. To reduce redundant modeling work for inland waters and to enhance the usability of algorithms, it is urgent to evaluate the published algorithms for similar optical water types. However, approaches of the algorithm assessment in previous studies vary in error metrics usage or relative comparison, leading to the current lack of a standard or consensus in the community. Thus, we proposed a round-robin scoring method based on optically fuzzy clustering for algorithm assessment. An improved scoring approach (namely the sort-based method) was employed to aggregate the metrics of candidate algorithms. We generate a new set of optical water types using 1702 in situ samples, showing an improvement on our previous work [Bi et al. (2019)]. Then, an integrated Chla result was produced by blending the estimations of optimal algorithms weighted by the membership values, which showed better performance than that of any single algorithm. The blending framework presents more flexible and expandable than previous studies. We aim to illustrate the importance of assessment which considers key properties of algorithms (i.e., Accuracy, Precision, and Effectiveness) and to advocate more in-depth research on certain water types under the fuzzy clustering-based estimation framework (such as clean inland waters with low Chla). This article is accompanied by the open-source R package FCMm for implementation of the proposed method.

Socio-economic assessment of the possibilities of ways to develop production as a result of digitalization

The article describes a new approach to solving the complex socio-economic problem of using production workers made redundant as a result of automation. It is shown that in modern conditions, it is possible to achieve a harmonious combination of social and economic results of production automation through the synthesis of activities of the two systems: the production system dedicated to manufacture where efficiency, among other factors, is determined by the number of redundant workers as a result of automation, and the creative system, which seeks the involvement of redundant workers in the improvement of creative potential of the production system. It is demonstrated that specific forms of enterprise synthesis are determined by the presence of proven solutions in one or another variant of the existence of «creative enterprises», including the promising form of «ergodynamic cooperatives».

Skill matching and mismatching: labour market trajectories of redundant manufacturing workers

ABSTRACT While re-employment opportunities for redundant workers have been a much-debated topic in economic geography, the characteristics of these new employments and the medium-run effect of major lay-offs constitute a less explored field. The present paper investigates skill matching between the pre-redundancy job and the employment workers have five years after redundancy by studying the distance and direction of their labour market trajectories. By following 670 manufacturing workers made redundant in major layoffs in 2003, the present paper connects patterns of career mobility and underemployment to possible frictions connected to spatial and industrial mobility. The results indicate that moving some distance from the initial point of departure is correlated with upward mobility. This especially concerns moving to a related industry in the same region or moving to a new region, but within the same industry. Moving too great a distance, however, increases the risk of downward mobility. Moving to unrelated industries in general, but also to related industries in new regions, is associated with a higher risk of facing underemployment in the medium run. In conclusion, the longer-run labour market trajectories, in relation to both distance and direction, need to be addressed if we are to assess the outcome of redundancies.

Detecting Duplicate Contributions in Pull-Based Model Combining Textual and Change Similarities

Communication and coordination between open source software (OSS) developers who do not work physically in the same location have always been the challenging issues. The pull-based development model, as the state-of-the-art collaborative development mechanism, provides high openness and transparency to improve the visibility of contributors’ work. However, duplicate contributions may still be submitted by more than one contributor to solve the same problem due to the parallel and uncoordinated nature of this model. If not detected in time, duplicate pull-requests can cause contributors and reviewers to waste time and energy on redundant work. In this paper, we propose an approach combining textual and change similarities to automatically detect duplicate contributions in the pull-based model at submission time. For a new-arriving contribution, we first compute textual similarity and change similarity between it and other existing contributions. And then our method returns a list of candidate duplicate contributions that are most similar to the new contribution in terms of the combined textual and change similarity. The evaluation shows that 83.4% of the duplicates can be found in average when we use the combined textual and change similarity compared with 54.8% using only textual similarity and 78.2% using only change similarity.

Regulatory support for the redevelopment design system

One of the main features of construction as a branch of material production is a wide range of various types of regulations, technical, process flow and methodology documentation, and governing standards determining the conditions for development of design solutions and the formation of the functional quality of construction products. Regulatory control of practical activities in the field of construction should be considered as a necessary tool and most important means of achieving the planned results, bearing in mind, first of all, the quality of organizational and process solutions, methods of construction operations in the specific conditions of a construction site, methods of ensuring control and supervisory measures in simple and complex construction processes. The structure of city-forming factors had changed noticeably by the middle of the twentieth century: the number of people employed in the service sector, education, and the banking sector had grown. The industrial production and transport structure has changed. Society began to impose increasingly stringent requirements on sanitary standards for the functioning of industries and many of them were forced to close down. Science-intensive industries sprang up in major cities to employ the redundant workers. The share of the economically active population employed in scientific and design centers, and medical and educational institutions increased. Relocation of some enterprises outside the major cities in Europe coincided with the perceived need for their radical technical re-equipment. Our country was at least 50-70 years late with these measures, which caused a general technical lag. Intensive housing construction in large cities of Russia has led to the fact that employees often use public and private transportation to get to work from “dormitory” areas in the direction of the center. As market principles for assessing the effectiveness of enterprises allowed for economic reforms, introduction of cadastral changed the structure of the urban economy.

SiameseQAT: A Semantic Context-Based Duplicate Bug Report Detection Using Replicated Cluster Information

In large-scale software development environments, defect reports are maintained through bug tracking systems (BTS) and analyzed by domain experts. Different users may create bug reports in a non-standard manner and may report a particular problem using a particular set of words due to stylistic choices and writing patterns. Therefore, the same defect can be reported with very different descriptions, generating non-trivial duplicates. To avoid redundant work for the development team, an expert needs to look at all new reports while trying to label possible duplicates. However, this approach is neither trivial nor scalable and directly impacts bug fix correction time. Recent efforts to find duplicate bug reports tend to focus on deep neural approaches that consider hybrid representations of bug reports, using both structured and unstructured information. Unfortunately, these approaches ignore that a single bug can have multiple previously identified duplicates and, therefore, multiple textual descriptions, titles, and categorical information. In this work, we propose SiameseQAT, a duplicate bug report detection method that considers information on individual bugs as well as information extracted from bug clusters. The SiameseQAT combines context and semantic learning on structured and unstructured features and corpus topic extraction-based features, with a novel loss function called Quintet Loss, which considers the centroid of duplicate clusters and their contextual information. We validated our approach on the well-known open-source software repositories Eclipse, NetBeans, and Open Office, comprised of more than 500 thousand bug reports. We evaluated both the retrieval and classification of duplicates, reporting a Recall@25 mean of 85% for retrieval and 84% AUROC for classification tasks, results that were significantly superior to previous works.