Visual Workshop Research Articles

Visual Workshop as the Single Model Editor for the ANSWERS Shielding and Criticality Codes

In this paper, we describe the design philosophy behind Visual Workshop, a model-viewing program. Visual Workshop is being developed as part of the nuclear codes development consortium between BNFL Group and Serco Assurance and will be marketed via Serco Assurance’s ANSWERS Software Service. Visual Workshop is a Java-based program that allows shielding and criticality engineers to visualize their computational models for the ANSWERS computational codes in a multiplicity of ways—wireframe and two-dimensional and three-dimensional ray trace—via a single graphical interface.Visual Workshop integrates the cross-platform portability of Java with the existing FORTRAN calculation engines that are used successfully with the existing ANSWERS visualization codes. The use of the Swing graphical user interface library provides a common look-and-feel on all platforms. Visual Workshop also has the innovation of employing JOGL, the Java binding to OpenGL, thus gaining the advantages of hardware support that OpenGL can bring. Visual Workshop has also made use of open-source freely licensed applications to provide functionality and to speed up development.Visual Workshop will act as a single interface for the checking of models, the submission of jobs, and the examination of job output. As such it builds upon the experiences gained using the suite of ANSWERS tools by expanding the existing capabilities to allow for the selective display of parameterized models, allow more effective error checking, and provide additional postprocessing and results display capabilities.Visual Workshop provides capabilities and tools for the engineers to refine and verify their models in a way that enhances their productivity.

Fear in Paradise: The Affective Registers of the English Lake District Landscape Re-visited

ABSTRACTDuring the summer of 2004, the artist Graham Lowe and I undertook a research project entitled Nurturing Ecologies within the Lake District National Park (LDNP) at Windermere. This landscape, considered as an icon of “Englishness,” is revisited through the embodied and sensory experiences of post-migration residents of Lancashire and Cumbria in an attempt to unravel multiple relationships embedded in visitor engagements with this landscape and thus disrupt the moral geography of the landscape as embodying a singular English sensibility, normally exclusionary of British multi-ethnic, translocal and mobile landscape values and sensibilities. The research led to the production of a series of drawings and descriptions made in visual workshops by participants, and a set of forty paintings produced by the artist. These paintings are examined in this paper as representing the values, sensory meanings and embodied relationships that exist for migrant communities with this landscape. These groups include the Asian community from the Lancashire town of Burnley and a “mixed” art group living in Lancashire. The initial drawings and subsequent paintings produced operate as a testimony to the Lake District landscape as a site for engendering feelings of terror, fear as well as representing a paradisiacal landscape.

Methodology out of context: Getting Zimbabwean entrepreneurs to participate in research

This paper reports on a project carried out in Zimbabwe in 1998. The aim of the work was to develop a methodology, based upon participative techniques, which could be adapted for use by the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) in assessing entrepreneurs' perception of government and non-government business support services. The overriding purpose of the project was to improve DFID's policies towards facilitating an enabling environment for the private sector. The project was commissioned in order to alter the conventional donor agency approach to businesses in Africa of using questionnaires. Instead, the project team developed a system of semi-structured interviews with individual entrepreneurs and managers, supplemented by a variety of visual techniques and collective workshops incorporating the participants themselves, government representatives and agency staff. Whilst the techniques used are not in themselves unique, the approach certainly is, within an African context.