Active Vibration & Noise Control: Design Towards Performance Limit

Active Vibration & Noise Control: Design Towards Performance Limit
Author: Jiqiang Wang
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2022-08-22
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9811941165

The book is motivated by the pivotal issue: what is the performance limit of active control and energy harvesting? It aims to develop systematic design methodologies with a “visualization technique” where the performance limit can be readily determined solely based on visual inspections. Modern technological systems have evolved toward high speed, heavy load, lightweight, flexible operation and extreme conditions, as demonstrated in aerospace, marine, transportation and manufacturing industries. The associated vibration and noise issues have become such problematic that they may significantly confine the performance of the systems, to say the discomfort at least. Through the geometric representation of the performance specifications, fundamental issues such as (1) the existence of feasible controllers; (2) the optimality of controllers; (3) the performance limit of controllers; (4) compromisability among the performance specifications; (5) the synthesis of controllers; and (6) the influence of constraints on optimal solutions can all be resolved within the proposed framework. The state of the art is thus refined with a new approach complementary to those optimization-based routines, where extra effort would have to be exercised to disclose the compromisability of performance specifications. The proposed book will result in a new design methodology—performance limit-oriented active control. It was initiated by the author with the project “Active Control for Performance Limit” (ACPL). A series of fundamental results are obtained and will be disseminated in this book. The results are verified through extensive numerical demonstrations and are expected to provide useful guidance for practical engineering in the vibration and noise industry and research.

Indonesia’s agriculture sector performance during the COVID-19 pandemic: Towards a resilient agrifood system

Indonesia’s agriculture sector performance during the COVID-19 pandemic: Towards a resilient agrifood system
Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.
Total Pages: 60
Release: 2023-10-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9251379750

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on food security in Indonesia. Ensuring food production and availability is a major concern for policymakers. The Indonesian government has historically made various efforts in this regard, encouraging and providing facilitation to farmers as the main producers of food, such as through the supply of agricultural inputs. In responding to the pandemic, the Indonesian government designed several programmes to protect farmers as food producers. The government was already carrying out these programmes before COVID-19 broke out but it increased their number and frequency during the pandemic. This paper examines the situation for several agricultural commodities as a result of the travel restrictions implemented under COVID-19. These restrictions affected the flow of goods, including of agricultural inputs and outputs. In addition, the paper compares conditions before and during the pandemic, assessing this within the broader context of government actions to address the challenges posed by COVID-19. It employs descriptive analysis, trend analysis and comparative analysis. The paper ends with an analysis of the adequacy of food consumption and food security in Indonesia and of the Social Safety Net (Jaring Pengaman Sosial – JPS) programme. As a result, the agriculture sector in Indonesia has withstood the shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic and its early restrictions relatively well. This can be seen in the economic growth (year on year) of the Indonesian agriculture sector, which was consistently positive for eight quarters (from the first quarter of 2020 to the fourth quarter of 2021) while at the same time total GDP growth in 2020 was negative. Specifically, the performance and relative resilience of the agriculture sector during the pandemic can be observed on several indicators, such as production, productivity, prices and trade in a number of main commodities, described below. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for all six commodities studied, no major shocks were observed on several indicators, including production, productivity, prices and trade. There were also no major shocks to food resilience. Responsive policies and assured provision of inputs were very important in facing the threat of food stock uncertainty. Indonesia’s government implemented several social safety net programmes, which suppressed the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food security. Policy recommendations for the government, to ensure the continued stability and resilience of agriculture and the food system.

Radical Candor

Radical Candor
Author: Kim Malone Scott
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2017-03-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1760553026

Radical Candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on the one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It is about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism, delivered to produce better results and help employees develop their skills and boundaries of success. Great bosses have a strong relationship with their employees, and Kim Scott Malone has identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees: make it personal, get stuff done, and understand why it matters. Radical Candor offers a guide to those bewildered or exhausted by management, written for bosses and those who manage bosses. Drawing on years of first-hand experience, and distilled clearly to give actionable lessons to the reader, Radical Candor shows how to be successful while retaining your integrity and humanity. Radical Candor is the perfect handbook for those who are looking to find meaning in their job and create an environment where people both love their work, their colleagues and are motivated to strive to ever greater success.

Towards Embodied Performance

Towards Embodied Performance
Author: Rachel Dickstein
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2024-06-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1040039170

Towards Embodied Performance invites directors and other generative performance makers to experiment with making their own original, visually stunning, sonically immersive, and physically rigorous embodied performance. Through historical context, the author’s 30-plus years of experience, and original interviews with leading theatre artists, this book sets the stage for a new generation of artists building boundary-breaking work. Directors are often categorized into one of only two frameworks: the Stanislavskian director, whose method is based on text analysis and character wants and needs, and the “auteur” director, whose work might focus on visual spectacle at the expense of text or character objectives. This book argues that the director of embodied performance fuses these two approaches, acting as the author of the event. In Part I, readers will explore the core elements of embodied performance – space, time, body, language, and action – through a lens that bridges traditional directing methodology with experimental, devised, collaborative theatre-making. Part II provides examples of this embodied practice by multi-disciplinary artists in visual and sound installation, video and film, dance-theatre, and new music/opera, including such artists as Shirin Neshat, James Turrell, Bill T. Jones, Janet Cardiff, Okwui Okpokwasili, William Kentridge, and Heather Christian. Part III suggests creative prompts and exercises for performance makers to engage the visual, physical, textual, and sonic in compositional storytelling on stage. Towards Embodied Performance is an invaluable resource for theatre directors, devisers, and generative artists at all levels from students to teachers, from early-career to mid-career artists. Directors, actors, choreographers, designers, composers, writers, scholars, and engaged audience members can all use this text to explore collaboratively created performance that invites its audience into the ripest version of the present moment.

Feminist Critical Policy Analysis I

Feminist Critical Policy Analysis I
Author: Catherine Marshall
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2005-10-05
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1135714657

Challenging the traditional power basis of the policy decision-makers in education, this text illustrates the use of a critical and feminist lens in the creation of policies to meet the needs, aspirations and values of women and girls. Focus is on the primary and secondary sectors of education.

Toward A Just Pedagogy Of Performance

Toward A Just Pedagogy Of Performance
Author: Charles O'Malley
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2023-12-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1003822754

This book is a compendium of resources largely by and for artists and scholars interested in engaging in conversations of justice, diversity, and historiography in the fields of theatre and performance studies. For these students, and for the future instructors in our field who will use this book, we hold a tripartite hope: to expand, to enable, and to provide access. In its whole, we intend for this book to provoke its readers to question the narratives of history that they’ve received (and that they may promulgate) in their artistic and scholarly work. We aim to question methods and ethics of reading present in the western mode of studying drama and performance history. The contributions in the book—not traditional chapters, but manifestos, experiences, articles, conversations, and provocations—raise questions and illuminate gaps, and they do not speak in a unified voice or from a static position. These pieces are written by artists, graduate students, teachers, administrators, and undergraduates; these are expressions of hope and of experience, and not of dogma. This book is aimed toward instructors of undergraduates, both graduate students and faculty at all levels of seniority within theatre and performance studies, as well as at artists and practitioners of the art that wish to find more just ways of viewing history.

Theatre in the Expanded Field

Theatre in the Expanded Field
Author: Alan Read
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2013-12-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1408183412

Theatre in the Expanded Field is a fiercely original, bold and daring exploration of the fields of theatre and performance studies and the received narratives and histories that underpin them. Rich with interdisciplinary reference, international, eclectic and broad-ranging in its examples, it offers readers a compelling and provocative reassessment of the disciplines, one that spans pre-history to the present day. Sixty years ago, in 1962, Richard Southern wrote a remarkable book called The Seven Ages of the Theatre. It was unusual in its time for taking a trans-disciplinary, new-historical and avowedly internationalist approach to its subject - nothing less than a totalizing view of its field. Theatre in the Expanded Field does not attempt to mimic Southern's work but rather takes his spirit of adventure and ambition as its frame for the contemporary moment of performance and its diverse pasts. Identifying seven ways of exploring the performance field, from pre-history to postdramatic theatre the book presents studies of both contemporary and historical works not as a chronological succession, but in keeping with their coeval qualities, as movements or 'generations' of connection and interaction, dissensus and interruption. It does this with the same purpose as Richard Southern's original work: to provide for the planning of responsive performance spaces 'now'. Illustrated throughout with line-drawings, Theatre in the Expanded Field is as richly rewarding as it is ambitious and expansive in it vision.