挑选高等教育杰作

本文对《美国高等教育经典著作百种》的选编特点、主要类别与部分著作及其作者作了简明扼要的说明。     

Design and testing of a frictionless mechanical inerter device using living-hinges

In this paper a novel type of frictionless mechanical inerter device is presented, where instead of gears, motion of the flywheel is achieved using living-hinges. The design is a type of pivoted flywheel inerter inspired in part by the Dynamic Anti-resonant Vibration Isolator (DAVI) concept, which was first developed in the 1960s. Unlike the DAVI, it will be shown that the pivoted flywheel inerter has the advantage of producing balanced forces. Furthermore the use of living-hinges eliminates the need for gears or other frictional elements in the inerter mechanism. To demonstrate the utility of the new concept, a bench-top experiment was performed using a small-scale living-hinge inerter manufactured using polypropylene hinges. By estimating the experimental system parameters, the transmissibility results from the experiment could be compared to a mathematical model. These results showed that the living-hinge inerter provided an isolation effect of at least three orders of magnitude in terms of the maximum amplitude reduction from the uncontrolled system compared to that with the inerter added. Although friction was eliminated, the living-hinges did introduce additional damping, and this was found to correspond to an increase in the equivalent damping ratio for the uncontrolled system of 1.2%. It is shown that the living-hinge inerter developed in this paper fits all of the essential conditions required to be a practical inerter device. Furthermore, as it operates without mechanical friction, or fluid flow, it represents a new paradigm in experimental inerter technology.     

Institutional complementarities: The origins of experimentation in China’s plug-in electric vehicle industry

A vast literature on technology transitions within industries suggests that early phases of new technologies are marked by periods of intense experimentation, but we know little about the conditions under which these periods emerge. We apply inductive, grounded theory-building techniques to examine what prompts firms to experiment across one emerging technology platform—plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs)—in China. Triangulating annual vehicle make and model sales data from 2003 to 2016 (plus monthly data from 2010 to 2016); 112 English and Mandarin archival documents from industry, academic, and news outlets; and 51 semi-structured interviews with industry, government, and academic stakeholders, we develop four in-depth case studies. We find that in contrast to the innovation trajectories of multinational and Chinese arms of joint venture (JV) firms, independent domestic Chinese firms (those with no history of international JV partnerships) are undertaking significant experimentation across multiple levels—infrastructure, core system, subsystem, and component—of the emerging PEV technology platform. We propose the concept of “institutional complementarities” to describe how interactions among institutions—here the national JV regulation and local market support and subsidies—may have turned regional markets into protected laboratories, extending the incubation periods for independent domestic firm experimentation. While this diverse experimentation may be an important antecedent of technology transition, consolidation induced by national policy standardization or competitive pressure may be required for PEV innovations to scale beyond their early, protected regional markets.     

Pathogenic organization in science: Division of labor and retractions

Science is increasingly a team activity, and the size of the teams has been growing. At the same time, there are concerns about an increasing rate of pathologies in science. The growth of team science suggests the need to look beyond individual-level explanations and focus on organizational structures and institutional contexts to explain pathologies in science. Drawing on the literature on organizational pathologies, we argue that division of labor may be a key factor contributing to pathologies in science. Furthermore, we examine the effects of high-stakes incentives and of institutional corruption as additional predictors of scientific pathologies. Using retractions as an indicator of pathologies, and drawing on a matched sample of 195 retracted papers and 349 paired papers that were not retracted, we develop indicators of the division of labor in the team that produced a paper and find that the rate of retractions is higher as the division of labor increases (net of team size). Additionally, we find that high-stakes incentives and institutional corruption are also associated with increased retractions. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for science policy, in particular for organizing team science projects.     

The art and artifice of early sports photography

Abstract

The rise of modern sport in the mid-nineteenth century coincided with the emergence of photography as a new image-making medium. Thus, both practices developed in parallel. Notably, many early photographers turned to sport as a subject for their work, despite the early technological limitations of the medium. Histories of photography have, however, tended to overlook this. Similarly, sport historians have tended to regard these early photographs simply as illustrative material rather than important innovations in the formation of new visual conventions for the representation of sport. This paper seeks to redress this by exploring, in close detail, examples of sports photography produced in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. More importantly, it examines the visual vocabularies deployed by these early photographers within the context of contemporary art practices, demonstrating how artistry and artifice were deployed in the production of some of the earliest, and finest, examples of sports photography ever produced.     

Neoliberal values & queer/disability in Margarita with a Straw

ABSTRACT

Margarita with a Straw is an Indian movie about a queer/disabled woman exploring her sexuality. The article uses textual analysis with a discursive formation approach to analyze how the protagonist’s queer/disabled identity is constituted vis-à-vis intimate partnerships alongside the promotion of neoliberal values. One relationship with an able-bodied white man takes place within a caregiving dynamic that challenges her independence. The other relationship with a disabled South Asian woman creates an interdependence that bifurcates their identities as disabled-and-queer. The article argues that the promotion of neoliberal values in the context of queer/disability is about independence from dependence on sociopolitical systems.     

Statistical learning for OCR error correction

Modern OCR engines incorporate some form of error correction, typically based on dictionaries. However, there are still residual errors that decrease performance of natural language processing algorithms applied to OCR text. In this paper, we present a statistical learning model for post-processing OCR errors, either in a fully automatic manner or followed by minimal user interaction to further reduce error rate. Our model employs web-scale corpora and integrates a rich set of linguistic features. Through an interdependent learning pipeline, our model produces and continuously refines the error detection and suggestion of candidate corrections. Evaluated on a historical biology book with complex error patterns, our model outperforms various baseline methods in the automatic mode and shows an even greater advantage when involving minimal user interaction. Quantitative analysis of each computational step further suggests that our proposed model is well-suited for handling volatile and complex OCR error patterns, which are beyond the capabilities of error correction incorporated in OCR engines.