Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe design of a system with many locations, each with many items which may fail while in use, is considered. When items fail, they require repair; the particular type of repair being governed by a probability distribution. As repairs may be lengthy, spares are kept on hand to replace failed items. System ineffectiveness is measured by expected weighted shortages over all items and locations, in steady state. This can be reduced by either having more spares or shorter expected repair times. Design consists of a provisioning of the number of spares for each item, by location; and specifying the expected repair times for each type of repair, by item and location. The optimal design minimizes expected shortages within a budget constraint, which covers both (i) procurement of spares and (ii) procurement of equipment and manning levels for the repair facilities. All costs are assumed to be separable so that a Lagrangian approach is fruitful, yielding an implementable algorithm with outputs useful for sensitivity analysis. A numerical example is presented.

Adopting the term from the work of French-Algerian artist, Kader Attia, this essay reflects on what 'repair' offers for a reading of decolonising practices of knowledge, addressing the cosmological besides the historical. In contrast to the 'modern Western' expectation of the work of repair, in which a break or wound is rendered invisible, Attia advocates the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of kintsugi, in which repair is even highlighted with gold dust – an illumination of fracture that foregrounds an object's transformation through the visible simultaneity of both the damage and its repair. Repair, here, is a thought-image of and for an anti-essentialism, challenging a cultural politics of 'identity' in which claims of and for an 'original' status that has been lost could be (ideally) redeemed or restored. The following discussion explores the resonances of this conception within an iconology of decolonialism, where the conceptual potential of repair connects with a cultural politics of what one might call 'demodernism' – addressing a correspondence, rather than simply a break, between pre- and post- in the historical self-definition of the 'modern'.

Goffman's work on footing has paved the way to specifying the analytic concepts of speaker and hearer in social interaction. This article empirically examines participants' moment-by-moment negotiated understandings of speakerhood in the context of conversational repair—sequences of talk dedicated to resolving problems of hearing, speaking, or understanding. I demonstrate that participation in repair sequences reflects interactants' orientations to socially distributed rights to knowledge, or epistemics. Even though speakers are ordinarily entitled to speak on their own behalf and, thus, to repair their own talk, the application of this right is a contingent, negotiated, and sometimes contested matter. Using the methodology of conversation analysis to examine a large corpus of video-recorded English, Russian, and bilingual multiparty interactions, I show how asymmetries in participants' experiences and expertise are drawn upon in the process of repair resolution, suggesting a respecification of the notion of "self" as it pertains to repair.

This paper examines the process and mechanism of conversational repair in spoken Hong Kong Cantonese. Levelt calls for accounts of conversational repair from diverse languages; this paper helps test his supposition that "the organization of repair is quite invariant across languages and cultures" (1989: 497). The paper also raises the hypothesis that personal and contextual factors are crucial variables which determine
which type of repair will be socially acceptable (and therefore prominent) in a particular conversational
setting.