Posts

Showing posts with the label been

The Rise and Fall of Saturn

If you would have been driving through the hills of Tennessee about 40 miles south of Nashville on I-65 in the 1990s, you would have come across a very curious exit called the Saturn Parkway. And if you would've taken that exit and gone a little farther, you would've come across something called the Donald Ephlin Parkway. That was the entrance to the Saturn Corporation, one of the boldest, most innovative, new experiments in labor management relations and organizations of the past 30 years. So let's take a look at what Saturn was all about and, unfortunately, why it failed. Well, Saturn started in the 1980s when a number of innovative labor and management leaders said, we've got to adjust the way in which we work. General Motors came to Donald Ephlin, who was the vice president of the auto workers union, and said, we can't build a small car in the United States competitively. We've got to outsource that work. Don, in his innovative way, said, well,...

MIT 3.60 Lec 6a Symmetry, Structure, Tensor Properties of Materials

PROFESSOR: All right, we've been slogging our way through derivation of the plane groups. And I think I'll do a few more, because we'll stumble across some major tricks in deriving a subfamily of them. But to not get lost in the forest because of all the trees, I have a set of notes. They are handwritten because my secretary would resign if she had to fit in all these figures and subscripts and strange symbols. So, they are as neat as I could make them. Sorry to say that, in running them through the Xerox machine in an attempt to get everything on one sheet, some of the last lines got clipped. So I'll run these through again and give you a copy that's minus those truncations. All right. What we've been doing so far, to have a brief reprise, was to take the symmetries, the 10 two-dimensional plane group symmetries. And they were one-, two-, three-, four-, or sixfold axes, a mirror plane, 2mm, 3m, 4mm, 6mm. So there are 10 of them. And these are the ...

Lecture 6B Streams, Part 2

PROFESSOR: OK, well, we've been looking at streams, this signal processing way of putting systems together. And remember, the key idea is that we decouple the apparent order of events in our programs from the actual order of events in the computer. And that means that we can start dealing with very long streams and only having to generate the elements on demand. That sort of on-demand computation is built into the stream's data structure. So if we have a very long stream, we only compute what we need. The things only get computed when we actually ask for them. Well, what are examples? Are they actually asking for them? For instance, we might ask for the n-th element of a stream. Here's a procedure that computes the n-th element of a stream. An integer n, the n-th element of some stream s, and we just recursively walk down the stream. And the end of 0, we compute the head. Otherwise, it's the n-th the minus 1 element of the tail of the stream. Those two are...

Lecture 6B MIT 6.001 Structure and Interpretation, 1986

PROFESSOR: OK, well, we've been looking at streams, this signal processing way of putting systems together. And remember, the key idea is that we decouple the apparent order of events in our programs from the actual order of events in the computer. And that means that we can start dealing with very long streams and only having to generate the elements on demand. That sort of on-demand computation is built into the stream's data structure. So if we have a very long stream, we only compute what we need. The things only get computed when we actually ask for them. Well, what are examples? Are they actually asking for them? For instance, we might ask for the n-th element of a stream. Here's a procedure that computes the n-th element of a stream. An integer n, the n-th element of some stream s, and we just recursively walk down the stream. And the end of 0, we compute the head. Otherwise, it's the n-th the minus 1 element of the tail of the stream. Those two are...