Thesis defense announcement

Addressing Cultural Factors in Mechanical Design

By Douglas Lee Van Bossuyt

Candidate for Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering

Oregon State University

Abstract

Mechanical design is often based on formal methodologies such as Quality Function Deployment (QFD). Techniques to quantitatively account for qualitative design factors such as attractability, sensory perception, and affective customer response have been successfully incorporated into these methodologies and are receiving growing acceptance across many industries. In today’s global economy, however, further work is needed to address the challenge of moving designs across cultural boundaries and facilitate the transfer of products to diverse and culturally distinct consumer groups.  This presentation describes one approach to quantitatively addressing cultural factors in the design process.

Monday, December 29, 2008

10:00 am, Rogers 226


osu-logo

School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering

Misc table information for LaTeX

While writing my thesis, I found need to include several tables.  The standard table package included in LaTeX sucks.  Doing some research, I found that the booktabs package is far superior and produces truly beautiful results.

It can be called by inserting this code:\usepackage{booktabs}

The following links are for later use:

  • Vertical table stuff – will be good for making Houses of Quality and other such things.
  • Various tabular information – Good for referencing how to make tables appear a certain way.  Maybe not entirely compatible with booktabs?
  • Basic table info – for starting with no table experience in LaTeX.
  • WikiBooks table info – pretty basic but this is where I found the first info on the booktabs package.
  • multicolumn – explanation of how multicolumns work.

Here is an example of a table I created.  Note that the “textwidth” variable is defined in my class files.

\begin{table}
\caption{GLOBE Cultural Clusters \cite{GLOBE04}.}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{l p{0.6\textwidth}}
\toprule
Cluster & Cultures \\
\midrule
Confucian Asia & Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, South Korea \\
\\
Southern Asia & Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Thailand, Iran \\
\\
Latin America & Ecuador, El Salvador, Columbia, Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, Argentina, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Mexico \\
\\
Nordic Europe & Denmark, Finland, Sweden \\
\\
Anglo & Canada, USA, Australia, Ireland, England, South Africa (White Sample), New Zealand \\
\\
Germanic Europe & Austria, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany-East, Germany-West \\
\\
Sub-Saharan Africa & Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia, Nigeria, South Africa (Black Sample) \\
\\
Eastern Europe & Greece, Hungary, Albania, Slovenia, Poland, Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan \\
\\
Middle East & Turkey, Kuwait, Egypt, Morocco, Qatar \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\label{table:cultural_clusters_GLOBE}
\end{table}