378,925 research outputs found

    Warranty Data Analysis: A Review

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    Warranty claims and supplementary data contain useful information about product quality and reliability. Analysing such data can therefore be of benefit to manufacturers in identifying early warnings of abnormalities in their products, providing useful information about failure modes to aid design modification, estimating product reliability for deciding on warranty policy and forecasting future warranty claims needed for preparing fiscal plans. In the last two decades, considerable research has been conducted in warranty data analysis (WDA) from several different perspectives. This article attempts to summarise and review the research and developments in WDA with emphasis on models, methods and applications. It concludes with a brief discussion on current practices and possible future trends in WDA

    Echoes of Populism and Terrorism in Libya’s Online News Reporting

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    This article focuses on news reporting in Libya, assessing both official and citizen journalism. Special attention is paid to online resources, primarily spontaneous posts written in Arabic. Social media shows the emergence of citizen journalism together with so-called User-generated Content. Both have proved capable of creating legitimacy. Political inclinations, including Islamic ideology and its religious claims, are presented, supported, or criticized by ordinary citizens who post their comments and opinions on the web. Official press and news agencies have their social media profiles as well, sharing the same online space with nonprofessionals. Monitoring and analysis of reporting show that there is no relevant difference in journalistic models; nor do concerns between professionals and nonprofessionals vary. Libya appears today to be a mosaic of different interests: one that is interconnected and in conflict at the same time. These interests are vying to establish new supremacies in the country. Journalism in its various typologies faces pressure from the abovementioned interests, so it is negatively affected by rhetoric in both reporting and commentary. These preliminary arguments lead us to the core topics of populism – for which a definition is suggested – and reporting about terrorism in Libya. Against this background, we analyze news flows, sources, and other issues. I conclude with a brief review of the main issues, the characteristics of the Arabic narrative discourse, and the emerging Arabic lexico

    Bond University Doctor of Physiotherapy Mini Congress: Book of Abstracts 2019

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    The Return of the Rogue

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    The “rogue trader”—a famed figure of the 1990s—recently has returned to prominence due largely to two phenomena. First, recent U.S. mortgage market volatility spilled over into stock, commodity, and derivative markets worldwide, causing large financial institution losses and revealing previously hidden unauthorized positions. Second, the rogue trader has gained importance as banks around the world have focused more attention on operational risk in response to regulatory changes prompted by the Basel II Capital Accord. This Article contends that of the many regulatory options available to the Basel Committee for addressing operational risk it arguably chose the worst: an enforced selfregulatory regime unlikely to substantially alter financial institutions’ ability to successfully manage operational risk. That regime also poses the danger of high costs, a false sense of security, and perverse incentives. Particularly with respect to the low-frequency, high-impact events—including rogue trading—that may be the greatest threat to bank stability and soundness, attempts at enforced self-regulation are unlikely to significantly reduce operational risk, because those financial institutions with the highest operational risk are the least likely to credibly assess that risk and set aside adequate capital under a regime of enforced self-regulation

    ALSEP termination report

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    The Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) final report was prepared when support operations were terminated September 30, 1977, and NASA discontinued the receiving and processing of scientific data transmitted from equipment deployed on the lunar surface. The ALSEP experiments (Apollo 11 to Apollo 17) are described and pertinent operational history is given for each experiment. The ALSEP data processing and distribution are described together with an extensive discussion on archiving. Engineering closeout tests and results are given, and the status and configuration of the experiments at termination are documented. Significant science findings are summarized by selected investigators. Significant operational data and recommendations are also included

    Facial expressions in response to a highly surprising event exceeding the field of vision: a test of Darwin's theory of surprise

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    Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.According to the affect program theory of facial displays, the evolutionary core of the human emotion system consists of a small set of discrete emotion mechanisms that comprise motor programs for emotion-specific facial displays. However, research on surprise has found that surprising events often fail to elicit the associated facial expression (widened eyes, raised eyebrows, mouth opening). The present study tested a refined Darwinian account of the facial expression of surprise, according to which surprising events cause widened eyes and raised eyebrows if they exceed the field of vision, as these facial changes increase the visual field and facilitate visual search. To test this hypothesis, we staged a surprising event that engulfed the field of vision: When the participants left the laboratory, they unexpectedly found themselves in a new room, a small chamber with bold green walls and a red office chair. In addition, to explore the role of social context for the expression of surprise, in two of three experimental conditions, a stranger or a friend they had brought to the experiment was sitting on the chair. The results provided no support for the Darwinian account of the facial expression of surprise. A complete expression of surprise was observed in 5% of the participants, and the individual components of the expression were shown only by a minority, regardless of social context. These findings reinforce doubts about the adequacy of affect program theory for the case of surprise

    Innovations in Monitoring Vital Events:Mobile Phone SMS Support to Improve Coverage of Birth and Death Registration: A Scalable Solution

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    Civil Registration (CR) of births and deaths is an essential component of any health information system.\ud Globally, across low income countries, CR suffers from unacceptably poor quality coverage. This Health\ud Information Systems Knowledge Hub (HIS Hub) working paper summarises and reports the results, conclusions and outlook from a small six-month project that investigated the potential of introducing a mobile phone step into the routine CR system in a rural district in Tanzania. The project developed a computer application that could receive SMS messages—from existing basic mobile phones of community-based CR officers—and feed them directly to the District Registrar’s office and computer. The message contained the details from the birth or death notification form. The system provided instant access to notifications and automatic feedback to the Village Executive Officer (VEO) if the family that experienced the birth or death event failed to register the event for certification. It also prompted the VEO to follow up with the family by conducting a questionnaire, administered by mobile phone, to determine and communicate the reasons for the non-registration. The District Civil Registrar was also able to monitor trends in these notifications via a user-friendly webbased browser and dashboard. The system was tested for six months and validated against an independent prospective household surveillance system that monitors pregnancies, births and deaths in the same period. In summary, the findings showed that the routine CR system notified only 28% of total births in the period. Adding the SMS step increased this to 51% of births. The routine CR system notified only 2.1% of deaths in the period. Adding the SMS step increased this to 14% of deaths. The SMS step therefore made significant improvements in the notification step (and modest improvements in the registration step) of routine CR. However, both notifications and registrations still fell well short of reality at community level. The most important finding of this pilot is that the current CR system in at least the study district, and likely in most of rural Tanzania, is essentially unable to provide adequate registration coverage for births and deaths, and that coverage is so low that even log order improvements are insufficient to lift it to satisfactory levels (in excess of 90%). This, as yet, says nothing regarding the quality of the data. No overwhelming reason is provided by families for the low reporting rate, suggesting that the problems are highly systemic and will need a radical redesign of CR processes to solve. To the extent that similar problems prevail in other low-income countries, it is clear that whatever these processes will be, some form of scalable real-time mobile communication such as SMS will greatly facilitate coverage levels. This pilot shows\ud that such technology is feasible. But these results also emphasise the need for an end-to-end overhaul of the\ud architecture and processes of how CR systems are built and integrated into the information fabric of a country. Small incremental technical fixes will not suffice\u

    The POINT-AGAPE survey II: An Unrestricted Search for Microlensing Events towards M31

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    An automated search is carried out for microlensing events using a catalogue of 44554 variable superpixel lightcurves derived from our three-year monitoring program of M31. Each step of our candidate selection is objective and reproducible by a computer. Our search is unrestricted, in the sense that it has no explicit timescale cut. So, it must overcome the awkward problem of distinguishing long-timescale microlensing events from long-period stellar variables. The basis of the selection algorithm is the fitting of the superpixel lightcurves to two different theoretical models, using variable star and blended microlensing templates. Only if microlensing is preferred is an event retained as a possible candidate. Further cuts are made with regard to (i) sampling, (ii) goodness of fit of the peak to a Paczynski curve, (iii) consistency of the microlensing hypothesis with the absence of a resolved source, (iv) achromaticity, (v) position in the colour-magnitude diagram and (vi) signal-to-noise ratio. Our results are reported in terms of first-level candidates, which are the most trustworthy, and second-level candidates, which are possible microlensing but have lower signal-to-noise and are more questionable. The pipeline leaves just 3 first-level candidates, all of which have very short full-width half-maximum timescale (<5 days) and 3 second-level candidates, which have timescales of 31, 36 and 51 days respectively. We also show 16 third-level lightcurves, as an illustration of the events that just fail the threshold for designation as microlensing candidates. They are almost certainly mainly variable stars. Two of the 3 first-level candidates correspond to known events (PA 00-S3 and PA 00-S4) already reported by the POINT-AGAPE project. The remaining first-level candidate is new.Comment: 22 pages, 18 figures, MNRAS, to appea
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