Medical Library and Information System for India: A Proposal

This research concerns the design and planning of a medical library and information system for India. Based on a questionnaire survey, it examines the strengths and weaknesses of the existing resources, services and cooperative activities in Indian medical and health science libraries. The study reveals the lack of coordination or resource sharing activities in these libraries and concludes that owing to inadequate budgetary provisions, document collections and a wide gap between the present service provisions and actual requirements, there is need to rationalise and supplement the existing infrastructural resources into a nationwide networking system. In order to gain information about the concept and planning of regional library systems and the need for a regional library or regional library unit, four different regional medical library and information systems in the U.K., namely Oxford, South West Thames, North Western and Trent, were surveyed. The focus is to ascertain in what ways the development of a regional library system could result in improvement of library services in the region and the factors that lead to particular successes (or failures) in operation and administration of direct regional support services. The survey also examines the nature of relationships between the regional library unit and member libraries and the extent to which regional services are used and valued. The proposed system for India (MEDLIS) is based on the particular context to which it relates. The results of the design are mainly presented by either descriptive or analytical models, decided by the category of issues involved. The research has focused on the organisational aspects of system planning and attempts to delineate and analyse those factors that will ultimately govern the configuration and functions of a national medical library networking system and its units on a regional basis. However, macro-considerations of technology are inevitable and three alternate programmes are suggested. Recommendations are made about the future developments of a national medical library system and a possible implementation plan is outlined

Participation in Transition(s):Reconceiving Public Engagements in Energy Transitions as Co-Produced, Emergent and Diverse

This paper brings the transitions literature into conversation with constructivist Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives on participation for the first time. In doing so we put forward a conception of public and civil society engagement in sustainability transitions as co-produced, relational, and emergent. Through paying close attention to the ways in which the subjects, objects, and procedural formats of public engagement are constructed through the performance of participatory collectives, our approach offers a framework to open up to and symmetrically compare diverse and interconnected forms of participation that make up wider socio-technical systems. We apply this framework in a comparative analysis of four diverse cases of civil society involvement in UK low carbon energy transitions. This highlights similarities and differences in how these distinct participatory collectives are orchestrated, mediated, and subject to exclusions, as well as their effects in producing particular visions of the issue at stake and implicit models of participation and ‘the public’. In conclusion we reflect on the value of this approach for opening up the politics of societal engagement in transitions, building systemic perspectives of interconnected ‘ecologies of participation’, and better accounting for the emergence, inherent uncertainties, and indeterminacies of all forms of participation in transitions

Computation of transient electromagnetic fields due to switching in high voltage substations

Switching operations of circuit breakers and disconnect switches radiate transient electromagnetic fields within high-voltage substations. The generated fields may interfere and disrupt normal operations of electronic equipment. Hence, the electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) of this electronic equipment has to be considered as early as the design stage of substation planning and operation. Also, microelectronics are being introduced into the substation environment and are located close to the switching devices in the switchyards more than ever before, often referred to as distributed electronics. Hence, there is the need to re-evaluate the substation environment for EMC assessment, accounting for these issues. This paper deals with the computation of transient electromagnetic fields due to switching within a typical high-voltage air-insulated substation (AIS) using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method

Goal Set Inverse Optimal Control and Iterative Re-planning for Predicting Human Reaching Motions in Shared Workspaces

To enable safe and efficient human-robot collaboration in shared workspaces it is important for the robot to predict how a human will move when performing a task. While predicting human motion for tasks not known a priori is very challenging, we argue that single-arm reaching motions for known tasks in collaborative settings (which are especially relevant for manufacturing) are indeed predictable. Two hypotheses underlie our approach for predicting such motions: First, that the trajectory the human performs is optimal with respect to an unknown cost function, and second, that human adaptation to their partner's motion can be captured well through iterative re-planning with the above cost function. The key to our approach is thus to learn a cost function which "explains" the motion of the human. To do this, we gather example trajectories from pairs of participants performing a collaborative assembly task using motion capture. We then use Inverse Optimal Control to learn a cost function from these trajectories. Finally, we predict reaching motions from the human's current configuration to a task-space goal region by iteratively re-planning a trajectory using the learned cost function. Our planning algorithm is based on the trajectory optimizer STOMP, it plans for a 23 DoF human kinematic model and accounts for the presence of a moving collaborator and obstacles in the environment. Our results suggest that in most cases, our method outperforms baseline methods when predicting motions. We also show that our method outperforms baselines for predicting human motion when a human and a robot share the workspace.Comment: 12 pages, Accepted for publication IEEE Transaction on Robotics 201