Tree Country

Tree Country is an employee newsletter released by the South Carolina Forestry Commission

H.F. Hauff Electric Pruner Drive Train

The H.F. Hauff Company invests a large amount of money in developing a quality pruner used in everyday agriculture. Modern electric pruners tend to be expensive while manual tree pruning is very physically demanding. A battery assisted pruner that is light-weight, ergonomic, inexpensive to build and powerful enough to cut branches that a nominal apple tree would possess is the direct affiliation that H.F. Hauff devotes its funding too. A team of engineering students from Central Washington University developed a product with consideration to each of these circumstances. Since hand drills have proven to be user friendly and of abundance in the agricultural industries due to the nature of machinery, the pruner is an attachment to a hand drill. An innovative self-reversing ball screw converts the rotational energy to linear energy driving the cutting blade utilizing a power efficiency of 90% and allows the drive train to reciprocate providing an unassisted return of the blade to the open position. Calculations prove that the average torque of a common drill nears 450 inch-pounds of torque fostering a linear force of nearly 1000 pounds. This Linear force satisfies the testing needed to cut a 1.5 inch branch which commonly occurs on the average apple tree. The pruner assembly costs $300 for material and manufactures using tool commonly found in industry keeping the price under$500 compared to competitive electric pruners upwards of $1000

An examination and confirmation of a macro theory of conversations through a realization of the protologic Lp by microscopic simulation

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Conversation Theory is a theory of interaction. From interaction (the theory asserts) arises all individuals and all concepts. Interaction, if it is to allow for evolution, must perforce contain conflict, and, if concepts and individuals are to endure, resolution of conflict. Conversation Theory as developed by Pask led to the protologic called Lp which describes the interaction of conceptual entities. Lp contains injunctions as to how entities can and may interact, including how they may conflict and how their conflict may be resolved. Unlike existing software implementations based on Conversation Theory, Lp in its pure form is a logic of process as well as coherence and distinction. The hypothesis is that a low-level simulation of Lp, that of an internal and microscopic level in which topics are influenced by "forces" that are exerted by the topology of the conceptual space, would, in its activation as a dynamic process of appropriate dimension, produce as a result (and hence be a confirmation of) the macroscopically-observed behaviour of the system manifest as conflict and resolution of conflict. Without this confirmation, the relationships between Conversation Theory and Lp remain only proposed; with it, their mutual consistencies and validity as a model of cognition, are affirmed. The background of Conversation Theory and Lp necessary to support the thesis is presented a long with a comparison of other software approaches to related problems. A description of THOUGHTSTICKER, a current embodiment of Lp at the macro level, provides a detailed sense of the Lp operations. Then a computer program (developed to provide a proof by demonstration of the thesis) is described, in which a microscopic simulation of Lp processes confirms the macroscopic behaviour predicted by Conversation Theory. Conversation Theory thereby gains support f or its use as a valid observer's language for every-day experience owing to this confirmation and its protologic as a basis for psychological phenomena in the interaction of conceptual entities of mind

Strategic Development Zone Reference Documentation

Reports : *Tree Survey *Waste Management Strategy *Wet Services Assessment – Technical Note *Flood Risk Assessment *DIT student response report *GDA Briefing Paper for submissions *Consideration by the GDA following calls for submissions in respect of preparing a draft Strategic Pla

Reasoning about Cyber Threat Actors

abstract: Reasoning about the activities of cyber threat actors is critical to defend against cyber attacks. However, this task is difficult for a variety of reasons. In simple terms, it is difficult to determine who the attacker is, what the desired goals are of the attacker, and how they will carry out their attacks. These three questions essentially entail understanding the attacker’s use of deception, the capabilities available, and the intent of launching the attack. These three issues are highly inter-related. If an adversary can hide their intent, they can better deceive a defender. If an adversary’s capabilities are not well understood, then determining what their goals are becomes difficult as the defender is uncertain if they have the necessary tools to accomplish them. However, the understanding of these aspects are also mutually supportive. If we have a clear picture of capabilities, intent can better be deciphered. If we understand intent and capabilities, a defender may be able to see through deception schemes. In this dissertation, I present three pieces of work to tackle these questions to obtain a better understanding of cyber threats. First, we introduce a new reasoning framework to address deception. We evaluate the framework by building a dataset from DEFCON capture-the-flag exercise to identify the person or group responsible for a cyber attack. We demonstrate that the framework not only handles cases of deception but also provides transparent decision making in identifying the threat actor. The second task uses a cognitive learning model to determine the intent – goals of the threat actor on the target system. The third task looks at understanding the capabilities of threat actors to target systems by identifying at-risk systems from hacker discussions on darkweb websites. To achieve this task we gather discussions from more than 300 darkweb websites relating to malicious hacking.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Engineering 201