"The fridge door is open" : temporal verification of a robotic assistant's behaviours

Robotic assistants are being designed to help, or work with, humans in a variety of situations from assistance within domestic situations, through medical care, to industrial settings. Whilst robots have been used in industry for some time they are often limited in terms of their range of movement or range of tasks. A new generation of robotic assistants have more freedom to move, and are able to autonomously make decisions and decide between alternatives. For people to adopt such robots they will have to be shown to be both safe and trustworthy. In this paper we focus on formal verification of a set of rules that have been developed to control the Care-O-bot, a robotic assistant located in a typical domestic environment. In particular, we apply model-checking, an automated and exhaustive algorithmic technique, to check whether formal temporal properties are satisfied on all the possible behaviours of the system. We prove a number of properties relating to robot behaviours, their priority and interruptibility, helping to support both safety and trustworthiness of robot behaviours

The complexities of religious tourism motivations: sacred places, vows and visions

The aim of this paper is to understand the complexity of travel motivations to sacred places. Using ethnographic techniques within the Greek Orthodox context, we argue that while motivations are institutionally constructed, they are fragile, dynamic and progressive; being embedded within everyday performances of religion. This calls into question the fixed centeredness and predetermined sacredness of religious sites. Travel motivations become directly influenced by believers’ intimate and emergent performances not only of places but also of religion itself; the meaning of places being based on lived experiences of doing religion and interacting with the sacred, as exemplified in vows and visions. Such understandings are crucial in predicting the effects of failing pilgrimages and the processes of authentication of places, which can help explain visitation patterns

Religiousness as tourist performances: a case study of Greek Orthodox pilgrimage

The aim of this paper is to decipher ways of experiencing religiousness through tourist performances, intersecting textual approaches with the essential embodiment and materiality of the tourist world. Exploring the diversity of religious tourists’ practices within the Greek Orthodox context, two dimensions underpinning religious tourist experience are highlighted: institutional performances and unconventional performances. Focussing on the embodied experience and drawing upon theories of performance, the paper critiques the interplays of body and place to re-conceptualise current understanding of the pilgrimage/tourism relationship. In doing so, the paper proposes that tourism and religion are not separate entities but linked through embodied notions of godliness sensed through touristic performances

Legume species mixtures.

Trial 86KA64 - ironstone hardsetting clay pH 8.0 86KA65 - orange/red loam pH 7.0 86KA66 - sandy gravel pH 5.6 - 5.7 Location: Dumbleyung. Current recommendations for pasture species in the medium rainfall zone has not included species mixtures for paddocks with varying soil types. These trials (three in total) are designed to test the hypothesis that legume species mixtures are more productive and persistent in the long term than monocultures, across three soil types and three different cropping/pasture rotations (continuous pasture, 1 year pasture : 1 year crop rotation, 2 years pasture : 1 year crop rotation)

Fine-scale analysis of biomineralized mollusc teeth using FIB and TEM

When it comes to mineral synthesis, there is a lot we can learn from nature. Although we can synthesize a range of materials in the laboratory, the experimental conditions are often constrained to particular ranges of temperature, pH, etc. Biological systems, on the other hand, seem to be able to produce individual minerals and complex composite mineral structures under a variety of conditions, many of which are far from those applied to create their synthetic counterparts. Understanding how nature does this could provide a means to produce novel biomimetic materials with potential applications in a diverse range of fields from medicine to materials engineering

The role of perennial pasture species for increasing sheep production in the medium rainfall zone of W.A.

Trials: 90AL33, 90AL34, 90ES56, 90ES57 and 90KA100 91KA117, 91KA116, Locations: Green Range, Esperance, Pingrup, Katanning, Broomhill. To examine the productivity and persistence of perennial grasses in the 350-800 mm rainfall zone of W.A

Anatomical pathways for auditory memory II: information from rostral superior temporal gyrus to dorsolateral temporal pole and medial temporal cortex

Auditory recognition memory in non-human primates differs from recognition memory in other sensory systems. Monkeys learn the rule for visual and tactile delayed matching-to-sample within a few sessions, and then show one-trial recognition memory lasting 10–20 min. In contrast, monkeys require hundreds of sessions to master the rule for auditory recognition, and then show retention lasting no longer than 30–40 s. Moreover, unlike the severe effects of rhinal lesions on visual memory, such lesions have no effect on the monkeys' auditory memory performance. The anatomical pathways for auditory memory may differ from those in vision. Long-term visual recognition memory requires anatomical connections from the visual association area TE with areas 35 and 36 of the perirhinal cortex (PRC). We examined whether there is a similar anatomical route for auditory processing, or that poor auditory recognition memory may reflect the lack of such a pathway. Our hypothesis is that an auditory pathway for recognition memory originates in the higher order processing areas of the rostral superior temporal gyrus (rSTG), and then connects via the dorsolateral temporal pole to access the rhinal cortex of the medial temporal lobe. To test this, we placed retrograde (3% FB and 2% DY) and anterograde (10% BDA 10,000 mW) tracer injections in rSTG and the dorsolateral area 38DL of the temporal pole. Results showed that area 38DL receives dense projections from auditory association areas Ts1, TAa, TPO of the rSTG, from the rostral parabelt and, to a lesser extent, from areas Ts2-3 and PGa. In turn, area 38DL projects densely to area 35 of PRC, entorhinal cortex (EC), and to areas TH/TF of the posterior parahippocampal cortex. Significantly, this projection avoids most of area 36r/c of PRC. This anatomical arrangement may contribute to our understanding of the poor auditory memory of rhesus monkeys

Formal verification of an autonomous personal robotic assistant

Human–robot teams are likely to be used in a variety of situations wherever humans require the assistance of robotic systems. Obvious examples include healthcare and manufacturing, in which people need the assistance of machines to perform key tasks. It is essential for robots working in close proximity to people to be both safe and trustworthy. In this paper we examine formal verification of a high-level planner/scheduler for autonomous personal robotic assistants such as Care-O-bot ™ . We describe how a model of Care-O-bot and its environment was developed using Brahms, a multiagent workflow language. Formal verification was then carried out by translating this to the input language of an existing model checker. Finally we present some formal verification results and describe how these could be complemented by simulation-based testing and realworld end-user validation in order to increase the practical and perceived safety and trustworthiness of robotic assistants

The average magnetic field draping and consistent plasma properties of the Venus magnetotail

A new technique has been developed to determine the average structure of the Venus magnetotail (in the range from −8 Rv to −12 Rv) from the Pioneer Venus magnetometer observations. The spacecraft position with respect to the cross-tail current sheet is determined from an observed relationship between the field-draping angle and the magnitude of the field referenced to its value in the nearby magnetosheath. This allows us statistically to remove the effects of tail flapping and variability of draping for the first time and thus to map the average field configuration in the Venus tail. From this average configuration we calculate the cross-tail current density distribution and J × B forces. Continuity of the tangential electric field is utilized to determine the average variations of the X-directed velocity which is shown to vary from −250 km/s at −8 Rv to −470 km/s at −12 Rv. From the calculated J × B forces, plasma velocity, and MHD momentum equation the approximate plasma acceleration, density, and temperature in the Venus tail are determined. The derived ion density is approximately ∼0.07 p+/cm³ (0.005 O+/cm³) in the lobes and ∼0.9 p+/cm³ (0.06 O+/cm³) in the current sheet, while the derived approximate average plasma temperature for the tail is ∼6×106 K for a hydrogen plasma or ∼9×107 K for an oxygen plasma

The Effects of High Liquid Water Content on Thunderstorm Charging

Charge transfer to a riming graupel target during interactions with ice crystals has been investigated in the laboratory. When liquid water contents sufficiently high to cause wet growth are achieved, the charge transfer falls to values which are insignificant to thunderstorm electrification. The implications of this null result to a recent analysis of thunderstorm-charging processes by Wiliams et al. (1991) are discussed