Your new colleague is a robot. Is that ok?

Human robot collaboration is a concept under development that will be applied within manufacturing environments in the near future to increase efficiency and quality. While there have been significant advances in technology to enable this progress there is still little known about the wider human factors issues of employing such systems in High Value Manufacturing environments. This paper sets out our current understanding of key organisational and individual factors which need to be explored

The use of job aids for visual inspection in manufacturing and maintenance

Visual inspection is a task regularly seen in manufacturing applications and is still primarily carried out by human operators. This study explored the use of job aids (anything used to assist the operator with the task, such as lists, check sheets or pictures) to assist with visual inspection within a manufacturing facility that inspects used parts. Job aids in the form of inspection manuals were used regularly during the inspection process, and how accurately they were followed was dependent on a number of factors such as size of part, experience of the operator, and accuracy of the inspection manuals. If the job aids were well structured, well written and accessible, then the inspectors were seen to follow them, however for certain jobs inspectors were seen to change the inspection order making inspection more efficient. The findings of the study suggest that prior experience can help in designing efficient, easy to use job aids and that a collaborative approach to design as well as using pictorial examples for comparison purposes would improve the inspection process

The geology and hydrogeology of the New Lead Belt, Missouri

In order to analyze the effects of pumping groundwater from underground lead mines upon present groundwater resources of the New Lead Belt area, the geology and hydrogeology of that area must first be determined. The primary method of investigation of this analysis was interpretation of ecologic and hydrogeologic data taken from water well logs and mineral exploration well logs, with supplemental information supplied by published and unpublished literature sources. From all these sources of data, structural contour maps of the Precambrian erosional surface; the tops of the Lamotte, Bonneterre, and Davis Formations; isopachous maps of the Davis and the Lamotte/Bonneterre Formations; a generalized clastic to carbonate ratio map of the Davis Formation; and a shallow aquifer potentiometric surface map were constructed. Structural contour maps of the Cambrian Lamotte, Bonneterre, and Davis Formations show that the general regional dip of sandstones and dolomites that lap onto Precambrian igneous intrusive and extrusive rocks is toward the southwest, except where influenced by normal faulting and initial dips of as much as 15 to 20 degrees around Precambrian knobs. Isopachous maps of these formations show that thinning and thickening of sediments around a buried Precambrian erosion surface had diminished by the time the Davis Formation was deposited. The clastic to carbonate ratio map of the Davis Formation indicates that there is a lithologic facies change within this formation. The shallow aquifer potentiometric surface map, when compared to the structural contour maps, illustrates that the regional hydrogeologic gradient within the Black River basin is at an oblique angle to the regional geologic gradient. Another prominent feature of this map is the Logan Creek sink located in T. 30 N., R. 1 W. Three hydrogeologic groups have been established to qualitatively evaluate the recharge of groundwater into mines. These groups are the shallow aquifer, the Davis Formation, and the deep aquifer. The concepts of the Davis Formation leaky aquiclude facies and aquifer facies have been introduced in accordance with the variable lithology of the Davis Formation. Using these groups, three primary methods of recharge to the deep aquifer are discussed. These methods are vertical leakage through the Davis Formation leaky aquiclude facies , which includes both intergranular leakage and leakage through faults and fractures; migration of groundwater from the deep aquifer outcrop area; and migration of groundwater down the shallow aquifer gradient to the Davis Formation aquifer facies . Groundwater is being pumped both from the shallow aquifer and deep aquifer. However, the most significant source of pumping within the New Lead Belt area is from mines within the deep aquifer --Abstract, pages ii-iii

Agent and object aware tracking and mapping methods for mobile manipulators

The age of the intelligent machine is upon us. They exist in our factories, our warehouses, our military, our hospitals, on our roads, and on the moon. Most of these things we call robots. When placed in a controlled or known environment such as an automotive factory or a distribution warehouse they perform their given roles with exceptional efficiency, achieving far more than is within reach of a humble human being. Despite the remarkable success of intelligent machines in such domains, they have yet to make a full-hearted deployment into our homes. The missing link between the robots we have now and the robots that are soon to come to our houses is perception. Perception as we mean it here refers to a level of understanding beyond the collection and aggregation of sensory data. Much of the available sensory information is noisy and unreliable, our homes contain many reflective surfaces, repeating textures on large flat surfaces, and many disruptive moving elements, including humans. These environments change over time, with objects frequently moving within and between rooms. This idea of change in an environment is fundamental to robotic applications, as in most cases we expect them to be effectors of such change. We can identify two particular challenges1 that must be solved for robots to make the jump to less structured environments - how to manage noise and disruptive elements in observational data, and how to understand the world as a set of changeable elements (objects) which move over time within a wider environment. In this thesis we look at one possible approach to solving each of these problems. For the first challenge we use proprioception aboard a robot with an articulated arm to handle difficult and unreliable visual data caused both by the robot and the environment. We use sensor data aboard the robot to improve the pose tracking of a visual system when the robot moves rapidly, with high jerk, or when observing a scene with little visual variation. For the second challenge, we build a model of the world on the level of rigid objects, and relocalise them both as they change location between different sequences and as they move. We use semantics, image keypoints, and 3D geometry to register and align objects between sequences, showing how their position has moved between disparate observations.Open Acces

Florida Water Resource Development: A Call for Statewide Leadership

In his article, Florida Water Resource Development: A Call for Statewide Leadership, Charles R. Fletcher argues that Florida\u27s current drought is due to a lack of statewide leadership in water resource planning and development. In discussing how Florida might improve its system, Mr. Fletcher surveys water resource development in North Carolina, New York, Texas, Kansas, Arizona, and California. These states offer alternatives to Florida\u27s current system, and Mr. Fletcher identifies a number of proposals to effectively increase water resource development in Florida without the need for revision of Florida\u27s administrative water use permitting system

Professor Charles Fletcher CBE FRCP in interview with Max Blythe: Interview 1

Part One: Penicillin Professor Charles Fletcher was the first doctor to administer penicillin to a patient, when he was working as a Nuffield research student in Professor Leslie Witt's department in Oxford in 1941. In this interview he discusses Howard Florey's and Ernst Chain's work on the development of penicillin at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford, following its discovery by Alexander Fleming in 1929. Encouraging results obtained from experiments with mice, and increased availability of the drug through improved extraction techniques, led to the first treatment of patients. He then outlines the cases of three patients suffering from bacterial infections, who were given penicillin, and the dramatic results observed. Next, Professor Fletcher tells of the initial scarcity of the drug, and the attempts of Howard Florey and Norman Heatley to interest pharmaceutical companies in America in the large-scale production of penicillin which led to its wider availability. He reflects on how Fleming receiving most of the publicity and credit for penicillin enabled Florey, who shunned publicity, to concentrate on his research and eventually become president of the Royal Society. In the final part of the interview Professor Fletcher discusses the search for other antibiotics, and the impact that the advent of antibiotic treatment of bacterial infections has had on clinical medicine with, for example, the closure of septic wards.Part Two: Television Medicine At the start of the interview, Professor Fletcher reflects on how he became involved in presenting television programmes on medicine for the BBC when he returned to London from Cardiff in 1952, and earlier programmes including 'Matters of Medicine', 'The Hurt Mind', and 'A Question of Science'.The discussion then moves to his involvement with the pioneering series 'Your Life in Their Hands', in which surgical operations were televised, from 1948 to 1962. Although the series had its critics in the medical profession when it began - the British Medical Journal argued that it was harmful to give patients too much information about disease - it proved immensely popular with the public. Also, the medical profession has come to accept the public discussion of medical issues over time. Next, Professor Fletcher speaks of his involvement in programmes aimed at general practitioners, and reflects on the contribution 'Your Life in Their Hands' has made to informing the public and de-mystifying medicine. The interview concludes with a discussion of the contribution television and video can make to medical education

Delusions and prediction error: clarifying the roles of behavioural and brain responses.

Griffiths and colleagues provided a clear and thoughtful review of the prediction error model of delusion formation [Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 2014 April 4 (Epub ahead of print)]. As well as reviewing the central ideas and concluding that the existing evidence base is broadly supportive of the model, they provide a detailed critique of some of the experiments that we have performed to study it. Though they conclude that the shortcomings that they identify in these experiments do not fundamentally challenge the prediction error model, we nevertheless respond to these criticisms. We begin by providing a more detailed outline of the model itself as there are certain important aspects of it that were not covered in their review. We then respond to their specific criticisms of the empirical evidence. We defend the neuroimaging contrasts that we used to explore this model of psychosis arguing that, while any single contrast entails some ambiguity, our assumptions have been justified by our extensive background work before and since.PRC was supported by the Connecticut State Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, an IMHRO/Janssen Rising Star Translational Research Award and CTSA [grant number UL1 TR000142] from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) and the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS), components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NIH road map for Medical Research. PCF is funded by the Wellcome Trust and Bernard Wolfe Health Neuroscience Fund.This is the final published version. It first appeared at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13546805.2014.990625#.VNtjdS6Qne4

The Politics of Municipal Incorporation in South Florida

In the past few years, more affluent unincorporated communities have chosen incorporation, particularly in South Florida. This Article addresses the recent incorporation phenomenon in Florida, examining the causes and effects of the movement. The first part of the Article provides background on the structure of Florida\u27s local government system. Additionally, the Article discusses the advantages of incorporation to Florida\u27s communities, explaining the impetus for this new trend. Next, the Article explores the revenue tax base erosion resulting from these recent incorporations and discusses other problems caused by the incorporation wave. Lastly, the Article presents potential options to assuage the incorporation crisis, examining the advantages and disadvantages of each of these proposals