Star forming regions of the southern galaxy

A catalog of southern dust cloud properties is being compiled to aid in the planning and analysis of radio spectral line surveys in the southern hemisphere. Ultimately, images of dust temperature and column density will be produced. For the interim, a list of the 60 and 100 micron fluxes was prepared for the cores and adjacent backgrounds of 65 prominent dust clouds. Dust temperatures and column densities were derived

Corporate Management of Highly Dynamic Risks: The Case of Terrorism Insurance in Germany

This article extends the theory of corporate risk management to encompass highly dynamic risks. Taking Viscusi'�s (1989) prospective reference from the context of individual decision making and applying it to a corporate context we propose a theory of how corporations process new information. Using unique data on all terrorism insurance policies sold in Germany we find support for this concept of risk-updating by showing that the demand for terrorism insurance is strongly determined by the recent occurrence of terrorist attacks.Corporate Insurance, Risk Management, Terrorism Insurance, Expected Utility, Prospect Theory

Combinaison de codeurs par algorithme génétique : Application à la vérification du locuteur

Le domaine de la vérification du locuteur regroupe les applications pour lesquelles on désire identifier l'identité d'une personne à partir de sa voix. Le champ d'application couvre de nombreux secteurs tels que l'accès sécurisé, les transactions téléphoniques, la surveillance, l'indexation audio ou encore l'expertise judiciaire. Notre étude porte sur l'étape d'extraction de caractéristiques du système de reconnaissance du locuteur. Ce module a pour fonction d'extraire du signal de parole les informations pertinentes du point de vue de la discrimination inter-locuteur. Nous proposons dans cet article d'utiliser un algorithme génétique pour optimiser un système d'extraction de caractéristiques adapté à la reconnaissance du locuteur. La méthode proposée permet d'obtenir une amélioration significative du taux de reconnaissance sur la base Nist SRE 2005

Tabaquismo en la consulta de enfermería de atención primaria

La Sociedad Científica Española de Enfermería –SCELE, ha realizado en la Facultad de Ciencias de la Salud de la Universidad de Alicante, los días 9 y 10 de Junio de 2016, el VIII Congreso Nacional SCELE, bajo el lema: "LIDERAZGO DE ENFERMERÍA EN LA GESTIÓN DE CUIDADOS EN LA CRONICIDAD". Se ofrece el acceso a los Resúmenes de las Comunicaciones Científicas Orales y Posters presentadas y defendidas en el trascurso del mencionado Congreso, en sus distintas categorías: estudios de investigación, proyectos de investigación y casos de cuidados

"The trauma of competition": the entry of Air Products Inc. into the industrial gases business in Britain and continental Europe 1947-1970

The British Oxygen Company (BOC) had a virtual monopoly on the supply of industrial gases (e.g. oxygen and acetylene) on the British market through the 1950s, when it was finally challenged by an American-based company, Air Products. Air Products Limited (APL) was able to undercut BOCs position, overcoming high barriers to entry to gain significant market share in this sector, which shares some features of network industries. Factors in this success included conditions imposed by the Board of Trade, APL’s innovations, BOC’s slow response, and favourable market conditions. APL’s success had implications for the internationalisation of the industrial gases industry

Learning agent's spatial configuration from sensorimotor invariants

The design of robotic systems is largely dictated by our purely human intuition about how we perceive the world. This intuition has been proven incorrect with regard to a number of critical issues, such as visual change blindness. In order to develop truly autonomous robots, we must step away from this intuition and let robotic agents develop their own way of perceiving. The robot should start from scratch and gradually develop perceptual notions, under no prior assumptions, exclusively by looking into its sensorimotor experience and identifying repetitive patterns and invariants. One of the most fundamental perceptual notions, space, cannot be an exception to this requirement. In this paper we look into the prerequisites for the emergence of simplified spatial notions on the basis of a robot's sensorimotor flow. We show that the notion of space as environment-independent cannot be deduced solely from exteroceptive information, which is highly variable and is mainly determined by the contents of the environment. The environment-independent definition of space can be approached by looking into the functions that link the motor commands to changes in exteroceptive inputs. In a sufficiently rich environment, the kernels of these functions correspond uniquely to the spatial configuration of the agent's exteroceptors. We simulate a redundant robotic arm with a retina installed at its end-point and show how this agent can learn the configuration space of its retina. The resulting manifold has the topology of the Cartesian product of a plane and a circle, and corresponds to the planar position and orientation of the retina.Comment: 26 pages, 5 images, published in Robotics and Autonomous System