Considerations Affecting Satellite and Space Probe Research with Emphasis on the "Scout" as a Launch Vehicle

This report reviews a number of the factors which influence space flight experiments. Included are discussions of payload considerations, payload design and packaging, environmental tests, launch facilities, tracking and telemetry requirements, data acquisition, processing and analysis procedures, communication of information, and project management. Particular emphasis is placed on the "Scout" as a launching vehicle. The document includes a description of the geometry of the "Scout" as well as its flight capabilities and limitations. Although oriented toward the "Scout" vehicle and its payload capabilities, the information presented is sufficiently general to be equally applicable to most space vehicle systems

Moral and Legal Rhetoric in International Relations: A Rational Choice Perspective

Critics of realist and rational choice approaches to international law argue that if nations were motivated entirely by power or self-interest, their leaders would not make moral and legal arguments because no one would believe them. Thus, the prevalence of moral and legal rhetoric on the international stage refutes the behavioral assumptions of realism and rational choice. This paper argues that even if nations are not motivated by a desire to comply with morality or law, the use of moral and legal arguments could occur in equilibrium. Signaling and cheap talk models show that nations may engage in talk in order (1) to deflect suspicion that they have unstable political systems or adversarial interests, and (2) to coordinate when gains from coordination are available. International talk is often moral and legal because the obligational vocabulary of moral and legal dispute between individuals is also useful for purely amoral strategic interactions when cooperation and coordination are involved. The existence of moral and legal rhetoric in international relations is the result of strategic incentives, not of the desire to comply with morality or law

Further Thoughts on Customary International Law

In two earlier articles, the tools of game theory were used to sketch a positive theoretical account of customary international law ( CIL ). This theory rejected as question-begging the usual explanations of CIL based on legality, morality, opinio juris, and related concepts. It was argued instead that CIL emerges from nations\u27 pursuit of self-interested policies on the international stage. This approach helps explain many overlooked features of CIL, including how CIL originates and changes, why the content of CIL tracks the interest of powerful nations, and why nations change their views of CIL when their interests change. Finally, the practices associated with four supposedly well-settled rules of CIL were examined, and it was concluded that this theory better explained these practices than competing theories

Resistance Tests of a 1/16 Size Model of the Hughes-kaiser Flying Boat, NACA Model 183

Tank tests were made of a hull model of the Hughes-Kaiser cargo airplane for estimates of take-off performance and maximum gross load for take-off. At hump speeds, with the model free to trim, the trim and resistance were high, which resulted in a load-resistance ratio of approximately 4.0 for a gross load coefficient of 0.75. With a 4000,000-lb load, the full size craft may take off in 69 sec over a distance of 5600 ft

RAMP: a benchmark for evaluating robotic assembly manipulation and planning

We introduce RAMP, an open-source robotics benchmark inspired by real-world industrial assembly tasks. RAMP consists of beams that a robot must assemble into specified goal configurations using pegs as fasteners. As such, it assesses planning and execution capabilities, and poses challenges in perception, reasoning, manipulation, diagnostics, fault recovery, and goal parsing. RAMP has been designed to be accessible and extensible. Parts are either 3D printed or otherwise constructed from materials that are readily obtainable. The design of parts and detailed instructions are publicly available. In order to broaden community engagement, RAMP incorporates fixtures such as April Tags which enable researchers to focus on individual sub-tasks of the assembly challenge if desired. We provide a full digital twin as well as rudimentary baselines to enable rapid progress. Our vision is for RAMP to form the substrate for a community-driven endeavour that evolves as capability matures

DreamUp3D: object-centric generative models for single-view 3D scene understanding and real-to-sim transfer

3D scene understanding for robotic applications exhibits a unique set of requirements including real-time inference, object-centric latent representation learning, accurate 6D pose estimation and 3D reconstruction of objects. Current methods for scene understanding typically rely on a combination of trained models paired with either an explicit or learnt volumetric representation, all of which have their own drawbacks and limitations. We introduce DreamUp3D , a novel Object-Centric Generative Model (OCGM) designed explicitly to perform inference on a 3D scene informed only by a single RGB-D image. DreamUp3D is a self-supervised model, trained end-to-end, and is capable of segmenting objects, providing 3D object reconstructions, generating object-centric latent representations and accurate per-object 6D pose estimates. We compare DreamUp3D to baselines including NeRFs, pre-trained CLIP-features, ObSurf, and ObPose, in a range of tasks including 3D scene reconstruction, object-matching and object pose estimation. Our experiments show that our model outperforms all baselines by a significant margin in real-world scenarios displaying its applicability for 3D scene understanding tasks while meeting the strict demands exhibited in robotics applications

Introspective physicalism as an approach to the science of consciousness

Most ‘theories of consciousness’ are based on vague speculations about the properties of conscious experience. We aim to provide a more solid basis for a science of consciousness. We argue that a theory of consciousness should provide an account of the very processes that allow us to acquire and use information about our own mental states – the processes underlying introspection. This can be achieved through the construction of information processing models that can account for ‘Type-C’ processes. Type-C processes can be specified experimentally by identifying paradigms in which awareness of the stimulus is necessary for an intentional action. The Shallice (1988b) framework is put forward as providing an initial account of Type-C processes, which can relate perceptual consciousness to consciously performed actions. Further, we suggest that this framework may be refined through the investigation of the functions of prefrontal cortex. The formulation of our approach requires us to consider fundamental conceptual and methodological issues associated with consciousness. The most significant of these issues concerns the scientific use of introspective evidence. We outline and justify a conservative methodological approach to the use of introspective evidence, with attention to the difficulties historically associated with its use in psychology