Users manual for the US baseline corn and soybean segment classification procedure

A user's manual for the classification component of the FY-81 U.S. Corn and Soybean Pilot Experiment in the Foreign Commodity Production Forecasting Project of AgRISTARS is presented. This experiment is one of several major experiments in AgRISTARS designed to measure and advance the remote sensing technologies for cropland inventory. The classification procedure discussed is designed to produce segment proportion estimates for corn and soybeans in the U.S. Corn Belt (Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois) using LANDSAT data. The estimates are produced by an integrated Analyst/Machine procedure. The Analyst selects acquisitions, participates in stratification, and assigns crop labels to selected samples. In concert with the Analyst, the machine digitally preprocesses LANDSAT data to remove external effects, stratifies the data into field like units and into spectrally similar groups, statistically samples the data for Analyst labeling, and combines the labeled samples into a final estimate

Wicked facets of the German energy transition – examples from the electricity, heating, transport, and industry sectors

We shed light on wicked problems in the German energy transition. Our methods consist of a multiple-case study and multi-criteria analysis, utilising the wicked problems theoretical framework introduced by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber [1973. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4 (2): 155–169. Accessed August 20, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730]. Results from the energy supply, heating/cooling, transport, and industry sectors illustrate where and how the 10-point frame of wicked problems manifests in the German energy transition. The four cases exhibit more wicked tendencies in the governance domain than the technical domain and differ in their degrees of technology maturity, policy regulation, and knowledge states. We do not find that the German energy transition is inherently wicked. However, wickedness unfolds through the social setting into which technical solutions of the energy transition are embedded. We aim to highlight these intricacies and encourage scrutinising these wicked facets early on

A Smart Robotic System for Industrial Plant Supervision

In today's chemical plants, human field operators perform frequent integrity checks to guarantee high safety standards, and thus are possibly the first to encounter dangerous operating conditions. To alleviate their task, we present a system consisting of an autonomously navigating robot integrated with various sensors and intelligent data processing. It is able to detect methane leaks and estimate its flow rate, detect more general gas anomalies, recognize oil films, localize sound sources and detect failure cases, map the environment in 3D, and navigate autonomously, employing recognition and avoidance of dynamic obstacles. We evaluate our system at a wastewater facility in full working conditions. Our results demonstrate that the system is able to robustly navigate the plant and provide useful information about critical operating conditions.Comment: Final submission for IEEE Sensors 202

Wicked facets of the German energy transition – examples from the electricity, heating, transport, and industry sectors

We shed light on wicked problems in the German energy transition. Our methods consist of a multiple-case study and multi-criteria analysis, utilising the wicked problems theoretical framework introduced by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber [1973. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4 (2): 155–169. Accessed August 20, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730]. Results from the energy supply, heating/cooling, transport, and industry sectors illustrate where and how the 10-point frame of wicked problems manifests in the German energy transition. The four cases exhibit more wicked tendencies in the governance domain than the technical domain and differ in their degrees of technology maturity, policy regulation, and knowledge states. We do not find that the German energy transition is inherently wicked. However, wickedness unfolds through the social setting into which technical solutions of the energy transition are embedded. We aim to highlight these intricacies and encourage scrutinising these wicked facets early on