FIDO-Class Development Rover

A report describes a rover-type robotic wheeled vehicle recently built for use as a testbed for development of software for future rover-type vehicles. This vehicle is a derivative of the Field Integrated Design and Operations (FIDO) rover, which is a prototype Mars-exploration rover that also serves as a terrestrial testbed. The present vehicle was designed to be nearly functionally identical to the FIDO rover but to be built at much lower cost and to incorporate several improvements to increase utility for development work. Accordingly, considerable effort was made to use commercial off-the-shelf parts and other parts that could be fabricated easily and at low cost. Important features of this vehicle include six-wheel drive and six-wheel steering; onboard computer and power, control, and data-communication electronics having flexibility needed for development of software; significantly increased maximum speed (60 cm/s versus 6 cm/s for the FIDO rover); a rocker-bogey suspension with external differential link, functionally equivalent to that of the FIDO rover; and a hand-held remote controller that can be used to control vehicle motion manually without using the computer (or while waiting for the onboard computer to boot up)

Text Mining for Protein Docking

The rapidly growing amount of publicly available information from biomedical research is readily accessible on the Internet, providing a powerful resource for predictive biomolecular modeling. The accumulated data on experimentally determined structures transformed structure prediction of proteins and protein complexes. Instead of exploring the enormous search space, predictive tools can simply proceed to the solution based on similarity to the existing, previously determined structures. A similar major paradigm shift is emerging due to the rapidly expanding amount of information, other than experimentally determined structures, which still can be used as constraints in biomolecular structure prediction. Automated text mining has been widely used in recreating protein interaction networks, as well as in detecting small ligand binding sites on protein structures. Combining and expanding these two well-developed areas of research, we applied the text mining to structural modeling of protein-protein complexes (protein docking). Protein docking can be significantly improved when constraints on the docking mode are available. We developed a procedure that retrieves published abstracts on a specific protein-protein interaction and extracts information relevant to docking. The procedure was assessed on protein complexes from Dockground (http://dockground.compbio.ku.edu). The results show that correct information on binding residues can be extracted for about half of the complexes. The amount of irrelevant information was reduced by conceptual analysis of a subset of the retrieved abstracts, based on the bag-of-words (features) approach. Support Vector Machine models were trained and validated on the subset. The remaining abstracts were filtered by the best-performing models, which decreased the irrelevant information for ~ 25% complexes in the dataset. The extracted constraints were incorporated in the docking protocol and tested on the Dockground unbound benchmark set, significantly increasing the docking success rate

What makes Xanthomonas albilineans unique amongst xanthomonads?

Xanthomonas albilineans causes leaf scald, a lethal disease of sugarcane. Compared to other species of Xanthomonas, X. albilineans exhibits distinctive pathogenic mechanisms, ecology and taxonomy. Its genome, which has experienced significant erosion, has unique genomic features. It lacks two loci required for pathogenicity in other plant pathogenic species of Xanthomonas: the xanthan gum biosynthesis and the Hrp-T3SS (hypersensitive response and pathogenicity-type three secretion system) gene clusters. Instead, X. albilineans harbors in its genome an SPI-1 (Salmonella pathogenicity island-1) T3SS gene cluster usually found in animal pathogens. X. albilineans produces a potent DNA gyrase inhibitor called albicidin, which blocks chloroplast differentiation, resulting in the characteristic white foliar stripe symptoms. The antibacterial activity of albicidin also confers on X. albilineans a competitive advantage against rival bacteria during sugarcane colonization. Recent chemical studies have uncovered the unique structure of albicidin and allowed us to partially elucidate its fascinating biosynthesis apparatus, which involves an enigmatic hybrid PKS/NRPS (polyketide synthase/non-ribosomal peptide synthetase) machinery

Browser-Based Application for Telemetry Monitoring of Robotic Assets

AEGSE Virtuoso Charting is an application that enables animated, real-time charting of telemetry streams of data from a rover. These automatically scaled charts are completely interactive, and allow users to choose the variables that they want to monitor. The charts can process data from streams with many variables. This application allows for the simultaneous viewing of up to four individually configured charts on a small touch-screen laptop. The charting application has been tested and found to be extremely robust during long operations. It was left running overnight, with incoming telemetry at 100 Hz, and it did not experience any signs of lost functionality or memory leaks. This robustness is critical for an application that will be used to support vital tests for the Mars Science Laboratory rover. The charting component also provides an interactive interface that allows the engineers to decide how many charts they want on their screen, and which attributes should be plotted on each chart. The application is optimized to make the charts on display take up as much of the available space as possible to maximize the use of the screen real estate. Engineers are also able to plot multiple attributes on the same chart, which enables them to observe the correlation between various attributes

KLJUČNI POKAZATELJI USPJEŠNOSTI PROCESA ZAŠTITE ZDRAVLJA, SIGURNOSTI NA RADU I ZAŠTITE OKOLIŠA

U suvremenom poslovanju i upravljanju poslovnim procesima standardizacija svih postupaka omogućava stvaranje do-datne vrijednosti, konkurentnosti i uspješnosti u poslovanju organizacije. U tom smislu primjena ključnih pokazatelja uspješnosti za upravljanje zaštitom zdravlja, sigurnošću na radu i zaštitom okoliša (HSE) pridonosi razvoju učinkovitih i djelotvornih modela upravljanja područjem HSE. U radu je prikazana analiza teorijskih postavki zaštite zdravlja, si-gurnosti na radu, zaštite okoliša te ključnih pokazatelja uspješnosti (KPI). KPI pomažu organizaciji definirati i mjeriti napredak prema postavljenim organizacijskim ciljevima. Za učinkovito mjerenje KPI neophodno je postavljanje poslov-nih ciljeva. Ciljevi poslovanja moraju biti specifični, mjerljivi, ostvarivi, svrsishodni i vremenski određeni. Na temelju provedene analize prepoznate su mogućnosti na osnovu kojih su određeni KPI za procese HSE. Praćenje i mjerenje KPI u području zaštite zdravlja, sigurnosti na radu i zaštite okoliša provodi se temeljem postavljenih ciljeva, a direktno u-tječe na poboljšanje učinkovitosti i djelotvornosti HSE. Obzirom da je područje HSE jedan od pokazatelja uspješnog po-slovanja organizacije, možemo konstatirati da utvrđivanje i mjerenje KPI u području zaštite zdravlja, sigurnosti na ra-du i zaštite okoliša pomaže u postizanju poslovnih ciljeva organizacije

KLJUČNI POKAZATELJI USPJEŠNOSTI PROCESA ZAŠTITE ZDRAVLJA, SIGURNOSTI NA RADU I ZAŠTITE OKOLIŠA

U suvremenom poslovanju i upravljanju poslovnim procesima standardizacija svih postupaka omogućava stvaranje do-datne vrijednosti, konkurentnosti i uspješnosti u poslovanju organizacije. U tom smislu primjena ključnih pokazatelja uspješnosti za upravljanje zaštitom zdravlja, sigurnošću na radu i zaštitom okoliša (HSE) pridonosi razvoju učinkovitih i djelotvornih modela upravljanja područjem HSE. U radu je prikazana analiza teorijskih postavki zaštite zdravlja, si-gurnosti na radu, zaštite okoliša te ključnih pokazatelja uspješnosti (KPI). KPI pomažu organizaciji definirati i mjeriti napredak prema postavljenim organizacijskim ciljevima. Za učinkovito mjerenje KPI neophodno je postavljanje poslov-nih ciljeva. Ciljevi poslovanja moraju biti specifični, mjerljivi, ostvarivi, svrsishodni i vremenski određeni. Na temelju provedene analize prepoznate su mogućnosti na osnovu kojih su određeni KPI za procese HSE. Praćenje i mjerenje KPI u području zaštite zdravlja, sigurnosti na radu i zaštite okoliša provodi se temeljem postavljenih ciljeva, a direktno u-tječe na poboljšanje učinkovitosti i djelotvornosti HSE. Obzirom da je područje HSE jedan od pokazatelja uspješnog po-slovanja organizacije, možemo konstatirati da utvrđivanje i mjerenje KPI u području zaštite zdravlja, sigurnosti na ra-du i zaštite okoliša pomaže u postizanju poslovnih ciljeva organizacije

An evaluation of Bradfordizing effects

The purpose of this paper is to apply and evaluate the bibliometric method Bradfordizing for information retrieval (IR) experiments. Bradfordizing is used for generating core document sets for subject-specific questions and to reorder result sets from distributed searches. The method will be applied and tested in a controlled scenario of scientific literature databases from social and political sciences, economics, psychology and medical science (SOLIS, SoLit, USB Köln Opac, CSA Sociological Abstracts, World Affairs Online, Psyndex and Medline) and 164 standardized topics. An evaluation of the method and its effects is carried out in two laboratory-based information retrieval experiments (CLEF and KoMoHe) using a controlled document corpus and human relevance assessments. The results show that Bradfordizing is a very robust method for re-ranking the main document types (journal articles and monographs) in today’s digital libraries (DL). The IR tests show that relevance distributions after re-ranking improve at a significant level if articles in the core are compared with articles in the succeeding zones. The items in the core are significantly more often assessed as relevant, than items in zone 2 (z2) or zone 3 (z3). The improvements between the zones are statistically significant based on the Wilcoxon signed-rank test and the paired T-Test