Integrating case-based reasoning and hypermedia documentation: an application for the diagnosis of a welding robot at Odense steel shipyard

Reliable and effective maintenance support is a vital consideration for the management within today's manufacturing environment. This paper discusses the development of a maintenance system for the world's largest robot welding facility. The development system combines a case-based reasoning approach for diagnosis with context information, as electronic on-line manuals, linked using open hypermedia technology. The work discussed in this paper delivers not only a maintenance system for the robot stations under consideration, but also a design framework for developing maintenance systems for other similar applications

International Deployment of Microbial Pest Control Agents: Falling Between the Cracks of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol?

This paper considers one tangled web of conflicting developments. It involves the popular desire to replace chemical pesticides with more “natural” biological control strategies, plus a slowly emerging awareness of a less benign side to microbial pest control agents, based on their potential invasiveness and sometimes striking similarities to agents of bioterrorism and biological warfare. This desire, however, is overshadowed by concerns about the environmental release of genetically engineered organisms. I argue that as some of the concerns about ecological diversity, as captured by the Convention on Biodiversity, were channeled into the subsequent Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity (Cartagena Protocol) with its emphasis entirely on products of biotechnology, microbial pest control agents have “fallen through the cracks” of international environmental law

The Silver Spring and Blackrock faults, east-central Nevada: Kinematics, timing, and role of low-angle normal faulting in the development of Railroad Valley

The structural development of Railroad Valley, a large and economically important Tertiary basin in east-central Nevada, has been the focus of much debate. This study addresses many of the points of controversy through a detailed geologic study of structures in the southwestern White Pine Range; Detailed geologic mapping and construction of cross-sections reveal both low- and high-angle normal faults. The low-angle faults consist of three bedding-parallel faults, two top-to-the-southwest and one top-to-the-south, and two large displacement (\u3e8 km heave) (26,000 ft) top-to-the-west detachments that denude a range-scale Mesozoic fold. Two spatially distinct groups of high-angle normal faults are present: (1) mostly synchronous faults in the hanging wall of the large-displacement detachments that developed in 3-D strain above non-planar footwalls; and (2) faults within the footwalls of the large-displacement detachments that indicate a counterclockwise rotation in extension direction from east-west to northwest-southeast though time; A structural model is proposed for the southwestern White Pine Range where extension and uplift of the range begins in the Oligocene along low-angle faults, and in the Late Miocene, shifts to high-angle normal faulting. A regional comparison of geometries, kinematics, and timing of major detachment faults suggests that Railroad Valley developed as a result of several distinct structural systems, some of which are separated by transverse faults

Policy instruments in the Common Agricultural Policy

Policy changes in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) can be explained in terms of the exhaustion and long-term contradictions of policy instruments. Changes in policy instruments have reoriented the policy without any change in formal Treaty goals. The social and economic efficacy of instruments in terms of evidence-based policy analysis was a key factor in whether they were delegitimized. The original policy instruments were generally dysfunctional, but reframing the policy in terms of a multifunctionality paradigm permitted the development of more efficacious instruments. A dynamic interaction takes place between the instruments and policy informed by the predominant discourses

New CO detections of lensed submillimeter galaxies in A2218: Probing molecular gas in the LIRG regime at high redshift

Context: Submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) are distant, dusty galaxies undergoing star formation at prodigious rates. Recently there has been major progress in understanding the nature of the bright SMGs (i.e. S(850um)>5mJy). The samples for the fainter SMGs are small and are currently in a phase of being built up through identification studies. Aims: We study the molecular gas content in two SMGs, SMMJ163555 and SMMJ163541, at z=1.034 and z=3.187 with unlensed submm fluxes of 0.4mJy and 6.0mJy. Both SMGs are gravitationally lensed by the foreground cluster A2218. Methods: IRAM Plateau de Bure Interferometry observations at 3mm were obtained for the lines CO(2-1) for SMMJ163555 and CO(3-2) for SMMJ163541. Additionally we obtained CO(4-3) for the candidate z=4.048 SMMJ163556 with an unlensed submm flux of 2.7mJy. Results: CO(2-1) was detected for SMMJ163555 at z=1.0313 with an integrated line intensity of 1.2+-0.2Jy km/s and a line width of 410+-120 km/s. From this a gas mass of 1.6x10^9 Msun is derived and a star formation efficiency of 440Lsun/Msun is estimated. CO(3-2) was detected for SMMJ163541 at z=3.1824, possibly with a second component at z=3.1883, with an integrated line intensity of 1.0+-0.1 Jy km/s and a line width of 280+-50 km/s. From this a gas mass of 2.2x10^10 Msun is derived and a star formation efficiency of 1000 Lsun/Msun is estimated. For SMMJ163556 the CO(4-3) is undetected within the redshift range 4.035-4.082 down to a sensitivity of 0.15 Jy km/s. Conclusions: Our CO line observations confirm the optical redshifts for SMMJ163555 and SMMJ163541. The CO line luminosity L'_CO for both galaxies is consistent with the L_FIR-L'_CO relation. SMMJ163555 has the lowest FIR luminosity of all SMGs with a known redshift and is one of the few high redshift LIRGs whose properties can be estimated prior to ALMA.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. A&A in pres

The Eyes of the Beholder: does responsibility for the lack of quality screenplays really lie at the door of inadequately trained screenwriters?

The relative lack of success for British films in the marketplace is often cited as being rooted in the lack of quality screenplays. As the primary strategic body for film in Britain, the UK Film Council subscribes to this broad analysis and has identified training as one of the key strategies for overcoming this weakness. In this article, I question this assumption and examine to what extent the decision-makers, and the processes of decision-making, themselves are a problem in the development of talent and quality British films

Overrated gaps: Inter-speaker gaps provide limited information about the timing of turns in conversation

Corpus analyses have shown that turn-taking in conversation is much faster than laboratory studies of speech planning would predict. To explain fast turn-taking, Levinson and Torreira (2015) proposed that speakers are highly proactive: They begin to plan a response to their interlocutor's turn as soon as they have understood its gist, and launch this planned response when the turn-end is imminent. Thus, fast turn-taking is possible because speakers use the time while their partner is talking to plan their own utterance. In the present study, we asked how much time upcoming speakers actually have to plan their utterances. Following earlier psycholinguistic work, we used transcripts of spoken conversations in Dutch, German, and English. These transcripts consisted of segments, which are continuous stretches of speech by one speaker. In the psycholinguistic and phonetic literature, such segments have often been used as proxies for turns. We found that in all three corpora, large proportions of the segments comprised of only one or two words, which on our estimate does not give the next speaker enough time to fully plan a response. Further analyses showed that speakers indeed often did not respond to the immediately preceding segment of their partner, but continued an earlier segment of their own. More generally, our findings suggest that speech segments derived from transcribed corpora do not necessarily correspond to turns, and the gaps between speech segments therefore only provide limited information about the planning and timing of turns