The impact of Scholasticism and Protestantism on Ulrich Huber’s views on constitutionalism and tyranny

Ulrich Huber’s (1636-1694) contribution to public law was initiated with his lectures on the general principles of constitutional law at Franeker. The fruits of his work culminated in his De Jure Civitatis. The era in which Huber produced this work was generally characterized by the emergence of rationalism and enlightenment in Dutch jurisprudence. More specifically Huber’s work reflects the influence of the transition from enlightened absolutism to democratic government based on the will of the subjects. His views on popular sovereignty culminated in Huber’s theory of limited government and resistance to tyranny. A study of the Latin text of Huber’s pioneering work reveals valuable perspectives on these trends in the transition of Dutch jurisprudence from scholasticism to enlightenment

Integration of inverter constraints in geometrical quantification of the optimal solution to an MPC controller

Published Conference ProceedingsThis paper considers a model predictive controller with reference tracking that manipulates the integer switch positions of a power converter. It can be shown that the optimal switch position can be computed without solving an optimization problem. Specifically, in a new coordinate system, the optimization problem can be solved offline, leading to a polyhedral partition of the solution space. The optimal switch position can then be found using a binary search tree. This concept is exemplified for a three-level single-phase converter with an RL load

The development of a computer driver jigsaw

With a jigsaw, sharp inside corners can only be sawn out if the blade of the jigsaw is lifted out of the material and the corner is approached from two different sides. For the blade to be able to re-enter the material no material must be present at the entry point. The most important feature of an automated jigsaw is that it should be able to round off inside corners on a contour and automatically return to these corners to remove material left between the round off and the contour. With this development project an automated jigsaw machine was designed, built and tested. Emphasis fell on the development of software that enables one to draw contours that need to be sawn out, change these contours into cutter paths for the jigsaw and transform the cutter paths into digital format necessary to control the jigsaw machine via the parallel port of a personal computer.‘n Figuursaag kan slegs skerp binnehoeke saag as die lem uit die materiaal uitgelig word en die hoek van twee kante af gesaag word. Waar die lem weer in die materiaal ingaan, mag geen materiaal aanwesig wees nie. Die belangrikste eienskap van ‘n ge-outomatiseerde figuursaag is dat kontoere so gesaag moet word dat binnehoeke afgerond kan word en die materiaal tussen die afronding en die gewensde kontoer outomaties verwyder moet word. Met hierdie ontwikkelingsprojek, is ‘n ge-outomatiseerde figuursaag ontwerp, gebou en getoets. Die klem van die projek val op die ontwikkeling van sagteware waarmee kontoere wat uitgesaag moet word, geteken kan word, omgeskakel kan word in ‘n snyerpad vir die saaglem en gebruik kan word vir digitale beheer van die saagmasjien deur gebruik te maak van die parallelpoort van ‘n persoonlike rekenaar.http://sajie.journals.ac.z

Dinosaur tracks in Triassic Molteno sediments: the earliest evidence of dinosaurs in South Africa?

A fossil tracksite containing well-preserved tridactyl footprints of bipedal theropod dinosaurs is reported from fluvial overbank deposits of Molteno age (Stormberg Group: Triassic) in the northeastern Cape Province, South Africa. They occur stratigraphically below the mudrocks of the Elliot Formation, in which dinosaur remains are comparatively common, and are taken to represent the earliest evidence for dinosaurs in South Africa. They also represent the earliest unequivocal evidence of tetrapods in Molteno deposits.Foundation for Research Development; Trustees of the Port Elizabeth Museu

A fossil peat deposit from the Late Triassic (Carnian) of Zimbabwe with preserved cuticle of Pteridospermopsida and Ginkgoales, and its geological setting

Well-preserved cuticular material of Pteridospermopsida and Ginkgoales from the Late Triassic of Zimbabwe is described here for the first time. It is preserved within a brown peat-like lens in the Upper Karoo Angwa Sandstone Formation. The locality is on the Manyima River in the lower portion of the mid-Zambezi Valley of Zimbabwe. Using SEM and light microscopy to identify the taxa, the fragmentary cuticles are of Pteridospermopsida type and have been assigned to Lepidopteris sp. (Peltaspermales) and Dicroidium sp. A, B, (Corystospermales). Cuticles of the ginkgoalean leaf genus, Sphenobaiera, are also described. Well-preserved ovules were found in close association with the cuticles, but as the stomata are not visible they cannot be assigned to any genus. Based on their close similarity to the Dicroidium flora of the South African Upper Karoo, the plants are considered to be equivalent to the South African Molteno Formation in age (Carnian). The palynoflora supports this age bracket, as does fauna preserved nearby. The taphonomic process was one of transport, sorting and deposition in a fluvial system.The CNRS-NRF agreement between France and South Afric

Ulcerative pododermatitis in free-ranging African elephant (Loxodonta africana) in the Kruger National Park

The occurrence of severe lameness in adult African elephant bulls in a shrub Mopane (Colophospermum mopane) ecosystem was investigated. Large ulcers in the soles of at least one front foot were seen in each of the recorded cases. Microscopically, the lesion can be described as a severe, chronic-active, ulcerative, bacterial pododermatitis (complicated by hypersensitivity/septic vasculitis). A variety of bacteria were isolated from these lesions as well as from regional lymph nodes. Streptococcus agalactiae was the most consistent isolate, while Dichelobacter nodosus, the only organism known to be involved with foot disease in domestic ruminants, was isolated from two cases. Contributory factors such as body mass, portal of entry and origin of potential pathogens may have predisposed to the development of the lesions.The articles have been scanned in colour with a HP Scanjet 5590; 600dpi. Adobe Acrobat X Pro was used to OCR the text and also for the merging and conversion to the final presentation PDF-format

Positive plant–plant interactions expand the upper distributional limits of some vascular plant species

Biotic interactions can shape species’ distributions through their impact on species’ realized niches, potentially constraining or expanding the range of conditions under which species occur. We examine whether fine-scale plant–plant interactions scale up to shape broad-scale species’ distributions, using Azorella selago, a widespread cushion plant that facilitates other species, and the rest of the vascular flora of sub-Antarctic Marion Island as a model system. We compared the upper elevational distributional limit of each species when growing on vs. away from A. selago to test how the interaction with this cushion plant species affects species’ ranges. Three out of 19 vascular plant species occurred at higher altitudes in the presence of A. selago than in the absence of A. selago: Acaena magellanica (+26 m higher), Colobanthus kerguelensis (+37 m higher), and Lycopodium saururus (+19 m higher). Therefore, A. selago’s fine-scale impacts scaled up to shape the distribution of a subset of the vascular flora of Marion Island. Plant–plant interactions thus have the potential to expand species upper distributional limits by increasing the niche space that a species can occupy, although the influence of these interactions may be strongly species-specific.The South African National Antarctic Program, the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the Swiss National Science Foundation.http://www.esajournals.org/loi/ecspam2020Plant Production and Soil Scienc

A robust mixed-effects parametric quantile regression model for continuous proportions : quantifying the constraints to vitality in cushion plants

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT : The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.There is no literature on outlier-robust parametric mixed-effects quantile regression models for continuous proportion data as an alternative to systematically identifying and eliminating outliers. To fill this gap, we formulate a robust method by extending the recently proposed fixed-effects quantile regression model based on the heavy-tailed Johnson-t distribution for continuous proportion data to the mixed-effects modeling context, using a Bayesian approach. Our proposed method is motivated by and used to model the extreme quantiles of the vitality of cushion plants to provide insights into the ecology of the system in which the plants are dominant. We conducted a simulation study to assess the new method’s performance and robustness to outliers. We show that the new model has good accuracy and confidence interval coverage properties and is remarkably robust to outliers. In contrast, our study demonstrates that the current approach in the literature for modeling hierarchically structured bounded data’s quantiles is susceptible to outliers, especially when modeling the extreme quantiles. We conclude that the proposed model is an appropriate robust alternative to the cur-rent approach for modeling the quantiles of correlated continuous proportions when outliers are present in the data.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679574am2024Plant Production and Soil ScienceStatisticsNon