Is Polder-Type Governance Good for You?: Laissez-Faire Intervention, Wage Restraint, And Dutch Steel

This paper searches for the origins of the relatively successful performance of Hoogovens, the only sizeable steel firm in the Netherlands. It is suggested that Hoogovens has at critical moments benefited substantially from both strategic and financial support, but was basically left to decide its own policies. Luckily, it mostly opted for 'right' policies so that the industry's decline hit less hard in the Netherlands than elsewhere thus making it less necessary to develop emergency programmes. More specifically, Hoogovens chose to diversify into the aluminium market at a relatively early stage, and it broke up its merger with Germany's Hoesch. However, Hoogovens also benefited from the Polder Model's emphasis on wage restraint as much of the firm's output is exported. Moreover, corporatist welfare arrangements allowed Hoogovens to shed labour without causing extraordinary unrest. It is concluded that the success of 'laissez-faire intervention' heavily depends on the qualities of the supported firm's management. Polder-type governance in terms of wages and labour has beneficial effects in the short run, may but retard innovation

Collision-free inverse kinematics of a 7 link cucumber picking robot

The paper presents results of research on inverse kinematics algorithms to be used in a functional model of a cucumber harvesting robot consisting of a redundant manipulator with one prismatic and six rotational joints (P6R). Within a first generic approach, the inverse kinematics problem was reformulated as a non-linear programming problem and solved with a generic algorithm. Solutions were easily obtained, but the considerable calculation time needed to solve the problem prevented on line implementation. To circumvent this problem, a second, less generic approach was developed consisting of a mixed numerical-analytic solution of the inverse kinematics problem exploiting the particular structure of the P6R manipulator. This approach facilitated rapid and robust calculation of the inverse kinematics of the cucumber harvester. During the early stages of the cucumber harvesting project, this inverse kinematics algorithm was used to off-line evaluate the ability of the robot to harvest cucumbers using 3D-information of a cucumber crop obtained in a real greenhouse. Thereafter, the algorithm was employed successfully in a functional model of the cucumber harvester to determine if cucumbers were hanging within the reachable workspace of the robot and to determine a collision-free harvest posture to be used for motion control of the manipulator during harvesting

№ 11. Виписка з протоколу засідання судової трійки при Колегії ДПУ УСРР стосовно П. Вишневського від 24 лютого 1930 р.

Публікація Д. Бойко, І. Бухарєвої, С. Кокіна, П. Кулаковського