Reply: Prof. Ulrich Weidmann

The Fast Transit on Request (FTR) vision is enticing: a very comfortable bus bringing each passenger rapidly, directly and comfortably to their destination - no annoying waiting and transferring necessary! Unfortunately, the concept has the following problems when viewed holistically

Quantifying the reliability of fault classifiers

International audienceFault diagnostics problems can be formulated as classification tasks. Due to limited data and to uncertainty, classification algorithms are not perfectly accurate in practical applications. Maintenance decisions based on erroneous fault classifications result in inefficient resource allocations and/or operational disturbances. Thus, knowing the accuracy of classifiers is important to give confidence in the maintenance decisions. The average accuracy of a classifier on a test set of data patterns is often used as a measure of confidence in the performance of a specific classifier. However, the performance of a classifier can vary in different regions of the input data space. Several techniques have been proposed to quantify the reliability of a classifier at the level of individual classifications. Many of the proposed techniques are only applicable to specific classifiers, such as ensemble techniques and support vector machines. In this paper, we propose a meta approach based on the typicalness framework (Kolmogorov's concept of randomness), which is independent of the applied classifier. We apply the approach to a case of fault diagnosis in railway turnout systems and compare the results obtained with both extreme learning machines and echo state networks

Komiks w czasach niekoniecznie normalnych

Artykuł przedstawia zarys dziejów komiksu w Polsce od 1956 roku po współczesność, stawia tezy dotyczące przyczyn zachodzących wówczas zmian, odnosi się krytycznie do ocen ówczesnego dorobku komiksowegoSzyłak outlines the history of the comic book in Poland since 1956 and tries to account for the shifts that marked the development of this form of cultural production. He also presents a critical perspective on the evaluation of comic books in the past

Wie sind die Vorschläge der Hartz-Kommission zu beurteilen?

Nach den Vorstellungen des Vorsitzenden und Namensgebers der Hartz-Kommission kann die Arbeitslosigkeit in nur drei Jahren halbiert werden. Ist dieses ehrgeizige Ziel zu erreichen? Welche Rolle spielt dabei die Ausgestaltung der Arbeitslosenversicherung? Was ist von den Vorschlägen der Hartz-Kommission zu halten? --

The Metrology Enhanced Tooling for Aerospace (META) Framework

Railway traffic management is the process of executing production plans, supervising traffic, detecting conflicts, and applying dispatching measures to resolve them. The activity space of traffic managers is constrained by infrastructure, rolling stock, and operations related features and rules. These constraints result in functional requirements that mathematical models should satisfy to be useful to support realtime traffic management. First, this paper identifies and describes these requirements. Second, it presents an overview of the most prominent mathematical formulations for timetabling and rescheduling in the literature. Using sample scheduling problems, it highlights how individual train runs and interactions are represented. The similarities and the differences among the formulations are strengthened to distinguish two main categories of models. Finally, the models are analysed with respect to the functional requirements from real-time traffic management. As expected, off-line scheduling models do not satisfy the requirements related to real-time monitoring and intervention. In contrast, on-line models satisfy most requirements. In particular, there are two rescheduling models that satisfy all functional requirements: the Resource Con- flict Graph and an extension of the Alternative Graph

Identification of Tilapia Lake Virus in Egypt in Nile tilapia affected by 'summer mortality' syndrome

Egyptian fish farms have faced unexplained mortality of tilapia during the summer months in recent years. Epidemiological surveys indicated that 37% of fish farms were affected in 2015 with an average mortality rate of 9.2% and a potential economic impact of around US$ 100 million. Despite a number of researchers and organizations investigating potential causes results so far have been inconclusive. Meanwhile recent reports emerged of the presence of a new orthomyxovirus, Tilapia Lake Virus (TiLV) in Israel, which shares a border and migrating avifauna with Egypt. Tissue samples from seven farms affected by ‘summer mortality’ were tested at the University of Stirling for TiLV. Samples from three of seven farms tested positive using PCR; the first time that TiLV has been identified in Egypt. Sequence analysis yielded a TiLV sequence with 93% homology to the published TiLV sequence described from Israel. More research is required to determine if TiLV is linked to ‘summer mortality’

Investigation of influence factors on residual stress determination within coated surfaces in consideration of the differential and integral method

Abstract. To improve the surface behavior of metal structures, like wear-and heat resistance or hardness, often thermally sprayed ceramic coatings are applied. A modern technology to realize dense layers is the High Velocity Oxygen Fuel (HVOF) technique. The deposition process and necessary pretreatments can cause high residual stresses within the coating and the substrate. While tensile stresses in the brittle coating may cause cracks, compressive stress states can even improve the materials behavior. To guarantee high product quality, it is necessary to know exactly the occurring residual stresses in the metal-ceramic hybrid system. A very common measurement technique is the incremental hole drilling (IHD) method. To determine the residual stresses out of IHD measurements the differential method (DM) or integral method (IM) can be used. To investigate the influence of interfacial layers, nonlinear stresses, cracking, anisotropy, variation of coating thickness and calculation formalisms several FEM models have been build, while case sensitive calibration was used for the coated systems

Characterisation of the First Bovine Parainfluenza Virus 3 Isolate Detected in Cattle in Turkey

A respiratory disease outbreak on a cattle farm in northern Turkey produced respiratory tract symptoms and severe pneumonia symptoms in 20 calves. Eight calves died, and a lung specimen from one carcass was analysed for bacteria and for viruses of the Bovine respiratory diseases complex. Bacteriological analysis was negative, but antigen detection ELISA and RT-PCR results indicated the presence of Bovine parainfluenza virus (BPIV). Virus isolation succeeded on Madin-Darby Bovine Kidney cells, and subsequent whole genome sequencing and phylogenetic analysis identified BPIV-3c. This is the first report of BPIV-3c isolation from cattle in Turkey, indicating the need for more virological and epidemiological studies

Molecular epidemiological study on Infectious Pancreatic Necrosis Virus isolates from aquafarms in Scotland over three decades

In order to obtain an insight into genomic changes and associated evolution and adaptation of Infectious Pancreatic Necrosis Virus (IPNV) the complete coding genomes of 57 IPNV isolates collected from Scottish aquafarms from 1982-2014 were sequenced and analysed. Phylogenetic analysis of the sequenced IPNV strains showed separate clustering of genogroups I, II, III and V. IPNV isolates with genetic reassortment of segment A/B of genogroup III/II were determined. About 59% of the IPNV isolates belonged to the persistent type and 32% to the low virulent type and only one highly pathogenic strain0 (1.79%) was identified. Codon adaptation index calculations indicated that the IPNV major capsid protein VP2 has adapted to its salmonid host. Underrepresentation of CpG dinucleotides in the IPNV genome to minimise detection by the innate immunity receptors, and observed positive selection in the virulence determination sites of VP2 embedded in the variable region of the main antigenic region, suggest an immune escape mechanism driving virulence evolution. The prevalence of mostly persistent genotypes together with the assumption of adaptation and immune escape indicates that IPNV is evolving with the host

On Eisenbud's and Wigner's R-matrix: A general approach

The main objective of this paper is to give a rigorous treatment of Wigner's and Eisenbud's $R$-matrix method for scattering matrices of scattering systems consisting of two selfadjoint extensions of the same symmetric operator with finite deficiency indices. In the framework of boundary triplets and associated Weyl functions an abstract generalization of the $R$-matrix method is developed and the results are applied to Schr\"odinger operators on the real axis