Leadership in the Emergent Baekje State: State Formation in Central-Western Korea (ca. 200–400 CE)

The process of state formation is a social phenomenon closely connected with a polity’s external relationships. During peer–polity interactions, polities undergo social reorganization as they mutually influence each other. This study examines this process and argues that in central-western Korea, around 200–400 CE, hostile interactions among multiple polities weakened the power of ingroup members to level social differences and increased social complexity. When confronted with unfriendly outgroups, potential rulers could assume different social roles (e.g., diplomat, war leader, or trader) and utilize new social threats to demand and legitimize higher social status. Archaeological data from central-western Korea illustrate the community’s efforts to build a defense system and prepare for war. Autonomous agricultural communities rapidly realigned into a state system in response to external threats, presumably from historically documented hostile groups such as the Lelang commandery and Goguryeo. The decision to oppose neighboring polities likely enhanced the leaders’ ability to consolidate power, while the rulers of the Baekje (also spelled “Paekche”) state could employ various other means for self-aggrandizement throughout its history

984 Ubiquitous Mobile Information and Collaboration Systems Community based Ubiquitous System Development in Multi-agent Environment

Abstract. Ubiquitous system can be considered as the intelligent space, in which many kinds of component are connected by networks and also each component recognizes their connection and cooperates with others for achieving some goals. In many case of ubiquitous computing environments, users and devices interact and cooperate each other to attain some goals. To develop such a ubiquitous system, we should model a ubiquitous system in a cooperation view. To do this, in this paper, we model a ubiquitous system using community metaphor consistently. In the proposed high-level abstraction model, we can represent mission-oriented organizations and interrelationships between members or organizations. In addition, so far, a developer of a ubiquitous system should start from scratch and think about the action as an individual component and also the action as a member of cooperative organization at same time. Therefore, we also introduce the development process, which make it possible concerning the cooperative action and the individual action separately. To examine the proposed community computing model and the development process, we trying to implement a small system in JADE Platform.

Adaptive Feedback Methods in an Extended Boolean Model

Relevance feedback methods have been used in information retrieval to generate improved query formulations based on information contained in previously retrieved documents. The relevance feedback techniques have been applied to extended Boolean query formulations as well as to vector query formulations. In this paper, we propose an adaptive way to improve the retrieval performance in an extended Boolean model. We develop a neural network model in which the weights used in extended Boolean queries can be adjusted by users relevance feedback. Experiments are performed on a TREC collection and the results show improved performance even after applying the previous feedback methods

Automated dimensional quality assessment of precast concrete panels using terrestrial laser scanning

Precast concrete panels are a popular component for many construction projects in the world. To safeguard the overall quality of these construction projects, it is imperative to ensure that the dimensions and the quality of precast concrete panels conform to their design specifications. It is, hence, necessary to develop techniques that can quickly measure the dimensions and reliably assess the quality of precast concrete panels. Currently, such measurement tasks mostly rely on trained inspectors, and the process can be rather time consuming. To address these limitations, this study presents a fully automated and non-contact measurement technique that measures and assesses the dimensions and the quality of precast concrete panels using a terrestrial laser scanner (TLS). An edge and corner extraction technique is developed to estimate the dimensional properties of precast concrete panels from TLS scanning data. To increase the measurement accuracy, a compensation model is employed to account for the dimension losses caused by an intrinsic limitation of TLS. Experimental tests are performed on a laboratory specimen as well as actual precast concrete panels to validate the effectiveness of the proposed technique. The results demonstrate that the proposed technique can accurately and reliably measure the length, width and squareness of precast concrete panels in an automatic manner. © 2014 Elsevier B.V