21,894 research outputs found
Technology transfer and cultural exchange: Western scientists and engineers encounter late Tokugawa and Meiji Japan
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During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Engineer was only one of many British and American publications that took an avid interest in the rapid rise of Japan to the status of a fully industrialized imperial power on a par with major European nations. In December 1897 this journal published a photographic montage of "Pioneers of Modem Engineering Education in Japan" (Figure I), showing a selection of the Japanese and Western teachers who had worked to bring about this singular transformation.' The predominance of Japanese figures in this representation is highly significant: it is an acknowledgment by British observers that the industrialization of Japan-the "Britain of the East"-was not a feat accomplished solely by Western experts who transferred their science and technology to passive Japanese recipients. Yet in focusing primarily on native teachers active in Japan after 1880, this image excludes several of the very foreigners who had trained this indigenous workforce in the preceding decade. Rather than attempting to assess the careers of each of the many international experts involved in Western encounters with Japan before and after the Meiji restoration in 1868, we will focus on disaggregating the highly individualized responses of just some of the Englishspeaking characters. In documenting their diverse encounters with Japanese people and technologies, we will look at the complex phenomena of cultural exchange in which they participated, not always without chauvinism or resistance
Ethanol: Implications for Rural Communities
This paper presents an overview of the U.S. ethanol industry, its location, and the public policy umbrella that supports its growth. Then the paper analyzes what happens when a county adds an ethanol plant, demonstrates what must be done to modify input-output models to capture those effects realistically, and applies the approach to proposed plants in three counties.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,
Autonomous spacecraft maintenance study group
A plan to incorporate autonomous spacecraft maintenance (ASM) capabilities into Air Force spacecraft by 1989 is outlined. It includes the successful operation of the spacecraft without ground operator intervention for extended periods of time. Mechanisms, along with a fault tolerant data processing system (including a nonvolatile backup memory) and an autonomous navigation capability, are needed to replace the routine servicing that is presently performed by the ground system. The state of the art fault handling capabilities of various spacecraft and computers are described, and a set conceptual design requirements needed to achieve ASM is established. Implementations for near term technology development needed for an ASM proof of concept demonstration by 1985, and a research agenda addressing long range academic research for an advanced ASM system for 1990s are established
Active Markov Information-Theoretic Path Planning for Robotic Environmental Sensing
Recent research in multi-robot exploration and mapping has focused on
sampling environmental fields, which are typically modeled using the Gaussian
process (GP). Existing information-theoretic exploration strategies for
learning GP-based environmental field maps adopt the non-Markovian problem
structure and consequently scale poorly with the length of history of
observations. Hence, it becomes computationally impractical to use these
strategies for in situ, real-time active sampling. To ease this computational
burden, this paper presents a Markov-based approach to efficient
information-theoretic path planning for active sampling of GP-based fields. We
analyze the time complexity of solving the Markov-based path planning problem,
and demonstrate analytically that it scales better than that of deriving the
non-Markovian strategies with increasing length of planning horizon. For a
class of exploration tasks called the transect sampling task, we provide
theoretical guarantees on the active sampling performance of our Markov-based
policy, from which ideal environmental field conditions and sampling task
settings can be established to limit its performance degradation due to
violation of the Markov assumption. Empirical evaluation on real-world
temperature and plankton density field data shows that our Markov-based policy
can generally achieve active sampling performance comparable to that of the
widely-used non-Markovian greedy policies under less favorable realistic field
conditions and task settings while enjoying significant computational gain over
them.Comment: 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent
Systems (AAMAS 2011), Extended version with proofs, 11 page
Random Walk Smooth Transition Autoregressive Models
This paper extends the family of smooth transition autoregressive (STAR) models by proposing a specification in which the autoregressive parameters follow random walks. The random walks in the parameters can capture structural change within a regime switching framework, but in contrast to the time varying STAR (TV-STAR) speciifcation recently introduced by Lundbergh et al (2003), structural change in our random walk STAR (RW-STAR) setting follows a stochastic process rather than a deterministic function of time. We suggest tests for RW-STAR behaviour and study the performance of RW-STARmodels in an empirical setting. The out-of sample forecasting performance of our RW-STAR models is encouraging - better than AR, LSTAR and TV-STAR specifications with respect to point forecasts and on a par with TV-STAR speciÞcations with respect to forecast density evaluations.Forecast density evaluation, Non-constant parameters, Random walk
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