Collaborate and die! Exploring different understandings of organisational cooperation within Scotland's uncertain North Sea oil and gas industry.

This study ethnographically explores how collaboration is enacted within two differently structured sub-sea engineering organisations local to the oil & gas industry in Aberdeen, Scotland. Literature suggests organisational collaboration practices are largely dependent on trust, historical cooperation, establishing interpersonal relations and information sharing networks. Such notions are suggested as readily enacted in Aberdeen. However, following changes in industry landscape, we uncover a variety of additional factors pertaining to macro-level local industry climate, and meso-level organisational cultures that shape different perceptions, understandings, and enactments of collaboration. To grow current scholarly thinking, we define how such diverse understandings actively prevent organisational collaboration in the restrictively competitive climate of Aberdeen’s oil & gas industry. Implications for expanding understandings of collaboration in employment sectors facing substantial industry destabilisation and reformation are discussed

Funnel control for systems with relative degree two

PublishedJournal ArticleTracking of reference signals yref (·) by the output y(·) of linear (as well as a considerably large class of nonlinear) single-input, single-output systems is considered. The system is assumed to have strict relative degree two with (weakly) stable zero dynamics. The control objective is tracking of the error e = y - yref and its derivative e within two prespecified performance funnels, respectively. This is achieved by the so-called funnel controller u(t) = -k0(t)2e(t)-k 1(t)e(t), where the simple proportional error feedback has gain functions k0 and k1 designed in such a way to preclude contact of e and e with the funnel boundaries, respectively. The funnel controller also ensures boundedness of all signals. We also show that the same funnel controller (i) is applicable to relative degree one systems, (ii) allows for input constraints provided a feasibility condition (formulated in terms of the system data, the saturation bounds, the funnel data, bounds on the reference signal, and the initial state) holds, (iii) is robust in terms of the gap metric: if a system is sufficiently close to a system with relative degree two, stable zero dynamics, and positive high-frequency gain, but does not necessarily have these properties, then for small initial values the funnel controller also achieves the control objective. Finally, we illustrate the theoretical results by experimental results: the funnel controller is applied to a rotatory mechanical system for position control. © 2013 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

Seeing Behind Objects for 3D Multi-Object Tracking in RGB-D Sequences

Multi-object tracking from RGB-D video sequences is a challenging problem due to the combination of changing viewpoints, motion, and occlusions over time. We observe that having the complete geometry of objects aids in their tracking, and thus propose to jointly infer the complete geometry of objects as well as track them, for rigidly moving objects over time. Our key insight is that inferring the complete geometry of the objects significantly helps in tracking. By hallucinating unseen regions of objects, we can obtain additional correspondences between the same instance, thus providing robust tracking even under strong change of appearance. From a sequence of RGB-D frames, we detect objects in each frame and learn to predict their complete object geometry as well as a dense correspondence mapping into a canonical space. This allows us to derive 6DoF poses for the objects in each frame, along with their correspondence between frames, providing robust object tracking across the RGB-D sequence. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world RGB-D data demonstrate that we achieve state-of-the-art performance on dynamic object tracking. Furthermore, we show that our object completion significantly helps tracking, providing an improvement of 6.5% in mean MOTA

Utjecaj odnosa s javnošću na hrvatske medije Razlikuju li se mišljenja novinara od mišljenja stručnjaka za odnose s javnošću?

The relationship between public relations professionals and journalists has been a questionable one since the very beginnings of both professions; it is clear that they depend upon each other but at the same time lack mutual trust. Both sides believe that their professional standards differ considerably from other side\u27s professional standards. Although a great number of researches into this relationship have been conducted in the world, this field has not been adequately researched in Croatia yet. The main goal of this study was to analyze the relationship between Croatian journalists and public relations experts. Two questionnaires of the same type were used to asses the opinions of both sides and compare them to each other. The purpose of the research was to compare the points of view the two professions have on the influence of press releases on the media agenda – the major assumption being that both sides believe that this influence is considerable. However, the results revealed a somewhat different situation. Although the journalist surveyed agreed that press releases have a certain influence on media agenda, in their opinion this influence is significantly lower than according to public relations professionals. Since the two professions surveyed are undeniably connected, it would prove useful to inform them more on the opinions of the other side in order to achieve better future collaboration.Odnos među stručnjacima za odnose s javnošću i novinarima pun je problema od samih početaka razvoja obje profesije; jasno je da ovise jedni o drugima, no istovremeno među njima nedostaje povjerenja. Obje strane vjeruju kako se njihovi profesionalni standardi značajno razlikuju od profesionalnih standarda druge strane. Iako u svijetu postoje brojna istraživanja međusobnih odnosa novinara i stručnjaka za odnose s javnošću, takvih istraživanja u Hrvatskoj gotovo da i nema. Osnovni cilj ovog istraživanja bio je analizirati dinamiku odnosa između hrvatskih novinara i stručnjaka za odnose s javnošću. U tu svrhu korišteni su istovrsni anketni upitnici kojima su ispitani uzorci obje populacije, te su rezultati međusobno uspoređeni. Problem istraživanja bio je usporediti stajališta dvije profesije o utjecaju koji objave za medije imaju na medijske sadržaje – pri čemu je polazna hipoteza bila kako je prema mišljenju obje strane spomenuti utjecaj značajan. Rezultati su međutim ukazali na nešto drugačiju situaciju. Iako su se ispitani novinari složili u mišljenju da objave za medije imaju određeni utjecaj na formiranje medijskih sadržaja, taj su utjecaj procijenili znatno manjim no što su to učinili stručnjaci za odnose s javnošću. Budući da su dvije ispitane struke neupitno povezane, bilo bi korisno bolje ih upoznati s mišljenjima druge strane u svrhu bolje buduće suradnje

Absence of Persistent Magnetic Oscillations in Type-II Superconductors

We report on a numerical study intended to examine the possibility that magnetic oscillations persist in type II superconductors beyond the point where the pairing self-energy exceeds the normal state Landau level separation. Our work is based on the self-consistent numerical solution for model superconductors of the Bogoliubov-deGennes equations for the vortex lattice state. In the regime where the pairing self-energy is smaller than the cyclotron energy, magnetic oscillations resulting from Landau level quantization are suppressed by the broadening of quasiparticle Landau levels due to the non-uniform order parameter of the vortex lattice state, and by splittings of the quasiparticle bands. Plausible arguments that the latter effect can lead to a sign change of the fundamental harmonic of the magnetic oscillations when the pairing self-energy is comparable to the cyclotron energy are shown to be flawed. Our calculations indicate that magnetic oscillations are strongly suppressed once the pairing self-energy exceeds the Landau level separation.Comment: 7 pages, revtex, 7 postscript figure

B I R T H T R A U M A F R O M T H E P E R S P E C T I V E O F P E R I N A T A L C O U N S E L L O R S : A M I N I F O C U S G R O U P S T U D Y

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Assessment of wildfire activity development trends for Eastern Australia using multi-sensor earth observation data

Increased fire activity across the Amazon, Australia, and even the Arctic regions has received wide recognition in the global media in recent years. Large-scale, long-term analyses are required to postulate if these incidents are merely peaks within the natural oscillation, or rather the consequence of a linearly rising trend. While extensive datasets are available to facilitate the investigation of the extent and frequency of wildfires, no means has been available to also study the severity of the burnings on a comparable scale. This is now possible through a dataset recently published by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). This study exploits the possibilities of this new dataset by exemplarily analyzing fire severity trends on the Australian East coast for the past 20 years. The analyzed data is based on 3,503 tiles of the ESA Sentinel-3 OLCI instrument, extended by 9,612 granules of the NASA MODIS MOD09/MYD09 product. Rising trends in fire severity could be found for the states of New South Wales and Victoria, which could be attributed mainly to developments in the temperate climate zone featuring hot summers without a dry season (Cfa). Within this climate zone, the ecological units featuring needleleaf and evergreen forest are found to be mainly responsible for the increasing trend development. The results show a general, statistically significant shift of fire activity towards the affection of more woody, ecologically valuable vegetation

Land Cover Mapping using Digital Earth Australia

This study establishes the use of the Earth Observation Data for Ecosystem Monitoring (EODESM) to generate land cover and change classifications based on the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Land Cover Classification System (LCCS) and environmental variables (EVs) available within, or accessible from, Geoscience Australia’s (GA) Digital Earth Australia (DEA). Classifications representing the LCCS Level 3 taxonomy (8 categories representing semi-(natural) and/or cultivated/managed vegetation or natural or artificial bare or water bodies) were generated for two time periods and across four test sites located in the Australian states of QueenslandandNewSouthWales. Thiswasachievedbyprogressivelyandhierarchicallycombining existing time-static layers relating to (a) the extent of artificial surfaces (urban, water) and agriculture and (b) annual summaries of EVs relating to the extent of vegetation (fractional cover) and water (hydroperiod, intertidal area, mangroves) generated through DEA. More detailed classifications that integrated information on, for example, forest structure (based on vegetation cover (%) and height (m); time-static for 2009) and hydroperiod (months), were subsequently produced for each time-step. The overall accuracies of the land cover classifications were dependent upon those reported for the individual input layers, with these ranging from 80% (for cultivated, urban and artificial water) to over95%(forhydroperiodandfractionalcover).Thechangesidentifiedincludemangrovediebackin the southeastern Gulf of Carpentaria and reduced dam water levels and an associated expansion of vegetation in Lake Ross, Burdekin. The extent of detected changes corresponded with those observed using time-series of RapidEye data (2014 to 2016; for the Gulf of Carpentaria) and Google Earth imagery (2009–2016 for Lake Ross). This use case demonstrates the capacity and a conceptual framework to implement EODESM within DEA and provides countries using the Open Data Cube (ODC) environment with the opportunity to routinely generate land cover maps from Landsat or Sentinel-1/2 data, at least annually, using a consistent and internationally recognised taxonomy