How geography matters: neglected dimensions in contemporary migration research

In Asia, migration is a complex phenomenon, the same as worldwide. The approaches of diaspora as well as transnational migration and transnational social spaces describe contemporary migration processes and are at the centre of this paper. Our major critique about these approaches is their dominantly socio-cultural perspective on migration, the missing link to other existing social theory, and missing consideration of the importance of place and identity, and the multiple ways how people perceive and construct space. To address this critique we present innovative geographical research showing the potential of social geography to contribute to the understanding of increasing mobility worldwide

Goal-conflict detection based on temporal satisfiability checking

Goal-oriented requirements engineering approaches propose capturing how a system should behave through the speci ca- tion of high-level goals, from which requirements can then be systematically derived. Goals may however admit subtle situations that make them diverge, i.e., not be satis able as a whole under speci c circumstances feasible within the domain, called boundary conditions . While previous work al- lows one to identify boundary conditions for con icting goals written in LTL, it does so through a pattern-based approach, that supports a limited set of patterns, and only produces pre-determined formulations of boundary conditions. We present a novel automated approach to compute bound- ary conditions for general classes of con icting goals expressed in LTL, using a tableaux-based LTL satis ability procedure. A tableau for an LTL formula is a nite representation of all its satisfying models, which we process to produce boundary conditions that violate the formula, indicating divergence situations. We show that our technique can automatically produce boundary conditions that are more general than those obtainable through existing previous pattern-based approaches, and can also generate boundary conditions for goals that are not captured by these patterns

Significance of the compliance of the joints on the dynamic slip resistance of a bioinspired hoof

Robust mechanisms for slip resistance are an open challenge in legged locomotion. Animals such as goats show impressive ability to resist slippage on cliffs. It is not fully known what attributes in their body determine this ability. Studying the slip resistance dynamics of the goat may offer insight toward the biologically inspired design of robotic hooves. This article tests how the embodiment of the hoof contributes to solving the problem of slip resistance. We ran numerical simulations and experiments using a passive robotic goat hoof for different compliance levels of its three joints. We established that compliant yaw and pitch and stiff roll can increase the energy required to slide the hoof by ≈ 20% compared to the baseline (stiff hoof). Compliant roll and pitch allow the robotic hoof to adapt to the irregularities of the terrain. This produces an antilock braking system-like behavior of the robotic hoof for slip resistance. Therefore, the pastern and coffin joints have a substantial effect on the slip resistance of the robotic hoof, while the fetlock joint has the lowest contribution. These shed insights into how robotic hooves can be used to autonomously improve slip resistance

Alternative axiomatics and complexity of deliberative STIT theories

We propose two alternatives to Xu's axiomatization of the Chellas STIT. The first one also provides an alternative axiomatization of the deliberative STIT. The second one starts from the idea that the historic necessity operator can be defined as an abbreviation of operators of agency, and can thus be eliminated from the logic of the Chellas STIT. The second axiomatization also allows us to establish that the problem of deciding the satisfiability of a STIT formula without temporal operators is NP-complete in the single-agent case, and is NEXPTIME-complete in the multiagent case, both for the deliberative and the Chellas' STIT.Comment: Submitted to the Journal of Philosophical Logic; 13 pages excluding anne

The role of faith-based health professions schools in Cameroon’s health system

Faith-based health professions schools contribute to the training of staff in many Sub-Saharan African countries. Yet little is known about these actors, their role in the health system, potential comparative advantages and challenges faced. This is a qualitative study drawing on 24 qualitative interviews and 3 focus group discussions. Participants included faith-based health professions schools, staff at faith-based health professions schools, Ministry of Health officials and donors. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. The findings reveal that understanding of faith-based health professions schools held by donors and the Ministry of Health rest on a set of assumptions rather than evidence-backed knowledge and that knowledge on key aspects is missing (not least on the market share of such actors). This suggests that collaboration with and oversight of these non-state schools is limited, raising questions about the balance of state regulation and control in the public-private mix for training health workers. Linked to this weak oversight, the findings also raise concerns over a number of problematic activities at these schools, unaccredited training programmes and the presence of missionary volunteers whose presence and actions are rarely interrogated

Granular jamming based controllable organ design for abdominal palpation

Medical manikins play an essential role in the training process of physicians. Currently, most available simulators for abdominal palpation training do not contain controllable organs for dynamic simulations. In this paper, we present a soft robotics controllable liver that can simulate various liver diseases and symptoms for effective and realistic palpation training. The tumors in the liver model are designed based on granular jamming with positive pressure, which converts the fluid-like impalpable particles to a solid-like tumor state by applying low positive pressure on the membrane. Through inflation, the tumor size, liver stiffness, and liver size can be controlled from normal liver state to various abnormalities including enlarged liver, cirrhotic liver, and multiple cancerous and malignant tumors. Mechanical tests have been conducted in the study to evaluate the liver design and the role of positive pressure granular jamming in tumor simulations