Enroute flight planning: The design of cooperative planning systems

Design concepts and principles to guide in the building of cooperative problem solving systems are being developed and evaluated. In particular, the design of cooperative systems for enroute flight planning is being studied. The investigation involves a three stage process, modeling human performance in existing environments, building cognitive artifacts, and studying the performance of people working in collaboration with these artifacts. The most significant design concepts and principles identified thus far are the principle focus

Megarian Local Adjudication: The Case of the Border Dispute between Epidauros and Corinth in 242-240 BCE (IG IV2.I.70 and 71)

Over the last quarter century, the study of interstate arbitration and the use of foreign judges to adjudicate disputes between city-states has been rejuvenated. This article re-examines the well-known Megarian adjudication of the border dispute between Epidauros and Corinth by the Achaean League in the 3rd century BCE, with a view to determining the reason for the Achaeans’ choice of Megara as judge and, more importantly, the acceptance of this decision by Corinth, given the less than friendly history between these two city-states

Design concepts for the development of cooperative problem-solving systems

There are many problem-solving tasks that are too complex to fully automate given the current state of technology. Nevertheless, significant improvements in overall system performance could result from the introduction of well-designed computer aids. We have been studying the development of cognitive tools for one such problem-solving task, enroute flight path planning for commercial airlines. Our goal was two-fold. First, we were developing specific systems designs to help with this important practical problem. Second, we are using this context to explore general design concepts to guide in the development of cooperative problem-solving systems. These designs concepts are described

Recent developments in the application of risk analysis to waste technologies.

The European waste sector is undergoing a period of unprecedented change driven by business consolidation, new legislation and heightened public and government scrutiny. One feature is the transition of the sector towards a process industry with increased pre-treatment of wastes prior to the disposal of residues and the co-location of technologies at single sites, often also for resource recovery and residuals management. Waste technologies such as in-vessel composting, the thermal treatment of clinical waste, the stabilisation of hazardous wastes, biomass gasification, sludge combustion and the use of wastes as fuel, present operators and regulators with new challenges as to their safe and environmentally responsible operation. A second feature of recent change is an increased regulatory emphasis on public and ecosystem health and the need for assessments of risk to and from waste installations. Public confidence in waste management, secured in part through enforcement of the planning and permitting regimes and sound operational performance, is central to establishing the infrastructure of new waste technologies. Well-informed risk management plays a critical role. We discuss recent developments in risk analysis within the sector and the future needs of risk analysis that are required to respond to the new waste and resource management agenda

Reduced-order PCA models for chemical reacting flows

pre-printOne of the most challenging aspects of turbulent combustion research is the development of reduced-order combustion models which can accurately reproduce the physics of the real system. The identification and utilization of the low dimensional manifolds in these system is paramount to understand and develop robust models which can account for turbulence-chemistry interactions. Recently, principal components analysis (PCA) has been given notable attention in its analysis of reacting systems, and its potential in reducing the number of dimensions with minimum reconstruction error. The present work provides a methodology which has the ability of exploiting the information obtained from PCA. Two formulations of the approach are shown: Manifold Generated from PCA (MG-PCA), based on a global analysis, and Manifold Generated from Local PCA (MG-L-PCA), based on performing the PCA analysis locally. The models are created using the co-variance matrix of a data-set which is representative of the system of interest. The reduced models are then used as a predictive tool for the reacting system of interest by transporting only a subset of the original state-space variables on the computational grid and using the PCA basis to reconstruct the non-transported variables. The present study first looks into the optimal selection of the subset of transported variables and analyzes the effect of this selection on the approximation of the state space and chemical species source terms. Then, a demonstration of various a posteriori cases is presented

Evolution of fungal phenotypic disparity

Organismal grade multicellularity has been achieved only in animals, plants, and fungi. All three kingdoms manifest phenotypically disparate body plans, but their evolution has only been considered in detail for animals. Here we seek to test the general relevance of hypotheses on the evolution of animal body plans by characterising the evolution of fungal phenotypic variety (disparity). The distribution of living fungal form is defined by four distinct morphotypes: flagellated, zygomycetous, sac-bearing, and club-bearing. The discontinuity between morphotypes is a consequence of the extinction of phylogenetic intermediates, indicating that a complete record of fungal disparity would present a much more homogeneous distribution of form. Fungal phenotypic variety gradually expands through time for the most part but sharply increases with the emergence of multicellular body plans. Simulations show these temporal trends to be decidedly non-random, and at least partially shaped by hierarchical contingency. Fungal phenotypic distance is decoupled from changes in gene number, genome size, and taxonomic diversity. Only differences in organismal complexity, the number of traits that constitute an organism, at the cellular and multicellular levels present a meaningful relationship with fungal disparity. Both animals and fungi exhibit a gradual increase in disparity through time, resulting in distributions of form made discontinuous by the extinction of phylogenetic intermediates. These congruences hint at a common mode of multicellular body plan evolution.Follow ReadMe files for explanation. Funding provided by: Natural Environment Research Council GW4+ Doctoral Training Programme*Crossref Funder Registry ID: Award Number: Funding provided by: Natural Environment Research CouncilCrossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000270Award Number: NE/P013678/1Funding provided by: Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research CouncilCrossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000268Award Number: BB/T012773/1Funding provided by: Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research CouncilCrossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000268Award Number: BB/N000919/1See linked manuscript