Regional density of private dentists: Empirical evidence from Austria

We investigated the determinants of disparities in the regional density of private dentists in Austria. Specifically, we focused on the relationship between the density of private dentists and their public counterparts, thereby controlling for other possible covariates of dentist density. Methods: Dentist density was measured at the district level. We used panel data of dentist density from 121 Austrian districts over the years 2001 to 2008. We applied a Hausman-Taylor framework to cope with possible endogeneity and to control for cross-district effects in the dentist density. Results: A significant negative relationship was found between the density of private and public dentists, indicating a substitution effect between the two dentist groups. A significant positive spatial relationship also existed for private and public dentists in the neighboring regions. Dental capacities in public and private hospitals and dental laboratories run by the public health insurance system did not have a significant effect on private dentist density. Conclusions: Although a strong negative relationship existed between private and public dentists within the districts, one should not draw the conclusion that private dentists in Austria are close substitutes for public dentists. Such a conclusion would require further empirical analysis on the utilization patterns of dental services and their relationships with financing mechanisms

Student Ensemble: Wind Symphony

Center for the Performing ArtsSunday AfternoonSeptember 13, 20153:00 p.m

Student Ensemble: Symphonic Winds

Center for the Performing ArtsMarch 23, 2016Wednesday Evening8:00 p.m

Systemarchitektur und Fahrmanöver zum sicheren Anhalten modularer automatisierter Fahrzeuge

Maschinelle Systeme übernehmen einen immer größer werdenden Anteil der dynamischen Fahraufgabe automatisierter Fahrzeuge. Funktionale Degradationen können die Fähigkeiten dieser Systeme negativ beeinflussen, sodass sie die Fahraufgabe nicht weiter erfüllen können. In diesen Fällen wird bei höher automatisierten Systemen die Fahraufgabe von einer maschinellen Rückfallebene übernommen. Im Rahmen des Forschungsprojekts UNICARagil wird eine modulare und dienstbasierte funktionale Fahrzeugarchitektur entwickelt, für die in diesem Beitrag die Anforderungen und die Systemarchitektur einer geeigneten funktionalen Rückfallebene vorgestellt werden und der weitere Forschungsbedarf hinsichtlich der erforderlichen Fähigkeiten der Teilfunktionen, ihrer gegenseitigen Abhängigkeiten und der Absicherung der Teil- und Gesamtfunktionen erläutert wird

Constitutivism

A brief explanation and overview of constitutivism

Collingridge and the dilemma of control: towards responsible and accountable innovation

The paper critically reviews the work of David Collingridge in the light of contemporary concerns about responsibility and accountability in innovation, public engagement with science and technology, and the role of scientific expertise in technology policy. Given continued interest in his thoughts on the ‘social control of technology’, and the ‘dilemma of control’, this attention is both timely and overdue. The paper illuminates a mismatch between the prevalence of citations to Collingridge’s work on the dilemma of control in the literature on responsible innovation, and the depth of engagement with his arguments. By considering neglected aspects of Collingridge’s substantive, methodological and philosophical analysis, important implications can be drawn for theory and practice relating to the governance of innovation and co-evolution between technology and society. The paper helps to improve understandings of wider political contexts for responsible innovation, especially in relation to anticipatory, participatory and institutional aspects of governance

Approach to Maintain a Safe State of an Automated Vehicle in Case of Unsafe Desired Behavior

For automated driving, higher levels of automation pose new challenges in terms of safety. In this paper, we develop a generic behavior safety framework that maintains a safe vehicle state even in case of system failures. It is applicable to different configurations of automated driving system architectures. We verify the designed generic behavior safety framework by applying it to two different architectures from both projects PRORETA 5 and UNICARagil. The previously defined safety requirements are met with both applications, which indicates that the developed generic safety framework is also valid for other configurations of automated driving systems

Real-Time Pose Graph SLAM based on Radar

This work presents a real-time pose graph based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system for automotive Radar. The algorithm constructs a map from Radar detections using the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) method to match consecutive scans obtained from a single, front-facing Radar sensor. The algorithm is evaluated on a range of real-world datasets and shows mean translational errors as low as 0.62 m and demonstrates robustness on long tracks. Using a single Radar, our proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance when compared to other Radar-based SLAM algorithms that use multiple, higher-resolution Radars