Formulation of design guidelines for automated robotic assembly in outerspace

The approach for arriving at design guidelines for assembly by robots in outerspace is illustrated. The use of robots in a zero gravity environment necessitates that extra factors over and above normal design guidelines be taken into account. Besides, many of the guidelines for assembly by robots on earth do not apply in space. However, considering the axioms for normal design and assembly as one set, guidelines for design and robotic assembly as another, and guidelines for design and assembly in space as the third set, unions and intersections of these sets can generate guidelines for two or more of these conditions taken together - say design and manual assembly in space. Therein lies the potential to develop expert systems in the future, which would use an exhaustive database and similar guidelines to arrive at those required by a superposition of these conditions

Human Activity Modelling in the Specification of Operational Requirements: Work in Progress

This paper describes our experience of integrating HCI concepts and techniques into a concurrent requirements engineering process called RESCUE. We focus on the use of a model of current human activity to inform specification of a future system. We show how human activity descriptions, written using a specially designed template, can facilitate the authoring of use case descriptions to be used in the elicitation of requirements for complex socio-technical systems. We describe our experience of using descriptions of human activity, written using the template, to support specification of operational requirements for DMAN, a system to support air traffic controllers in managing the departure of aircraft from airports. We end with a discussion of lessons learnt from our experience and present some ideas for future development of work in this area

Economics of organic farming (extension to OF0125)(0F0190)

This project OF0190 was an extension to OF0125 to cover completing the comparison data for 1997/98 and to extend the data collection by one further year (1998/99). The final reports for the two projects are therefore being submitted jointly. The OF0125 report covers the period 1995/96-1997/98, for which a detailed report was submitted to MAFF in July 1999, and a revised detailed report including a complete set of comparisons with conventional farms was submitted to MAFF, after revisions, in July 2000. That report has now been published at www.organic.aber.ac.uk/library/organic farm incomes.pdf. A detailed report for 1998/99 has been submitted to MAFF in March 2001, and will be published at the same internet site once accepted. The report presents results from research work carried out for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) on the financial performance of organic farms in 1998/99. The aim of the research was to assess the financial performance of organic farms differentiated by farm type, in order to inform MAFF policy-making with respect to organic farming, and to provide a basis for assessments by farmers, advisers and other interested parties of the farm-level implications of conversion to and continued organic farming. To provide an idea of the trends over time, where possible data for continuous samples of farms are presented for 1997/98 and 1998/99. The specific objectives were to extend the previous project (OF0125, covering 1995/96 to 1997/98) to collect and collate data on the financial performance of organic farms, differentiated by farm type . This was achieved through the collation of financial data collected under three different MAFF-funded research projects supplemented by data collected on other farm types. The samples of organic farms are small because of the limited number of organic holdings over 8 ESU (European Size Units) with identifiable holding numbers in 1996, when the previous study was started. As the sample is small there is limitation on how the results may be extrapolated to the wider population of organic farms, especially as the structure and objectives of those converting to organic production in the late 1990s may be different from those that converted in the 1970s and 1980s. Detailed financial input, output, income, liabilities and assets and some physical performance measures are presented for 1998/99. Where an identical sample of five farms is available, data are presented for 1997/98 and 1998/99 for the sample. The organic farm samples are so small that outliers (especially larger farms) have a large influence on the average. If the samples were larger, general trends would be more apparent and less influenced by individual farms; despite this, some explanation has been attempted of trends and changes in inputs, outputs and incomes. However, great care must be taken in extrapolating results. Of those farm types for which a continuous identical sample of five farms was available, Net Farm Incomes (NFI) increased for cropping (£281/ha) and dairy farms (£487/ha) in 1998/99 compared with 1997/98; in both cases outputs as well as inputs increased between years. Mixed farms showed an average reduction in outputs and increase in inputs, lowering the average NFI to £15/ha in 1998/99. The five lowland cattle and sheep farms improved a negative NFI of £161/ha in 1997/98 to a positive £7/ha in 1998/99 through an increase in livestock outputs with a similar level of inputs to that of 1997/98. Due to the high level of farmer and spouse labour on horticultural holdings, the average Management and Investment Income (MII) of the sample was negative, but the average NFI was £1,836/ha. On four holdings, 1998/99 average outputs were 92%, and inputs were 97% of the previous year, resulting in an average NFI in 1998/99 for that group of 75% of the 1997/98 result. The group of LFA farms, consisting of four cattle and sheep and one mixed farm, achieved an average NFI of £72/ha in 1998/99

User roles in asynchronous distributed collaborative idea generation

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study within a real-life context that investigates participant behaviour and emergent user roles in asynchronous distributed collaborative idea generation by a defined community of users. In the study, a high-fidelity prototype of an online virtual ideas room was built and used by a Community of Interest consisting of representatives from 10 different voluntary organisations spread across Denmark. The study revealed five user roles, which the authors propose that future asynchronous distributed collaborative idea generation platforms should consider

Higgs boson pair production in gluon fusion at NLO with full top-quark mass dependence

We present the calculation of the cross section and invariant mass distribution for Higgs boson pair production in gluon fusion at next-to-leading order (NLO) in QCD. Top-quark masses are fully taken into account throughout the calculation. The virtual two-loop amplitude has been generated using an extension of the program GoSam supplemented with an interface to Reduze for the integral reduction. The occurring integrals have been calculated numerically using the program SecDec. Our results, including the full top-quark mass dependence for the first time, allow us to assess the validity of various approximations proposed in the literature, which we also recalculate. We find substantial deviations between the NLO result and the different approximations, which emphasizes the importance of including the full top-quark mass dependence at NLO.Comment: Version published in PRL, v2: results at 13 TeV (v1 was at 14 TeV), minor correction to virtual part included, conclusions unchange

Agricultural interpretation technique development

There are no author-identified significant results in this report