Showing papers in "Springer Netherlands in 2015"

Trajectory tracking sliding mode control of underactuated AUVs

Abstract: This paper deals with the control of underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). AUVs are needed in many applications such as the exploration of oceans, scientific and military missions, etc. There are many challenges in the control of AUVs due to the complexity of the AUV model, the unmodelled dynamics, the uncertainties and the environmental disturbances. A trajectory tracking control scheme is proposed in this paper; this control scheme is designed using the sliding mode control technique in order to be robust against bounded disturbances. The control performance of an example AUV, using the proposed method, is evaluated through computer simulations. These simulation studies, which consider different reference trajectories, show that the proposed control scheme is robust under bounded disturbances.

Understanding Student Participation and Choice in Science and Technology Education

Abstract: Introduction: Participation in science and technology education - presenting the challenge and introducing project IRIS.- Section 1:Theoretical perspectives on educational choice.- Chapter 1: Expectancy-value perspectives on STEM choice in late-modern societies.- Chapter 2. A narrative approach to understand students' identities and choices.- Chapter 3: Gender, STEM studies and educational choices. Insights from feminist perspectives.- Section 2: Interest and participation in STEM from primary school to phD.- Chapter 4: STEM attitudes, interests and career choice.- Chapter 5: Science aspirations and gender identity: Lessons from the ASPIRES project.- Chapter 6: The impact of science curriculum content on students' subject choices in post-compulsory schooling.- Chapter 7: A place for STEM: Probing the reasons for undergraduate course choices.- Chapter 8: Short stories of educational choice - in the words of science and technology students.- Chapter 9: Understanding declining science participation in Australia: A systemic perspective.- Chapter 10: Choice patterns of PhD students: why should i pursue a PhD?.- Chapter 11: The impact of outreach and out-of-school activities on Norwegian upper secondary students' STEM motivations.- Section 3: Staying in STEM, leaving STEM?.- Chapter 12: Why do students in stem higher education programmes drop/opt out? Explanations offered from research.- Chapter 13: What makes them leave and where do they go? Non-completion and institutional departures in STEM.- Chapter 14: The first-year experience: Students' encounter with science and engineering programmes.- Chapter 15: Keeping pace. Educational choice motivations and first-year experiences in the words of Italian students.- Section 4: Applying feminist perspectives to understand STEM participation.- Chapter 16: When research challenges gender stereotypes: Exploring narratives of girls' educational choices.- Chapter 17: Italian female and male students' choices: STEM studies and motivations.- Chapter 18: Being a woman in a man's place or being a man in a women's place: insights into students' experiences of science and engineering at university.- Chapter 19: Italian students' ideas about gender and science in late modern societies. interpretations from a feminist perspective.- Section 5: Understanding and improving STEM participation: Conclusions and recommendations.- Chapter 20: Understanding student participation and choice in science and technology education: The contribution of IRIS.- Chapter 21: Improving participation in science and technology higher education: Ways forward.- Appendix: The IRIS questionnaire: Brief account of instrument development, data collection and respondents.

Quantum Theory: Informational Foundations and Foils

Abstract: This book provides the first unified overview of the burgeoning research area at the interface between Quantum Foundations and Quantum Information. Topics include: operational alternatives to quantum theory, information-theoretic reconstructions of the quantum formalism, mathematical frameworks for operational theories, and device-independent features of the set of quantum correlations. Powered by the injection of fresh ideas from the field of Quantum Information and Computation, the foundations of Quantum Mechanics are in the midst of a renaissance. The last two decades have seen an explosion of new results and research directions, attracting broad interest in the scientific community. The variety and number of different approaches, however, makes it challenging for a newcomer to obtain a big picture of the field and of its high-level goals. Here, fourteen original contributions from leading experts in the field cover some of the most promising research directions that have emerged in the new wave of quantum foundations. The book is directed at researchers in physics, computer science, and mathematics and would be appropriate as the basis of a graduate course in Quantum Foundations.

Protected areas’ role in climate-change mitigation

Abstract: Globally, 15.5 million km(2) of land are currently identified as protected areas, which provide society with many ecosystem services including climate-change mitigation. Combining a global database of protected areas, a reconstruction of global land-use history, and a global biogeochemistry model, we estimate that protected areas currently sequester 0.5 Pg C annually, which is about one fifth of the carbon sequestered by all land ecosystems annually. Using an integrated earth systems model to generate climate and land-use scenarios for the twenty-first century, we project that rapid climate change, similar to high-end projections in IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, would cause the annual carbon sequestration rate in protected areas to drop to about 0.3 Pg C by 2100. For the scenario with both rapid climate change and extensive land-use change driven by population and economic pressures, 5.6 million km(2) of protected areas would be converted to other uses, and carbon sequestration in the remaining protected areas would drop to near zero by 2100.

Encoded loop-lanthanide-binding tags for long-range distance measurements in proteins by NMR and EPR spectroscopy

Abstract: We recently engineered encodable lanthanide binding tags (LBTs) into proteins and demonstrated their applicability in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, X-ray crystallography and luminescence studies. Here, we engineered two-loop-LBTs into the model protein interleukin-1β (IL1β) and measured (1)H, (15)N-pseudocontact shifts (PCSs) by NMR spectroscopy. We determined the Δχ-tensors associated with each Tm(3+)-loaded loop-LBT and show that the experimental PCSs yield structural information at the interface between the two metal ion centers at atomic resolution. Such information is very valuable for the determination of the sites of interfaces in protein-protein-complexes. Combining the experimental PCSs of the two-loop-LBT construct IL1β-S2R2 and the respective single-loop-LBT constructs IL1β-S2, IL1β-R2 we additionally determined the distance between the metal ion centers. Further, we explore the use of two-loop LBTs loaded with Gd(3+) as a novel tool for distance determination by Electron Paramagnetic Resonance spectroscopy and show the NMR-derived distances to be remarkably consistent with distances derived from Pulsed Electron-Electron Dipolar Resonance.

Science Aspirations and Gender Identity: Lessons from the ASPIRES Project

Abstract: This chapter emphasises how identity and gender identity in particular, can play an important role in shaping children’s attitudes to science and science aspirations. We illustrate our arguments with empirical data from the ASPIRES (Science Aspirations and Career Choice age 10–14 (See www.kcl.ac.uk/aspires and www.tisme-scienceandmaths.org)) project–a 5 year, longitudinal English study of children’s science aspirations and career choice age 10–14. Drawing on our analyses of girls’ aspirations in particular (Archer et al. Sci Edu 96(6):967–989, 2012b, J Edu Policy, Published on iFirst, 23/5/13, 2013), we suggest that the versions of femininity that girls see as possible and desirable for themselves (and the gendered identities that they ‘do’, or ‘perform’ in their everyday lives) will affect the extent to which they see science aspirations as ‘for me’. In particular, we propose that prevalent popular associations of science with ‘cleverness’ and ‘masculinity’ deter the majority of girls from seeing science as ‘for me’ and mean that those girls who are developing science aspirations (i) have to engage in considerable identity work to reconcile their aspirations with ‘acceptable’ gender identity performances and (ii) face additional challenges to maintaining their aspirations over time.

Scalar implicatures of embedded disjunction

Abstract: Sentences with disjunction in the scope of a universal quantifier, Every A is P or Q, tend to give rise to distributive inferences that each of the disjuncts holds of at least one individual in the domain of the quantifier, Some A is P & Some A is Q. These inferences are standardly derived as an entailment of the meaning of the sentence together with the scalar implicature that it is not the case that either disjunct holds of every individual in the domain of the quantifier, $${ eg}$$ Every A is P & $${ eg}$$ Every A is Q (plain negated inferences). As we show, this derivation faces a challenge in that distributive inferences may obtain in the absence of plain negated inferences. We address this challenge by showing that on particular assumptions about alternatives, a derivation of distributive inferences as scalar implicatures can be maintained without in fact necessitating plain negated inferences. These assumptions accord naturally with the grammatical approach to scalar implicatures. We also present experimental data that suggest that plain negated inferences are not only unnecessary for deriving distributive inferences, but might in fact be unavailable.

An epigenetic clock controls aging

Abstract: We are accustomed to treating aging as a set of things that go wrong with the body. But for more than twenty years, there has been accumulating evidence that much of the process takes place under genetic control. We have seen that signaling chemistry can make dramatic differences in life span, and that single molecules can significantly affect longevity. We are frequently confronted with puzzling choices the body makes which benefit neither present health nor fertility nor long-term survival. If we permit ourselves a shift of reference frame and regard aging as a programmed biological function like growth and development, then these observations fall into place and make sense. This perspective suggests that aging proceeds under control of a master clock, or several redundant clocks. If this is so, we may learn to reset the clocks with biochemical interventions and make an old body behave like a young body, including repair of many of the modes of damage that we are accustomed to regard as independent symptoms of the senescent phenotype, and for which we have assumed that the body has no remedy.

Preparation of superhydrophobic and self-cleaning polysulfone non-wovens by electrospinning: influence of process parameters on morphology and hydrophobicity

Abstract: Electrospinning is used to prepare hydrophobic and self-cleaning polysulfone (PSf) surfaces. The effects of PSf concentration in Dimethylformamide (DMF) solvent and electrospinning process parameters on the surface structure and hydrophobicity are investigated. The experimental results show that depending on PSf concentration, three types of morphologies are obtained: beads, beads-on-strings, and free-beads fibers. The surface hydrophobicity depends mainly on the resultant surface morphology, and the existence of beads increases hydrophobicity. The contact angle (CA) is found to increase from 73° for smooth PSf surface to more than 160° for surfaces formed by electrospinning. Moreover, the contact angle hysteresis (CAH) was generally less than 10° for all the chemistries. It is noted that increasing the PSf concentration leads to the formation of beads-on-string and free-beads fiber structures; this morphological change is accompanied by a reduction in the contact angle. Surface structures are found to be more sensitive to electrospinning feed rate than to electrospinning voltage; however, these two parameters have a negligible influence on the hydrophobicity. Porosity measurements of different chemistries show an average pore size in the range 3–8 microns. The thickness of PSf mats was variable, from as low as 10 μm to as high as 70 μm.

Infective endocarditis and cancer in the elderly

Abstract: Little is known about the magnitude of the association between infective endocarditis and cancer, and about the natural history of cancer patients with concomitant diagnosis of infective endocarditis. We used the SEER-Medicare linked database to identify individuals aged 65 years or more diagnosed with colorectal, lung, breast, or prostate cancer, and without any cancer diagnosis (5 % random Medicare sample from SEER areas) between 1992 and 2009. We identified infective endocarditis from the ICD-9 diagnosis of each admission recorded in the Medpar file and its incidence rate 90 days around cancer diagnosis. We also estimated the overall survival and CRC-specific survival after a concomitant diagnosis of infective endocarditis. The peri-diagnostic incidence of infective endocarditis was 19.8 cases per 100,000 person-months for CRC, 5.7 cases per 100,000 person-months for lung cancer, 1.9 cases per 100,000 person-months for breast cancer, 4.1 cases per 100,000 person-months for prostate cancer and 2.4 cases per 100,000 person-months for individuals without cancer. Two-year overall survival was 46.4 % (95 % CI 39.5, 54.5 %) for stage I–III CRC patients with concomitant endocarditis and 73.1 % (95 % CI 72.9, 73.3 %) for those without it. In this elderly population, the incidence of infective endocarditis around CRC diagnosis was substantially higher than around the diagnosis of lung, breast and prostate cancers. A concomitant diagnosis of infective endocarditis in patients with CRC diagnosis is associated with shorter survival.

Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP) Investigation: Design of the Solar Wind and Coronal Plasma Instrument Suite for Solar Probe Plus

Abstract: United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (contract NNN06AA01C (Task NNN10AA08T))

Quality of Life and Recycling Behaviour in High-Rise Buildings: A Case in Hong Kong

Abstract: Many researchers, environmentalists and economists have made tremendous efforts to enable polices and measures for waste recycling, to improve the quality of the public living environment and to achieve a better quality of everyday life. This study examined the quality of life (QOL) in high-rise buildings in relation to sustainability. It investigated household recycling behaviour and explored the QOL factors that affect such behaviour. Two models based on different types of recycling behaviour were estimated: 1) a model for the use of public recycling facilities (UPRF) and 2) a model for the use of private recycling sectors (UPRS). Data were collected through a survey of 505 residents in two old districts of Hong Kong. The assessment of QOL included consideration for the physical settings, the socio-demographic variables and the respondents’ attitudes on recycling and living environments. The research methods involved questionnaires and interviews. Correlations and multiple regression analyses were conducted to interpret the data collected through the questionnaires. The findings indicated that UPRF can be significantly predicted by physical settings and by satisfaction with the location of facilities, with the residents’ participation and with the quality of the neighbourhood and accommodation. UPRS can be significantly predicted by housing type, income and the availability of private recycling sectors. These findings also indicate some directions for researchers and policymakers to consider. These directions concern how environments and public facilities should be designed to encourage sustainable behaviour and enable a better QOL without compromising environmental sustainability.

Learning Science as Explorers: Historical Resonances, Inventive Instruments, Evolving Community

Abstract: Doing science as explorers, students observe, wonder and question the unknown, stretching their experience. To engage students as explorers depends on their safety in expressing uncertainty and taking risks. I create these conditions in my university seminar by employing critical exploration in the classroom, a pedagogy developed by Eleanor Duckworth, based on Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder. My students observe nature and evolve trust in working together. They experience historical resonances through constructing their own diagrams and proofs of Euclid’s geometry and experimenting with motions in response to Galileo’s 1632 Dialogue. Historical figures become virtual members in the classroom, whose historical discourse is treated as if written by a current collaborator. Finding parallels between their thinking and history, students invent such instrumental assists as modeling moonrise through configurations of their bodies, balls and a lamp in the darkroom, which they later test observationally. In the process, their curiosity becomes self-sustaining, instigating further investigation. Drawing on diverse strengths of participants, collaboration among explorers is not like a chain; it can be “as strong as its strongest link.” One person’s insightful confusion can take the whole group’s understanding to a new and different place; an experiment or diagram beginning in one person’s hands soon engages all. Their collaboration has at its disposal the union of life experiences of its members. As students generate multiple concurrent, conflicting perspectives, they diverge from the goal-directed curricula of most schools today. They learn how to observe; how to question; how to communicate; how to determine what is reasonable and what is not; how to create knowledge rather than just accepting it.

Equity and emissions trading in China

Abstract: China has embarked on an ambitious pathway for establishing a national carbon market in the next 5–10 years. In this study, we analyze the distributional aspects of a Chinese emissions-trading scheme from ethical, economic, and stated-preference perspectives. We focus on the role of emissions permit allocation and first show how specific equity principles can be incorporated into the design of potential allocation schemes. We then assess the economic and distributional impacts of those allocation schemes using a computable general equilibrium model with regional detail for the Chinese economy. Finally, we conduct a survey among Chinese climate-policy experts on the basis of the simulated model impacts. The survey participants indicate a relative preference for allocation schemes that put less emissions-reduction burden on the western provinces, a medium burden on the central provinces, and a high burden on the eastern provinces. Most participants show strong support for allocating emissions permits based on consumption-based emissions responsibilities.

Improving Participation in Science and Technology Higher Education: Ways Forward

Abstract: In this chapter we focus on how the insights which have emerged from the preceding chapters may be useful for stakeholders working to improve STEM participation. Stimulating interest in STEM may impact positively on many young people’s choice process, but on its own it will not improve STEM participation. Part of the problem is that students have limited knowledge about STEM-related applications and professions. However, it also seems that choosing an education is related not only to what you want to do, but to who you want to be. That finding points to the role of the media and the informal science sector in influencing young people’s images of science and technology. In terms of pedagogic strategies, engaging with socio-scientific issues within the school science curriculum encourages students to consider further STEM education. We also know that students are concerned about the workload and difficulty of STEM education which is something that needs to be considered when designing the curriculum and classroom activities. A variety of STEM-related experiences meets the needs of diverse student groups. In particular, interventions to improve recruitment should be designed with sensitivity to gender differences but without making essentialist claims about gender or reproducing self-fulfilling prophesies about gender and STEM. The nature of the STEM participation challenge may necessitate large-scale, national interventions over a sustained period. Finally, in order to increase the number of STEM graduates, keeping students on the STEM track is just as important as recruiting new ones and this requires that students’ experiences in undergraduate STEM programmes match their expectations. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of how improved participation in STEM is related to social and gender equity, free and well-informed choices, and society’s need for expertise and a scientifically and technologically literate workforce.

Global networks and the emergent sites of contemporary evangelicalism in brazil

Abstract: This chapter considers the global networks, historical events and political economic contexts that have given rise to Evangelical and Pentecostal faiths in Brazil. Acknowledging Brazil’s long-held traditions for religious tolerance and syncretism, we query the roles of international forces in producing Brazil’s rather unique religious landscape. By unpacking a host of interrelated political, social and economic factors, we offer fresh insight regarding the growth and development of evangelical and Pentecostal faiths in Brazil and Latin America more generally. We explore the roots of their missionary efforts and the ways they adapted and grew in the late twentieth century. Related to these developments are domestic and international political events, as well as the changing role of the Catholic Church in Brazilian society. By focusing on the northeastern city of Fortaleza, we highlight the ways religious conversion and evangelical/Pentecostal growth connects to larger processes of globalization and political economic change. While proselytizing efforts were once linked with urban poverty and American missionaries, today Brazilians are leading this charge, establishing churches throughout the Amazon as well as in Africa and Asia. Our findings suggest that the growth of these Brazilian faiths relates to a multitude of political economic processes and patterns of global change: Brazil’s return to democracy in the 1980s and the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s played important roles as did domestic and international migration patterns and shifting urbanization trends. These churches’ practices have adapted and evolved as they have globalized which explains the appeal of these faiths to Brazilians and elsewhere throughout Latin America. Just as Brazil’s religious past was characterized by rapid spiritual change and global connectivities, so will its religious future likely be just as dynamic and heterogeneous.

Parts and differences

Abstract: Part/whole is said in many ways: the leg is part of the table, the subset is part of the set, rectangularity is part of squareness, and so on. Do the various flavors of part/whole have anything in common? They may be partial orders, but so are lots of non-mereological relations. I propose an “upward difference transmission” principle: x is part of y if and only if x cannot change in specified respects while y stays the same in those respects.

The Transnational Debate Over Homosexuality in the Anglican Communion

Abstract: This chapter examines how debates over homosexuality are serving to reshape the international Anglican Communion, producing new geographies of connection and disconnection in diverse contexts globally. These debates include the morality of same-sex relationships, the blessing of same-sex unions, the ordination of gay clergy, and the consecration of gay bishops. We draw on original research from a larger project on the sexuality debates within Anglicanism which involved interviews with a range of key actors, observation at several important Communion events, and parish-level case studies in England, U.S. and South Africa with additional fieldwork in Uganda and Lesotho. Following a broad discussion of the nature of the sexuality debates in global Anglicanism, we explore new networks and alliances s national/provincial borders and how they have responded to recent developments in the Communion related to homosexuality. While traditional scalar categories such as parish, diocese, and province are important for understanding the shape of the debates and their implications, these new networks and alliances both interact with and challenge the traditional organization of the Anglican polity. Drawing on select examples from parish case studies, we then explore how local ideas about the nature of the international Communion are being challenged and shaped by the wider transnational debate over homosexuality. The intensification of transnational flows of discourses, people, and money, rather than serving as a force connecting people worldwide who share an Anglican identity, has often created senses of disconnection to the wider Communion rather than fostering senses of connection and belonging. We raise questions about the future of the Anglican Communion and Anglican identity more broadly.

Forces of the cosmos in alam minangkabau: A phenomenological perspective

Abstract: The literature of the Minangkabau tribe of the Malay World is rich with proverbs based on their view of ‘nature and nurture’. By and large, they construe the world (alam) as an open book and a ‘guru’ into the mysteries of life. In this paper, the author will examine some of those proverbs based on the book Kato Pusako Papatah Patitih Ajaran dan Filsafat Minangkabau. Towards the end, an outline of their belief regarding the destiny of man, levels of reality and the gradation of what is occult and manifest is analysed within the unfolding drama between skies and earth.

Characterization of the expression of the pro-metastatic MenaINV isoform during breast tumor progression

Abstract: United States. Dept. of Defense. Breast Cancer Research Program (Grants W81XWH-10-1-0040 and W81XWH-13-1-0031)

T-cell costimulatory molecules

Abstract: Transplant tolerance, similar to transplant rejection, is mediated by T cells, and activation of T cells is a prerequisite for both rejection and induction of donor-specific tolerance. Thus, costimulatory molecules play an important role in regulating rejection or acceptance of the allograft. Because of this, T-cell costimulatory molecules have been at the forefront of transplantation research for decades. The initial paradigm was that engagement of costimulatory molecules, in the context of TCR stimulation, promotes activation, clonal expansion, survival and effector differentiation of T cells, and therefore, their absence would have resulted in anergy and/or apoptotic cell death of activated T cells, a situation that favors transplant survival. Earlier studies, mostly using in vitro models, supported this paradigm. In fact, activation of T cells by TCR stimulation in the presence of CD28 costimulatory blockade often resulted in anergy and apoptosis of responding T cells. An implication of this finding is that by blocking costimulatory signals at a critical time of TCR stimulation, the T-cell response might be aborted, and in the setting of transplantation, rejection might be prevented, which may result in long-term allograft survival and possibly tolerance. Indeed, in selected rodent models, blocking CD28 and/or CD154 costimulation can induce prolonged allograft survival, and in some cases, donor-specific tolerance (Sayegh and Turka 1998). These initial findings generated tremendous enthusiasm toward clinical translation in that therapeutic blockade of key costimulatory pathways may be a promising way to the induction of transplant tolerance.

Impact of Some Agro Fluids on Corrosion Resistance of Mild Steel

Abstract: The corrosion behavior of mild steel in apple, mango, grape, orange and the mixture of these agro fluids were electrochemically studied. Chemical compositions of both mild steel and the agro fluids were carried out to determine the corrosion mechanism for the reaction. Polarization behaviors of mild steel in the agro fluids were determined by Tafel extrapolation curves over the interval of five days for a sixty-day immersion period at a constant temperature of 27 ± 2 °C. The cathodic polarization curves were almost identical irrespective of variation in concentration of the various fluids while the anodic polarization curves exhibited varying active and passive corrosion behavior. Also, the corrosion rates of the alloy decreased with increase in immersion period which could be due to gradual decline in the concentration of the acidic level in the fluids within the given range of potentials. Hence, the evolution of hydrogen gas and reduction of oxygen molecules from the reacting system were presumed to be major factors decreasing corrosiveness of the solution involved. SEM and EDS analysis of the corroded mild steel showed the respective compositions of the mild steel after the electrochemical tests. The result obtained from the study showed that electrochemical corrosion rate over the duration of immersion was in a range of mixture of the fluids > orange juice > grape juice > mango juice > apple juice.