1,721,078 research outputs found
Interview with Magdy Ahmed Hussien
No full textفي هذه المقابلة، يتحدث مجدي أحمد حسن، أمين عام حزب العمل المعارض، عن فصل بعض أعضاء الحزب للإنضمام للإتجاه الإسلامي ودلالات ذلك. أجرت المقابلة إيمان رافع.In this interview, Magdy Ahmed Hassan, Secretary General of the opposition Labor Party, discusses the removal of some party members to join the Islamist movement and its consequences. The interview was conducted by Iman Rafi
Externalities and agreements in international rivers
No full textThe thesis investigates the unidirectional impact of an upstream country’s activities on the water quantity/quality of an international river in a downstream country, an the effect of this unidirectional externality on reaching self-enforcing water agreements. The first part of the thesis develops a dynamic game of incomplete information to model strategic behaviour in reaching agreements on sharing the waters of the River Nile, when the actual power of downstream Egypt is unknown to upstream Ethiopia. The main results of the analysis are that beliefs do matter, that being perceived as strong is more important that actually being strong to avoid conflict, and that more accurate information can prevent war although it cannot prevent the conflict. The second part of the thesis considers a two-player, multi-period dynamic game with complete but imperfect information, to model the effect of asymmetric irreversibility of the actions of two countries sharing a river on the feasibility of reaching a self-enforcing environmental agreement. The main results of the analysis are that full co-operation cannot be achieved if at least one country’s actions are irreversible, that higher levels of partial co-operation can be sustained if both countries’ actions are irreversible compared to the case where only one country’s actions are irreversible, the type of co-operation, whether gradual or immediate has only an effect if both countries’ actions are irreversible. The final part of the thesis examines two reduced form relationships between various river pollution indicators and economic development indicators for domestic and international rivers. The objective is to determine whether the income-environmental quality relationship is affected by the nature of the river and to determine the effect of ignoring inter-country pollution on the intra-country turning points of the Environmental Kuznets curves. The main results indicate that national income is an important determinant for river pollution, especially for domestic rivers, that upstream effects and especially income related upstream effects, seem to play an important role in river pollution, that all pollutants peak at a lower level of income in domestic rivers than in international river, that most pollutants peak at lower level of income when upstream effects are considered.</p
Digital model reconstruction through 3D Stereo Depth camera: a faster method exploiting robot poses
Full text linkIn industrial robotic contact-based operations it is necessary to have a detailed geometrical knowledge of the work-piece to automate the generation of the working trajectory. In many cases, the digital model is not available or it differs from its as built actual conditions. Vision sensors, especially 3D vision sensors allows to scan the work-piece and reconstruct its digital copy that is used for the generation of the robotic working trajectory. In this paper we compare two algorithms for the generation of the 3D model of an unknown work-piece based on the use of the RGB-D images taken from different perspectives. The first technique, based on standard image reconstruction methods commonly used for reconstruction of indoor scenes where error in the order of few centimeters is negligible, is exploited in this work in order to be exploited in contact-based robotic operations where the geometrical error has to be limited to few millimeters. It is based on the analysis of the images to estimate the camera pose taking each image. Based on the pose, the algorithm integrates then the information contained in the images in a unique volume representing the scene. The second algorithm directly uses the known poses of the robot, stored while capturing each image, to integrate the information to create the model. The two algorithms are compared to evaluate the accuracy, acquisition time and elaboration time. The analysis is done considering two kinds of objects, the first one with regular shape, the second one corresponding to an actual industrial object
A Feasibility Study of a Robotic Approach for the Gluing Process in the Footwear Industry
No full textManufacturing processes in the shoe industry are still characterized to a large extent by human labour, especially in small and medium craft enterprises. Even when machinery is adopted to support manufacturing operations, in most cases an operator has to supervise or carry out the task. On the other hand, craft footwear industries are called to respond to continuous challenges to face the globalization effects, so that a rapid adaptability to customer needs is required. The industry 4.0 paradigms, which are taking place in the industrial environments, represent an excellent opportunity to improve the efficiency and quality of production, and a way to face international competitors. This paper analyses and proposes a robotic cell to automatize the process of glue deposition on shoe upper, which exploits a new means of depositing the glue compared to State-of-Art applications. While the latter mainly adopt glue gun spraying systems or pneumatic syringes, the proposed robotic cell is based on an extrusion system for the deposition of molten material originally in the form of a filament, similar to all extent to those adopted for Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). Two cell solutions are designed and tested. In the former the extruder is the robot end effector and the shoe upper is grounded to the cell frame. In the second, being the reciprocal, the shoe last is clamped to the robot wrist and the extruder is fixed to the cell frame. The peculiarities of the two solutions are pointed out and compared in terms of cell layout, hardware, programming software and possibility to develop collaborative applications. A self developed slicing software allows designing the trajectories for glue deposition based on the CAD model of the shoe upper, also allowing driving the inclination of the extruder nozzle with respect to the vectors normal to the upper surface. Both the proposed cell layouts permit to achieve good quality and production times. The solution with the mobile extruder is able to deposit glue at highest end-effector speed (up to 200 mm/s). On the other hand, the solution with the mobile shoe upper and fixed extruder seems to be more appropriate to enhance collaborative applications
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
