Search results for "Subject"

A proposed mapping method for aligning machine execution data to numerical control code

2019

The visions of the digital thread and smart manufacturing have boosted the potential of relating downstream data to upstream decisions in design. However, to date, the tools and methods to robustly map across the related data representations is significantly lacking. In response, we propose a mapping technique for standard manufacturing data representations. Specifically, we focus on relating controller data from machining tools in the form of MTConnect, an emerging standard that defines the vocabulary and semantics as well as communications protocols for execution data, and G-Code, the most widely used standard for numerical control (NC) instructions. We evaluate the efficacy of our mappin…

Do terrorism, organized crime (drug production), and state weakness affect contemporary armed conflicts? An empirical analysis

2015

ABSTRACTIn 2014, the UN Security Council emphasized the dangers of terrorism, criminal activity (especially drug production and trafficking), and state weakness in conflict areas. However, neither policy debates nor scholarly analyses have focussed on the potential impact of these elements on conflict dynamics and characteristics, and the investigated partial relationships have led to inconclusive results. This article explores the presence in armed conflicts of terrorist groups among fighting parties, major drug production (indicating the presence of activities typical of criminal organizations), and state failure in the period 1990–2011. Focussing on intrastate conflicts, this article hig…

Care Workers’ Readiness for Robotization : Identifying Psychological and Socio-Demographic Determinants

2020

Successful implementation of robots in welfare services requires that the staff approves of them as a part of daily work tasks. In this study, we identified psychological and socio-demographic determinants associated with readiness for robotization among professional Finnish care-workers. National survey data were collected from professional care workers (n = 3800) between October and November 2016. Random samples were drawn from the member registers of two Finnish trade unions. The data were analyzed with regression models for respondents with and without firsthand experience with robots. The models explained 34–39% of the variance in the readiness for robotization. The readiness was posit…

Lying Cheating Robots : Robots and Infidelity

2018

Love has been described as unpredictable, immeasurable and non-purchasable and as such, poses challenges for anyone in a relationship to both stay in love, and to not fall in love with someone else. Scientists are still discovering whether or not love follows any specific recipe. Outlooks, personality, sense of humor and talent may not perfectly guarantee an individual falls in love with another, and more importantly is able to sustain that relationship. This article portrays a futuristic scenario in which truly intelligent and emotional robots already exist. Here, the bi-directional love discussed in Lovotics is not simulated through engineering, but rather is genuine from the perspectives…

Pricing Sovereign Contingent Convertible Debt

2016

We develop a pricing model for sovereign contingent convertible bonds (S-CoCo) with payment standstills triggered by a sovereign's credit default swap CDS spread. One innovation is the modeling of CDS spread regime switching which is prevalent during crises. Regime switching is modeled as a hidden Markov process and is integrated with a stochastic process of spread levels to obtain S-CoCo prices through simulation. The paper goes a step further and uses the pricing model in a Longstaff-Schwartz. American option pricing framework to compute state contingent S-CoCo prices at some risk horizon, thus facilitating risk management. Dual trigger pricing is also discussed using the idiosyncratic CD…

Resilience to flash floods in wetland communities of northeastern Bangladesh

2018

Globally, a number of catastrophic hydrometeorological hazards occurred in 2017 among which the monsoon floods in South Asia was particularly disastrous, killing nearly 1200 people in India, Nepal and Bangladesh. The wetland region (Haor) of northeastern (NE) Bangladesh was severely affected by flash floods early in 2017, affecting nearly 1 million households and damaging US $450 million worth of rice crops. This study investigates how the NE Bangladesh experienced the 2017 flash floods, and to what degree the wetland communities are vulnerable and resilience to flash floods. Focus group discussion, key informant interviews, and household questionnaire surveys (n = 80) were applied in the s…

2019

Final disposal of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) from nuclear power plants (NPPs) is an ethical issue with implications within and across generations. We address this issue from the perspective of nuclear communities that host nuclear waste disposal sites. These are primarily the communities that face injustice due to the potential radiological risks. A resident survey (n = 454) was conducted in two Finnish nuclear communities, i.e. Eurajoki and Pyhajoki, that are being considered as alternative sites for a second repository for SNF. The nuclear waste management (NWM) company Posiva is already building a repository in Eurajoki, the first in Finland. These communities are in different stages of th…

The Challenge of Coexistence in Socially Vulnerable Schools

2017

Abstract Society in general and schools in particular continue to express their concerns with regard to the many challenges posed nowadays by living in a globalized world, where learning to coexist involves knowing oneself and those around us. Therefore, the professionals from the education sector and specially from the most vulnerable contexts demand the necessity to know strategies and initiatives which enable them to build a democratic school, where learning to coexist is the key to educate engaged citizens living in an increasingly intercultural, changing world. The study presented here has been conducted in two differentiated, but complementary, phases. During the first phase a documen…

Subjective Logic-Based In-Network Data Processing for Trust Management in Collocated and Distributed Wireless Sensor Networks

2018

While analyzing an explosive amount of data collected in today’s wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the redundant information in the sensed data needs to be handled. In-network data processing is a technique which can eliminate or reduce such redundancy, leading to minimized resource consumption. On the other hand, trust management techniques establish trust relationships among nodes and detect unreliable nodes. In this paper, we propose two novel in-network data processing schemes for trust management in static WSNs. The first scheme targets at networks, where sensor nodes are closely collocated to report the same event. Considering both spatial and temporal correlations, this scheme generat…

State effects and the effects of state building: institution building and the formation of state-centred societies

2016

AbstractThis article discusses the assumptions underlying state-building efforts and the effects of these efforts. It addresses two main questions: why has state building not led to the establishment of effective states? And what are the effects of statebuilding? It is argued that these efforts have been based on an institutionalist model of the state derived from a Weberian framework, and that the basic reason why state building has failed is that the creation of effective states requires the creation of state-centred societies, where both material and symbolic resources are concentrated in the state. This is very difficult to achieve for external actors. But, although state building has n…