Climbing high to avoid thieves

Using Monodromy to Avoid High Precision

When solving polynomial systems with homotopy continuation, the fundamental numerical linear algebra computations become inaccurate when two paths are in close proximity. The current best defense against this ill-conditioning is the use of adaptive precision. While sufficiently high precision indeed overcomes any such loss of accuracy, high precision can be very expensive. In this article, we d...

Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves

Thieves of the state.

719 September 2012, Vol. 102, No. 9 SAMJ Thieves of the state To the Editor: I do not discount what has historically occurred and, according to Erasmus’ article,1 is apparently still occurring. A decade after my internship, I still recall calculating that I was, in effect, earning R12 per hour at that time. The culture dictated that one ‘sucked it up’ – and that is what we did. In the academic ...

Hume and the Prince of Thieves

Hume’s readers love to hate the Sensible Knave. But hating the Knave is like hating a messenger with bad tidings. The message is that there is a gap, on Hume’s account, between our motivations and our obligations to just action. But it isn’t the Knave’s character that is to blame, for the same gap will be found if we turn our attention to alter egos, such as Robin Hood, the benevolent “Prince o...

Stair Climbing Robots and High-grip Crawler

Stair climbing is one of the most attractive performance of mobile robot for both legged and wheeled. (e.g. Stoeter et al., 2002; Murphy, 2000; Yim et al., 2000; Krishna et al., 1997; Granosik et al., 2005; Liu et al., 2005; Arai et al., 2006; Tanaka et al., 2006; Miyanaka et al., 2007; Tsukagoshi et al.,2005) Authors have been developing various kinds of stair climbers, considering how to make...