The quest for a useful design tool that incorporated the effect of dynamics of conveyor belts on the design of a conveyor system started halfway the 1950's. It was however not until halfway the 1980's that the first useful design tool became available. In the early days of using dynamics of belt conveyor systems the attention was focused on an analysis of both the starts and the stops of long o...

Adaptive control is a very appealing technology, at least in principle. Yet its use has been conditioned by an attitude of distrustfulness on the part of some practitioners. In this paper, we review some concepts, the isolation of which was necessary to engender confidence in the technology. These include the unpredictable failure of the MIT rule; the bursting phenomenon, and how to prevent it;...

Pulsar timing at the Mt Pleasant observatory has focused on Vela, which can be tracked for 18 hours of the day. These nearly continuous timing records extend over 24 years allowing a greater insight into details of timing noise, micro glitches and other more exotic effects. In particular we report the glitch parameters of the 2004 event, along with the reconfirmation that the spin up for the Ve...

Ripple Down Rules (RDR) were developed in answer to the problem of maintaining medium to large rule-based knowledge systems. Traditional approaches to knowledge-based systems gave little thought to maintenance as it was expected that extensive upfront domain analysis involving a highly trained specialist, the knowledge engineer, and the time-poor domain expert would produce a complete model cap...

20 per cent are living with a closed defect by 30, and 24 per cent by 6o years, both figures being a little better than those for persistent ductus. Closures occur mainly, but not exclusively, with small defects and normal pulmonary arterial pressures. This group, which forms nearly one-third of the total, has now an almost normal life expectation since treatment should eliminate the risk of dy...

BACKGROUND The care for trauma patients has undergone major changes during the last decades. Additionally, many injury prevention measures have been established. The objective of these efforts was to reduce the number of traumatic incidents and to reduce mortality and morbidity in injured patients. The aim of our study was to assess how these measures and improved care have altered trauma mecha...

After nearly two decades of graphene research, condensed-matter physicists Luis Foá Torres and Sergio O Valenzuela delve into the ongoing mystery material’s perplexing non-local response “valley Hall effect”

Nearly half of the world's population in 2000 lived in countries with fertility rates at or below replacement level, and nearly all countries will reach low fertility levels in the next two decades. Concerns about low fertility, fertility that is well below replacement, are widespread. But there are both persistent rationales for having children and institutional adjustments that can make the w...