Operating heavy equipment can be a difficult and very tedious task. Control of an agricultural tractor requires the continuous attention of the driver, and farmers often work long hours during critical times of planting and harvesting. Loaders and other ground vehicles are frequently used in situations that are unpleasant or even hazardous for a human operator. This paper explores the use of ca...

This work adds to the previous literature on networked business incubators (NBIs) by exploring the complex network of relationships originated from a NBI. In particular, social ties (cooperative relations between individuals) and business ties (formal linkages between organizations) are investigated. The analytical framework developed here is empirically illustrated through a case study researc...

Recent advancements in photovoltaic (PV) system technologies have decreased their investment cost and enabled the construction of large PV farms for bulk power generations. The output power of PV farms is aaected by both failure of composed components and solar radiation variability. These two factors cause the output power of PV farms be random and diierent from that of conventional units. The...

The contribution of this paper is a technique that in certain circumstances allows one to avoid the removal of dynamic shadows in the visible spectrum making use of images in the infrared spectrum. This technique emerged from a real problem concerning the autonomous navigation of a vehicle in a wind farm. In this environment, the dynamic shadows cast by the wind turbines' blades make it necessa...

In July 1995, 40 Montana residents were identified with laboratory-confirmed Escherichia coli O157:H7 infection; 52 residents had bloody diarrhea without laboratory confirmation. The median age of those with laboratory-confirmed cases was 42 years (range, 4- 86); 58% were female. Thirteen patients were hospitalized, and 1 developed hemolytic-uremic syndrome. A case-control study showed that 19 ...

We explore the role of farm animals in providing care to different types of participants at care farms (e.g., youngsters with behavioural problems, people with severe mental problems and people with dementia). Care farms provide alternative and promising settings where people can interact with animals compared to a therapeutic healthcare setting. We performed a literature review, conducted focu...

Online detectors form an important part of achieving coordination and synchronization in large-scale distributed applications running in peer to peer systems, the Grid, PlanetLab, and large-scale Enterprise like server farms. Detectors can be used to monitor the up/down status of hosts, the malicious behavior among processes, the availability behavior among hosts, and to estimate the number of ...

We address the challenge of link estimation and routing over highly dynamic links, thats is, bursty links that rapidly shift between reliable and unreliable periods of transmissions. Based on significant empirical evidence of over 100,000 transmissions over each link in 802.15.4 and 802.11 testbeds, we propose two metrics, expected future transmissions (EFT) and MAC3, for runtime estimation of ...

For the HERA-B experiment a processor farm for the third level trigger and full event reconstruction is planned. It will consist of more than 100 processor nodes, receiving data via high speed data links from a switching network. In 1996, a VME-based system (test farm) was built to test a possible implementation. In parallel, investigations of alternative, non-VME-based solutions for the proces...

The level 2 trigger on charged particles (L2C) of the NA48 experiment features powerful capabilities for implementing complex triggering algorithms in real-time software. These algorithms may involve track reconstruction, vertex, invariant mass or transverse momentum computation, etc. After a brief outline of the L2C architecture, this paper describes the salient features of the I/O and process...