The efficient acquisition and generalization of skills for manual tasks requires that a robot be able to perceive and control the important aspects of an object while ignoring irrelevant factors. For many tasks involving everyday toollike objects, detection and control of the distal end of the object is sufficient for its use. For example, a robot could pour a substance from a bottle by control...

Lameness in pigs is a major welfare concern and one of the most commonly reported reasons to premature culling of breeding sows. The prevalence of lameness in sows was estimated from 113 English pig breeding units and different risk factors associated with the occurrence of lameness were examined, followed by an assessment of the economic costs of lameness in sows. The prevalence of lameness in...

Traditionally, there have been tensions between frontline healthcare professionals and managers, with well-known stereotypes of difficult consultants and pen-pushing managers. Many junior doctors have limited management experience and have often never even met a manager prior to taking on a consultant role. Based on a successful programme pioneered by Dr Robert Klaber (Imperial, London) we have...

A novel calculator, designed for interactive whiteboards and pen-based devices, provides a better task fit than conventional approaches. The calculator provides a natural, dynamic method of doing calculations by handwriting and using conventional notation. This paper discusses the calcualtor’s underlying design principles, which collectively create a coherent and innovative ‘look and feel.’ The...

Building on recent work by Rippon and Stallard, we explore the intricate structure of the spider’s web fast escaping sets associated with certain transcendental entire functions. Our results are expressed in terms of the components of the complement of the set (the ‘holes’ in the web). We describe the topology of such components and give a characterisation of their possible orbits under iterati...

We report a preliminary analysis of the interactions between eye and hand during tracing and drawing of four simple shapes. Eye and hand movements were recorded using the ASL 504 system and the Flock of Birds system, respectively. During tracing, pen tip and eye were tightly coupled, with participants making a series of small saccades just in front of the moving pen, interspersed with periods o...

Seventy-two Friesian calves (BW = 102.0 +/- 1.8 kg) were bought from a commercial calf farm and distributed to a factorial arrangement of treatments in a complete block design with 3 treatments and 3 blocks of similar fasted BW to study the effect of increasing the number of feeding places per pen on performance, behavior, and welfare indicators during the 4 wk after arrival. Treatments consist...

We prove a formula for the Fekete-Leja transfinite diameter of the pullback of a set E ⊂ C by a regular polynomial map F , expressing it in terms of the resultant of the leading part of F and the transfinite diameter of E. We also establish the nonarchimedean analogue of this formula. A key step in the proof is a formula for the transfinite diameter of the filled Julia set of F .

Representations suchas free-bodyand circuit diagramsare central to engineeringpractice andproficiency.Developing and using representations is an essential skill that engineering students need to learn. In this paperwe present a case study of the use of pen-based computing to improve representational literacy through dynamic knowledge construction and management activities among engineering stud...

0 lies on a periodic orbit. We then perturb F0 by adding a pole at the origin. Our goal is to investigate the structure of the Julia set of Fλ, which we denote by J(Fλ), when λ is nonzero. For these maps, the point at ∞ is always a superattracting fixed point, so we have an immediate basin of attraction of ∞ that we denote by Bλ. As a consequence, we may also define the filled Julia set for the...