A riderless bicycle can automatically steer itself so as to recover from falls. The common view is that this self-steering is caused by gyroscopic precession of the front wheel, or by the wheel contact trailing like a caster behind the steer axis. We show that neither effect is necessary for self-stability. Using linearized stability calculations as a guide, we built a bicycle with extra counte...

SUMMARY During short-term scheduling in a steel plant, one problem is to know beforehand how long equipment will be usable and when it will have to be maintained. The proposed system answers this question for a part in a continuous caster in order to inform another system that schedules short-term production. It uses fuzzy inference rules to process input data and to compute the life-expectancy...

A customer who places a tentative order at a steel mill customarily receives a due-date quotation, namely the date by which the mill says that it will ship the order. The steel mill wants the due date to be early enough so that the customer won’t balk (withdraw the order), but late enough so that the probability of tardiness is low. This note obtains expressions for the tardiness probability at...

When distinguishing illumination from reflectance edges, both edge blurriness and textural continuity across an edge are generally used as cues to promote the illumination-edge interpretation. However, when these cues were combined, i.e., when a dark spot having a blurred edge was placed on textured backgrounds, we unexpectedly found that the spot appears stained or painted rather than differen...

The batch machine scheduling of continuous caster with flexible jobs is first proposed based on its character. The difference with classical problem is first summarized. The preprocess of the problem based on rule is proposed, and then the mathematical model with minimizing setup costs is proposed. To improve the efficiency of local search, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) is introduced, a...