On the kinematic of a 3‐DOF Stewart platform

The kinematic behavior of the Stewart platform has been discussed in the literature by many researchers. In the present article, a special form of the Stewart platform, namely, the 3‐degrees of freedom platform with triangular shaped base and upper platforms, is considered by thoroughly deriving a new set of constraint equations which makes it possible to discover several new properties of the platform. Both the inverse and direct kinematic problems are discussed and a new approach for solution of the direct kinematic problem is described which gives all the real (physical) solutions. ©1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

A perspective from furniture and cabinet manufacturers in Turkey

This study evaluated current furniture and cabinet industry in Turkey. A survey was used to cover 680 of 2250 companies in the country. Some of the problems of small- and mid-sized furniture and cabinet manufacturers such as procurement of raw material, inventory capacity, reasons of insufficient raw material inventory, production types, marketing problems and their reasons were analyzed based on the response to the survey. Possible suggestions to solve the above problems of the manufacturers were made to understand the mechanics and improve overall quality of the industry.     

Towards the experiential meaning of milieu for neighbourhood regeneration: discussions on the institutional designation of milieu-valued areas in Tallinn, Estonia

This article analyses the constructive and strategic character of the milieu discourse in the planning of urban neighbourhoods in Tallinn, Estonia, that has an influence on neighbourhood regeneration. In the institutional designation of milieu areas, the concept of milieu area means the coherent historical housing environment as assessed by planning experts. The article argues that this milieu discourse has strategic aims in terms of preserving architectural housing heritage and acknowledging the traditional understanding of the heritage value. This has influenced, in the collective knowledge, the specific perception of the term ‘milieu’ that will in turn influence the change of a neighbourhood’s social structure and of its placemaking. For example, the concept of milieu area is used by real estate agents for selling and renting apartments in deprived neighbourhoods that are institutionally acknowledged as the neighbourhoods with the milieu value. The study concludes that the expert-based milieu discourse does not consider the socio-spatial neighbourhoods’ everyday life, which is significant in terms of viable neighbourhood regeneration. The reconstruction of the milieu term towards an experiential milieu approach is suggested, as the involvement of residents in neighbourhood regeneration is especially essential in the neighbourhoods of the dispossessed.     

Assessment of self- and cross-absorbed SAF values for HDRK-man using GEANT4 code: internal photon and electron emitters

The ultimate need to account for the partial amount of energy deposited in target tissue/organ resulting from internal inhalation, ingestion, and injection intakes of radionuclides, defined by the Medical Internal Radiation Dosimetry committee as the specific absorbed fraction(SAF), has become obvious. In this study, we assessed the SAF values for self-and cross-absorption, which were calculated for a uniform distribution of monoenergetic photon and electron emitters with energies ranging from15 ke V to 3 Me V. The voxelized human phantom ‘‘HighDefinition Reference Korean-man'(HDRK-man), which was implemented using the Monte Carlo simulation code GEANT4(version 10.1), was used for several combinations of target–source organs. The results were compared to those of the International Commission on Radiological Protection Reference(ICRP133) and Zubal phantoms. It was found that the SAF values of the three models have a similar trend. However, the SAF values for the HDRK-man phantom were higher than those of the other two models,with a relatively good agreement with those for the ICRP133 phantom(differences of 13.9 ± 2.8 and12.1 ± 3.2 for photon and electron emitters, respectively).To analyze the differences in SAF values, we calculatedthe chord length distributions(CLDs) for selected target–source combinations. The parameters of organ mass(or volume) and CLDs, in addition to the adopted computational procedures, mainly cause such discrepancies. For realistic radionuclide emission spectra, an overall overestimation was observed when computing the S values for three radiopharmaceuticals studied(I-131, In-111, and Lu-177) and for liver–spleen intra-and inter-organ absorption when compared with published data. The new arrangement of S and SAF values is expected to add value for multidisciplinary research and clinical communities.     

Fault diagnosis of rotary kiln using SVM and binary ACO

This paper proposes a novel hybrid algorithm for fault diagnosis of rotary kiln based on a binary ant colony (BACO) and support vector machine (SVM). The algorithm can find a subset selection which is attained through the elimination of the features that produce noise or are strictly correlated with other already selected features. The BACO algorithm can improve classification accuracy with an appropriate feature subset and optimal parameters of SVM. The proposed algorithm is easily implemented and because of use of a simple filter in that, its computational complexity is very low. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through two real Rotary Cement kiln datasets. The results show that our algorithm outperforms existing algorithms.     

Residential decision-making and satisfaction among new suburbanites in the Tallinn urban region, Estonia

The prevailing research into suburbanisation in former centrally planned countries explains suburban change by referring to macro-level factors that are evident in the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy. Findings show that in a neo-liberal environment, the public sector plays only a modest role in residential planning; the key players are developers and banks. This study takes a different approach by focusing on the micro-level factors that lead households to move from the city to new, post-Soviet suburban settlements, specifically in the Tallinn urban region of Estonia. A sample of data from the University of Tartu’s 2006 New Residential Areas Survey is herein analysed in order to ascertain the reasons for moving, the criteria used in the selection of a particular suburban settlement, and the subsequent levels of residential satisfaction. The results show that, for the period in question, housing adjustment moves were more prevalent than induced moves triggered by life-course changes. In addition, it was found that, generally, new suburbanites were satisfied with their housing and neighbourhoods. However, they were less satisfied with the provision of local services, especially when their new settlements lay at a distance from pre-transition settlements.     

Support Vector Learning for Semantic Argument Classification

The natural language processing community has recently experienced a growth of interest in domain independent shallow semantic parsing—the process of assigning a Who did What to Whom, When, Where, Why, How etc. structure to plain text. This process entails identifying groups of words in a sentence that represent these semantic arguments and assigning specific labels to them. It could play a key role in NLP tasks like Information Extraction, Question Answering and Summarization. We propose a machine learning algorithm for semantic role parsing, extending the work of Gildea and Jurafsky (2002), Surdeanu et al. (2003) and others. Our algorithm is based on Support Vector Machines which we show give large improvement in performance over earlier classifiers. We show performance improvements through a number of new features designed to improve generalization to unseen data, such as automatic clustering of verbs. We also report on various analytic studies examining which features are most important, comparing our classifier to other machine learning algorithms in the literature, and testing its generalization to new test set from different genre. On the task of assigning semantic labels to the PropBank (Kingsbury, Palmer, & Marcus, 2002) corpus, our final system has a precision of 84% and a recall of 75%, which are the best results currently reported for this task. Finally, we explore a completely different architecture which does not requires a deep syntactic parse. We reformulate the task as a combined chunking and classification problem, thus allowing our algorithm to be applied to new languages or genres of text for which statistical syntactic parsers may not be available.Editors: Dan Roth and Pascale FungThis research was partially supported by the ARDA AQUAINT program via contract OCG4423B and by the NSF via grant IIS-9978025.     

Accuracy Testing of a Vehicle Proximity Warning System based on GPS and Wireless Networks

A vehicle proximity warning system is being developed using GPS and wireless local area networks to improve safety of off-highway trucks in open pit mines. After two years of research, software development, and laboratory testing, field-tests were performed at the Colorado School of Mines and in two open-pit operations to evaluate GPS accuracy and overall system effectiveness under rugged operating conditions. This paper discusses the methodology used for testing and presents a summary of results.