scholarly journals A New Breed of Robots that Drive Themselves

2011 ◽  
Vol 133 (02) ◽  
pp. 28-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Tilbury ◽  
A. Galip Ulsoy

This article elaborates the advancement in unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) technology. UGVs are the robotic ground vehicles capable of operating in a variety of environments and functioning in place of humans. They are being used for a variety of commercial and military purposes. UGVs can go to places where humans cannot, such as hundreds of meters down oil well pipes. These kinds of robots are on the brink of becoming an integral part of the everyday world. However, to truly become revolutionary, UGVs need a capability beyond locomotion, a suite of sensors, and a manipulator arm. They need to be able to navigate new environments without the guidance of a human operator. There are several research projects aimed at improving UGVs and making the technology ready to take on a larger role in the economy. These projects include such concepts as adjustable autonomy, enhanced reliability through design optimization, control reconfiguration, and augmented reality user interfaces.

Author(s):  
Peter Hopkins

The chapters in this collection explore the everyday lives, experiences, practices and attitudes of Muslims in Scotland. In order to set the context for these chapters, in this introduction I explore the early settlement of Muslims in Scotland and discuss some of the initial research projects that charted the settlement of Asians and Pakistanis in Scotland’s main cities. I then discuss the current situation for Muslims in Scotland through data from the 2011 Scottish Census. Following a short note about the significance of the Scottish context, in the final section, the main themes and issues that have been explored in research about Muslims in Scotland.


Author(s):  
William H. Galperin

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 100272
Author(s):  
Alexander von Lühmann ◽  
Yilei Zheng ◽  
Antonio Ortega-Martinez ◽  
Swathi Kiran ◽  
David C. Somers ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
pp. 004711782199161
Author(s):  
Cemal Burak Tansel

This forum brings together critical engagements with Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton’s Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis to assess the prospects and limits of historical materialism in International Studies. The authors’ call for a ‘necessarily historical materialist moment’ in International Studies is interrogated by scholars working with historical materialist, feminist and decolonial frameworks in and beyond International Relations (IR)/International Political Economy (IPE). This introductory essay situates the book in relation to the wider concerns of historical materialist IR/IPE and outlines how the contributors assess the viability of Bieler and Morton’s historical materialist project.


Antiquity ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 75 (290) ◽  
pp. 825-836 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoë Crossland

The landscapes of the central highlands of Madagascar are inhabited by the spirits of the dead as well as by the living. The ancestors are a forceful presence in the everyday world, and the archaeology of the central highlands is intimately entwined with them. This is made manifest both in the on-the-ground experiences encountered during fieldwork, and in archaeological narratives, such as the one presented here. Tombs are a traditional focus of archaeological research, and those that dot the hills of the central highlands are part of a network of beliefs and practices which engage with the landscape as a whole and through which social identity is constructed and maintained. In the central highlands, and indeed elsewhere in Madagascar, there is an intimate relationship between peoples’ understandings of their social and physical location in the world and their understanding of their relationship to the dead.


2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andre Van Oudtshoorn

Jesus� imperatives in the Sermon on the Mount continue to play a significant role in Christian ethical discussions. The tension between the radical demands of Jesus and the impossibility of living this out within the everyday world has been noted by many scholars. In this article, an eschatological-ontological model, based on the social construction of reality, is developed to show that this dialectic is not necessarily an embarrassment to the church but, instead, belongs to the essence of the church as the recipient of the Spirit of Christ and as called by him to exist now in terms of the coming new age that has already been realised in Christ. The absolute demands of Jesus� imperatives, it is argued, must relativise all other interpretations of reality whilst the world, in turn, relativises Jesus� own definition of what �is� and therefore also the injunctions to his disciples on how to live within this world. This process of radical relativisation provides a critical framework for Christian living. The church must expect, and do, the impossible within this world through her faith in Christ who recreates and redefines reality. The church�s ethical task, it is further argued, is to participate with the Spirit in the construction of signs of this new reality in Christ in this world through her actions marked by faith, hope and love.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Elter

TV-journalism is popular: three-fourths of all germans inform themselfs in this way about the current events: may it be politics, culture or sports. But this linerar leading medium is aging. Through the deep-reaching digitalisation of the everyday-world, the last stage of the media-convergence is reached. Television and Web are melting together, for excample on the tablet, the smartphone or media library. „TV+AV-Journalismus“ is the first German-speaking opus that reflects this development for full-video journalism in a theoretical and practical way. In volume I, the most important theories of media and communication are flowing into an universal model of the digital journalism. This model is then subsequently applied to current trends and developments in praxis within volume II. Moreover, the most vital genres and formats are introduced plus the structural and economic requirements for journalism are explained. Theory and praxis are adressed. The author dares to bridge the gap between these, still separeted „two cultures“.


Author(s):  
Alan Cole

This chapter highlights several important elements at work in the process of writing history. The first thing to see is that writing history represents a doubling of reality: in addition to the everyday world that one lives in, where one's senses are engaged in a fluid and continuous manner, the writer of history works to evoke scenes and events that, though invisible, can be made to appear to the reader as integral parts of reality, albeit in the past. Put this way, one can appreciate how the skills needed to write history reflect the growing human ability to artify the world. Why this matters for understanding Chan literature is that one wouldn't be far wrong in describing Chan as a gradually solidifying set of literary gestures designed to enhance—and organize—the present, by carefully designing and curating images of an imaginary past.


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