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The purpose of this study is to describe knowledge, awareness and experience of different employees in a Swedish municipality (City of Gothenburg) concerning the disability perspective, accessibility and universal design in practice.

This study is based on an online survey. A total of 119 different employees responded to the survey. The data was analyzed from a mixed-method approach, using descriptive statistics and textual analysis. The study also included personal interviews with 19 employees in the City of Gothenburg.

A total of 521 employees in the City of Gothenburg participated in disability awareness exercises (DAE) at the Disability Awareness Arena to gain greater knowledge and insight on disability perspectives in different environments and services. Of these, 119 people representing different professions in soft and hard services and companies participated in the survey; and 19 people participated in personal interviews. The study showed that a vast majority of them were very satisfied and they have developed and practiced their new knowledge and attitude toward disability and accessibility.

One limitation in this study is that it has investigated the experiences and effects of the DAE 6–12 months after its implementation. Therefore, it is not possible to analyze long-term effects that the DAE can have in practice.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior study of these issues has been conducted in Sweden. This study is deemed to have significant social benefit because of the steadily increasing demand for disability simulations, awareness of disability perspective and accessibility in municipality settings. No other study has addressed the importance of the DAE in these perspectives. DAE is defined in this article as a unique concept for promoting the usage of the disability perspective in the everyday workplace.

Model order reduction (MOR) has been widely used in the electric networks but little has been done to reduce higher index differential algebraic equations (DAEs). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Most methods first do an index reduction before reducing a higher DAE but this can lead to a loss of physical properties of the system.

The paper presents a MOR method for DAEs called the index-aware MOR (IMOR) which can reduce a DAE while preserving its physical properties such as the index. The feasibility of this method is tested on real-life electric networks.

MOR has been widely used to reduce large systems from electric networks but little has been done to reduce higher index DAEs. Most methods first do an index reduction before reducing a large system of DAEs but this can lead to a loss of physical properties of the system. The paper presents a MOR method for DAEs called the IMOR which can reduce a DAE while preserving its physical properties such as the index. The feasibility of this method is tested on real-life electric networks.

The main purpose of this paper is to find convenient methods to solve the differential‐algebraic equations which have great importance in various fields of science and engineering.

The paper applies a semi‐analytical approach, using both the homotopy analysis method (HAM) and the modified homotopy analysis method (MHAM) for finding the solution of linear and nonlinear DAEs.

The results show that the new modification can effectively reduce computational costs and accelerates the rapid convergence of the series solution.

Some high index DAEs are investigated to present a comparative study between the HAM and the MHAM.

This study aims to, in the light of the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) objective to provide “broadband for all”, investigate how the DAE can make use of universal service as a regulatory instrument created specifically to ensure a minimum of available and affordable electronic communications services within a competitive market.

The paper uses systematic and comparative legal analyses of the European Union (EU)’s universal service rules and contrasts them with Information Society policy measures.

There are strong commonalities between the DAE and universal service on the level of objectives. However, due to heavy reliance on the measures stimulating supply-side, there are discrepancies in the mechanisms of their achievement. At the same time, an effective use of universal service instrument by the DAE is not reasonable. In its current form, universal service does not correspond to the substantive requirements of the Information Society policy and needs to be reformed. The paper calls for additional empirical and theoretical research on the role and form of universal service in the Information Society and outlines main issues for further research.

The paper uses the perspective of the EU Information Society policy to undertake a legal analysis of the current universal service regulation. Against this backdrop, it points out obsolescence of individual elements of the scope and logical deficiencies of the review mechanism.

Compares changes in the competitive position of six Dynamic Asian Economies (DAEs) – Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong – exporting to the USA, Japan and the European Union (EU) between 1983 and 1995. Dynamic shift‐share methods are applied to two digit data for the top five manufactured exports to the USA and the EU, and the top four in the case of Japan. Findings emphasise the magnitude of the structural transformation which occurred over this period as the emerging DAEs such as Malaysia and Thailand became more competitive across a broad range of manufactured goods relative to the older DAEs, while the latter endeavoured to switch into higher value‐added manufacturing and services or new markets, or to establish manufacturing facilities overseas as a substitute for exports.

After the Korean War, South Korean politics was dominated by national security concerns. Reversing Carl von Clausewitz's well-known dictum, in South Korea, “politics is the continuation of war by other means.” Until the late 1980s, politics in South Korea was far from democratic. South Korea had five direct presidential elections (1987, 1992, 1997, 2002, and 2007) and six national assembly elections (1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008) after the democratic transition of 1987. In 1992, a civilian candidate, Young Sam Kim, was elected president. Young Sam Kim (1993–1998) prosecuted and punished former generals turned presidents Doo Hwan Chun (1980–1988) and Tae Woo Roh (1988–1993) for corruption, mutiny and treason in 1995. Dae Jung Kim (1998–2003) was elected president in 1997. For the first time in South Korean political history, regime change occurred between a ruling party and an opposition party.

In this chapter, the change and continuity of civil–military relations through the fluctuating dynamics of the democratic transition and consolidation in South Korea is examined. A positive consolidation of democratic reform is one that, while securing indisputable civilian supremacy, grants the military enough institutional autonomy for the efficient pursuit of its mission. Civilian supremacy should be institutionalized not only by preventing military intervention in civilian politics but also by ensuring civilian control over the formation and implementation of national defense policy.

In sum, despite three terms of civilian presidency, civilian supremacy has not yet fully institutionalized. Although significant changes in civil-military relations did occur after the democratic transition, they were not initiated by elected leaders with the intention of establishing a firm institutional footing for civilian supremacy. South Korea's political leaders have not crafted durable regulations and institutions that will sustain civilian control over the military.

More than six decades, Korea is still divided. The most highly militarized zone in the world lies along the demilitarized zone. How to draw the line prudently between seeking national security and promoting democracy shall be the most delicate task facing all the civilian regimes to come in South Korea. That mission will remain challenging not only for civilian politicians but also for military leaders.

The main goal of this paper is to create a methodology for estimating public research and development (R&D) expenditures on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the European Union (EU). The study further applies this methodology on business expenditures on R&D (BERD) data across all sectors and estimate ICT BERD within each of them. Then the study assesses the evolution of these expenditures in the context of the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) and its specific target to double them by 2020.

The study assumes that the share of public ICT R&D expenditures in total public R&D expenditures is similar to the share of ICT R&D labour costs. The study bases its estimation on government budget appropriations or outlays on R&D (GBAORD).

EU public ICT R&D expenditures grew steadily over the period 2004-2010 and in 2010 reached 5.9 billion. The study also estimates that the total EU ICT BERD in 2010 amounted to 15.8 billion. Regarding the DAE target about ICT R&D expenditures, the study shows that, in both public and private, the EU drops behind.

The study estimates that substantial ICT BERD can be found also in non-ICT sectors.

The methodology allows for monitoring one of the DAE targets.

The methodology currently represents the only way for measuring public ICT R&D expenditures in the EU.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the intelligent semisupervised fault diagnosis method of aeroengine.

A semisupervised fault diagnosis method based on denoising autoencoder (DAE) and deep belief network (DBN) is proposed for aeroengine. Multiple state parameters of aeroengine with long time series are processed to form high-dimensional fault samples and corresponding fault types are taken as sample labels. DAE is applied for unsupervised learning of fault samples, so as to achieve denoised dimension-reduction features. Subsequently, the extracted features and sample labels are put into DBN for supervised learning. Thus, the semisupervised fault diagnosis of aeroengine can be achieved by the combination of unsupervised learning and supervised learning.

The JT9D aeroengine data set and simulated aeroengine data set are applied to test the effectiveness of the proposed method. The result shows that the semisupervised fault diagnosis method of aeroengine based on DAE and DBN has great robustness and can maintain high accuracy of fault diagnosis under noise interference. Compared with other traditional models and separate deep learning model, the proposed method also has lower error and higher accuracy of fault diagnosis.

Multiple state parameters with long time series are processed to form high-dimensional fault samples. As a typical unsupervised learning, DAE is used to denoise the fault samples and extract dimension-reduction features for future deep learning. Based on supervised learning, DBN is applied to process the extracted features and fault diagnosis of aeroengine with multiple state parameters can be achieved through the pretraining and reverse fine-tuning of restricted Boltzmann machines.

The purpose of this study is to further advance the multiple space/time subdomain framework with model reduction. Existing linear multistep (LMS) methods that are second-order time accurate, and useful for practical applications, have a significant limitation. They do not account for separable controllable numerical dissipation of the primary variables. Furthermore, they have little or no significant choices of altogether different algorithms that can be integrated in a single analysis to mitigate numerical oscillations that may occur. In lieu of such limitations, under the generalized single-step single-solve (GS4) umbrella, several of the deficiencies are circumvented.

The GS4 framework encompasses a wide variety of LMS schemes that are all second-order time accurate and offers controllable numerical dissipation. Unlike existing state-of-art, the present framework permits implicit–implicit and implicit–explicit coupling of algorithms via differential algebraic equations (DAE). As further advancement, this study embeds proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) to further reduce model sizes. This study also uses an iterative convergence check in acquiring sufficient snapshot data to adequately capture the physics to prescribed accuracy requirements. Simple linear/nonlinear transient numerical examples are presented to provide proof of concept.

The present DAE-GS4-POD framework has the flexibility of using different spatial methods and different time integration algorithms in altogether different subdomains in conjunction with the POD to advance and improve the computational efficiency.

The novelty of this paper is the addition of reduced order modeling features, how it applies to the previous DAE-GS4 framework and the improvement of the computational efficiency. The proposed framework/tool kit provides all the needed flexibility, robustness and adaptability for engineering computations.

An effective machine vision-based method for micro-crack detection of solar cell can economically improve the qualified rate of solar cells. However, how to extract features which have strong generalization and data representation ability at the same time is still an open problem for machine vision-based methods.

A micro-crack detection method based on adaptive deep features and visual saliency is proposed in this paper. The proposed method can adaptively extract deep features from the input image without any supervised training. Furthermore, considering the fact that micro-cracks can obviously attract visual attention when people look at the solar cell’s surface, the visual saliency is also introduced for the micro-crack detection.

Comprehensive evaluations are implemented on two existing data sets, where subjective experimental results show that most of the micro-cracks can be detected, and the objective experimental results show that the method proposed in this study has better performance in detecting precision.

First, an adaptive deep features extraction scheme without any supervised training is proposed for micro-crack detection. Second, the visual saliency is introduced for micro-crack detection.