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The purpose of this paper is to develop an intelligent robot assembly system for the moving production line. Moving production lines are widely used in many manufacturing factories, including automotive and general industries. Industrial robots are hardly used to perform any tasks on the moving production lines. One of the main reasons is that it is difficult for conventional industrial robots to adjust to any sort of change. Therefore, more intelligent industrial robotic systems have to be developed to adopt the random motion of the moving production lines. This paper presents an intelligent robotics system that performs an assembly process while the object is moving, using synergic combination of visual servoing and force control technology.

The developed intelligent robotic system includes some rules to ensure the success of the assembly processes. Also visual servoing and force control are used to deal with the random motion of the moving objects. Since the objects on the moving production lines are moving with random speed, visual servoing is adopted to tracking the motion of the moving object. Force control is also integrated to control the motion of the robot and keep the robotic system compliant with the moving objects to avoid the damage of the whole system.

The developed intelligent robotic technology has been successfully implemented. The wheel loading process is used as example.

Since the developed technology is based on the low‐level motion control, safety has to be considered. Currently, it is done by motion supervision.

The developed technology can be used to perform assemblies in the moving production lines. Since the developed platform is based on the synergic combination of visual servoing and force control technology, it can be used in other areas, such as seam tracking and seat loading, etc.

This paper provides a practical solution of performing assemblies on the moving production lines, which is not available on the current industrial robot market.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the impact of the Great Recession on the capital assets being depreciated and the capital assets condition ratio for the governmental activities of the government-wide financial statements, while identifying possible socioeconomic and financial variables that help explain capital investment behavior in local government.

Based on capital spending from fiscal year 2005–2006 (FY06) to fiscal year 2012–2013 (FY13) for the governmental activities of 471 North Carolina municipalities as reported on their government-wide financial statements, the authors use a fixed effects model to test our two hypotheses.

The authors find that most municipalities consistently invested in capital assets before, during, and after the Great Recession but were not able to maintain pace with depreciation. The authors also find that the capital assets being depreciated is affected by numerous socioeconomic and financial variables, while the capital assets condition ratio is not.

The study continues to build on previous research, demonstrating that different results are produced when the analysis is based on local data rather than sub-national data.

An implication from our study that expands across research and practice is that capital investment and capital value are two different dimensions of capital management in local government, which drives research in terms of how this multidimensional concept is specified and drives practices in terms of how this multidimensional concept is approached within annual capital budgets and capital improvement programs.

The study represents one of the first studies that focuses on capital spending in local government based on data from the government-wide financial statements.

Through a case study of Pan American World Airways (Pan Am), this paper sets out to explore the roots of twentieth century globalization and the postcolonial nature of the trading relations involved.

Drawing on Foucault's broad notion of “the archive” a critical hermeneutics approach is used to examine a series of company‐produced texts, including minutes, travelogues, company narratives, annual reports, film, diaries, and published histories.

The paper argues that Pan Am contributed to the “idea of Latin America” and, in the process contributed to practices of dependency that served the interests of the USA. Drawing on a case study of Pan Am, the paper further argues that multi‐national corporations help to establish the contours of international trade by influencing the very character and boundaries of the territories traded in, with troubling implications for the countries traded in.

As a detailed case study extension of the findings to other global trading arrangements needs to take into account to social‐political context and relational histories of the players involved.

The paper generates insights into the role of rhetoric in developing trading relationships and its roots in embedded notions of postcolonial thinking and generalizations.

The paper contributes to an understanding of the role of language and the social construction of national identities involved in the development of international business.

This study aims to examine the association between apprenticeship training and self-employment and how gender moderates the association.

Secondary data from the World Bank’s Skills Towards Employment and Productivity (STEP) survey on Ghana were analysed using a binary choice (logit regression) model. The STEP survey drew its nationally representative sample from the working-age population (15–64 years) in urban areas.

After controlling for several factors identified in the literature as determinants of self-employment, the results indicate that completing apprenticeship training increases the likelihood of being self-employed. However, women who have completed apprenticeship training are more likely to be self-employed than men.

By examining the moderating effect of gender on the association between apprenticeship training and self-employment, this study has offered new evidence that policymakers can use to promote self-employment, especially among women, to reduce the entrepreneurial gap between men and women.

This paper surveys theoretical and practical issues associated with a particular type of information retrieval problem, namely that where the information need is pictorial. The paper is contextualised by the notion of a visually stimulated society, in which the ease of record creation and transmission in the visual medium is contrasted with the difficulty of gaining effective subject access to the world's stores of such records. The technological developments which, in casting the visual image in electronic form, have contributed so significantly to its availability are reviewed briefly, as a prelude to the main thrust of the paper. Concentrating on still and moving pictorial forms of the visual image, the paper dwells on issues related to the subject indexing of pictorial material and discusses four models of pictorial information retrieval corresponding with permutations of the verbal and visual modes for the representation of picture content and of information need.

To outline notable events of the 31st Annual Science & Technology Policy Forum of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), held in Washington, DC, in April 2006. Design/methodology/approach –‐ Gives a brief review of the main features of the conference.

The annual AAAS Policy Forum is the venue for when journalists and the US people learn what the financial commitments to science and technology for the year have been and what implications it has for policies in this subject area. Potentially complicated this forum brings together the scientific community from industry and academe to see how economics drives science.

The sharing of educational value and awareness of issues covered at the forum. To educate different communities about the kind of priorities science and technology policy sets dependent on the fiscal support given by the federal government.

The assessment of library service quality requires both expertise and objectivity. Undergraduate students are neither expert nor objective, and assessment methods that rely heavily on students’ perceptions are likely to be inadequate in several respects. Students’ needs are not necessarily consistent with their preferences, for example, and the limited experiences of most undergraduates give them only a partial understanding of library collections and services. Although user surveys provide valuable information about patrons’ perceptions, that information is no substitute for objective standards based on professional knowledge.

The policies of the American Library Association (ALA) concerning the concept of intellectual freedom are embodied in the Library Bill of Rights, the association's official statement on free access to libraries and library materials. The Library Bill of Rights is a brief, deceptively simple document that has provoked constant debate and reinterpretation since its adoption by ALA almost 40 years ago.

The available evidence is partly consistent and partly inconsistent with a negative association of branching restrictions and the number of banking offices. In this paper, I present evidence that the failure to consistently find such a negative association of branching restrictions and banking offices is quite robust. I suggest that the endogeneity of the banking restrictions and regulators' unmodeled behavior are the basic source of the inconsistency. I conclude that there is no evidence that suggests substantial changes in the number of banking offices with the introduction of interstate branching.

IT would be quite impossible adequately to report a Dublin conference of any kind in purely professional terms. The warm friendliness of its people demands an equally personal reaction from its visitors and for public librarians certainly this is as it should be, because we are ourselves, above all, involved with people. So professional affairs at this conference were kept in their proper place—as only a part of the whole and merely providing a framework round which the business of renewing contacts and making friends could take place.