The article discusses selected issues related to the process of creating a document, Strategy Warsaw 2030, adopted in May 2018. The construction of the strategy lasted almost two years and was characterized by high social involvement. The experience that Warsaw can share with other cities and municipalities clearly shows that creating documents in a participatory manner is the most possible and gives many opportunities to create synergies. At the same time, the scope of changes that the document specifi es in the context of its implementation, orders careful observation of the actions of the city authorities in the future. The article focuses primarily on the following issues: the period in which the strategy should be updated, the city’s relations with its surroundings, the strategic team, socialization and fi nally the implementation of the strategy.
Health psychology was founded as a response to social needs for better understanding and regulation of psychological aspects of biological, mental, and social well-being. Despite initial enthusiasm and optimism in its early days, three decades of development yielded results that are disappointing to many scholars in terms of health psychology practical meaning. Thus, in this paper we review several challenges for health psychology. We believe that health psychology might benefit from revival of aims and values that distinguished the discipline at its onset such as bio-psycho-social perspective that has been narrowed to somatic illness in recent days. Second, more integration is needed in theory and terminology to eliminate overlapping concepts labeled with different names. Furthermore, social practice would benefit from greater responsiveness of health psychologists to new technologies. Finally, health psychology is likely to derive benefits from more general well-established perspectives on diffusion of innovation in social practice. We conclude that health psychology as a practice-related scientific discipline is likely to regain its initial momentum once these problems are solved and novel areas of scientific exploration are identified.
In this paper, the PLC-based (Programmable Logic Controller) industrial implementation in the form of the general-purpose function block for ADRC (Active Disturbance Rejection Controller) is presented. The details of practical aspects are discussed because their reliable implementation is not trivial for higher order ADRC. Additional important novelties discussed in the paper are the impact of the derivative backoff and the method that significantly simplifies tuning of higher order ADRC by avoiding the usual trial and error procedure. The results of the practical validation of the suggested concepts complete the paper and show the potential industrial applicability of ADRC.
The telemetry data are essential in evaluating the performance of aircraft and diagnosing its failures. This work combines the oversampling technology with the run-length encoding compression algorithm with an error factor to further enhance the compression performance of telemetry data in a multichannel acquisition system. Compression of telemetry data is carried out with the use of FPGAs. In the experiments there are used pulse signals and vibration signals. The proposed method is compared with two existing methods. The experimental results indicate that the compression ratio, precision, and distortion degree of the telemetry data are improved significantly compared with those obtained by the existing methods. The implementation and measurement of the proposed telemetry data compression method show its effectiveness when used in a high-precision high-capacity multichannel acquisition system.
The paper deals with the application of the eXtended Finite Element Method (XFEM) to simulations of discrete macro-cracks in plain concrete specimens under tension, bending and shear. Fundamental relationships and basic discrete constitutive laws were described. The most important aspects of the numerical implementation were discussed. Advantages and disadvantages of the method were outlined.
The main purpose of this article is to present an author’s methodology of production levelling
and to show the impact of levelling on the time during which the product passes
through the process and on staff performance. The article presents the analysis of literature
concerning the method of improving the production process, especially taking production
levelling into consideration. The authors focussed on the definition and methodologies of
production levelling. A diagram of interrelations showing determinants and efficiency measures
of production levelling as well as an author’s production levelling methodology have
been presented. An example of the implementation of production levelling in one of the departments
of a company manufacturing surgical instruments has also been shown. Analysis
of the current state, stages of implementation and end effects have been presented. Attention
was focussed on the time during which the product passes through the process and on staff
performance.
The research is devoted to the organization of the energy policy objectives implementation
through programs. A country’s energy policy can be monitored in many ways. The article proposes
to consider the implementation of energy policy objectives with the budget programs maintenance
on the example of Ukraine. Budget programs make it possible to trace the dynamics of changes in
the aim and directions of the authorities’ energy policy, implemented for budgetary funds. With the
budget programs since 2002 in Ukraine, it was possible to trace the increase in spending on the coal
industry, highlight the funding forced of negative consequences in the energy sector and separate
the steps to develop an energy strategy. Changes in the totality of energy policy budget programs
are shown, their contents are considered. The decrease in the budget programs number associated
both with the enlargement of their aim and with the withdrawal expenses for reconstruction and
social protection of those affected by the previous energy activities from the budget funding. To
assess budget programs planning and implementation uniformity the author’s integrated indicator is
proposed. It takes the funding level and the quality indicator implementation on assignment directions
into account. The calculation of the indicator showed that the expenditures for the general
management of the energy policy and for scientific development are planned in the programs more
evenly than the expenses for the energy strategy implementation.
In this work, the support of two general galleries located in poor quality rock mass and subjected to the influence of high thickness coal layer exploitations is designed and optimized. The process is carried out in four phases:
A first preliminary support is defined employing different geomechanical classifications and applying the New Austrian Tunnelling Method (NATM) using bolts and shotcrete.
An instrumentation campaign is carried out with the goal of analysing the behaviour of the support. The study noticed the failure of the support due to the time of placement of the different elements.
A back-analysis using the Flac and Phases software has allowed the evaluation of the properties of the rock mass and the support, the study of the influence of the time of placement on the component elements (bolts and shotcrete), and the redefinition of that support.
Subsequently, a new support is designed and optimized through numerical modeling after the start of mining without experience in these sizes of sublevel caving that caused the failure of the previously designed support. The new support is formed by yieldable steel arches that are more suitable to withstand the stresses generated by nearby mining work.
In the past it was usual to exert a huge effort in the design, simulation, and the real time implementation of the complicated electronic and communication systems, like GNSS receivers. The complexity of the system algorithms combined with the complexity of the available tools created a system that is difficult to track down for debugging or for redesign. So, the simulation and educational tools was different from the prototyping tools. In this paper the parallel search acquisition phase of a GPS receiver was simulated and implemented on FPGA using the same platform and through a graphical programming language. So this paper introduces the fruit of integrating the prototyping tools with the simulation tools as a single platform through which the complicated electronic systems can be simulated and prototyped.
Blood glucose level monitoring and control is of utmost importance to millions of people who have been diagnosed with diabetes or similar illnesses. One of the conventional tests for measuring how the human body breaks down glucose is IVGTT, the Intravenous Glucose Tolerance Test. The difficulty of computing the models of glucose-insulin interaction presents an issue when attempting to implement them in embedded hardware. The Metabolic P (MP), contrary to other models, does not require solving differential equations to compute, thus it could be an effective modelling approach for real-time applications. The present paper proves that MP system methodology-based IVGTT implementation in the Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) technology is reasonably precise and sufficiently flexible to be used effectively in multi-user scenarios. Presentation of the state-of-the-art focuses on glucose-insulin interaction models, glucose monitoring systems and MP system implementation techniques. Methods for MP system computations and techniques for their implementation on FPGA, together with the original unified MP system implementation technique, have been presented in this paper. The results of an elaborate investigation into the IVGTT MP systems, as well as their single and unified MP implementation techniques have also been considered. It is shown that the techniques developed are applicable to all known IVGTT MP systems, and can achieve RMSE not higher than 15% using a word length of at least 32 bits. The novel MP system combined quality metrics and its pictorial representation allow the analysis of various implementation characteristics. Compared to the unified pipelined IVGTT MP system implementation technique, the developed unified combinational technique ensures a 2‒3 times higher speed.
Five years ago, the Act on the protection of animals used for scientific or educational purposes entered into force. It is the implementation of Directive 2010/63/ EU into the Polish legal system. During the work on the Directive, most scientists were convinced that the previous Act on animal experiments of 2005 was in line with the new EU law and only minor modifications would be necessary. Legislators, however, decided to create a completely new legal act. Already at the time of the Act's creation, the scientific community made many critical comments regarding the law. Significant discrepancies between the Directive and the proposed provisions of the Act were far more stringent, and in many places with imprecise provisions which could have resulted in difficulties in conducting research using animals. Unfortunately, most of the postulates of the scientific community were not considered at that time. What does the Act look like 5 years after its adoption? Instead of a transparent and balanced law modeled on the EU Directive, which provides real protection for experimental animals, while safeguarding the intellectual rights of animal testing units, a patch of underdeveloped, sometimes mutually exclusive provisions has been issued. Instead of raising the welfare of the animals used for research to a higher level, it significantly increased the costs of operating research units and increased bureaucracy. Instead of rationalizing the system of issuing consents for research, it has been weakened and entangled in administrative and legal disputes without the provision of basic administrative facilities. Instead of increasing the international mobility of scientists and technicians working with experimental animals, the implementation of the law created a training “system” that is not recognized in any other EU country. In the light of the 5-year experience of the scientific community and the expert part of the composition of local ethics committees, we postulate to introduce a number of significant changes to the act so that its amended version actually ensures animal protection, respect for researchers and returns to the current of European legislation.
The article focuses on the fractional-order backward difference, sum, linear time-invariant equation analysis, and difficulties of the fractional calculus microcontroller implementation with regard to designing a fractional-order proportional integral derivative (FOPID) controller. In opposite to the classic proportional integral derivative (PID), the FOPID controller is defined by five independent parameters. Hence, it is more customizable and, potentially, more precise on condition that the values of fractional integration and differentiation orders are properly selected. However, a number of operations and the time required to calculate the output signal continuously increase. This can be a significant problem considering the limitations of a microcontroller, including memory size and a constant sampling time of the set-up analog-to-digital (ADC) converters. In the article, three solutions are considered, and results obtained in the experiments are presented.
An application specific integrated design using Quadrature Linear Discriminant Analysis is proposed for automatic detection of normal and epilepsy seizure signals from EEG recordings in epilepsy patients. Five statistical parameters are extracted to form the feature vector for training of the classifier. The statistical parameters are Standardised Moment, Co-efficient of Variance, Range, Root Mean Square Value and Energy. The Intellectual Property Core performs the process of filtering, segmentation, extraction of statistical features and classification of epilepsy seizure and normal signals. The design is implemented in Zynq 7000 Zc706 SoC with average accuracy of 99%, Specificity of 100%, F1 score of 0.99, Sensitivity of 98% and Precision of 100 % with error rate of 0.0013/hr., which is approximately zero false detection.