How soccer players head the ball: a test of optic acceleration cancellation theory with virtual reality

We measured the movements of soccer players heading a football in a fully immersive virtual reality environment. In mid-flight the ball’s trajectory was altered from its normal quasi-parabolic path to a linear one, producing a jump in the rate of change of the angle of elevation of gaze (α) from player to ball. One reaction time later the players adjusted their speed so that the rate of change of α increased when it had been reduced and reduced it when it had been increased. Since the result of the player’s movement was to regain a value of the rate of change close to that before the disturbance, the data suggest that the players have an expectation of, and memory for, the pattern that the rate of change of α will follow during the flight. The results support the general claim that players intercepting balls use servo control strategies and are consistent with the particular claim of Optic Acceleration Cancellation theory that the servo strategy is to allow α to increase at a steadily decreasing rate.

Fusing data-mining and knowledge elicitation for the supervisory control of an aluminium plate mill

Knowledge-elicitation is a common technique used to produce rules about the operation of a plant from the knowledge that is available from human expertise. Similarly, data-mining is becoming a popular technique to extract rules from the data available from the operation of a plant. In the work reported here knowledge was required to enable the supervisory control of an aluminium hot strip mill by the determination of mill set-points. A method was developed to fuse knowledge-elicitation and data-mining to incorporate the best aspects of each technique, whilst avoiding known problems. Utilisation of the knowledge was through an expert system, which determined schedules of set-points and provided information to human operators. The results show that the method proposed in this paper was effective in producing rules for the on-line control of a complex industrial process.

Design, implementation and testing of an intelligent knowledge-based system for the supervisory control of a hot rolling mill

This paper describes the design, implementation and testing of an intelligent knowledge-based supervisory control (IKBSC) system for a hot rolling mill process. A novel architecture is used to integrate an expert system with an existing supervisory control system and a new optimization methodology for scheduling the soaking pits in which the material is heated prior to rolling. The resulting IKBSC system was applied to an aluminium hot rolling mill process to improve the shape quality of low-gauge plate and to optimise the use of the soaking pits to reduce energy consumption. The results from the trials demonstrate the advantages to be gained from the IKBSC system that integrates knowledge contained within data, plant and human resources with existing model-based systems. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The death of John Stuart Mill

This article surveys the fiercely contested posthumous assessments of John Stuart Mill in the newspaper and periodical press, in the months following his death in May 1873, and elicits the broader intellectual context. Judgements made in the immediate wake of Mill's death influence biographers and historians to this day and provide an illuminating aperture into the politics and shifting ideological forces of the period. The article considers how Mill's failure to control his posthumous reputation demonstrates both the inextricable intertwining of politics and character in the 1870s, and the difficulties his allies faced. In particular, it shows the sharp division between Mill's middle and working class admirers; the use of James Mill's name as a rebuke to his son; the redefinition of Malthusianism in the 1870s; and how publication of Mill's Autobiography damaged his reputation. Finally, the article considers the relative absence of both theological and Darwinian critiques of Mill.

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886-1962), ex-mill girl novelist

This short article explores the life and work of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, the first working-class woman in Britain to publish full-length novels. It assesses her politics and her literacy legacy and is part of the Women's History Network's series, 'Reclaiming Women's Histories'.

‘God’s Truth’: Kant, Mill and moral epistemology in Oliver Twist

This essay aims to demonstrate how Dickens’s search for ‘truth’ (and his understanding of what that abstraction consists of) entered into and emerged from one of the key philosophical discussions of the early nineteenth century: namely whether moral knowledge is the sum of one’s experiences or whether there are such things as a priori or ‘natural’ principles of ethics that transcend human practice.

Ball milling as an effective route for the preparation of doped bornite: synthesis, stability and thermoelectric properties

Bornite, Cu5FeS4, is a naturally-occuring mineral with an ultralow thermal conductivity and potential for thermoelectric power generation. We describe here a new, easy and scalable route to synthesise bornite, together with the thermoelectric behaviour of manganese-substituted derivatives, Cu5Fe1-xMnxS4 (0 ≤ x ≤ 0.10). The electrical and thermal transport properties of Cu5Fe1-xMnxS4 (0 ≤ x ≤ 0.10), which are p-type semiconductors, were measured from room temperature to 573 K. The stability of bornite was investigated by thermogravimetric analysis under inert and oxidising atmospheres. Repeated measurements of the electrical transport properties confirm that bornite is stable up to 580 K under an inert atmosphere, while heating to 890 K results in rapid degradation. Ball milling leads to a substantial improvement in the thermoelectric figure of merit of unsusbtituted bornite (ZT = 0.55 at 543 K), when compared to bornite prepared by conventional high-temperature synthesis (ZT < 0.3 at 543 K). Manganese-substituted samples have a ZT comparable to that of unsubstituted bornite.