Introduction to the 26th international conference on logic programming special issue

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The 15th International Geological Congress, South Africa (1929): The Resurgence of Wegener’s Continental Drift Theory

The 15th International Geological Congress was held in South Africa in 1929. Many interesting issues were tackled, thanks to the development of geophysical techniques, ideas about magmatic differentiation, and the origin of the Karroo System, among others. The importance of the Congress from the point of view of the history of geology lies in the fact that an ‘inflection point’ occurred as regards thinking about the continental drift theory that had been proposed by Wegener a few years earlier. It can be said that the contributions of Du Toit allowed a deepening in the theoretical bases of this scientific hypothesis, which celebrated its first hundred years in 2012.

Evaluation of mission planning strategies of a robotic aerial vehicle for the AIRC international competition

The International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) is an important event where teams from universities design flying autonomous vehicles to overcome the last challenges in the field. The goal of the Seventh Mission proposed by the IARC is to guide several mobile ground robots to a target area. The scenario is complex and not determinist due to the random behavior of the ground robots movement. The UAV must select efficient strategies to complete the mission. The goal of this work has been evaluating different alternative mission planning strategies of a UAV for this competition. The Mission Planner component is in charge of taking the UAV decisions. Different strategies have been developed and evaluated for the component, achieving a better performance Mission Planner and valuable knowledge about the mission. For this purpose, it was necessary to develop a simulator to evaluate the different strategies. The simulator was built as an improvement of an existing previous version.

A Vision-based Quadrotor Multi-robot Solution for the Indoor Autonomy Challenge of the 2013 International Micro Air Vehicle Competition

This paper presents a completely autonomous solution to participate in the Indoor Challenge of the 2013 International Micro Air Vehicle Competition (IMAV 2013). Our proposal is a multi-robot system with no centralized coordination whose robotic agents share their position estimates. The capability of each agent to navigate avoiding collisions is a consequence of the resulting emergent behavior. Each agent consists of a ground station running an instance of the proposed architecture that communicates over WiFi with an AR Drone 2.0 quadrotor. Visual markers are employed to sense and map obstacles and to improve the pose estimation based on Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and ground optical flow data. Based on our architecture, each robotic agent can navigate avoiding obstacles and other members of the multi-robot system. The solution is demonstrated and the achieved navigation performance is evaluated by means of experimental flights. This work also analyzes the capabilities of the presented solution in simulated flights of the IMAV 2013 Indoor Challenge. The performance of the CVG UPM team was awarded with the First Prize in the Indoor Autonomy Challenge of the IMAV 2013 competition.

Genetics today : proceedings of the XI International Congress of Genetics, The Hague, The Netherlands, September 1963 / edited by S. J. Geerts.

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Seeding a Profession: The Intersection of the State, International Interests, and the Early Development of Brazilian Nursing

State and international entities can have profound effects on the development of a country’s nursing profession. Through a global health governance lens, this paper explores the development of nursing in Brazil during the early twentieth century, and its intersections with national and international interests. Accordingly, we will show how state policies established an environment that fostered the institutionalization of nursing as a profession in Brazil and supported it as a means to increase the presence of females in nation building processes. The State focused on recruiting elite women for nursing, in part due to the Rockefeller Foundation’s involvement in the country. Nurses who worked for Rockefeller came from well-educated classes within US society with specific ideas about who should be a nurse and the roles of nurses in a healthcare system. These women served as the primary vehicles for interacting with Brazilian health authorities responsible for health system development. Their early efforts did not, however, ensure a system capable of producing nursing human resources at a rate that, in present day Brazil, could meet the health needs of the country. Findings from this paper offer new avenues for historians to explore the early roots of professional nursing through a global health governance lens, improve the understanding of the intersection between international politics and professionalization, and highlight how these factors may impact nursing human resources production in the long term.

The Proactive International Dimension and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes

There is international consensus among scholars that democratic transitions are multicausal processes in which both internal and international variables are involved (Pridham 1991, 1995; Whitehead 1996; Schmitter 1996; Linz and Stepan 1996; Carothers 1999; Morlino and Magen 2008; Grilli di Cortona 2009). This chapter is limited, on the one hand, to the dependent variable consisting solely of the crisis/breakdown/transformation of non-democratic regimes in the Third Wave of democratization, and, on the other hand, to an independent variable identified solely with the international dimension of democratic transition. This factor, which can be termed the Proactive International Dimension (PID), specifically concerns that combination of actions or processes, produced by one or more international actors, that, intentionally or not, cause or contribute to the crisis/breakdown/transformation of a non-democratic regime.