Explicit Requirements Research Articles

Implementing the Soil Enrichment Protocol at Scale: Opportunities for an Agricultural Carbon Market

High-quality agricultural carbon credits that incentivize regenerative practices can help address climate change through greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement and CO2 sequestration. Generating large volumes of such credits requires rigorous crediting methodologies. The Soil Enrichment Protocol (SEP) by the Climate Action Reserve (CAR) aims to unlock this type of crediting potential. The SEP includes new expert-driven standards for validating the use of soil biogeochemical modeling to generate credits. Technical experts at Indigo Ag participated in the SEP working group and are supporting implementation of the first project, CAR 1459_RP1, on hundreds of thousands of acres in the US. The authors share their thoughts on new approaches enabled by the SEP as both contributors to the theory behind and practitioners of these approaches. The SEP enables scalable, high-quality credits through four main advances: (1) allowing flexibility in the use of biogeochemical models that meet explicit performance requirements, (2) enabling a new approach to field-level, modeled baselines, (3) supporting a hybrid approach of credit generation using both soil measurement and modeling, and (4) requiring a new type of credit uncertainty quantification that accounts for multiple sources of uncertainty. Together these advances support agricultural credit quantification that enables payments to offset transitional costs for growers, at large enough scales to create a robust market, with a level of rigor that ensures any credited emission reductions have real climate impact. Innovations in soil analyses, advances in research, and improvements in data collection could further improve the potential for agricultural carbon credits to scale.

Explicit and Implicit Intergenerational Digital Literacy Dynamics: How Families Contribute to Overcome the Digital Divide of Grandmothers

ABSTRACT The accelerated pace of digital innovations represents a challenge to some individuals, particularly for older people with low digital skills. Several studies focused on information and communication technologies (ICTs) education programs in institutional settings, yet the provision of informal support in the family context is a critical element in the digital literacy of older people. This study examines the familial intergenerational dynamics that facilitate or hinder the digital literacy of grandmothers and carries out a comparison in different cultural contexts. Focus groups were conducted with grandmothers aged 65 and over in Colombia, Italy, Peru, Romania and Spain, followed by thematic analysis. The results show that the grandmothers involved in the study acquire new digital skills through explicit and non-explicit learning dynamics. Grandmothers first resort to their children and grandchildren for explicit requirements, although facing various emotional and attitudinal challenges that hamper this learning. Otherwise, non-explicit learning dynamics emerge in their everyday interaction with offspring and include enactive, immersive, vicarious, and collaborative learning. Thus, intergenerational dynamics are key for grandmothers to keep updated with the continuous flux of innovations. Moreover, the explicit and non-explicit dynamics described should be considered in policies related to digital literacy of older women.

Coordinated compliance control of dual-arm robot astronaut for payload operation

Dual-arm robot astronaut has more general and dexterous operation ability than single-arm robot, and it can interact with astronaut more friendly. The robot will inevitably use both arms to grasp payloads and transfer them. The force control of the arms in closed chains is an important problem. In this article, the coordinated kinematic and dynamic equations of the dual-arm astronaut are established by considering the closed-chain constraint relationship. Two compliance control methods for dual-arm astronaut coordinated payload manipulating are proposed. The first method is called master–slave force control and the second is the shared force control. For the former, the desired path and operational force of the master arm should be given in advance and that of slave arm are calculated from the dual-arm robot closed-chain constraint equation. In the share control mode, the desired path and end operational force of dual arms are decomposed from the dual-arm robot closed-chain constraint equation directly and equally. Finally, the two control algorithms are verified by simulation. The results of analysis of variance of the simulation data show that the two control methods have no obvious difference in the accuracy of force control but the second control method has a higher position control accuracy, and this proves that the master–slave mode is better for tasks with explicit force distribution requirements and the shared force control is especially suitable for a high-precision requirement.

Optimal calibration plan for inertial measurement unit based on microelectromechanical system

This paper is about the composition of scientifically substantiated calibration plan from the specific requirements for inertial measurement unit on microelectromechanical sensors. It is proposed to decompose the common problem into three tasks – converting implicit requirements to the explicit requirements with error components, determining of requirements by indirect parameters and finding direct parameter values, time limited calibration that have limits for full time. All these tasks may be presented as multi-criteria optimizations and be solved by numerical methods with some semi-analytical substitutions. Suggested methods are useful for composing an optimal calibration plan in conditions of ambiguous requirements, to estimate reaching accuracy, test volume and total calibration time. This approach offers the researcher a new look at the problem of balance between calibration accuracy and optimal use of resources.

Q-Learning Based Optimisation Framework for Real-Time Mixed-Task Scheduling

ABSTRACT Mixed periodic and aperiodic tasks with explicit deterministic or probabilistic timing requirements are becoming increasingly deployed in real-time industry control systems. Such systems pose significant challenges to the scheduling algorithms because the failure of scheduling can be catastrophic. In the past decades, significant research effort has been dedicated on the scheduling problems, and various scheduling algorithms were proposed to meet various system requirements and task loads. However, a single fixed scheduling algorithm usually cannot fully satisfy the requirements for a dynamic mixed-task-set, which is commonly found in modern complex real-time control systems. It is thus extremely hard for engineers to design a set of scheduling solutions to guarantee the correctness and optimality under all conditions. Aiming at optimising the scheduling performance in a real-time control system, this paper proposes a Q-learning-based optimisation framework to select proper scheduling algorithms for the mixed-task-set. Built on a three-layer perceptron network, our Q-learning framework is able to efficiently and effectively choose scheduling algorithms that dynamically adapt to the characteristics of task-sets. Experimental results using real-world data proved the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Action Generalization Across Group Members: Action Efficiency Matters

Actions are usually generalized among social group members. Importantly, the efficiency of an action with respect to achieving an external target determines action understanding, and it may have different degrees of social relevance to social groups. Thus, this study explored the role of action efficiency in action generalization. We used computer animations to simulate actions in social groups initiated by visual action cues or category labels, and we measured differences in response times between identifying actions that were and were not consistent with group members, without explicit requirements regarding generalization. It was found that in both visually introduced and explicitly labeled social groups, when the group members acted inefficiently toward the external object, perceivers identified group-consistent actions faster than group-inconsistent actions, indicating that the exemplars' common inefficient actions are generalized to the unknown ingroup member, accordingly facilitating the identification of expected consistent inefficient action (Experiment 1). As this effect was not present when removing social group cues, it was determined to be specific to social groups (Experiment 2). Importantly, such generalization was not observed when the identical action was deemed efficient toward the external object (Experiment 3) and was specific to the demonstration of the action being completed by multiple group members rather than being repeated twice by one group member, supporting the group-based inference and ruling out the possibility of the increased memorability of inefficient actions leading to more generalization relative to efficient actions (Experiment 4). Therefore, the efficiency of an action bounds the generalization of the action across social group members through a process that is spontaneous and implicit. This constrained action generalization may be due to inefficient actions being represented as culture-specific conventional forms.

What Can Rabbinic Depictions of Ruth’s Conversion Teach Us about the Importance of Belief in Judaism?

This article examines selected stories of Ruth’s conversion in order to find out whether the belief in God was an explicit conversion requirement in rabbinic Judaism. This examination aims to establish whether there are rabbinic sources that could support the decision to convert non-believers to Progressive Judaism. First, the article examines the story of Ruth’s conversion in bYevamot 47a–b in the context of rabbinic conversion requirements delineated in bYevamot 46a–48b. It proposes that Yevamot 47a–b treats the belief in God as an implicitly necessary requirement for conversion. Second, the article analyses the story of Ruth’s conversion found in Targum Ruth, which includes the description of Ruth’s belief in the World-to-Come but focuses on pious observance of the commandments. Finally, the article posits that the absence of explicit references to faith in God among rabbinic conversion requirements calls for Progressive communal and liturgical openness to contemporary Jewish struggles with belief.

Mitigating False Negatives in Harsh Electromagnetic Environments by Combining Complementary Error Detection Codes

In our modern daily lives, more and more electronic systems are performing safety-critical tasks. For these systems, robust communication is crucial. Undetected corruptions of data (a.k.a. False Negatives) within these channels might lead to severe harm to humans or the environment. In order to detect corruptions, Error Detection Codes have since long been used. This letter assesses the resilience of a straightforward duplication mechanism against electromagnetic disturbances by simulating a harsh reverberating electromagnetic environment. The simulations reveal that simply duplicating the bits is not sufficient. By analysing the different fault mechanisms present in duplication, new Error Detection Codes are proposed. These new codes are derived from existing codes, with the explicit requirement to cover each other's vulnerabilities towards False Negatives. In this letter, the EMI-resilient codes are built based on a duplication methodology combined with a Hamming Double Error Detection Code. Due to the different coverage of failure mechanisms under the considered reverberating electromagnetic environment, the rate of False Negatives is significantly reduced.

European Integration as a Determinant Factor of Macedonian National Identity

The concept of the EU normative power implies transformation challenges which project norms on the national level of European periphery. The research aims to assess extent the EU requirements contradict the Macedonian national identity and determine changes that either are perceived as imposed or reflect implicit European norms. Depending on the level of the EU engagement europeanization of national identity takes different forms ranging from institutional changes with the European mediators’ assistance (conflict settlement, the name issue) to the search of alternative national legitimation models apart from socialist Yugoslavia. Conditionality of explicit requirements that refer to disputes with neighbouring countries is integrated into national narrative in the form of sacrifice, which still is perceived as external pressure. Implicit norms like decommunization are more difficult to identify but imply a long-term deconstruction of national identity. Such deconstruction could provide not just prospects for the future of the Macedonian nation and state but allows to select and describe implicit European norms that are disseminated into the periphery. The article outlines conditionality between European standards and requirements and transformations in basic principles of Macedonian national identity.

OpenACC. An open database of car-following experiments to study the properties of commercial ACC systems

Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) systems are becoming increasingly available as a standard equipment in modern commercial vehicles. Their penetration rate in the fleet is constantly increasing, as well as their use, especially under freeway conditions. At the same time, limited information is openly available on how these systems actually operate and their differences depending on the vehicle manufacturer or model. This represents an important gap because as the number of ACC vehicles on the road increases, traffic dynamics on freeways may change accordingly, and new collective phenomena, which are only marginally known at present, could emerge. Yet, as ACC systems are introduced as comfort options and their operation is entirely under the responsibility of the driver, vehicle manufacturers do not have explicit requirements to fulfill nor they have to provide any evidence about their performances. As a result, any safety implication connected to their interactions with other road users escapes any monitoring and opportunity of improvement.This work presents a set of experimental car-following campaigns, providing an overview of the behavior of commercial ACC systems under different driving conditions. Furthermore, the suggestion of a unified data structure across the different tests facilitates comparison between the different campaigns, vehicles, systems and specifications. The complete data is published as an open-access database (OpenACC), available to the research community. As more test campaigns will be carried out, OpenACC will evolve accordingly.The activity is performed in the framework of the openData policy of the European Commission Joint Research Centre with the objective to engage the whole scientific community towards a better understanding of the properties of ACC vehicles in view of anticipating their possible impacts on traffic flow and prevent possible problems connected to their widespread introduction. In this light, OpenACC, over time, also aims at becoming a reference point to study if and how the parameters of such systems need to be regulated, how homogeneously they behave, how new ACC car-following models should be designed for traffic microsimulation purposes and what are the key differences between ACC systems and human drivers.

Essential secret image sharing approach with same size of meaningful shares

Essential Secret Image Sharing (ESIS) is a method to decompose a secret image into two groups of shares, where one group is essential and the other group is non-essential. In this method, recovery of secret image is possible only if threshold number of shares along with all essential shares will be present. Existing state of art has some limitations such as different share size, complex computation, random pattern (meaningless) share, explicit codebook requirement, pixel expansion and constraint on image type. These limitations restrict the applications of the secret image sharing. In this paper, a novel approach of generating shares of similar size as that of the secret image has been proposed. The proposed “essential secret image sharing approach with same size of meaningful shares” (ESISMS) scheme produces meaningful shares based on bitwise XORing. This proposed approach resolves all the above stated issues and the advantages and applicability of this approach have been demonstrated by the theoretical analysis and experimental results.

Can Structural Changes Fix the Supreme Court?

Proposals for structural changes to the US Supreme Court have attracted attention in recent years amid a perceived “legitimacy crisis” afflicting the institution. This article first assesses whether the court is in fact facing a legitimacy crisis and then considers whether prominent reform proposals are likely to address the institutional weaknesses that reformers aim to resolve. The article concludes that key trends purportedly contributing to the crisis at the court are more ambiguous in their empirical foundations and normative implications than reformers often suggest. It also argues that prominent reform proposals—including term limits, age limits, lottery selection of justices, and explicit partisan balance requirements for court membership—are unlikely to resolve the institutional flaws that proponents perceive. It ends by suggesting a more modest (though novel) reform, which would allocate two lifetime appointments per presidential term and allow the size of the court to fluctuate within bounds.

Administração que cala consente? Dever de decidir, silêncio administrativo e aprovação tácita

o artigo aborda os passos do ordenamento brasileiro no combate à omissão de decidir da Administração Pública. Em seguida, examina a aprovação tácita nos termos previstos pela Lei de Liberdade Econômica e seu Decreto Regulamentar. Abordam-se seus requisitos explícitos e implícitos, as hipóteses de vedação, os efeitos posteriores ao ato fictício e a questão da aplicabilidade do instituto a Estados e Municípios

XOR-based visual secret sharing scheme using pixel vectorization

The XOR operation has improved the recovery effect of the visual secret sharing schemes. Various visual secret sharing schemes based on XOR operation are available in the literature with some limitations, e.g. direct non-applicability of the scheme to the gray-scale images and reduced quality of the reconstructed secret image. Many existing visual secret sharing schemes in the literature, firstly converts grayscale secret image into a halftone image then creates the shares. This paper proposes XOR-based (n,n) − V CSXOR visual secret sharing scheme using pixel vectorization. It diffuses and disguise secret information into multiple meaningless shares prior to allocating participants of the group having no clue about the secret information. The scheme also resolves various problems like pixel expansion, contrast-loss, explicit codebook requirement, limitation on number of participants and lossy recovery of the secret image. The proposed scheme makes use of implicit codebook and pixel vectorization to encode gray secret image directly without converting to halftone image, into multiple random looking shares. Also applicable to binary image. Reveal a secret image perfectly by XOR-ing all share. The efficacy of the proposed scheme is verified by numerical illustrations, experimental results and comparative analysis. We found that proposed scheme outperform in comparison to the state-of-the-art approaches.

Sustainability in Railway Investments, a Study of Early-Phase Analyses and Perceptions

This article presents a study of sustainability in railway investment projects. The purpose of the study was to analyse how sustainability is interpreted and evaluated in the early phases of major public investment projects. These phases are characterized by potentially very influential decisions being made prior to when precise, detailed knowledge is available. The research uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative information sources and three datasets; 12 interviews, document analyses for 10 railway projects, and a case study. The qualitative data are from semi-structured interviews, while the quantitative data are based on structured document review of planning documents from ten Norwegian railway projects. In addition, a detailed case study of a major rail infrastructure project has been performed. The findings show that several aspects of sustainability are evaluated in the early phase of investment projects, but there are no explicit requirements to do an overall analysis of sustainability. Environmental aspects of sustainability are predominant in the respondents’ interpretation of the concept. Still, the structure and requirements of the early phases in the national project model ensures that the economic dimension of sustainability has the most influence in decisions regarding which project concepts that receive financing for further development.

CEDAW, Transforming Stereotypes, and Judicial Obligations: The 'Provoked' Killing of Women in India, Malaysia, and Singapore

Gender stereotypes continue to profoundly impact criminal law adjudication despite CEDAW’s explicit requirement that state actors refrain from stereotyping and eradicate gender stereotypes. This comparative study of provocation jurisprudence from three Asian jurisdictions—India, Malaysia, and Singapore—employs a feminist lens to explore the negative and positive obligations of domestic criminal courts when dealing with gender stereotypes pursuant to CEDAW’s transformative commitments. It argues that these courts should not only avoid gender stereotypes but also actively contest such stereotypes in judicial decisions by employing gender-informed explanations of harm, representing women in a dignified and rights-based manner, and adopting interpretations of the law that delegitimize stereotyping.

Applying Agile Methodology to Regulatory Compliance Projects in the Financial Industry: A Case Study Research

We investigate the application of agile methodology to regulatory compliance projects. Regulatory compliance projects normally apply waterfall approach given the regulatory explicit specified requirements. We identify the major advantages and disadvantages. The findings have implications for practictioners in deciding if agile methodology and approach should be followed for regulatory compliance projects. The article concludes that agile methodology strictly applied contain major unique advantages towards waterfall approach, as fostering autonomous problem solving teams.

Revisiting the United States Telecommunications Network Policy in a Post-Huawei World: Improving Economic Competitiveness, Addressing Security Weakness, and Building Alliances

The evolution of the network gear manufacturing market into a small number of global providers has made network service providers (NSP’s) and countries increasingly reliant on a small number of supplier firms – a process exacerbated by the need to exclude recognized national security threats. The original intent of the O-RAN Alliance to increase interoperability, reduce excessive reliance on monopolistic providers and create a common pool of IP around interoperable standards is reasonable. In the first instance, the intent of the legislation focused on stimulating economic efficiency and addressing valid national security threats. The wording of that legislation, however, provides no explicit guidance, requirements, or standards linking national security threats to telecoms gear. Between a combination of conflicting incentives, lack of factual understanding on the issues, and poor oversight of legislative intent, the US promotion of open radio network interoperability as currently organized stands only to provide China the dominant position in standard setting and network manufacturing. Policy measures individually and in combination need to decouple the United States telecommunications network market from China; provide explicit legislative guidance and exclusions at the intersection of national security and telecommunications; build data and verification capacity on US supply chains that feed into telecommunications networks; and collaborate with allies to increase technology security and providing assurances to firms about the direction and reliability of US policy. These are individual measures that have received broad bipartisan support across the legislative and executive branches, over recent years.

Towards Mass Individualisation: setting the scope and industrial implication

AbstractWithin the last few years, a need for renewed product personalisation has been observed in some markets such as consumer electronics, fashion to meet the exact demands of the customers. Product customisation emphasises the fulfilment of explicit requirements of a defined market segment, but product individualisation targets at satisfying the particular needs of a customer. Mass Individualisation (MI) is a new product design approach comprising of an open hardware platform and multiple modules to be integrated with the platform. It gives freedom to end-users to integrate different modules into the platform as per their choice. Technological and strategic integration of all actors involved in the design process is the primary focus of this research. This paper identifies key areas which need to be focussed on to realise this approach and convert it into an industrial practice by an explorative study of existing product design and customisation approaches. An industrial survey was conducted, and results for the industrial implication and insights on this approach are presented. The findings show that the end product from product design for MI will be more creative and innovative by the networking of all actors, and offers more individualised and technologically advanced products.

Plastic Bottle Cap Recycling—Characterization of Recyclate Composition and Opportunities for Design for Circularity

In line with efforts to create a circular economy of plastics, recent EU legislation is strengthening plastic bottle recycling by ambitious separate collection targets and mandatory recycled content obligations. Furthermore, explicit design requirements on the caps of bottles and composite beverage packaging have been introduced. These caps are typically made of polyethylene or polypropylene and often contain additives such as slip agents and anti-statics. Commercially available bottle cap recyclates (BCRs) as well as specifically formulated model compounds were analyzed in terms of composition by means of infrared spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, and high-performance liquid chromatography. Their composition was found to be heterogeneous due to polyolefin cross-contamination, directly reflecting the diversity of cap materials present in the market. Slip agent legacy additives originating from the initial use phase were found and quantified in both commercial and model cap recyclates. This highlights the opportunity for redesigning plastic bottle caps not only in response to regulatory requirements, but to pursue a more comprehensive strategy of product design for circularity. By including considerations of polymer resin and additive choice in cap manufacturing, more homogeneous waste streams could be derived from plastic bottle cap recycling, enabling recycling into more demanding and valuable applications.