Steering Capacity Research Articles

Finite Element Analysis of Effect of Flexible Pupjoints on Push-the-Bit Rotary Steering Deflecting Force

As one of the most advanced international drilling technologies at present, rotary steering has been extensively applied to large-displacement, long-distance horizontal, and complex structural wells with numerous advantages, such as strong steering deflecting capacity and good borehole quality. Push-the-bit rotary steering is nowadays commercially applied on a large scale. In the bottom hole assembly (BHA) design of push-the-bot rotary steering drilling, flexible pup joints are the main components that exert an important effect on the exertion of steering deflecting capacity of push-the-bit rotary steering tools. The effect of flexible pup joints on steering capacity of BHA used in the push-the-bit rotary steering drilling process was investigated through a finite element analysis and their action laws were summarized. The results indicated that in order to optimize the deflecting capacity of rotary steering drilling tools, flexible pup joints should be installed cooperatively so as to obtain greater steering drilling capacity. In the rotary steering drilling process, as the outer diameter of flexible pup joints increased, the maximum stress of the BHA decreased. Side cutting force of the drill would increase with the length of pup joints, but this would result in degradation of anti-torsion performance of the BHA.

Constructing and justifying risk and accountability after extreme events: public administration and stakeholders’ responses to a wildfire disaster

ABSTRACTThe impacts of extreme weather events, causing severe storms and wildfires, cascade across administrative borders within a country, challenging the steering capacity of governance networks at different political scales. This paper examines how accountability and risk were constructed and negotiated in the aftermath of Sweden’s largest wildfire. It draws on results from an interview study with executives of organizations and landowners involved, and an analysis of government reports about the wildfire’s cause and consequences. Although the fire was human-caused, public administrative bodies paid considerable attention to the local emergency services and their poor handling of the wildfire, caused by lack of knowledge of forest fire behavior. The study confirms many of the challenges associated with governance networks. It finds that issues about who to hold accountable, in what forum and for what issue are not fully addressed, being overwhelmed by demands for better knowledge of forest fire prevention and improved coordination and collaboration. To conclude, the paper calls for a better-informed public administration, forest sector and interrelated networks that take responsibility for their actions or lack thereof.

Reform in the contract state: Embedded directions in public procurement regulation in South Africa

ABSTRACTAs South Africa contemplates another episode of public procurement legal reform, we trace the post-apartheid history of such efforts and consider critical issues moving forward. South Africa has over the last few decades followed the international trend of an expanding ‘contract state’. Public procurement is increasingly important to state operational and allocative concerns. South Africa’s public procurement regime is progressively configured into a centrally steered but decentralised organisational form. Inflected through domestic public procurement politics, however, the development of this organisational form has been truncated, with the establishment of only limited central steering capacity producing a public procurement regulatory regime which is weak, fragmented and incoherent, contributing to problems of state incapacity and corruption. In 2013 South Africa’s Minister of Finance announced a major push to reform South Africa’s contract state. The effort aims to better establish, locate and extend public procurement regulatory authority. It has begun to elaborate a centre-led, strategic and increasingly developmental procurement methodology. It is moving towards more flexibility, effectively an attempt to reduce rigidity in rules while building more robust and distributed disciplinary mechanisms, ones which take account of deficits in regulatory capacity and political will. We consider the potentials and pitfalls of these movements and suggest ways to optimise them.

Gleichstellungspolitik in der Schweiz: Einführung in ein umstrittenes PolitikfeldFuchs, GesineOpladen, Verlag Barbara Budrich (2019), 263 p., ISBN 978‐3‐8474‐0

Gleichstellungspolitik in der Schweiz: Einführung in ein umstrittenes PolitikfeldFuchs, GesineOpladen, Verlag Barbara Budrich (2019), 263 p., ISBN 978‐3‐8474‐0

The neo-Weberian state and the neodevelopmentalist strategies in Latin America: the case of Uruguay

This article seeks to contribute to the development of the neo-Weberian theory of public administration by making it travel to the Latin American context. We argue that this model of public administration reform, identified in continental European states, tends to be present in some Latin American countries that have followed neodevelopmentalist models of economic development. The neo-Weberian political strategy promotes a public sector modernization that enhances its steering and coordination capacities which is functional to a neodevelopmental view that aims to rebuild the state’s central role in leading economic growth and social cohesiveness. Yet, the public management model that is implanted resembles an ‘imperfect’ neo-Weberianism due to the institutional deficiencies of these countries and the difficulties in providing a clear reform script. We provide this link by decoding the main outlines of the public management model in Uruguay in the context of the reforms implemented by the Frente Amplio.Points for practitionersThe article demonstrates two central points. First, that the processes of public sector reform are usually linked to other broader development strategies and to calculations of political feasibility. This can explain to some extent the options taken by politicians. Second, public sector reforms are often a combination of multiple administrative doctrines. This poses the risk of being unsystematic, incoherent or even contradictory.

The Immanent Potential of Economic and Monetary Integration: A Critical Reading of the Eurozone Crisis

The Eurozone crisis revealed fundamental flaws in the institutional architecture of the Economic and Monetary Union. Its lack of political steering capacity has demonstrated the need for a broad but seemingly unachievable political union with shared economic governance and a common treasury. Agreement on further measures has been difficult to achieve, as different actors have imposed divergent external criteria for the success of the Eurozone. As part of their heritage in Western Marxism, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School sought to overcome such problems by identifying internal standards for social criticism. Building on their understanding of immanent critique, I argue that the Eurozone already contains the normative principles necessary to support greater political integration. While the citizens of Europe must provide the democratic legitimation necessary to realize this latent potential, the flaws revealed by the crisis are already pushing Europe towards greater transnational solidarity.

Mobile Robot Trajectory Planning Under Kinematic and Dynamic Constraints for Partial and Full Field Coverage

The constantly rising food demand of a steadily increasing world population requires improvement in efficiency, competitiveness, and productivity of current meat and dairy production systems. Thus, robotics‐based approaches have an important role to play, especially in dairy cattle farming, because the intensive grazing systems depend on numerous time‐consuming and tedious operations required to be carried out to assure an optimal cattle feeding as well as utilization of forage resources. These operations range from data acquisition considering the amount and quality of available forage within the paddocks, to carrying out maintenance operations in order to safeguard high yield with required quality and availability of the forage throughout the whole grazing season. This issue is addressed within the ICT‐AGRI project i‐LEED, in which one of the main tasks is to build accurate and feasible trajectories for a scouting and a maintenance robot to fully or partially cover the paddocks, as well as to reach only targeted spots previously located. This paper presents an original and fully operational method for trajectory planning by designing segments of clothoids while taking into account additional dynamic constraints, such as the steering rate capacity of the robot, its speed, and the maximally allowed transverse acceleration. In case of specific points to reach within a paddock, this approach is completed by morphological operations to first define regions and next rank them w.r.t. the minimal length of travel by solving the traveling salesman problem. Based on the kinematic and dynamic properties of the scouting and maintenance robots devoted to the i‐LEED project, the performances of the proposed planning approaches are presented.

The Study Area

The Study Area

From Resource to Burden: Rescaling Solidarity with Strangers in the Single Market

Abstract‘Organised solidarity’ of a mediated legal form constitutes the backbone of the modern welfare state built on solidarity between strangers. The interplay between the single market and the national social systems is key in defining who owes what to whom under the ‘transnationalised’ European solidarity. Free movement rights have increased the ‘entanglement’ of national social systems' revenue and expenditure sides, considered to jeopardise their steering capacity. As a corollary to free movement, transnational solidarity does not take place beyond or between national welfare states, but rather within: as solidarity with strangers. Here transnational solidarity is applied by way of a sociological framework to trace the evolutionary path of free movement of persons as it fluctuates between ‘commodification’ and ‘decommodification’. Against that backdrop, this article reviews whether a paradigm shift is currently promoted as to the question where solidarity with strangers begins and ends.

Design, implementation and validation of a stability model for articulated autonomous robotic systems

The use of robots in agriculture and forestry is rapidly growing thanks to the progress in sensors, controllers and mechatronics devices. Especially in hilly and mountainous terrains, the development of (semi-)autonomous systems that could travel safely on uneven terrain and perform many operations is an open field of investigation. One of the most promising mobile robot architectures is the articulated 4-wheeled system that shows an optimal steering capacity, and the possibility to adapt to uneven terrains thanks to a central passive degree of freedom. In this paper, the kinematic and (quasi-)static model for evaluating the phase I instability presented in Baker and Guzzomi(2013) has been firstly extended to allow to threat a generic articulated robotic system and to forecast the instability conditions. Then, the model and the stability conditions have been implemented in a Matlab™ simulator and validated by means of an experimental emulator. Finally, a first prototype for a mechatronic anti-overturning device is discussed.

Governance challenges of flood-prone delta cities: Integrating flood risk management and climate change in spatial planning

Delta cities are increasingly exposed to the risks of climate change, particularly to flooding. As a consequence, a variety of new spatial development visions, strategies, plans and programmes are being developed by city governments in delta regions to address these risks and challenges. Based on a general conceptual framework, this paper examines the nature of visions, strategies, plans and programmes in the delta cities of Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Rotterdam which are highly exposed to flooding and connected through a network of epistemic communities. The paper follows two main lines of inquiry. First, it examines the terms, concepts, and dominant institutional characteristics associated with the development of these visions, strategies, plans and programmes as a way of constructing a conceptual framework for understanding and explaining their connectivity. Second, it explores how and why cities’ spatial plans and governance dynamics are shaping climate adaptation responses. The systematic development of conceptual frameworks and in-depth analyses of varied, representative case studies is needed as their findings have important implications for vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in terms of policy options and cities as the optimal level for adaptation. The paper finds that dominant institutional characteristics critically affect the steering capacity of organisations/agencies (including their coordination capacity) to address climate-related risks. The findings have important implications for vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in cities, in general and delta cities, in particular.

The Continuing Relevance of the Convention?

If people were money: writing over 30 years ago, Goodin and Barry pointed to a then already visible paradox. Whereas the modern economy was becoming global, increasingly being rooted in the free movement of capital across borders, free crossborder movement was still denied to peoples. Today, the paradox is unbearable: discord is not simply attributable to the fact that law, evermore global in character, now makes support for the free movement of capital one of its primary purposes yet continues to subject the free movement of peoples to severe restrictions. Instead, a process of paradigm shift would similarly appear to be dictated by the inclusion of peoples and—above all, their movement—within the determining contours of the emerging global economy. Where the economic steering capacities of the modern state have been severely curtailed and where economic success is measured in terms of competitive capability, labour flexibility—at its core, labour mobility—takes on its own distributive function, acting not only as competitive motor, but also as arbiter for allocative efficiency, or in modern judicial thinking, as a harbinger for ‘allocative justice’. Far outside the reach of the Refugee Convention (1951), post-national law has accordingly had its own disintegrative impacts upon traditional mechanisms of sovereign national border control, for example, redefining cross-border migrants as

Control and Autonomy—The SAIs in Norway, Denmark, and Germany as Watchdogs in an NPM-Era?

New public management (NPM) reforms have weakened the direct steering capacity within state bureaucracy. This article looks into how supreme audit institutions in three countries (Norway, Denmark, and Germany) assess these types of reforms. The analysis shows that all three SAIs have taken on an evaluative role when judging NPM instruments. At the same time their emphasis on legality and compliance can be at odds with some of the operating principles in NPM. All in all the German SAI seems to be the most radical critic. This may be linked to the lack of openness of the German SAIs results that makes it more internally focused within a mindset of administrative accountability.

항만과 수로의 제한속력 설정 모델 개발에 관한 연구(Ⅰ) - 제한속력 설정을 위한 고려요소 식별 -

This research is the first research on developing the speed limit select model and also it is the result of the research on the importance of each element and consideration factors when selecting the speed limit. For the consideration factor discrimination and calculation of the importance, the delphi method and AHP method was used. The delphi survey was processed through third round survey, 5 high consideration factor(Level 1) and 23 low consideration factor(Level 2) was discriminated. During the process of the third delphi survey, when the CVR cost was in the range between 0.4~1.0 it was treated as the consideration factor when selecting the speed limit and less than 0.4 cost was eliminated. In the process of the second delphi survey, 33 consideration factors were discriminated but was reordered into 23 categories through the third survey. Based on the 23 categories earned through the third delphi analysis, the AHP survey was processed. The result of the AHP survey was that out of the importance of the 5 high consideration factor(Level 1), the traffic condition was evaluated as the number one factor and the vessel condition, waterway condition, environment condition, supporting condition and etc. conditions were evaluated following the traffic condition. Out of the 23 low consideration factor(Level 2) consideration, the visibility was evaluated to be the first important and the performance of the vessel steering, objective factors within the harbor, amount of traffic and density, distance between the passing vessel, speed of the steering capacity and tidal current were the following evaluated factors.

Implications of project-based funding of research on budgeting and financial management in public universities

The main goal of the paper is to explore—both theoretically and empirically—the implications of project-based research funding for budgeting and financial management at public universities. The theoretical contribution of the paper is to provide a synthesized discussion of the possible impacts of project-based funding on university financial management and budgeting. In the empirical part of the study, the cases of the two largest public universities in Estonia are used to uncover whether and in what form the effects outlined in the theoretical discussion have emerged. The study concludes that project-based funding of research gives rise to the following challenges: fluctuating revenues, fragmented revenue sources, high transaction costs, coordination problems, high complexity in managing the finances, difficulties in securing cash flows, and problems in covering indirect costs. The Estonian experience also indicates that extreme reliance on project-based funding of research—when combined with certain features of funding instruments and weak steering capacities of the central administration—can lead to a paradoxical situation: the more successful the research groups are in obtaining project-based funding from diverse sources, the more strained becomes the budget of the university as a whole.

When doctors shape policy: The impact of self‐regulation on governing human biotechnology

AbstractThis paper investigates the development and adoption of governance modes in the field of human biotechnology. As the field of human biotechnology is relatively new, voluntary professional self‐regulation constituted the initial governing mode. In the meantime, with the exception of Ireland, all Western European countries have moved toward greater state intervention. Nevertheless, they have done so in contrasting ways and the resulting governance modes for assisted reproductive technology and embryonic stem‐cell research vary greatly. Instead of imposing their steering capacity in a “top‐down” fashion, governments have taken pre‐existing self‐regulatory arrangements in the field into account and built up governance mechanisms in conjunction with private actors and pre‐existing modes of private governance. Our analysis demonstrates that the form and content of the initial self‐regulation explain why the self‐steering capacity of the medical profession was largely or at least partially preserved through hybrid governance systems in Britain and Germany, while in France the self‐regulation was entirely replaced by governmental intervention.

Benjamin Cohen on global political order: when Keynes meets realism - and beyond

This article analyses the trajectory of Benjamin J. Cohen's work by focusing on his ongoing concern with the nature and governance of world order. It does so by playing out his debt to realism and to Keynesianism. In a first moment, Cohen criticises the economic determinism of dependency scholarship, while turning to political realism, and then to possible Keynesian co-operation under anarchy: agents have the power to affect positive change. Later, Cohen the disillusioned Keynesian, watching how the possible reform of financial markets is marginalised by politicians and academics alike, shifts his analysis to more structural aspects of governance or rule that affect actors' preferences. I draw two conclusions. First, in this shift towards theorising the global political order away from steering capacity towards impersonal rule and bias, Cohen also questions the very setup of the theories with which we deal with that world - only to see that this very inspiration of original IPE is abandoned in the course of the ongoing 'professionalisation' of IPE as practised in the United States. Second, his analysis seems to incorporate a warning. The underlying grand question is nothing less than the bargain between capitalism and liberal democracy as we know it, since the present system undermines equality before the law - money trumps equal political rights - and undermines democratic accountability. One of the main achievements of the post-war Keynesian turn was the reappropriation of political space from anti-democratic forces. Therefore, the decline of Keynesianism could provoke a Polanyian nightmare in which the 'double movement' by which the laissez-faire is answered by moves to protect society does not strengthen democracies, as in earlier times of 'embedded liberalism', but undermines them instead.

Evaluation and stability comparison of different vehicle configurations for robotic agricultural operations on side-slopes

Progress in sensors, controllers and mechatronics devices and the development of (semi-) autonomous systems that can travel safely on uneven terrain and perform many operations has encouraged research interest in the use of robotics for agriculture and forestry in hilly and mountainous terrains. Here, the main mobile configurations that are likely to be used for robotic platforms as implement-carriers (3-wheeled, conventional/articulated 4-wheeled, tracked) were reviewed and discussed in terms of their suitability for agricultural operations and their stability. A numerical index accounting for the lateral stability of a vehicle, the roll stability index, was used to indicate the in-field working capacity of these platforms during side-slope operations. Assuming the same overall dimensions for all the configurations, the 3-wheel configuration, although very simple and agile, was seen as being the least stable, while a tracked vehicle was the most stable, although it had some important drawbacks when used in an agricultural context. This drawbacks included increased soil erosion and landslides caused by its tracks especially in the areas involving turning manoeuvres. The articulated system was found to be the most suitable for uneven and side-slope terrains because of its optimal steering capacity, agility and good stability. It was found to reach a critical stability angle close to the 4-wheel vehicle.

Enforcing Social Europe through Labour Inspectorates: Changes in Capacity and Cooperation across Europe

Despite its central importance for the implementation of EU social policy, the issue of member state enforcement of European regulations has attracted little academic attention. This paper analyses changes in national enforcement systems and horizontal cooperation between them by comparing labour inspectorates in the EU-15 member states over time (2000 versus 2010). Starting from the assumption that, as administrations, enforcement systems are strongholds of national sovereignty, it is argued that member states’ interest in creating a level playing field and in enabling free movement in accordance with the ‘four freedoms’ should nevertheless bring about change. The results show insufficient enforcement capacity overall, but also that important changes have taken place regarding the coordination, steering and pressure capacity of national labour inspectorates, and also regarding cooperation amongst them. This points to the emergence of horizontal cooperation as a distinct feature of the European Administrative Space.

Globalisation, Democratisation and the Institutional Transformation of Taiwan's Welfare Regime

In the context of the discussion about the governance capacity of small states in the world market raised by Katzenstein, the case of East Asian newly industrialised countries is an interesting one. This article takes the development of social policy in Taiwan as a case study through which to explore the role of social policy in the process of rapid industrialisation in small states. It is argued that in the initial phase of industrialisation the productive component of social policy was highlighted by the developmental state to serve the goal of economic development. Social policy functioned at this stage as an effective instrument to dampen the cost of labour and thus contributed to the low-cost strategy of developmental state. Since the 1980s, however, social policy has been profoundly transformed as a consequence of economic globalisation on the one hand and domestic democratisation on the other. It is argued that social policy making since the 1990s in Taiwan has shifted in emphasis from the productive to the consumptive component. Finally, it is suggested that three factors will be decisive in determining Taiwan's social policy in the future: limited governmental revenues, fiscal strain due the public debt problem and the steering capacity of minority governments.