The paper examines in selected detail, issues of maritime security in international law that are currently at the forefront of concerns in the maritime world. It provides an overview of the nature of maritime security contra maritime safety and gives an introduction of the most common threats. It looks at the current scenario in light of what is evolving in response to certain dramatic events of t

The problem to minimize power losses in an electrical network subject to voltage and power constraints is in general hard to solve. However, it has recently been discovered that semidefinite programming relaxations in many cases enable exact computation of the global optimum. Here we point out a fundamental reason for the successful relaxations, namely that the passive network components give rise

Good approximations of code-symbol a-posteriori probabilities (APPs) are obtained using a list of the most likely codewords, instead of the whole code-book. This list is found by bidirectional efficient algorithm for searching code trees (BEAST), whose complexity is shown to be lower than of the known trellis-based algorithms

In this work new methods based Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) have been developed to measure different kinds of structural properties in soft materials. The advantage of using NMR as a technique to measure material properties is that it is non-destructive, which makes it possible to measure on the actual piece of material that will be used for the application. One does not have to be concerned

This paper presents ongoing research involving design and evaluation of different architectures for providing knowledge-based solutions in industrial robotized automation systems. The conclusions are that distributed, cloud-based approaches offer many possibilities, in particular for knowledge exchange and reuse, and facilitate new business models for industrial solutions. However, there are many

This paper describes the results of a perception experiment in which subjects listening to a retold story in Dutch were asked to mark various perceived discourse structures and to give their judgements on prominence in the verbatim transcription of that story. They marked discourse boundaries by means of conventional punctuation, indicating perceived non-final, sentence final, and paragraph final

Broadband services require data rates that can only be achieved by using relatively high spectrum frequencies. At such high frequencies, the DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) signal is more susceptible to external noise sources, such as radio frequency interference and impulsive noise. This paper aims to characterize how the impulsive noise impacts on services and applications for a broadband system u

This dissertation examines the role of modernism and modernity in Chinese spoken drama and film during the years between the May Fourth Movement and the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War. This influence is traced through close readings of a selection of works in different categories, underlining relevant themes and structures that are recurring in both drama and film.

The main purpose of this thesis is to show in a case study how it is possible to inform, with Activity Theory, the design and evaluation of a pedestrian navigation system that uses audio-tactile feedback. The case study consists of an iterative design process that results in a tourist guide application used in a mobile phone. The interaction with the user is mostly through the audio and haptic mod