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Antenna and electric field probe calibration requires precise positioning and movement throughout a known RF field. Measurements are usually made in an anechoic chamber. A robotic six‐axis antenna positioner was needed that would work in this environment at NIST. Discusses NIST’s vendor‐selection process for the new positioner and how the positioner has enhanced their capabilities. Also chronicles the design, technical challenges and manufacture of the positioner by Mek‐A‐Nize Engineering & Robotics, Inc., the vendor selected by NIST to provide the turnkey robotic antenna positioner.

The purpose of this paper is to describe common methods for evaluating the performance of wireless devices such as wireless sensors in harsh radio environments.

The paper describes how measurements of real‐world propagation environments can be used to support the evaluation process, then presents representative measurement data from multipath environments where sensor networks are likely to be deployed: a fixed‐infrastructure, process‐control environment (here an oil refinery), and a heavy industrial environment (here an automotive assembly plant).

Results on the characterization of multipath in the propagation channel are summarized and how these results may be used in the performance evaluation of sensor networks is discussed.

The paper describes measurement results from environments where little open‐literature data exists on point‐to‐point propagation, specifically high‐multipath environments. These highly reflective scenarios can present difficulties for deployment of sensor networks.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

There has been considerable research into wine marketing worldwide, but little has been published concerning the marketing of UK wines. This paper outlines the background to the retail marketing activities of UK vineyards. Strategies are analysed using three exemplar frameworks: the Ansoff matrix, generic strategies, and the marketing mix. The analysis also makes reference to marketing segmentation. The most active vineyards are pursuing strategies in all four of Ansoff’s growth vectors, with the largest players involved in diversification, for example into tourism. The marketing mixes for most UK wine producers are hybrids between the parameters expected for the “fine” and “beverage” wine segments. For the tiny UK wine industry to exist and prosper, we contend that it is necessary to target niche segments using Porter’s “focused differentiation” approach. Larger vineyards attempt a broader target with tourism activities. UK wines from vineyards of all sizes are differentiated primarily by prestige pricing and by what is effectively “place marketing”.

There is no argument among serious researchers that a mongoloid stock first colonized the New World from Asia. Nor is there controversy about the fact that these continental pioneers used the Bering Land Bridge that then connected the Asian Far East with Alaska.– Gerald F. Shields, et al.American Journal of Genetics (1992)

Directors help determine the strategic direction of a corporation and are responsible for ensuring the institution has a good system of internal control. Banking institutions without a strategic direction emphasizing sound lending practices that promote the long-run financial health and viability of the institution will be sued more frequently than peer institutions. Institutions that do not have a good system of internal control will also be sued more frequently. Hence, legal expense is a bank corporate governance measure. We compare the performance of bank legal expense and a widely cited corporate governance index in a regression framework to determine which better predicts bank performance. The regressions indicate legal expense is a much better predictor, hence a better measure of bank corporate governance. Regulators should require legal expense reporting and rank institutions by the ratio of legal expense to assets to help identify institutions with weak governance. Seven case studies illustrate the role of legal expense in corporate governance.

I. Introduction In their recent pastoral letter, the Catholic bishops of this country have reputedly taken a new approach in rooting their moral imperatives in the Bible. As opposed to the established, official convention of “proof‐texting”, the US bishops focus on certain biblical themes which presumably “speak to” contemporary issues and problems. Chief among these is the so‐called “preferential option for the poor”, which is attributed to both the Old and New Testaments and early Church (Christianity).

THE Manchester School of Librarianship was founded in October 1946, one of the original five schools opened in the autumn of that year. It was attached to the Department of Industrial Administration in the Manchester College of Science and Technology and was thus something of an exception, as the majority of schools of librarianship were attached to Colleges of Commerce or general Colleges of Further Education. As accommodation was very limited in this rapidly expanding college, the then City Librarian of Manchester, Charles Nowell, kindly offered the use of two rooms in the Central Library, so after a brief period in the College building, the students were moved to the Central Library, though the School remained administratively a part of the College. Many former students must have memories of those two curving rooms, the Manchester Room and the Lancashire Room, with their old‐fashioned school desks.

Compared with the low-fidelity model, the high-fidelity model has both the advantage of high accuracy, and the disadvantage of low efficiency and high cost. A series of multi-fidelity surrogate modelling method were developed to give full play to the respective advantages of both low-fidelity and high-fidelity models. However, most multi-fidelity surrogate modelling methods are sensitive to the amount of high-fidelity data. The purpose of this paper is to propose a multi fidelity surrogate modelling method whose accuracy is less dependent on the amount of high-fidelity data.

A multi-fidelity surrogate modelling method based on neural networks was proposed in this paper, which utilizes transfer learning ideas to explore the correlation between different fidelity datasets. A low-fidelity neural network was built by using a sufficient amount of low-fidelity data, which was then finetuned by a very small amount of HF data to obtain a multi-fidelity neural network based on this correlation.

Numerical examples were used in this paper, which proved the validity of the proposed method, and the influence of neural network hyper-parameters on the prediction accuracy of the multi-fidelity model was discussed.

Through the comparison with existing methods, case study shows that when the number of high-fidelity sample points is very small, the R-square of the proposed model exceeds the existing model by more than 0.3, which shows that the proposed method can be applied to reducing the cost of complex engineering design problems.