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In this paper we describe a localisation process and focus on localisation standards. Localisation standards provide a common framework for localisers, including authors, translators, engineers, and publishers. Standards with rich semantic metadata generally facilitate, accelerate, and improve the localisation process. We focus particularly on the XML Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF), and present our experiment and results. An html file after converted into XLIFF, travels through different commercial localisation tools, and as a result, data as well as metadata are stripped away. Interoperability between file formats and application is a key issue for localisation and thus we stress how this can be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present our approach to localisation of a robot in a known environment. The decision making and the driving is much harder to be done without the knowledge of the exact position. Therefore we discuss the importance of the localisation and describe several known localising algorithms. Then we concentrate on the one we have chosen for our application and outline the implementation supporting various inputs. Combining of the measurements is also discussed. In addition to well known inputs like odometry and other simple inputs we describe deeper our beaconing system which proved to be very useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Location information is an important source of context for ubiquitous computing systems. We have previously developed a wearable location system that combines a foot-mounted inertial unit, a detailed building model and a particle filter to locate and track humans in indoor environments. In this paper we present an algorithm in which a map of radio beacon signal strengths is used to solve two of the major problems with the original system: scalability to large environments and uncertainty due to environmental symmetry. We show that the algorithm allows the deployment of the system in arbitrarily large buildings, and that uncertainty due to environmental symmetry is reduced. This reduction allows a user to be located after taking an average of 38 steps in a 8725 m2 three-storey building, compared with 76 steps in the original system. Finally, we show that radio maps such as those required by the algorithm can be generated quickly and automatically using the wearable location system itself. We demonstrate this by building a radio map for the 8725 m2 building in under two and a half hours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research works towards the integration of cultural factors in global information systems like the Web or digital libraries to enhance global access to information and services. In this context, we study cultural differences in categorization and classification by means of card sorting experiments in combination with observations and interviews. An initial analysis of data collected in Pakistan and UK reveals a number of differences between Pakistani and British participants as to how they classify every-day objects. The differences found suggest a number of design solutions for cultural inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The SenseCam is a wearable camera that automatically takes photos of the wearer΄s activities, generating thousands of images per day. Automatically organising these images for efficient search and retrieval is a challenging task, but can be simplified by providing semantic information with each photo, such as the wearer΄s location during capture time. We propose a method for automatically determining the wearer΄s location using an annotated image database, described using SURF interest point descriptors. We show that SURF out-performs SIFT in matching SenseCam images and that matching can be done efficiently using hierarchical trees of SURF descriptors. Additionally, by re-ranking the top images using bi-directional SURF matches, location matching performance is improved further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present novel algorithms to infer movement by making use of inherent fluctuations in the received signal strengths from existing WLAN infrastructure. We evaluate the performance of the presented algorithms based on classification metrics such as recall and precision using annotated traces obtained over twelve hours effectively from different types of environment and with different access point densities. We show how common deterministic localisation algorithms such as centroid and weighted centroid can improve when a motion model is included. To our knowledge, motion models are normally used only in probabilistic algorithms and such simple deterministic algorithms have not used a motion model in a principled manner. We evaluate the performance of these algorithms also against traces of RSSI data, with and without adding inferred mobility information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an efficient distributed algorithm for localising motes in a large scale sensor network using radio interferometric positioning. The focus here is on finding exact solutions while using a relatively small number of measurements, where the effects of noise are largely ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonial civilisation and the adoption of Christianity The majority of the world's Christians no longer live in Europe or north America but in the countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa south of the Sahara. Christianities of one sort or another are taken for granted aspects of the lives of billions of people in diverse communities that retain collective memories of non-Christian traditions and, frequently, continue to perform practices associated with them. The present constitution of different local Christianities is highly varied, reflecting in part the different forms and context of its promotion, adoption and ongoing transformation in and through practice. While these Christianities may appear to have very little in common beyond a belief in Jesus Christ they share to an extent a common origin and history. What informed and facilitated the remarkable and comparatively recent globalisation of Christianity was colonialism in its myriad forms (Hefner 1993, Burridge 1991). Colonial conquest created the preconditions for the kinds of political and economic contexts with which foreign missionaries could engage relatively unchallenged. Colonial governance formalised specific niches for missionary action that complemented the evangelisation endeavour. Of course, neither colonialism nor missionary evangelisations were unitary projects in any simple sense (Thomas 1994). However, affinities in goal and purpose fostered a synergy that was to enhance the expansionist capabilities of both. Colonialism is essentially concerned with the establishment and consolidation of control over subject populations through their transformation (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 235). The aims of evangelical mission were similar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political problems of polyethnic societies are legion. The liberal solution, the pretence that there are no ethnic differences, has only very recently had its ethnocentric weaknesses exposed; in practice nonracialism is frequently fraudulent, since those belonging to or willing to acculturate to the dominant group outpace all others. The various ameliorative poverty programmes in the United States of America and Britain are for the most part inspired by the ideal of assimilation to the middle-class life style. Egalitarian ideals are satisfied by the provision of weighted handicaps in the competition for bourgeois prizes of higher educational opportunity and highly paid employment. The adoption by Botswana of a liberal, non-racial, national policy in 1966, just as illusions about liberalism in American and Britain were beginning to fade, was a bold step. If ethnicity was proving a tenacious factor in industrial societies, where its intrinsic irrelevance to the system could be argued, how much more tenacious it would be likely to be in a non-industrial society in which ethnicity had hitherto been the cornerstone of administration and organisation. Many factors contributed to the decision: the liberal British influence on decision makers; the necessity to be seen to be opposed to South Africa ideologically despite heavy dependence on South Africa economically; and the preponderance of Tswana in the composition of the population which ensured that for most people the policy would be without impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the public imagination the Kalahari is associated with Bushmen, and rightly so, since not only are they its majority group, but it is the only place where their hunting and gathering life style survives. It is the Bushmen who draw anthropologists and linguists by the score into the Kalahari. This book, however, is about another Kalahari people, white Afrikaans-speaking cattle pastoralists who for three generations have occupied the limestone ridge in the western Kalahari that stretches from Gobabis in Namibia to the Kwebe Hills below Lake Ngami in Botswana. Although these Afrikaners feature in the anthropological texts, they tend to be confined to the small type of footnotes or acknowledgements, shadowy subsidiaries, supplying petrol, acting as guides, interpreters and drivers, cited by name and occupation rather than collectively, since they spoil the stereotype of Afrikaners as the Bushman enemy and exploiter. Perhaps they spoil the anthropological idyll. The anthropologists like to reserve to themselves the monopoly of intimacy with this anachronistic stone-age culture. The reality of the Kalahari is less romantic but in many ways more interesting. Besides the Bushmen and the Afrikaners there are the various pastoral people who have been attracted to the remote empty grasslands: Coloured settlers from the northern Cape, Kgalagari from the south and west, Herero fleeing east from German rule in Namibia, and Barolong moving westwards to escape British colonial taxation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]