β Scribed by H. Chestnut; A. Tustin
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
DL~RING the last few decades, technology has advanced faster than at any time in all the years of human history. We are involved in a complex process of interacting scientific, social, economic, political and educational change.
A situation may emerge in which future developments will largely be dominated by the awareness of men in all lands of the possibility of material abundance through co-operative endeavour for the three billion inhabitants of this planet. Through centuries of labour, concepts have been built up that are reliable and adequate for the most complex manipulations of the physical world and, to a partial but increasing extent, of the biological world also. Science now offers possibilities that include unlimited supplies of energy, many different kinds of new materials and forms of communication and transport that could bring all mankind into contact. Above all, there is a prospect of a greatly increased productivity of labour by the provision of machines and automatic mechanisms of new kinds.
This international journal Automatica has been created with the purpose of contributing to international co-operation in developing a topic that is fundamental for the realization of these possibilities, namely, the topic of 'automatic control' and its broad implications.
The possibilities latent in mechanization and in automatic control must be approached with realisim. Significant reductions in labour cost have been demonstrated by recent applications of automatic mechanisms to the production of selected types of product, but the rate at which such possibilities are being realised is much lower than some persons expected. The reasons for this are both economic and technical.
Production by machines is a substitution of direct labour by labour expended in producing, maintaining and replacing machines, and this labour must be diverted from current production. There are limits to the possible rate of this accumulation of capital. Also, although automatic production is applicable to many commodities, those for which it has so far been developed are a small part only of the total range of goods and services. In countries with existing industries most suitable for automation, there is reluctance to convert and, in many cases, the present tariff and customs restrictions on marketing are proving a great hindrance to effective automation.
There are also great technical difficulties. The production of each distinct commodity presents a unique problem, calling for a high degree of inventiveness, great engineering knowledge and skill, and a thorough practical acquaintance with particular specialized processes. Whether the problem concerns an assembly line, a chemical process, or the control of a distribution system, the existence of generalized mathematical theorems indicating possibilities can be only a step towards the realization of working installation, not prohibitively costly and of the required reliability.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
The Editorial Board of the Anatomical Record is privileged to have the opportunity to devote the pages of this issue of the journal to the topic of Pulmonary Neuroendocrine Cells. This seems to be entirely appropriate since much of the earlier descriptive and cytochemical work has appeared in our pa