This paper introduces the conceptual foundations and motivation for creating a digital archive to display developments in the field of robotics over the past 50 years. The archive is meant to represent robotics as an evolving “ecology of knowledge” (Akera, 2007b) and contains interviews with robotics researchers accompanied by other related documents, such as videos, photos, and online resources, and by visualizations of bibliometric analyses of co-authorship ties, citation networks, common keywords and concepts, etc. Rather than representing a unified and unilinear view of “the history” of robotics, the archive is designed to allow users to explore and navigate the available materials guided by their own interests, thereby constructing multiple narratives about robotics. We describe the project as involving multiple “memory practices” (Bowker, 2005): robotics “pioneers” narrating their lived experiences in the field, publications that inscribe the results and practices of scientific research, social scientists collecting and presenting these materials to further understand scientific practice, and users from the public navigating the archive to develop their own understandings of robotics over the years. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of new information technologies such as digital archives for memory practices in science studies and the sciences.

There is much evidence that microvascular free flaps are successfully used in the reconstruction of the head and neck defects in cancer patients. It has become evident that proportional with ageing population, there is an increase in the number of elderly patients requiring microvascular reconstruction after radical excision of tumors in the head and neck region. The aim of this study is to estimate the correlation between the application of a microvascular free flap for defect reconstruction in elderly patients based on ASA (American Society of Anesthesiology) classification and postoperative surgical and medical morbidity. Study included 31 patients older than 70 years hospitalized in the period from 1996 to 2010 at the Clinic for Maxillofacial Surgery, Zagreb, Croatia. Base of reference for every patient included data about: gender, age, date and length of surgical procedure, basic diagnosis, chronic illneses, ASA (American Society of Anesthesiology) clasiffication, type of surgical procedure, type of microvascular free flap, postoperative complications, length of hospitalization and treatment results. Based on the data analysis it is estimated that morbidity was significantly higher in the number of male patients than the number of female patients (61% : 38.7%). Average age was 76 years and the oldest patient was 87 years old. According to ASA clasiffication patients were mostly ASA III (60,87%) and then ASA II 26.08%. Overall, the success rate of microvascular free flap was 94%. Moreover, postoperative medical complications were in the correlation with ASA status 19.45%. The study shows that the successs rate of microvascular free flap reconstruction of cancer in the head and neck region with elderly patients is directly related to ASA and the length of surgical procedure, as significant predictors in postoperative surgical and medical morbidity.

A mechanisms-based fracture model applicable to a broad class of cemented aggregates and, among them, plastic-bonded explosive (PBX) composites, is presented. The model is calibrated for PBX 9502 using the available experimental data under uniaxial compression and tension gathered at various strain rates and temperatures. We show that the model correctly captures inelastic stress-strain responses prior to the load peak and it predicts the post-critical macro-fracture processes, which result from the growth and coalescence of micro-cracks. In our approach, the fracture zone is embedded into elastic matrix and effectively weakens the material's strength along the plane of the dominant fracture.