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A novel and highly sensitive immunochromatographic strip based on a monoclonal antibody (3A9) was developed for the detection of cadmium in tap water. The 50% inhibition concentration of the antibody, which showed no cross-reactivity with other heavy metal ions, was 0.45 ng/mL and it recognized Cd(II)-1-(4-isothiocyanobenzyl) ethylenediamine-N,N,N′,N′-tetraacetic acid (EDTA) (Cd(II)-ITCBE) and not metal-free ITCBE and EDTA. The cutoff value for semi-quantitative detection of the strip was 5 ng/mL and the lower limit of detection for quantitative detection was 0.2 ng/mL using a scanning reader. The percent recovery ranged from 107.6% to 132% in tap water samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studies in Conservation is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

"Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia" is a book by Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr that explores the cultural pathways of traditional Scottish and Irish folk music as it traveled to Appalachia. The book examines the influences of Welsh, English, German, Dutch, French, African American, and Cherokee cultures on these songs. It is structured into three main sections and includes photographs, maps, and sidebars covering various topics related to folk music. The authors also exchange letters discussing their perspectives on Old and New World music. The book sheds light on the history of American folk music and its connection to immigrant experiences. It includes a contextual timeline, resource centers, a discography, and a bibliography for further exploration. Scholars and music enthusiasts will find this book to be a valuable resource. [Extracted from the article]

The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, certain common fixed point theorems are established via φ-contractive multivalued mappings involving point-dependent control functions as coefficients in the framework of complex valued metric spaces. Our results improve and extend several results in the existing literature. Moreover, this section is equipped by some illustrative examples in support of our results. Secondly, we point out some slip-ups in the examples of some recent papers based on multivalued contractive mappings in complex valued metric spaces. Our observations are also authenticated with the aid of some appropriate examples. Some rectifications to correct the erratic examples are also suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the proliferation of information available online and through academic libraries, students are increasingly reading from the screen. Academic documents can be long and complex, requiring sustained concentration to read deeply. This paper reviews current literature on the advantages and disadvantages of electronic and paper media for academic reading. Theoretical and empirical research into screen reading in academic institutions falls broadly into the following categories; reading and comprehension theory, the effect of a document’s platform, design and tools on reading, and screen versus paper research studies. These categories inform and provide the structure for this review. This paper concludes by considering how academic librarians can manage their collections and deliver library services in response to recent screen reading research. This overview of the literature on reading theory, the platforms and tools integral to reading electronic documents, and screen versus paper reading research, will enable academic librarians to make more informed collection management and library service decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A science, business, or law that is basing its validity on the level ofp-values,tstatistics and other tests of statistical significance is looking less and less relevant and more and more unethical. Today’s economist uses a lot of wit putting a clever index of opportunity cost into his models; but then, like the amnesiac, he fails to see opportunity cost in statistical estimates he makes of those same models. Medicine, psychology, pharmacology and other fields are similarly damaged by this fundamental error of science, keeping bad treatments on the market and good ones out. A few small changes to the style of the published research paper using statistical methods can bring large beneficial effects to more than academic research papers. It is suggested that misuse of statistical significance be added to the definition of scientific misconduct currently enforced by the NIH, NSF, Office of Research Integrity and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global increase in electrical device consumption has escalated the demand for excellent surge protectors. As a state-of-the-art technology, varistor has received considerable attention due to its outstanding versatility and wide range of applications. Hence, it is crucial to understand the development trend of varistor to expand the collaboration networks and propel its advancement. In this bibliometric article, several procedures were presented and analyzed to determine the global research trend of varistor based on the publication output each year, leading countries, most prolific authors, and co-occurrences of author keywords. After several stages of collecting and refining the textual information from the Scopus database, a total number of 2122 research articles and conference papers were retrieved between 1951 and 2021. Results show that since 1975, the annual number of publications has increased significantly, with 2020 recording the highest value of 1363 articles. China, the United States, South Korea, and Japan contributed around 60% of the total articles published. Moreover, three of the most prolific institutions associated with the research topic were ranked among the top 200 universities globally. The analysis of varistor research progress will provide a common overview of collaborative networks and potential collaborators for a better broadening of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kirigami is an art of paper cutting, which can be used in mechanical metamaterials, actuators, and energy absorption based on its deployable and load-deflection characteristics. Traditional cuts with zero width produce undesirable plastic deformation or even tear fracture due to stress concentration in stretching. This study proposes to enlarge the cut width into a notch flexure, which is applied to an orthogonality-cutted kirigami sheet, which buckles out of plane into a 3D configuration patterns under uniaxial tension. The use of compliant beam as the notch makes the stress distribution around the cuts more uniform in both elastic and elastoplastic regime. The experimental and numerical results show that by tuning the geometric parameters of cuts and material properties of the sheets, the trigger condition of 3D patterns can be adjusted. Potential capability of tunable phononic wave propagation in this kirigami-inspired metamaterial is demonstrated. This design methodology offers a theoretical guide for kirigami-based structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge is an essential ingredient for economic development, growth and gaining a competitive advantage. In order to produce novel and valuable knowledge, it is advantageous, perhaps vital, to rely on insights gained from prior research efforts. Those knowledge spillovers (KS) provide the rationale for sustained economic growth and produce unique place-based knowledge spaces. Due to the spatial embeddedness and stickiness of knowledge, most investigations mainly pay attention to the localized nature of KS, but what about those spillovers from other jurisdictions, or perhaps even from across the globe? To analyse the role played by international KS, the present study investigates to what extent international KS shape the evolution of the UK science and technology space. The first step involves creating knowledge spaces following the methodology outlined by Kogler et al. (2013; 2017) for the period 2006-15. Subsequently, we are following the paper trail of publications and patents developed by UK authors and inventors to depict to what degree international KS in specific science and technology domains have contributed to the production of novel knowledge in the UK. The results indicate that four out of five citations made in publications and patents in the UK are the works of authors and inventors residing elsewhere. This has important policy implications considering recent tendencies to curtail trade and the free movement of labour, all of which contribute to the diffusion of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author describes a modified version of the Paper River exercise that appeared in this journal in the Spring 1999 issue. The original game was designed to illustrate the application of the Coase theorem for solving an externality problem. In the Paper River, pairs of students share a single productive resource: small pieces of paper. At question is who has the rights to the paper. The author presents a modified version of the game that retains many of the same elements from the original, but the students work in groups rather than in pairs. Doing so increases the transaction costs associated with negotiating a solution. In addition, the productive resource is common property, so property rights are difficult to establish. These difficulties make a Coasian solution more difficult but make the simulation more realistic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lightweight glass-ceramic from waste material consists of (x) paper ash- (80-x) cullet – 20 Kaolin clay where (10 ≤ x ≤ 30 weight %) are sintered at 900°C, 1000°C and 1100°C using conventional solid-state reaction technique. The influence of composition and sintering temperature on density, crystalline phase, porosity and surface pore morphology was studied. The crystal symmetry, space group and unit cell dimensions which are executed from XRD data are analyzed using SmartLab Studio II Powder XRD software. Meanwhile, the lattice parameter, cell volume, theoretical densities and porosity were estimated by Rietveld refinement method. The results reveal that all parameters exhibit a temperature-dependent character, as the temperature is increased, the density decreases and porosity increases due to bloating effects. It is also found out that the glass-ceramic compose of 25 paper ash −55 cullet-20 Kaolin clay, sintered at 900°C exhibits an optimum characteristic of the sample density reached optimum because of vitrification between cullet glass, paper ash and kaolin clay to form liquid phase which promotes adhesion and polymerization. It is observed that the surface morphology of the sample is affected by the crystallization process during sintering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing fascination of sport in society and the increasing availability of sport-related data, there are great opportunities to carry out sports analytics research. In this article, we discuss some of the issues that are relevant to publishing in the field of sports analytics. Potential publication outlets are identified, some summary statistics are given, and some experiences and opinions are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paper-based microfluidic devices have emerged as simple yet powerful platforms for performing low-cost analytical tests. This paper reports a microfluidic paper-based electrochemical biosensor array for multiplexed detection of physiologically relevant metabolic biomarkers. Different from existing paper-based electrochemical devices, our device includes an array of eight electrochemical sensors and utilizes a handheld custom-made electrochemical reader (potentiostat) for signal readout. The biosensor array can detect several analytes in a sample solution and produce multiple measurements for each analyte from a single run. Using the device, we demonstrate simultaneous detection of glucose, lactate and uric acid in urine, with analytical performance comparable to that of the existing commercial and paper-based platforms. The paper-based biosensor array and its electrochemical reader will enable the acquisition of high-density, statistically meaningful diagnostic information at the point of care in a rapid and cost-efficient way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global biodiversity crisis and constantly growing human impact on the natural environment call for more evidence where conservation actions are the most urgent. As the agricultural lands are under increased pressure of growing human food needs here the literature survey on farmland bird conservation (FBC) was conducted to reveal geographical distribution in research intensity, the topics addressed and to identify potential drivers for the worldwide scientific effort. The Scopus database search has revealed 2290 papers dedicated to FBC from the period 1990-2020. The distribution was spatially uneven with most papers published in Western Europe and North America. Scientific collaboration was also spatially biased in favor of countries located close to each other and having high scientific capacity. The analysis also revealed 139 terms representing main topics raised in FBC research. The number of FBC papers per country was positively correlated with Gross Domestic Production (GDP), the total number of scientific papers, and number of threatened species, and negatively with the GDP from agricultural production, whereas it was not related to area of agricultural lands or bird species richness. Spatial and thematic biases in studies of farmland birds may have important consequences since uneven scientific evidence constrains development of proper conservation solutions and limits their implementation. We conclude that research on FBC should be globally coordinated and flexible enough to undertake burning conservation problems adjusted to regional differences in agriculture, socio-economy, and bird diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The laser induced forward transfer and sintering of metal nanoparticle inks has been proven a key enabling technology for flexible electronics. Nevertheless, many challenges concerning the conformal processing of non-planar substrates incorporating thermally sensitive layers are yet to be addressed. In this work, we study the behaviour of conformal laser printing of silver nanoparticle inks on patterned samples comprising sensitive underlying structures, by correlating the laser sintering powers employed to the undesired effects on the adjacent interfaces. The latter include demanding surface topographies with periodic patterns and microcomponents exhibiting aspect ratio in the nano to 100-micron scale. We investigate the contribution of crucial processing parameters, such as the per pulse energy, repetition rate and the pulse to pulse spatial and temporal overlap to the overall result. The demonstrated results validate the versatility of laser processing which can offer application specific solutions on different use cases involving multilayered and multimaterial electronics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the maturity of information and communication technology (ICT), numerous innovative applications are proposed in different arenas including smart living environments. Technology-enabled smart living has transformed the traditional living system to an enhanced user satisfaction model by providing a balanced environment, thus, securing the residents from disruptions and risks. Besides these magnified advantages, it is found almost full of faints in emergency situations. The researchers and architects put their full potential towards the development of new applications, but no significant attention is paid to analyze the existing designs to identify flaws and suggest enhanced solutions accordingly. To bridge this gap in the literature, this paper presents a comprehensive review to evaluate the capabilities of available smart home designs to counter any emergency situations. Along with highlighting safety, healthcare, and many other unwanted challenges, we also discussed the key problems that obfuscate the trustworthiness of smart homes for its residents. Moreover, the design limitations to present an early alarming and automatic evacuation mechanism especially for deaf, blind, and other visually impaired people is another big challenge to tackle. Finally, we elaborate on the limitations of available smart home solutions and suggest various open research problems that require further development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The market of courier, express and parcel services (CEP) is characterized by the presence of requests for the transfer of goods and documents. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the global postal and CEP infrastructure played a key role in enabling governments to respond to the emerging challenges. In this paper, the competitiveness and the rank of four observed CEP service providers are analyzed using ratio indicators, the Ordinal Priority Approach method (OPA) and the Weighted Sum Method (WSM). We use the OPA method because there is no need for a pairwise comparison matrix and no need for normalization. The paper aims to examine the liquidity, economy and profitability of CEP service providers to get a true picture of the situation in the market of postal and CEP services in the Serbia. In the analysis of business performance and the implementation of the OPA method, the opinions of experts were taken into account. This paper yields a key insight: the identification of the top-performing provider within the group of service providers is accomplished through the utilization of both the OPA and WSM methods. Sensitivity analysis is shedding light on the varying impact of the provider's rank on the final ranking of the CEP providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the result of the analysis of the painting materials found in the studio of artist J. M. W. Turner at his death in 1851, which was conducted by N. W. Hanson, head of the Analytical Section in the Paints Division of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). The author is of the opinion that Hanson had to modify his use of emission spectrography, and if he is alive today, should consider the combination of reliable, reproducible, analysis of samples of complex, aged and often contaminated materials with concomitant research into out-of-print and rare historical sources. The author also believes that the claim of Hanson that he could distinguish aged mastic from aged dammar is unjustified.

This paper critically assesses current architectural research, as represented in a sampling of papers presented at ACSA conferences, through the lens of research typologies related to people-place interactions taken from neighboring fields in the social sciences. Specifically, 253 papers from four ACSA conferences were assessed for methodological approaches to their objects of inquiry. This resulted in a tabulation of all the papers into nine methodological categories, ranging from interpretive approaches to causal-experimental approaches to design projects. These nine categories are critically evaluated in light of extant people-place research frameworks from the social science literature. The paper concludes by suggesting that established social science frameworks can help clarify the architectural research realm, particularly in the "interpretive" range, and that "design" offers a unique venue within which sociological approaches such as critical theory and/or grounded theory can find expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The safe and effective treatment of patients accessing multiple NHS services relies upon efficient communication between primary care, secondary care, and out of hours providers. There is a theoretical risk to patient safety from delays in these processes, to which paper communications are particularly vulnerable. When letters are received they must be reviewed and prioritised in order of clinical importance, a process that requires both time and clinical resources. This is relevant to the challenge of resource allocation to maximise patient benefit. This retrospective study investigated the impact on patient safety of 249 clinical letters reporting routine clinical encounters in secondary care and out of hours services that were delayed by an average of 18-24 months to a suburban London general practice. No clinical harm could be attributed to the delay. This small study did not suggest delays in routine communications pose a significant risk to patient safety. Conversely, it questions the efficiency and benefit to patients of prioritising clinical time to reviewing routine letters. The adoption of fully integrated, shared electronic patient records with the function to highlight clinically urgent or important communications might ease clinician workload, to the ultimate benefit of patient care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Paper River is a classroom simulation designed to examine a negative externality generated by a productive process that elicits a Coasian solution. Previous experiments designed by Hazlett (1995), Nugent (1993, 1997), and Bergstrom and Miller (1997, 179–99) focus on how pollution emission rights can be efficiently allocated by the market through property rights. Although these experiments touch on property rights in demonstrating how emission rights are a more efficient means of reducing pollution than government imposed limits, they do not address Coase's Theorem directly. Classroom experiments that demonstrate Coase's Theorem include those by Delemeester and Neral (1995, 115–19) and Stodder (1996). In these activities, students imagine they are either the creator or recipient of a hypothetical externality. Although this approach is useful for conveying Coase's Theorem, it does not give students the opportunity to generate and experience the externality directly. In the Paper River, students create and experience an externality first hand and then conceptualize a correction procedure that is consistent with Coase's Theorem. The unique nature of this simulation allows students to be involved directly in the externality. In addition, it simulates an actual environmental problem, which will enable students to identify more easily other examples of externalities that affect our society, such as endangered species, destruction of the rainforests, and preservation of natural habitats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A culture of innovation that can continuously change to ongoing external market shifts will be a critical source of competitive advantage for organizations over the next decade. The lessons for leading such a culture of innovation come from humanity's earliest beginnings and are communicated through our myths. The authors discuss the use of the Hero's Journey with modern change management and innovation techniques such as foresight, customer-centered research and lean startup, to anticipate challenges along an established road of creating a culture of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Games have been designed to be challenging and fun for humans to play, so we can test the AI system against the best human players in the world to quantify how good our AI systems are getting to be. We went from there to AlphaGo, which was our AI system to master the ancient and complex game of Go. DeepMind: From Games to Scientific Discovery: This paper is an edited version of Demis Hassabis' 2021 IRI Medal talk. He discussed his personal AI journey - from games to scientific discovery, some of his breakthrough results in complex games of strategy, and some of the exciting ways that lessons from the world of games are helping to accelerate scientific discovery. [Extracted from the article]

Since the ending of apartheid, the state, political parties, civil society and ordinary people in South Africa have attempted to deal with the traumatic legacies of the past to engender a common sense of nationhood. This paper examines this process of dealing with the past through the theoretical lens of post-colonialism, focusing, in particular, on attempts to establish historical truth and collective memory for black women, who have often been most marginalised by colonialism and apartheid and excluded from dominant accounts of history. It argues that if black women are denied a presence and agency in the construction of collective memory, their belonging and citizenship is consequently mediated in the process of nation building. It considers how exclusionary and discriminating patterns are reproduced through attempts to construct national memory-archives, focusing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It then explores the measures being taken to create a more inclusive process of restoring collective memory. In particular, it discusses the importance and possibilities of creating a postcolonial archive, where the voices and texts of historically marginalised people can be incorporated into national projects of remembering and notions of belonging. The paper focuses specifically on recent attempts to archive black women's pictorial and written testimony in a memory cloths programme. It concludes that representations of the past by women are a valuable tool in tracing the ways in which the legacy of their belonging and social standing shapes their contemporary citizenship. The radical potential of postcolonial archives lies in the fact that they can work against more sanitised representations of contemporary South Africa and towards the requirements for social justice (especially for black women) that are embodied within, but were arguably not met by, the TRC and broader nation building processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about a 'place' that effectively no longer exists - in the sense of being a recognisable unit of territory. 'Chishanga' has always been a term of contestation, referring more or less tenuously to a stretch of ground across which struggles for authority, power and identity have taken place. In tracking and examining these struggles using oral history techniques, the paper draws attention to the fallacies of a chiefdom-based approach to pre-colonial African history. At the same time, it emphasises the significance or the real and imagined geographies around which identities revolve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our research, we study the case of a pulp and paper producer who decides to establish a partnership with one buyer. Using two different types of relationship, namely a traditional system without any collaboration scheme and Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment, we develop decision models describing the producer and the buyer planning processes. We also identify which approach is more profitable for each actor as well as for the network, based on real costs and parameters obtained from the industrial case. We then test how different incentives can improve the traditional system and provide higher gains for each partner. Our results show that using incentives increases the system's profit by up to 4% if parameters are well defined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of financial sectors is considered as one of vital determinants of the growth of Ethiopian economy, and for secure equitable distribution of the benefits to the society. However, financial distress has an effect on the sectors. This review was conducted to assess financial distress situation of financial sectors in Ethiopia. The objective is specifically to identify the determinants of financial distress, opportunities of financial sectors, and challenges and constraints of financial distress in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a developing country with majority of unbanked population. Liquidity, profitability, leverage, firm size, capital adequacy, management efficiency, earning ability, inflation and interest rate are major determinant of financial distress in Ethiopia. Moreover, Ethiopian financial sectors have an opportunity of trade openness, rapid economic growth, unexploited resource, population growth and encouragement of privatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the one-minute paper, a method for the active participation of students in the learning process, and on a pilot implementation of this technique to manage instruction in the micro portion of the introductory economics course at a large public university. The one-minute paper is a "modest, relatively simple and low-tech" innovation designed to obtain regular feedback from students. In the final minute or two of a class, the teacher asks the students what they learned in the class on that day. The teacher encourages students to provide thoughtful and sincere responses to his questions. Unlike standard end-of-term evaluations, one-minute paper allows the students to provide guidance for their own ongoing instruction and not for students in the future. The results of the pilot project, on the effectiveness of the one-minute paper, suggests that the one-minute paper does enhance economic knowledge by approximately .6 of a point on the postTUCE exam, ceteris paribus. This result represents an approximate 6.6 percent increase in economic knowledge relative to the mean preTUCE level, a practically significant return for a modest investment of time.

The commentary of Dr. Katz and Ms. Waisman[1] misrepresents the 2017 Canadian Guideline for opioid therapy and chronic noncancer pain. The Guideline did encourage clinicians to approach patients prescribed high-dose opioid therapy to consider a voluntary trial of tapering that, in patients who elected to proceed, could be paused or discontinued based on their response. We also place a high value on patient autonomy under these circumstances (p. 1).[8] The 2017 Opioid Guideline did not introduce strict dose limits for people taking opioids. [Extracted from the article]

A literature review on the order picking process in warehouses is presented for delineating the trends in time of research topics in this field. A total of 269 journal papers published between 2007 and 2022 were retrieved from Scopus. After a methodological classification, descriptive analyses were performed on authors, journals, subject area and top publishing countries. Bibliometric tools were used to map the topics covered by the reviewed studies, categorise them and determine possible relationships. Papers' contents were evaluated in terms of eight categories, including five typical issues of order picking systems, plus three aspects dealing with the characteristics of the application. Insights about the extent to which these aspects have been covered in the literature are derived; relationships between the various aspects of the picking process are also delineated. Suggestions for future research activities are finally deducted, offering researchers and practitioners strong bases for works on order picking systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of European Journal of Psychotraumatology is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper addresses the difficulties with connected vehicle systems (CVSs), particularly with vehicle platooning, are examined in this paper. For leader and follower-connected vehicles, the control protocol (which includes artificial delays, disturbances and proportional gains) is implemented. With tracking error systems, system dynamics are modelled while taking outside influences into consideration. Using creative thinking, a centralized event-triggered control system is implemented to maximize fleet wide communication updates. System stability is guaranteed by this centralized method in combination with quadratic form Lyapunov stability analysis. The risk of zeno behaviour is reduced by an event-triggered communication condition that is activated when a threshold is exceeded. The effectiveness of the centralized event-triggered system in improving stability and resilience in connected vehicle platooning scenarios is evaluated numerically through simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in technology have enabled the use of sensors with varied modalities to monitor different parts of systems, each providing diverse levels of information about the underlying system. However, resource limitations and computational power restrict the number of sensors/data that can be processed in real-time in most complex systems. These challenges necessitate the need for selecting/scheduling a subset of sensors to obtain measurements that guarantee the best monitoring objectives. This paper focuses on sensor scheduling for systems modeled by hidden Markov models. Despite the development of several sensor selection and scheduling methods, existing methods tend to be greedy and do not take into account the long-term impact of selected sensors on monitoring objectives. This paper formulates optimal sensor scheduling as a reinforcement learning problem defined over the posterior distribution of system states. Further, the paper derives a deep reinforcement learning policy for offline learning of the sensor scheduling policy, which can then be executed in real-time as new information unfolds. The proposed method applies to any monitoring objective that can be expressed in terms of the posterior distribution of the states (e.g. state estimation, information gain, etc.). The performance of the proposed method in terms of accuracy and robustness is investigated for monitoring the security of networked systems and the health monitoring of gene regulatory networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the sensorless control of a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM) to be employed on a turbo-generator to recover the exhaust gas energy of an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE). The main problem with this application is the high rotational speed required by the exhaust gas turbo-generator. Indeed, this implies the difficulty of installing an encoder for speed measurement and control. For this reason, sensorless control is highly recommendable, but, on the other hand, the main sensorless techniques could fail in this peculiar situation because of the high computational effort required compared with the other sensorless applications. Moreover, a good knowledge of the model parameters is necessary. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to compare two main sensorless techniques for rotational speed measurement, both in the deterministic framework (Model Reference Adaptive System (MRAS) observer) and stochastic framework (Extended Kalman Filter (EKF)), to verify their effectiveness, their computational load, their sensitivity against parameter variation and noisy measurements, and, finally, to present the best solution for the exhaust gas energy recovery from the internal combustion engine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel robust adaptive control approach for nonlinear uncertain vehicle suspension system with time delayed actuation and bounded disturbances. The uncertainty and disturbance as well as the input delay on the system are all limited and unknown. This paper explores a control-oriented nonlinear model to accurately describe the dynamics of the vehicle suspension which incorporates uncertainty, disturbance and actuator delay. The controller is designed based on robust and adaptive approaches, which along with guaranteeing general goals for the suspension system is able to assure the stability of the closed-loop system in the Lyapunov concept. Also, due to the use of smooth functions in the robust controller structure, sudden changes in the behavior of system states are prevented. The simulation and comparison results in MATLAB environment show the efficiency of the proposed robust adaptive method in covering the effects of uncertainty, disturbance and time-variant actuator delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]