The velocities of intranetwork and network magnetic fields

We analyzed two sequences of quiet-Sun magnetograms obtained on June 4, 1992 and July 28, 1994. Both were observed during excellent seeing conditions such that the weak intranetwork (IN) fields are observed clearly during the entire periods. Using the local correlation tracking technique, we derived the horizontal velocity fields of IN and network magnetic fields. They consist of two components: (1) radial divergence flows which move IN fields from the network interior to the boundaries, and (2) lateral flows which move along the network boundaries and converge toward stronger magnetic elements. Furthermore, we constructed divergence maps based on horizonal velocities, which are a good representation of the vertical velocities of supergranules. For the June 4, 1992 data, the enhanced network area in the field of view has twice the flux density, 10% higher supergranular velocity and 20% larger cell sizes than the quiet, unenhanced network area. Based on the number densities and flow velocities of IN fields derived in this paper and a previous paper (Wang et al., 1995), we estimate that the lower limit of total energy released from the recycling of IN fields is 1.2 × 10²⁸ erg s⁻¹, which is comparable to the energy required for coronal heating

Detecting and diagnosing faults in dynamic stochastic distributions using a rational b-splines approximation to output PDFs

Describes the process of detecting and diagnosing faults in dynamic stochastic distributions using a rational b-splines approximation to output PDFs

On the convergence of autonomous agent communities

This is the post-print version of the final published paper that is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 IOS Press and the authors.Community is a common phenomenon in natural ecosystems, human societies as well as artificial multi-agent systems such as those in web and Internet based applications. In many self-organizing systems, communities are formed evolutionarily in a decentralized way through agents' autonomous behavior. This paper systematically investigates the properties of a variety of the self-organizing agent community systems by a formal qualitative approach and a quantitative experimental approach. The qualitative formal study by applying formal specification in SLABS and Scenario Calculus has proven that mature and optimal communities always form and become stable when agents behave based on the collective knowledge of the communities, whereas community formation does not always reach maturity and optimality if agents behave solely based on individual knowledge, and the communities are not always stable even if such a formation is achieved. The quantitative experimental study by simulation has shown that the convergence time of agent communities depends on several parameters of the system in certain complicated patterns, including the number of agents, the number of community organizers, the number of knowledge categories, and the size of the knowledge in each category

A General Signal of a Phase Transition from Single-Particle Momentum Distributions

A two-particle space correlation function is derived from the single-particle momentum distribution of the emission source. A signal of a first order phase transition is obtained from this correlation function if density fluctuations are large.Comment: 5 pages, 2 Postscript figure

Intimate Partner Violence in Immigrant/Refugee Populations

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is the most common type of violence affecting women. Globally, Central Africa and South Asia have some of the highest rates of IPV. In Vermont, the majority of refugees are from these regions. Individual, interpersonal, and especially cultural values play critical roles in the definition/appraisal and decision to seek help in these women. This study examines ways to mitigate challenges that healthcare professionals have in identifying women who need help and barriers preventing these women from seeking help.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1276/thumbnail.jp

H∞ fuzzy control for systems with repeated scalar nonlinearities and random packet losses

Copyright [2009] IEEE. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of Brunel University's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.This paper is concerned with the H∞ fuzzy control problem for a class of systems with repeated scalar nonlinearities and random packet losses. A modified Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model is proposed in which the consequent parts are composed of a set of discrete-time state equations containing a repeated scalar nonlinearity. Such a model can describe some well-known nonlinear systems such as recurrent neural networks. The measurement transmission between the plant and controller is assumed to be imperfect and a stochastic variable satisfying the Bernoulli random binary distribution is utilized to represent the phenomenon of random packet losses. Attention is focused on the analysis and design of H∞ fuzzy controllers with the same repeated scalar nonlinearities such that the closed-loop T-S fuzzy control system is stochastically stable and preserves a guaranteed H∞ performance. Sufficient conditions are obtained for the existence of admissible controllers, and the cone complementarity linearization procedure is employed to cast the controller design problem into a sequential minimization one subject to linear matrix inequalities, which can be readily solved by using standard numerical software. Two examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design method

Robust H∞ filtering for a class of nonlinear networked systems with multiple stochastic communication delays and packet dropouts

Copyright [2010] IEEE. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of Brunel University's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.In this paper, the robust H∞ filtering problem is studied for a class of uncertain nonlinear networked systems with both multiple stochastic time-varying communication delays and multiple packet dropouts. A sequence of random variables, all of which are mutually independent but obey Bernoulli distribution, are introduced to account for the randomly occurred communication delays. The packet dropout phenomenon occurs in a random way and the occurrence probability for each sensor is governed by an individual random variable satisfying a certain probabilistic distribution in the interval. The discrete-time system under consideration is also subject to parameter uncertainties, state-dependent stochastic disturbances and sector-bounded nonlinearities. We aim to design a linear full-order filter such that the estimation error converges to zero exponentially in the mean square while the disturbance rejection attenuation is constrained to a give level by means of the H∞ performance index. Intensive stochastic analysis is carried out to obtain sufficient conditions for ensuring the exponential stability as well as prescribed H∞ performance for the overall filtering error dynamics, in the presence of random delays, random dropouts, nonlinearities, and the parameter uncertainties. These conditions are characterized in terms of the feasibility of a set of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), and then the explicit expression is given for the desired filter parameters. Simulation results are employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed filter design technique in this paper.This work was supported in part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the U.K. under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the U.K., the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany, National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 60825303, 60834003, 973 Project under Grant 2009CB320600, Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation under Grant 111064, and the Youth Science Fund of Heilongjiang Province under Grant QC2009C63

Robust filtering for bilinear uncertain stochastic discrete-time systems

Copyright [2002] IEEE. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of Brunel University's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.This paper deals with the robust filtering problem for uncertain bilinear stochastic discrete-time systems with estimation error variance constraints. The uncertainties are allowed to be norm-bounded and enter into both the state and measurement matrices. We focus on the design of linear filters, such that for all admissible parameter uncertainties, the error state of the bilinear stochastic system is mean square bounded, and the steady-state variance of the estimation error of each state is not more than the individual prespecified value. It is shown that the design of the robust filters can be carried out by solving some algebraic quadratic matrix inequalities. In particular, we establish both the existence conditions and the explicit expression of desired robust filters. A numerical example is included to show the applicability of the present method