15 research outputs found

    Sensor Fault Diagnosis Using Principal Component Analysis

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    The purpose of this research is to address the problem of fault diagnosis of sensors which measure a set of direct redundant variables. This study proposes: 1. A method for linear senor fault diagnosis 2. An analysis of isolability and detectability of sensor faults 3. A stochastic method for the decision process 4. A nonlinear approach to sensor fault diagnosis. In this study, first a geometrical approach to sensor fault detection is proposed. The sensor fault is isolated based on the direction of residuals found from a residual generator. This residual generator can be constructed from an input-output model in model based methods or from a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based model in data driven methods. Using this residual generator and the assumption of white Gaussian noise, the effect of noise on the isolability is studied, and the minimum magnitude of isolable fault in each sensor is found based on the distribution of noise in the measurement system. Next, for the decision process a probabilistic approach to sensor fault diagnosis is presented. Unlike most existing probabilistic approaches to fault diagnosis, which are based on Bayesian Belief Networks, in this approach the probabilistic model is directly extracted from a parity equation. The relevant parity equation can be found using a model of the system or through PCA analysis of data measured from the system. In addition, a sensor detectability index is introduced that specifies the level of detectability of sensor faults in a set of redundant sensors. This index depends only on the internal relationships of the variables of the system and noise level. Finally, the proposed linear sensor fault diagnosis approach has been extended to nonlinear method by separating the space of measurements into several local linear regions. This classification has been performed by application of Mixture of Probabilistic PCA (MPPCA). The proposed linear and nonlinear methods are tested on three different systems. The linear method is applied to sensor fault diagnosis in a smart structure and to the Tennessee Eastman process model, and the nonlinear method is applied to a data set collected from a fully instrumented HVAC system

    Observer-based fault isolation for statically non-isolable linear systems

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    #Becoming: Emergent Identity of College Students in the Digital Age Examined Through Complexivist Epistemologies

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    This dissertation explores the possibilities and limitations of conducting research on college student identity in the digital age. Utilizing philosophical theories from complexity theory, post-qualitative research, and new materialisms, I interrogate, question, disrupt, and challenge current theories and models of college student identity, largely developed from a positivist, modernist, empiricist perspective. Conducting research on college student identity in the twenty-first century may benefit from discarding the old ‘developmental’ language of the twentieth century, replacing this discourse and understanding with a language drawn from complexity theory. In this regard, I believe educators, researchers, and practitioners should begin talking about identity emergence and becoming. I explore how to embrace more complexivist epistemologies, moving educators, practitioners, and researchers away from traditional research methodologies. Drawing on emerging theoretical work of post-qualitative researchers, particularly Karen Barad (2008a), Alecia Youngblood Jackson and Lisa Mazzei (2012), my post-qualitative research agenda explored in this study used processes of digital immersion, interviewing, theoretical reading, and online blogging tools to create a research process viewed as a living system, exploring college student identities in the digital age as an emergent phenomena. This research highlights seven college students actively engaged in multiple distributed social media spaces. I refer to these seven college students as human becomings. In addition to following and intra-acting with these students in distributed social media spaces, I also conducted two interviews: issues of identity, digital practice(s), digital presentation(s), meaning-making, digital materiality, agency, and discourse were discussed. I conducted a process of dat(a)nalysis, highlighting dialogue, conversation, and observations on each human becoming. Further, I begin a process of entangling with theoretical, philosophical, and discursive research, creating the complexivist epistemologies so critical to understanding research on identity in the digital age. I end this dissertation discussing cyber-currere: viewing digital social media spaces as educational spaces where the processes of human becoming and subjectification occur as emergent phenomena: nonlinearly, non-hierarchically, and synchronously. In my closing remarks, I articulate how educators, particularly college student educators and curriculum theorists, might view digital spaces as always authentic, partial, and ontological – and what such an approach means for practice and future research

    Aeternitas - a Spinozistic study

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    THE following essay is essentially metaphysical: it is an attempt towards providing a corrective for the phenomenalism which, in one form or another, directly or inversely, prevails in our era. Though I am an Englishman, my belief in metaphysics as the source of genuine knowledge of the Real is naked and unashamed; but metaphysics must not be conceived as remote from the most fundamental interests of the spirit of m an: the circle of human knowledge returns upon itself, and its most remote point is therefore to be found among our most intimate and deeplyfelt concerns. Here as elsewhere it is incompleteness that gives the sense of distance; and similarly it is incompleteness in the form of an overweening phenomenalism that drives the human mind to the pictorial, and therefore inadequate, metaphysics of popular theology and superstition. T o the negations of naturalism the spirit must oppose affirmations: if possible, adequate affirmations, but in any case affirmations. Thus where naturalism would confine human existence to the period between birth and death (and rightly, taking duration to be the sole meaning of existence), the spirit (equally rightly) demands something more. But not rightly if it too accepts the ultimacy of temporal existence, and thence infers a life after death (and even before birth) conceived as more of a similar kind. But the affirmation is but an illegitimate form of the correct refusal to accept a limited period of time as an adequate expression of human reality. Nevertheless it is surely clear that no one really desires an immortal existence thought of as an infinitely extended persistence through time. The dull round of endeavour and failure, of trust and deception, of achievement and recurrent dissatisfaction, while ‘to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day’, can only be an intolerable oppression to the alert imagination. Dusty death itself would be better than such immortality. ‘T o think of life as passing away is a sadness, to think of it as past is at least tolerable.’1 Our vaunted immortal hopes are but dallyings with eternity; they cannot slake ‘the undying thirst that purifies our mortal thought’ ; but even that thought, so purified, may become ‘a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters’. Other source of satisfaction for us there is none; an immortality of ever-increasing insight and enjoyment may, indeed, seem less tantalizing, but that is not the destiny of beings cast upon this bank and shoal of time, however it may be in the strong level flight of angelic existence. For us, temporal life is largely repetitive and accumulative, with but few periods of that triumphant consciousness which is our reality and our highest good. And what we really desiderate is always more reality, and less of the idle repetition that belongs to mere time, and, with accumulation, is still the characteristic even of our duration. Our good is our eternity.The description of the essay as A Spinozistic Study rather than as ‘A Study of Spinoza’ is intended to be significant, and is connected with what I have already said about the aim of the work. A Spinozistic study cannot fail also to be in some considerable measure a study of Spinoza, while many a study of Spinoza has failed simply because it has not been a Spinozistic study. But the distinction thus drawn does not imply that it is intended to put aside critical exposition in favour of biased defence, or even of insistence upon a mere ipse dixit (though no modern philosopher has a stronger claim than Spinoza to the dogmatic mantle of Aristotle); it means that I prefer philosophy itself to the mere history of philosophy, and the creative spirit to the inert letter of an unfinished system.T he purpose of the book is thus not limited to a precise and conservative exposition of the views of a philosopher long dead, and, it may be thought, superseded, with respect to a set of topics far removed from the living thought of our own day. Such inquiries would in themselves be respectable and, however misleading when wrongly estimated, even valuable in no mean degree; here they are not to my taste, and in this study of the underlying principles of the system of Spinoza my aim has rather been to discover clues to the solution of some ultimate problems that in recent times have come into the focus of philosophical attention (though not always as problems), and which can only be met on the plane of metaphysics. Thus where I have found it necessary to discuss important points of interpretation, scholarship, use, or criticism in detail, I have done so by way of ‘Excursus’, and I hope that by this device, without failing to satisfy the just demands of exact scholarship, I have prevented the main argument from becoming too academic or overloaded with minutiae. The general reader may thus, if he wishes, avoid discussions which happen to lie beyond his immediate requirements, by occasionally omitting an Excursus

    Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

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    The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen

    Grounding the Linking Competence in Culture and Nature. How Action and Perception Shape the Syntax-Semantics Relationship

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    Part I of the book presents my basic assumptions about the syntax-semantics relationship as a competence of language users and compares them with those of the two paradigms that presently account for most theoretical linguistic projects, studies, and publications. I refer to them as Chomskyan Linguistics and Cognitive-Functional Linguistics. I will show that these approaches do not provide the means to accommodate the sociocultural origins of the “linking” competence, creating the need for an alternative approach. While considering these two approaches (sections 2.1 and 2.3), an alternative proposal will be sketched in section 2.2, using the notion of “research programme”. Thus, part I deals mainly with questions of the philosophy of science. Nevertheless, the model underlying the research programme gives structure to the procedure followed throughout the rest of the book, since it identifies the undertaking as multidisciplinary, following from the central roles of perception and action/attribution. This means that approaching the competence of relating form to content as characterized above requires looking into these sub-competences first, since the former draws upon the latter. Part I concludes with the formulation of an action-theoretic vocabulary and taxonomy (section 2.4). This vocabulary serves as the guideline for how to talk about the subject-matter of each of these disciplines. Part II and chapter 3 then deal with the sub-competences that have been identified as underlying linguistic competence. They concern the use of perception, identification/categorization, conceptualization, action, attribution, and the use of linguistic symbols. Section 3.1 in part II deals with perception. In particular, two crucial properties of perception will be discussed: that it consists of a bottom-up part and a top-down part, and that the output of perception is underspecified in the sense that what we perceive is not informative with respect to actional, i.e., socially relevant matters. The sections on perception to some degree anticipate the characterization of conceptualization in section 3.2 because the latter will be reconstructed as simulated perception. The property of underspecification is thus sustained in conceptualization, too. If utterances encode concepts and concepts are underspecified with respect to those matters that are most important for everyday interaction, one wonders how verbal interaction can (actually) be successful. Here is where action competence and attribution come into play (the non-conceptual contents referred to above). I will show that native speakers act and cognize according to particular socio-cognitive parameters, on the basis of which they make socially relevant attributions. These in turn specify what was underspecified about concepts beforehand. In other words, actional knowledge including attribution must complement concepts in order to count as the semantics underlying linguistic utterances. Sections 3.3 and 3.4 develop a descriptive means for semantic contents. I present the inherent structural organization of concepts and demonstrate how the spatial and temporal aspects of conceptualization can be systematically related to the syntactic structures underlying utterances. In particular, I will argue that conceptualization is organized by means of trajector-landmark configurations which can quite regularly be related to parts of speech in syntactic constructions using the notion of diagrammatic iconicity. Given a diagrammatic mapping and conceptualization as simulated perception the utterance thus becomes something like an instruction to simulate a perception. In part III, section 4.1 deals with the question of what the formal constituents of utterances/constructions contribute to the building of a concept from an utterance. In this context a theory of the German dative is presented, based on the theoretical notions developed throughout this work. Section 4.2 sketches the non-formal properties that reduce the remaining underspecification. In this context one of the most fundamental cognitive properties of language users is uncovered, namely their need to find the cause of any event they are cognizing about. I will then outline the consequences of this property for language production and comprehension. Section 4.3 lists the most important linking schemas for German on the basis of the most important constructions, i.e., motivated conceptualization-syntactic construction mappings, and then describes in a step-by-step manner how – from the utterance-as-instruction-for-conceptualization perspective – such an instruction is obeyed, and how such an instruction is built up from the perception of an event, respectively. The last section, 4.4, is dedicated to a discussion of some of the most famous and most puzzling linguistic phenomena which theoretical linguists traditionally deal with. In discussing the formal aspects of the linguistic competence, examples from German are used

    Principles of organisation of psychic energy within psychoanalysis : a systems theory perspective

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    The concept of Psychic Energy holds a very important position in the field of Psychoanalysis, particularly within the theories of Sigmund Freud. These ideas, including the notion of a constancy of excitation, or the ‘pleasure principle’, as well as energy transfer and ‘cathexis’, are important not only historically in terms of the subsequent development of Psychoanalytic theory, but also remain a core conceptual assumption of a number of concepts in contemporary use. However, the central ideas related to psychic energy have undergone little substantial revision or development since the end of Freud’s career, despite a number of compelling critiques that call into question the central definitions and assumptions of these concepts, particularly the principles defining their governance. Grobbelaar (1989) has suggested that a number of problems within Psychoanalytic theory can be powerfully addressed through recourse to central propositions from the field of systems theory, and the case is made in the present thesis that some of the core problems with the energic theory may indeed be the result of a pre-systems epistemology. The present study proposes that psychic energy be defined as recursively constituted through three levels of the human system (inorganic, organic and informational), and that the core principles of regulation at the informational level is not constancy, or pleasure, but rather the necessity of maintaining organisation. In line with this proposition, the study reviews a number of theoretical propositions from systems theory and cybernetics (including the notions of energy defined as ‘information’ or ‘free energy’) and how they may be usefully deployed as principles of organisation of psychic energy within the psychoanalytic framework. Examples of how these principles may be used to explain Freud’s core observations of ego functioning are presented as well.PsychologyPh. D. (Psychology

    Refiguring Prose Style: Possibilities for Writing Pedagogy

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    For about two decades, say Johnson and Pace, the discussion of how to address prose style in teaching college writing has been stuck, with style standing in as a proxy for other stakes in the theory wars. The traditional argument is evidently still quite persuasive to some—that teaching style is mostly a matter of teaching generic conventions through repetition and practice. Such a position usually presumes the traditional view of composition as essentially a service course, one without content of its own. On the other side, the shortcomings of this argument have been much discussed—that it neglects invention, revision, context, meaning, even truth; that it is not congruent with research; that it ignores 100 years of scholarship establishing composition\u27s intellectual territory beyond service. The discussion is stuck there, and all sides have been giving it a rest in recent scholarship. Yet style remains of vital practical interest to the field, because everyone has to teach it one way or another. A consequence of the impasse is that a theory of style itself has not been well articulated. Johnson and Pace suggest that moving the field toward a better consensus will require establishing style as a clearer subject of inquiry. Accordingly, this collection takes up a comprehensive study of the subject. Part I explores the recent history of composition studies, the ways it has figured and all but effaced the whole question of prose style. Part II takes to heart Elbow\u27s suggestion that composition and literature, particularly as conceptualized in the context of creative writing courses, have something to learn from each other. Part III sketches practical classroom procedures for heightening students\u27 abilities to engage style, and part IV explores new theoretical frameworks for defining this vital and much neglected territory. The hope of the essays here—focusing as they do on historical, aesthetic, practical, and theoretical issues—is to awaken composition studies to the possibilities of style, and, in turn, to rejuvenate a great many classrooms.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1156/thumbnail.jp

    Sense-Making Bodies: Feminist Materiality and Phenomenology in Constructive Body Theologies

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    Constructive body theology provides an ethical commitment to and a set of analytical principles for understanding bodily experience. If we insist upon the theological value of embodied experience, how can we give an adequate account of it? Are feminist appeals to the senses useful in developing theological truth claims based in embodied experiences? Feminist theologies which explicitly seek to overcome body/mind dualisms often reinscribe them when they neglect to attend to perception as a critical element of bodily experience. Phenomenological analyses of perception (such as suggested by Merleau-Ponty) strengthen and refine our conception of embodiment. Grounding constructive theology in experience requires understanding experience as bodily perceptual orientation, as perceptual bodily and cultural acts involved in socially and historically situated contextual meaning-making processes. This shift expands phenomenological concepts such as intentionality and habit, and allows for a comparative investigation of historical and cultural differences in embodied experiences through examples found in sensory anthropology. Body theology, framed as principles, strengthens theological projects (such as those by Carter Heyward and Marcella Althaus-Reid, as well as new constructive possibilities) through opening dialogical avenues of exploration into embodied being in the world. Body theology principles help us conceive of and address how our bodily experiencing--our feeling, tasting, hearing, imaging, remembering and other sensory knowledge --comes to matter in our lives, especially where oppressive forces viscerally affect embodied life
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