Alas, Alack! Revisited

In Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book 4, Chapter XVIII through XXI, Pantagruel and his men are facing a dreadful storm at sea. One of the sailors, Panurge, is convinced of impeding death and spends all four chapter blubbering. While he lets loose with a few boo-hoo-hoo s and a few well-placed woe is me! woe, woe! s and the like, most of interjections are highly original, packed with logological curiosities

Railway station development in post-industrial Rotterdam - path dependency and shifting priorities

The combined effects of industrial decline and the development of a service economy currently bring about a change in urban economies. Accessibility, proximity and an attractive urban climate are considered important factors of urban competitiveness. These are all combined in railway station area, which is therefore considered a focus point of urban economic development. The paper investigates the role of station development projects in the perspective of these long-term social and institutional processes in contrast to the continuity found in a city’s estab-lished economic structure, prevailing policy arenas, objectives and cultures. It does so by means of an analysis of station development in Rotterdam, a manufacturing and seaport city now strug-gling to find ways to develop a competitive service economy. The paper draws a comparison with Rotterdam’s rival Amsterdam, showing that differences in present economic performance and urban development are partly rooted in different economic histories. The paper investigates to which extent these differences affect the role of major railway station redevelopment projects in both cities, and the way these projects are implemented.

An internal model approach to (optimal) frequency regulation in power grids with time-varying voltages

This paper studies the problem of frequency regulation in power grids under unknown and possible time-varying load changes, while minimizing the generation costs. We formulate this problem as an output agreement problem for distribution networks and address it using incremental passivity and distributed internal-model-based controllers. Incremental passivity enables a systematic approach to study convergence to the steady state with zero frequency deviation and to design the controller in the presence of time-varying voltages, whereas the internal-model principle is applied to tackle the uncertain nature of the loads.Comment: 16 pages. Abridged version appeared in the Proceedings of the 21st International Symposium on Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems, MTNS 2014, Groningen, the Netherlands. Submitted in December 201

Individuals charts and additional tests for changes in spread

Some authors recommend the use of an additional test for detecting increases in the spread, when using a control chart for individual observations. We examine this recommendation both in a practical situation and theoretically. Both studies show that the additional test gives somewhat more power for detecting a 25% increase of the process variation. For nearly all other deviations from the in-control state the test is more likely to cause confusion. From a practical viewpoint we therefore advise against its use.

Philippines Trip

Postcard from Kristin Thomas, during the Linfield College Semester Abroad Program at Hong Kong Baptist Universit

Trip Prediction by Leveraging Trip Histories from Neighboring Users

We propose a novel approach for trip prediction by analyzing user's trip histories. We augment users' (self-) trip histories by adding 'similar' trips from other users, which could be informative and useful for predicting future trips for a given user. This also helps to cope with noisy or sparse trip histories, where the self-history by itself does not provide a reliable prediction of future trips. We show empirical evidence that by enriching the users' trip histories with additional trips, one can improve the prediction error by 15%-40%, evaluated on multiple subsets of the Nancy2012 dataset. This real-world dataset is collected from public transportation ticket validations in the city of Nancy, France. Our prediction tool is a central component of a trip simulator system designed to analyze the functionality of public transportation in the city of Nancy