Effects of alarms on control of robot teams

Annunciator driven supervisory control (ADSC) is a widely used technique for directing human attention to control systems otherwise beyond their capabilities. ADSC requires associating abnormal parameter values with alarms in such a way that operator attention can be directed toward the involved subsystems or conditions. This is hard to achieve in multirobot control because it is difficult to distinguish abnormal conditions for states of a robot team. For largely independent tasks such as foraging, however, self-reflection can serve as a basis for alerting the operator to abnormalities of individual robots. While the search for targets remains unalarmed the resulting system approximates ADSC. The described experiment compares a control condition in which operators perform a multirobot urban search and rescue (USAR) task without alarms with ADSC (freely annunciated) and with a decision aid that limits operator workload by showing only the top alarm. No differences were found in area searched or victims found, however, operators in the freely annunciated condition were faster in detecting both the annunciated failures and victims entering their cameras' fields of view. Copyright 2011 by Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Inc. All rights reserved

Design mobile satellite system architecture as an integral part of the cellular access digital network

The Cellular Access Digital Network (CADN) is the access vehicle through which cellular technology is brought into the mainstream of the evolving integrated telecommunications network. Beyond the integrated end-to-end digital access and per call network services provisioning of the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), the CADN engenders the added capability of mobility freedom via wireless access. One key element of the CADN network architecture is the standard user to network interface that is independent of RF transmission technology. Since the Mobile Satellite System (MSS) is envisioned to not only complement but also enhance the capabilities of the terrestrial cellular telecommunications network, compatibility and interoperability between terrestrial cellular and mobile satellite systems are vitally important to provide an integrated moving telecommunications network of the future. From a network standpoint, there exist very strong commonalities between the terrestrial cellular system and the mobile satellite system. Therefore, the MSS architecture should be designed as an integral part of the CADN. This paper describes the concept of the CADN, the functional architecture of the MSS, and the user-network interface signaling protocols

Feynman Rules in the Type III Natural Flavour-Conserving Two-Higgs Doublet Model

We consider a two Higgs-doublet model with $S_3$ symmetry, which implies a $\pi \over 2$ rather than 0 relative phase between the vacuum expectation values $$and$$. The corresponding Feynman rules are derived accordingly and the transformation of the Higgs fields from the weak to the mass eigenstates includes not only an angle rotation but also a phase transformation. In this model, both doublets couple to the same type of fermions and the flavour-changing neutral currents are naturally suppressed. We also demonstrate that the Type III natural flavour-conserving model is valid at tree-level even when an explicit $S_3$ symmetry breaking perturbation is introduced to get a reasonable CKM matrix. In the special case $\beta = \alpha$, as the ratio $\tan\beta = {v_2 \over v_1}$ runs from 0 to $\infty$, the dominant Yukawa coupling will change from the first two generations to the third generation. In the Feynman rules, we also find that the charged Higgs currents are explicitly left-right asymmetric. The ratios between the left- and right-handed currents for the quarks in the same generations are estimated.Comment: 16 pages (figures not included), NCKU-HEP/93-1

Acculturation and Filial Piety as Mediators of the Relationship Between Caregiver Burden and Gender-Role Expectations in Hispanic-American Rehabilitation Services Students

Purpose: Hispanic-Americans are the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. The need to care for older Hispanics has become an important issue as they now enjoy longer life expectancies due to better access to healthcare and less labor participation in hazardous occupations. The present study examined whether the association between caregiver burden and gender-role expectations is mediated by acculturation and filial piety. Method: The sample consisted of 93 Mexican-American rehabilitation services students enrolled at a large public university in Texas. The four instruments used in the study were the Zarit Burden Interview, the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican-Americans-Revised, and the Expectations of Filial Piety Scale. Participants visited an online survey site to respond to the questionnaire. Results: About half of the most common person to whom care was being provided was a parent 49.5% (n = 46) with 35.5% (n = 33) grandparents and 15.1% (n = 14) siblings. Acculturation scores were positively correlated with both gender-role expectations (r = .23, p = .027) and filial piety (r = .30, p = .003) scores. In addition, caregiver burden scores were negatively correlated with gender-role expectation scores (r = -.21, p = .046) and filial piety scores were positively correlated with gender-role expectation scores (r = .29, p = .005). The correlation between caregiver burden and filial piety was not statistically significant (r = -.10, P \u3e .05 n.s.). Moreover, neither acculturation nor filial piety mediated the relationship between gender-role expectations and caregiver burden. Conclusion: Mexican-Americans view aging positively, have a sense of caring for elders, and have strong ties to their culture. As a result of strong Hispanic family values, the obligation to care for family members (i.e., familism) tends to occur with little hesitance. Future replication studies are needed to better understand the effects of acculturation and filial piety on caregiver burden among Mexican-Americans residing in other regions of the country, including outside the cities along the United States-Mexico border. The rationale for further research is that living in predominantly-White states such as Minnesota and Wyoming, where Mexican-Americans make up a small fraction of the population, might have effects on their acculturation

Localization and Anomalous Transport in a 1-D Soft Boson Optical Lattice

We study the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensed atoms in a 1-D optical lattice potential in a regime where the collective (Josephson) tunneling energy is comparable with the on-site interaction energy, and the number of particles per lattice site is mesoscopically large. By directly imaging the motion of atoms in the lattice, we observe an abrupt suppression of atom transport through the array for a critical ratio of these energies, consistent with quantum fluctuation induced localization. Directly below the onset of localization, the frequency of the observed superfluid transport can be explained by a phonon excitation but deviates substantially from that predicted by the hydrodynamic/Gross-Pitaevskii equations.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

Archiving scientific data

We present an archiving technique for hierarchical data with key structure. Our approach is based on the notion of timestamps whereby an element appearing in multiple versions of the database is stored only once along with a compact description of versions in which it appears. The basic idea of timestamping was discovered by Driscoll et. al. in the context of persistent data structures where one wishes to track the sequences of changes made to a data structure. We extend this idea to develop an archiving tool for XML data that is capable of providing meaningful change descriptions and can also efficiently support a variety of basic functions concerning the evolution of data such as retrieval of any specific version from the archive and querying the temporal history of any element. This is in contrast to diff-based approaches where such operations may require undoing a large number of changes or significant reasoning with the deltas. Surprisingly, our archiving technique does not incur any significant space overhead when contrasted with other approaches. Our experimental results support this and also show that the compacted archive file interacts well with other compression techniques. Finally, another useful property of our approach is that the resulting archive is also in XML and hence can directly leverage existing XML tools

On Existence and Properties of Approximate Pure Nash Equilibria in Bandwidth Allocation Games

In \emph{bandwidth allocation games} (BAGs), the strategy of a player consists of various demands on different resources. The player's utility is at most the sum of these demands, provided they are fully satisfied. Every resource has a limited capacity and if it is exceeded by the total demand, it has to be split between the players. Since these games generally do not have pure Nash equilibria, we consider approximate pure Nash equilibria, in which no player can improve her utility by more than some fixed factor $\alpha$ through unilateral strategy changes. There is a threshold $\alpha_\delta$ (where $\delta$ is a parameter that limits the demand of each player on a specific resource) such that $\alpha$-approximate pure Nash equilibria always exist for $\alpha \geq \alpha_\delta$, but not for $\alpha < \alpha_\delta$. We give both upper and lower bounds on this threshold $\alpha_\delta$ and show that the corresponding decision problem is ${\sf NP}$-hard. We also show that the $\alpha$-approximate price of anarchy for BAGs is $\alpha+1$. For a restricted version of the game, where demands of players only differ slightly from each other (e.g. symmetric games), we show that approximate Nash equilibria can be reached (and thus also be computed) in polynomial time using the best-response dynamic. Finally, we show that a broader class of utility-maximization games (which includes BAGs) converges quickly towards states whose social welfare is close to the optimum

Characterization of a broad-based mosquito yeast interfering RNA larvicide with a conserved target site in mosquito semaphorin-1a genes

BACKGROUND: RNA interference (RNAi), which has facilitated functional characterization of mosquito neural development genes such as the axon guidance regulator semaphorin-1a (sema1a), could one day be applied as a new means of vector control. Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker's yeast) may represent an effective interfering RNA expression system that could be used directly for delivery of RNA pesticides to mosquito larvae. Here we describe characterization of a yeast larvicide developed through bioengineering of S. cerevisiae to express a short hairpin RNA (shRNA) targeting a conserved site in mosquito sema1a genes. RESULTS: Experiments conducted on Aedes aegypti larvae demonstrated that the yeast larvicide effectively silences sema1a expression, generates severe neural defects, and induces high levels of larval mortality in laboratory, simulated-field, and semi-field experiments. The larvicide was also found to induce high levels of Aedes albopictus, Anopheles gambiae and Culex quinquefasciatus mortality. CONCLUSIONS: The results of these studies indicate that use of yeast interfering RNA larvicides targeting mosquito sema1a genes may represent a new biorational tool for mosquito control

Quantum rotor theory of spinor condensates in tight traps

In this work, we theoretically construct exact mappings of many-particle bosonic systems onto quantum rotor models. In particular, we analyze the rotor representation of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates. In a previous work it was shown that there is an exact mapping of a spin-one condensate of fixed particle number with quadratic Zeeman interaction onto a quantum rotor model. Since the rotor model has an unbounded spectrum from above, it has many more eigenstates than the original bosonic model. Here we show that for each subset of states with fixed spin F_z, the physical rotor eigenstates are always those with lowest energy. We classify three distinct physical limits of the rotor model: the Rabi, Josephson, and Fock regimes. The last regime corresponds to a fragmented condensate and is thus not captured by the Bogoliubov theory. We next consider the semiclassical limit of the rotor problem and make connections with the quantum wave functions through use of the Husimi distribution function. Finally, we describe how to extend the analysis to higher-spin systems and derive a rotor model for the spin-two condensate. Theoretical details of the rotor mapping are also provided here.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure