6,642 research outputs found
The Guidebook, the Friend, and the Room: Visitor Experience in a Historic House
In this paper, we describe an electronic guidebook prototype and report on a
study of its use in a historic house. Supported by mechanisms in the guidebook,
visitors constructed experiences that had a high degree of interaction with
three entities: the guidebook, their companions, and the house and its
contents. For example, we found that most visitors played audio descriptions
played through speakers (rather than using headphones or reading textual
descriptions) to facilitate communication with their companions
Bio-inspired swing leg control for spring-mass robots running on ground with unexpected height disturbance
We proposed three swing leg control policies for spring-mass running robots, inspired by experimental data from our recent collaborative work on ground running birds. Previous investigations suggest that animals may prioritize injury avoidance and/or efficiency as their objective function during running rather than maintaining limit-cycle stability. Therefore, in this study we targeted structural capacity (maximum leg force to avoid damage) and efficiency as the main goals for our control policies, since these objective functions are crucial to reduce motor size and structure weight. Each proposed policy controls the leg angle as a function of time during flight phase such that its objective function during the subsequent stance phase is regulated. The three objective functions that are regulated in the control policies are (i) the leg peak force, (ii) the axial impulse, and (iii) the leg actuator work. It should be noted that each control policy regulates one single objective function. Surprisingly, all three swing leg control policies result in nearly identical subsequent stance phase dynamics. This implies that the implementation of any of the proposed control policies would satisfy both goals (damage avoidance and efficiency) at once. Furthermore, all three control policies require a surprisingly simple leg angle adjustment: leg retraction with constant angular acceleration
Cellular automaton rules conserving the number of active sites
This paper shows how to determine all the unidimensional two-state cellular
automaton rules of a given number of inputs which conserve the number of active
sites. These rules have to satisfy a necessary and sufficient condition. If the
active sites are viewed as cells occupied by identical particles, these
cellular automaton rules represent evolution operators of systems of identical
interacting particles whose total number is conserved. Some of these rules,
which allow motion in both directions, mimic ensembles of one-dimensional
pseudo-random walkers. Numerical evidence indicates that the corresponding
stochastic processes might be non-Gaussian.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure
Brownian motion of solitons in a Bose-Einstein Condensate
For the first time, we observed and controlled the Brownian motion of
solitons. We launched solitonic excitations in highly elongated
BECs and showed that a dilute background of impurity atoms in a different
internal state dramatically affects the soliton. With no impurities and in
one-dimension (1-D), these solitons would have an infinite lifetime, a
consequence of integrability. In our experiment, the added impurities scatter
off the much larger soliton, contributing to its Brownian motion and decreasing
its lifetime. We describe the soliton's diffusive behavior using a quasi-1-D
scattering theory of impurity atoms interacting with a soliton, giving
diffusion coefficients consistent with experiment.Comment: 4 figure
First passage behaviour of fractional Brownian motion in two-dimensional wedge domains
We study the survival probability and the corresponding first passage time
density of fractional Brownian motion confined to a two-dimensional open wedge
domain with absorbing boundaries. By analytical arguments and numerical
simulation we show that in the long time limit the first passage time density
scales as t**{-1+pi*(2H-2)/(2*Theta)} in terms of the Hurst exponent H and the
wedge angle Theta. We discuss this scaling behaviour in connection with the
reaction kinetics of FBM particles in a one-dimensional domain.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure
A Complexity View of Rainfall
We show that rain events are analogous to a variety of nonequilibrium
relaxation processes in Nature such as earthquakes and avalanches. Analysis of
high-resolution rain data reveals that power laws describe the number of rain
events versus size and number of droughts versus duration. In addition, the
accumulated water column displays scale-less fluctuations. These statistical
properties are the fingerprints of a self-organized critical process and may
serve as a benchmark for models of precipitation and atmospheric processes.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure
Scaling Analysis and Evolution Equation of the North Atlantic Oscillation Index Fluctuations
The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) monthly index is studied from 1825 till
2002 in order to identify the scaling ranges of its fluctuations upon different
delay times and to find out whether or not it can be regarded as a Markov
process. A Hurst rescaled range analysis and a detrended fluctuation analysis
both indicate the existence of weakly persistent long range time correlations
for the whole scaling range and time span hereby studied. Such correlations are
similar to Brownian fluctuations. The Fokker-Planck equation is derived and
Kramers-Moyal coefficients estimated from the data. They are interpreted in
terms of a drift and a diffusion coefficient as in fluid mechanics. All partial
distribution functions of the NAO monthly index fluctuations have a form close
to a Gaussian, for all time lags, in agreement with the findings of the scaling
analyses. This indicates the lack of predictive power of the present NAO
monthly index. Yet there are some deviations for large (and thus rare) events.
Whence suggestions for other measurements are made if some improved
predictability of the weather/climate in the North Atlantic is of interest. The
subsequent Langevin equation of the NAO signal fluctuations is explicitly
written in terms of the diffusion and drift parameters, and a characteristic
time scale for these is given in appendix.Comment: 6 figures, 54 refs., 16 pages; submitted to Int. J. Mod. Phys. C:
Comput. Phy
Identification of an Endogenous Allosteric Modulator's Binding Site at the Human Cannabinoid-1 Receptor, using the Forced-Biased Metropolis Monte Carlo Simulated Annealing Method (Mmc)
Long range correlations in DNA : scaling properties and charge transfer efficiency
We address the relation between long range correlations and charge transfer
efficiency in aperiodic artificial or genomic DNA sequences. Coherent charge
transfer through the HOMO states of the guanine nucleotide is studied using the
transmission approach, and focus is made on how the sequence-dependent
backscattering profile can be inferred from correlations between base pairs.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev. Let
- …