Planar microstrip YAGI antenna array

A directional microstrip antenna includes a driven patch surrounded by an isolated reflector and one or more coplanar directors, all separated from a ground plane on the order of 0.1 wavelength or less to provide end fire beam directivity without requiring power dividers or phase shifters. The antenna may be driven at a feed point a distance from the center of the driven patch in accordance with conventional microstrip antenna design practices for H-plane coupled or horizontally polarized signals. The feed point for E-plane coupled or vertically polarized signals is at a greater distance from the center than the first distance. This feed point is also used for one of the feed signals for circularly polarized signals. The phase shift between signals applied to feed points for circularly polarized signals must be greater than the conventionally required 90 degrees and depends upon the antenna configuration

Antennas for mobile satellite communications

A NASA sponsored program, called the Mobile Satellite (MSAT) system, has prompted the development of several innovative antennas at L-band frequencies. In the space segment of the MSAT system, an efficient, light weight, circularly polarized microstrip array that uses linearly polarized elements was developed as a multiple beam reflector feed system. In the ground segment, a low-cost, low-profile, and very efficient microstrip Yagi array was developed as a medium-gain mechanically steered vehicle antenna. Circularly shaped microstrip patches excited at higher-order modes were also developed as low-gain vehicle antennas. A more recent effort called for the development of a 20/30 GHz mobile terminal antenna for future-generation mobile satellite communications. To combat the high insertion loss encountered at 20/30 GHz, series-fed Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit (MMIC) microstrip array antennas are currently being developed. These MMIC arrays may lead to the development of several small but high-gain Ka-band antennas for the Personal Access Satellite Service planned for the 2000s

A microstrip array feed for MSAT spacecraft reflector antenna

An L-band circularly polarized microstrip array antenna with relatively wide bandwidth has been developed. The array has seven subarrays which form a single cluster as part of a large overlapping cluster reflector feed array. Each of the seven subarrays consists of four uniquely arranged linearly polarized microstrip elements. A 7.5 percent impedance (VSWR less than 1.5) as well as axial ratio (less than 1 dB) bandwidths have been achieved by employing a relatively thick honeycomb substrate with special impedance matching feed probes

Practical Reasoning and Rationality

Proceedings of the DRUMS II Workshop 9 - 11 February 1996, Windsor, UK (Funded by Esprit III BRA 6156

Novelty and Reinforcement Learning in the Value System of Developmental Robots

The value system of a developmental robot signals the occurrence of salient sensory inputs, modulates the mapping from sensory inputs to action outputs, and evaluates candidate actions. In the work reported here, a low level value system is modeled and implemented. It simulates the non-associative animal learning mechanism known as habituation effect. Reinforcement learning is also integrated with novelty. Experimental results show that the proposed value system works as designed in a study of robot viewing angle selection

Dealing with the Bad Loans of the Chinese Banks

Chinese banks suffer from serious financial fragility manifested by high proportions of non-performing loans and low capital-adequacy ratios. A key policy introduced recently by the Chinese government to reduce financial risks is the establishment of four asset management companies (AMCs) for dealing with bad loans. Drawing on the experiences of the Resolution Trust Corporation in the United States and bank restructuring in the Central European transition economies, we argue that the original AMC design will not be successful in resolving the existing non-performing loans (NPLs) nor will it prevent the creation of new bad loans. We recommend a modification of the current proposal that redefines the relationships between the parent banks and the AMCs by transferring the deposits of problem enterprises along with their NPLs from parent banks to AMCs.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39741/3/wp357.pd

Do roads lead to grassland degradation or restoration? A case study in Inner Mongolia, China

We use satellite remote sensing data of grassland cover in Inner Mongolia, China to test whether the existence of and the size of roads in 1995 is associated with the nature of the grassland in 2000 and/or if it affects the rate of change of the grassland between 1995 and 2000. The regression results show that the impact of roads on grassland cover depends on the nature of the resource. When the grassland is composed of relatively high quality grassland, roads lead to degradation, whereas when grassland resources are sparse, access to a road results in the restoration of the resource

New measures of the costs of unemployment: Evidence from the subjective well-being of 2.3 million Americans

By exploiting two very large samples of US subjective well-being data we are able to obtain comparable estimates of the monetary and other costs of unemployment on the unemployed themselves, while simultaneously estimating the effects of local employment on the subjective well-being of the rest of the population. For those who are unemployed, the subjective well-being consequences can be divided into income and non-income effects, with the latter being five times larger than the former. This is similar to what has been found in many countries, as is our finding that the non-income effects are lower for individuals living in areas of high unemployment. Most importantly, we are able to use the large sample size and variety of questions in the BRFSS and Gallup daily polls to reconcile, and extend to the United States, what had previously seemed to be contradictory results on the size and nature of the spillover effects of unemployment on subjective well-being. At the population level the spillover effects are twice as large as the direct effects, making the total well-being costs of unemployment fifteen times larger than those directly due to the lower incomes of the unemployed.unemployment; well-being

Improving estimates of inequality and poverty from urban China’s household income and expenditure survey

In urban China the Household Income and Expenditure Survey requires respondents to keep a daily expenditure diary for a full 12-month period. This onerous reporting task makes it difficult to recruit households into the survey, compromising the representative nature of the sample. In this article we use data on the monthly expenditures of households from two urban areas of China to see if data collection short-cuts, such as extrapolating to annual totals from expenditure reports in only some months of the year, would harm the accuracy of annual expenditure, inequality and poverty estimates. Our results show that replacing 12-month diaries with simple extrapolations from either one, two, four or six months would cause a sharp increase in estimates of annual inequality and poverty. This finding also undermines international comparisons of inequality statistics because no country other than China uses such comprehensive 12-month expenditure records. But a corrected form of extrapolation, based on correlations between the same household’s expenditures in different months of the year, gives much smaller errors in estimates of inequality and poverty