16,404 research outputs found
Preliminary design-lift/cruise fan research and technology airplane flight control system
This report presents the preliminary design of a stability augmentation system for a NASA V/STOL research and technology airplane. This stability augmentation system is postulated as the simplest system that meets handling qualities levels for research and technology missions flown by NASA test pilots. The airplane studied in this report is a T-39 fitted with tilting lift/cruise fan nacelles and a nose fan. The propulsion system features a shaft interconnecting the three variable pitch fans and three power plants. The mathematical modeling is based on pre-wind tunnel test estimated data. The selected stability augmentation system uses variable gains scheduled with airspeed. Failure analysis of the system illustrates the benign effect of engine failure. Airplane rate sensor failure must be solved with redundancy
Controlling the crystal polymorph by exploiting the time dependence of nucleation rates
Most substances can crystallise into two or more different crystal lattices,
called polymorphs. Despite this, there are no systems in which we can
quantitatively predict the probability of one competing polymorph forming,
instead of the other. We address this problem using large scale (hundreds of
events) studies of the competing nucleation of the alpha and gamma polymorphs
of glycine. In situ Raman spectroscopy is used to identify the polymorph of
each crystal. We find that the nucleation kinetics of the two polymorphs is
very different. Nucleation of the alpha polymorph starts off slowly but
accelerates, while nucleation of the gamma polymorph starts off fast but then
slows. We exploit this difference to increase the purity with which we obtain
the gamma polymorph by a factor of ten. The statistics of the nucleation of
crystals is analogous to that of human mortality, and using a result from
medical statistics we show that conventional nucleation data can say nothing
about what, if any, are the correlations between competing nucleation
processes. Thus we can show that, with data of our form, it is impossible to
disentangle the competing nucleation processes. We also find that the growth
rate and the shape of a crystal depends on when it nucleated. This is new
evidence that nucleation and growth are linked.Comment: 8 pages, plus 17 pages of supplementary materia
Can students' feedback literacy be improved? A scoping review of interventions
Student feedback literacy has been the subject of much conceptual literature; however, relatively little intervention research has investigated how and if it can be developed. Further, no evaluation of the current empirical literature has been conducted to assess which elements of feedback literacy can be successfully improved in practice, and which elements need further investigation. This paper seeks to explore how different aspects of feedback literacy have been developed in higher education. A scoping review was conducted to address the foci, nature and success of interventions. The review found evidence that educational interventions enhanced feedback literacy in students, such as managing perceptions and attitudes, and having more confidence and agency in the feedback process. While some interventions have an effect on influencing student feedback literacy, both improved study design and intervention design are required to make the most of future feedback literacy interventions
Influence of soil acidity on barley production.
A soil survey of 38 sites in barley growing areas of Western Australia was carried out in 1984. It was found that 53% of topsoils surveyed had a pH less than 5.5, acid enough to suspect barley yields might be affected. In 1985 an extensive field trial proqramme was established at 9 sites. The sites were selected from the 1984 survey and they varied in their level of acidity from mild to severe. 85NA, 85NA2, 85NA5, 85NA4, 85NA3, 85KA3, 85KA4, 85KA5, 85KA6, 83N046
MissForest - nonparametric missing value imputation for mixed-type data
Modern data acquisition based on high-throughput technology is often facing
the problem of missing data. Algorithms commonly used in the analysis of such
large-scale data often depend on a complete set. Missing value imputation
offers a solution to this problem. However, the majority of available
imputation methods are restricted to one type of variable only: continuous or
categorical. For mixed-type data the different types are usually handled
separately. Therefore, these methods ignore possible relations between variable
types. We propose a nonparametric method which can cope with different types of
variables simultaneously. We compare several state of the art methods for the
imputation of missing values. We propose and evaluate an iterative imputation
method (missForest) based on a random forest. By averaging over many unpruned
classification or regression trees random forest intrinsically constitutes a
multiple imputation scheme. Using the built-in out-of-bag error estimates of
random forest we are able to estimate the imputation error without the need of
a test set. Evaluation is performed on multiple data sets coming from a diverse
selection of biological fields with artificially introduced missing values
ranging from 10% to 30%. We show that missForest can successfully handle
missing values, particularly in data sets including different types of
variables. In our comparative study missForest outperforms other methods of
imputation especially in data settings where complex interactions and nonlinear
relations are suspected. The out-of-bag imputation error estimates of
missForest prove to be adequate in all settings. Additionally, missForest
exhibits attractive computational efficiency and can cope with high-dimensional
data.Comment: Submitted to Oxford Journal's Bioinformatics on 3rd of May 201
Testing the assumptions of linear prediction analysis in normal vowels
This paper develops an improved surrogate data test to show experimental evidence, for all the simple vowels of US English, for both male and female speakers, that Gaussian linear prediction analysis, a ubiquitous technique in current speech technologies, cannot be used to extract all the dynamical structure of real speech time series. The test provides robust evidence undermining the validity of these linear techniques, supporting the assumptions of either dynamical nonlinearity and/or non-Gaussianity common to more recent, complex, efforts at dynamical modelling speech time series. However, an additional finding is that the classical assumptions cannot be ruled out entirely, and plausible evidence is given to explain the success of the linear Gaussian theory as a weak approximation to the true, nonlinear/non-Gaussian dynamics. This supports the use of appropriate hybrid linear/nonlinear/non-Gaussian modelling. With a calibrated calculation of statistic and particular choice of experimental protocol, some of the known systematic problems of the method of surrogate data testing are circumvented to obtain results to support the conclusions to a high level of significance
Bistable Gradient Networks II: Storage Capacity and Behaviour Near Saturation
We examine numerically the storage capacity and the behaviour near saturation
of an attractor neural network consisting of bistable elements with an
adjustable coupling strength, the Bistable Gradient Network (BGN). For strong
coupling, we find evidence of a first-order "memory blackout" phase transition
as in the Hopfield network. For weak coupling, on the other hand, there is no
evidence of such a transition and memorized patterns can be stable even at high
levels of loading. The enhanced storage capacity comes, however, at the cost of
imperfect retrieval of the patterns from corrupted versions.Comment: 15 pages, 12 eps figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev. E. Sequel to
cond-mat/020356
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