Wallenstein’s Power Problem and Its Consequences

This paper wants to be both: an introduction to game-theoretical thinking as well as a game-theoretical discussion of Schiller’s Wallenstein. Note that the intention of this article is to convince theatergoers and people who work in the theatrical arts that it is worthwhile to study some game theory. Others will hopefully profit from the unusual Wallenstein interpretation. It is not this article’s purpose to teach game theorists, but rather to inspire applications. The drama is depicted as a game and consequently submitted to a formal analysis that is based on the economic concept of rationality. Weber’s definition of power is operationalized and applied to Wallenstein’s decision situation.Power, bargaining, mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium, theater, Wallenstein

Learning Near-optimal Decision Rules for Energy Efficient Building Control

Recent studies suggest that advanced optimization based control methods such as model predictive control (MPC) can increase energy efficiency of buildings. However, adoption of these methods by industry is still slow, as building operators are used to working with simple controllers based on intuitive decision rules that can be tuned easily on-site. In this paper, we suggest a synthesis procedure for rule based controllers that extracts prevalent information from simulation data with MPC controllers to construct a set of human readable rules while preserving much of the control performance. The method is based on the ADABOOST algorithm from the field of machine learning. We focus on learning binary decisions, considering also the ranking and selection of measurements on which the decision rules are based. We show that this feature selection is useful for both complexity reduction and decreasing investment costs by pruning unnecessary sensors. The proposed method is evaluated in simulation for six different case studies and is shown to maintain the high performance of MPC despite the tremendous reduction in complexity

Seamless Insert-Plasmid Assembly at High Efficiency and Low Cost

Seamless cloning methods, such as sequence- and ligation-independent cloning (SLIC) or the Gibson assembly, are essential tools for the construction of protein expression plasmids. We here show that single-stranded gaps in double-stranded plasmids, which for example occur in typical SLIC protocols, can drastically decrease the efficiency at which the DNA transforms competent E. coli bacteria. Conversely, filling-in of single-stranded gaps using DNA polymerase resulted in increased transformation efficiency. Ligation of the remaining nicks did not lead to a further increase in transformation efficiency. These data point out a critical factor for robust seamless cloning. Highly efficient insert-plasmid assembly can be achieved by using only T5 exonuclease and Phusion DNA polymerase, without Taq DNA ligase from the original Gibson protocol, which significantly reduces the cost of the reactions. We successfully used this method with two short insert-plasmid overlap regions, each counting only 15 nucleotides

Arabische, tükische und persische Studien

Donated by Klaus Kreise