The Caltech helicopter control experiment

This report describes the Caltech helicopter control experiment. The experiment consists of an electric model helicopter interfaced to and controlled by a PC. We describe the hardware and software. A state-space model for the angular position is identified from experimental data near hover, using the prediction error method. An LQR controller with integrators for set point tracking is designed for the system. We also undertake a separate identification and loop shaping control for the yaw dynamics

The Application of Puritanism in American Early Literature

Puritanism is an important cornerstone of American society and culture, and it has exerted a very important influence on the economy, politics, religion and social life of American society. It has a profound influence on the American people’s thoughts and culture from all aspects, and has laid the keynote of American society and American spirit, and shaped the American people’s character of hard work, thrift, piety sobriety. Early American literary works were also influenced by Puritanism, showing the characteristics of simplicity, directness and freshness. This paper discusses the cause and connotation of Puritanism, as well as its influence on the American character. Based on this, this passage takes the Autobiography of Franklin and the Declaration of Independence as examples to analyze the specific application of Puritanism in early American literary works

A Study of Strategies for English Pragmatic Teaching in Senior High School under Core Competency

Pragmatic competence is an indispensable element of communicative competence, which is also one goal of core competencies. The introduction of the concept of core competency in General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards puts more emphasis on cultivating students’ pragmatic competence and on teachers’ input of pragmatic knowledge in English teaching. This paper begins with clarifying the theories of pragmatic competence and pragmatic failure by referring to other linguists’ explanations. Then, it briefly discusses the importance of pragmatic teaching in senior high school English classrooms. Finally, this paper proposes some feasible teaching strategies to promote high school students’ pragmatic competence

Heavy Tails, Generalized Coding, and Optimal Web Layout

This paper considers Web layout design in the spirit of source coding for data compression and rate distortion theory, with the aim of minimizing the average size of files downloaded during Web browsing sessions. The novel aspect here is that the object of design is layout rather than codeword selection, and is subject to navigability constraints. This produces statistics for file transfers that are heavy tailed, completely unlike standard Shannon theory, and provides a natural and plausible explanation for the origin of observed power laws in Web traffic. We introduce a series of theoretical and simulation models for optimal Web layout design with varying levels of analytic tractability and realism with respect to modeling of structure, hyperlinks, and user behavior. All models produce power laws which are striking both for their consistency with each other and with observed data, and their robustness to modeling assumptions. These results suggest that heavy tails are a permanent and ubiquitous feature of Internet traffic, and not an artifice of current applications or user behavior. They also suggest new ways of thinking about protocol design that combines insights from information and control theory with traditional networking

Genetic algorithms and simulated annealing for robustness analysis

Genetic algorithms (GAs) and simulated annealing (SA) have been promoted as useful, general tools for nonlinear optimization. This paper explores their use in robustness analysis with real parameter variations, a known NP hard problem which would appear to be ideally suited to demonstrate the power of GAs and SA. Numerical experiment results show convincingly that they turn out to be poorer than existing branch and bound (B&B) approaches. While this may appear to shed doubt on some of the hype surrounding these stochastic optimization techniques, we find that they do have attractive features, which are also demonstrated in this study. For example, both GAs and SA are almost trivial to understand and program, so they require essentially no expertise, in sharp contrast to the B&B methods. They may be suitable for problems where programming effort is much more important than running time or the quality of the answer. Robustness analysis for engineering problems is not the best candidate in this respect, but it does provide an interesting test case for the evaluation of GAs and SA. A simple hill climbing algorithm is also studied for comparison

HyperLink: Virtual Machine Introspection and Memory Forensic Analysis without Kernel Source Code

Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) is an approach to inspecting and analyzing the software running inside a virtual machine from the hypervisor. Similarly, memory forensics analyzes the memory snapshots or dumps to understand the runtime state of a physical or virtual machine. The existing VMI and memory forensic tools rely on up-to-date kernel information of the target operating system (OS) to work properly, which often requires the availability of the kernel source code. This requirement prevents these tools from being widely deployed in real cloud environments. In this paper, we present a VMI tool called HyperLink that partially retrieves running process information from a guest virtual machine without its source code. While current introspection and memory forensic solutions support only one or a limited number of kernel versions of the target OS, HyperLink is a one-for-many introspection and forensic tool, i.e., it supports most, if not all, popular OSes regardless of their versions. We implement both online and offline versions of HyperLink.We validate the efficacy of HyperLink under different versions of Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X. For all the OSes we tested, HyperLink can successfully retrieve the process information in one minute or several seconds. Through online and offline analyses, we demonstrate that HyperLink can help users detect real-world kernel rootkits and play an important role in intrusion detection. Due to its version-agnostic property, HyperLink could become the first introspection and forensic tool that works well in autonomic cloud computing environments

Mechanism of Klebsiella pneumoniae resistance to carbapenem antibiotics

Purpose: To investigate the mechanism of action of Klebsiella pneumoniae (Kpn) resistance to carbapenem. Methods: The susceptibility of six Klebsiella pneumoniae strains to antibiotics was determined using KB assay. Six isolated strains which were resistant to carbapenem were identified and collected using modified Hodge test. The phenotypes of metal enzyme were evaluated by ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid (EDTA) disk diffusion method. The genes for beta-lactamases, including KPC gene, were examined. Results: The six carbapenem-resistant strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae were resistant to imipenem, meropenem and aztreonam, but were sensitive to amikacin, fosfomycin, minocycline, and polymyxin. The six pathogens did not produce metal enzyme, but they produced carbapenemases. Moreover, the six strains partially carried blaTEM or blaSHV gene, but all had blaKPC-2 gene. Conclusion: These results suggest that the pathogens that contain blaKPC-2 gene may be involved in the mechanism of Klebsiella pneumoniae (Kpn) resistance to carbapenem

Genetic algorithms and simulated annealing for robustness analysis

Genetic algorithms (GAs) and simulated annealing (SA) have been promoted as useful, general tools for nonlinear optimization. This paper explores their use in robustness analysis with real parameter variations, a known NP hard problem which would appear to be ideally suited to demonstrate the power of GAs and SA. Numerical experiment results show convincingly that they turn out to be poorer than existing branch and bound (B&B) approaches. While this may appear to shed doubt on some of the hype surrounding these stochastic optimization techniques, we find that they do have attractive features, which are also demonstrated in this study. For example, both GAs and SA are almost trivial to understand and program, so they require essentially no expertise, in sharp contrast to the B&B methods. They may be suitable for problems where programming effort is much more important than running time or the quality of the answer. Robustness analysis for engineering problems is not the best candidate in this respect, but it does provide an interesting test case for the evaluation of GAs and SA. A simple hill climbing algorithm is also studied for comparison