Coping and resilience in riverine Bangladesh

This paper investigates the impacts of two successive years of severe floods on households, their coping strategies and resilience to riverine hazards in northern Bangladesh. Based on focus groups and interviews with the same households after floods in 2016 and 2017, we found a cumulative decline in assets through sale of livestock and borrowing, and almost all households evacuated short term to higher places. Three notable recent ways that vulnerable households use socio-hydrological landscapes to enhance their resilience to hazards were revealed. Firstly, local flood protection embankments were the main destination for evacuation and were highly valued as safe places, although they breached and failed to protect the land. Secondly, community organisations, formed mainly for livelihood enhancement, took initiatives to provide warnings, to help households relocate during floods, and to access relief and rehabilitation services. Thirdly, seasonal migration by men, particularly to urban areas, is an important element of long-term coping and resilience based on diversified livelihoods for about 70% of these rural households. Although the unintended use of infrastructure, social capital and urban opportunities all form part of coping and resilience strategies in hazardous riverine landscapes, the high mobility that they are based on is not supported by enabling policies

Optimization of the reconstruction and anti-aliasing filter in a Wiener filter system

This paper discusses the influence of the reconstruction and anti-aliasing filters on the performance of a digital implementation of a Wiener filter for active noise control. The overall impact will be studied in combination with a multi-rate system approach. A reconstruction and anti-aliasing filter will be selected and its parameters will be varied to optimize the system level performance of the Wiener filter for a feedback controller based on an internal model control principle. It will be shown that the selection of the reconstruction and anti-aliasing filter is an important decision that can largely influence the overall system performance. This method can be used in combination with standard optimization algorithms to automatically find the optimal filters that will give the largest reduction for the overall system

Active vibration control applied to a vacuum pump for high precision equipment

This paper presents results of a system for active vibration reduction on a setup with a vacuum pump that is tightly coupled with high-precision equipment. The precision of this equipment is critically dependent on the level of the vibrations that are introduced by the vacuum pump. The vibrations were reduced by a recently developed adaptive control scheme in a multi-input multi-output feedback configuration using a sampling rate of 12 kHz. The convergence properties of this algorithm allowed effective tracking of the varying excitation spectrum. Programmable digital minimum-phase reconstruction and anti-aliasing filters at a sampling rate of 100 kHz were used for an optimal tradeoff between sampling errors and phase shift. Effective broadband control was obtained in the frequency range of 100 Hz to 5 kHz, leading to 11.3 dB average broadband reduction on the error sensors

Implementation issues of a High-Speed distributed Multi-Channel ADDA System

A multi-channel ADDA controller is used in many active noise cancellation and active vibration control problems. Such a con- troller is able to yield good performance, however it also requires a lot of hardware on a centralized place and a lot of sensitive wiring. A practical work around for this problem would be to use a local single channel controller. However such a controller would reduce the overall system performance and may introduce instability. In this paper a system will be presented that acts as a hybrid form and combines the performance of a local feedback loop with a large multi-channel controller. To reduce the wiring and the influence of disturbances on this wiring a local analog to digital and digital to analog converter will be used. These systems will be interconnected using a high-speed serial com- munication system. To reduce the sample rate for the overall system, a local decimation and interpolation filter will be imple- mented. Further performance improvements will be realized by means of a simple local feedback system. The implementation issues concerning such a system are the subject of this paper

SN 1993J VLBI (IV): A Geometric Determination of the Distance to M81 with the Expanding Shock Front Method

We compare the angular expansion velocities, determined with VLBI, with the linear expansion velocities measured from optical spectra for supernova 1993J in the galaxy M81, over the period from 7 d to ~9 yr after shock breakout. We estimate the distance to SN 1993J using the Expanding Shock Front Method (ESM). We find the best distance estimate is obtained by fitting the angular velocity of a point halfway between the contact surface and outer shock front to the maximum observed hydrogen gas velocity. We obtain a direct, geometric, distance estimate for M81 of D=3.96+-0.05+-0.29 Mpc with statistical and systematic error contributions, respectively, corresponding to a total standard error of $+-0.29 Mpc. The upper limit of 4.25 Mpc corresponds to the hydrogen gas with the highest observed velocity reaching no farther out than the contact surface a few days after shock breakout. The lower limit of 3.67 Mpc corresponds to this hydrogen gas reaching as far out as the forward shock for the whole period, which would mean that Rayleigh-Taylor fingers have grown to the forward shock already a few days after shock breakout. Our distance estimate is 9+-13 % larger than that of 3.63+-0.34 Mpc from the HST Key Project, which is near our lower limit but within the errors.Comment: 25 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

The Opacity of Nearby Galaxies from Counts of Background Galaxies: II. Limits of the Synthetic Field Method

Recently, we have developed and calibrated the Synthetic Field Method (SFM) to derive the total extinction through disk galaxies. The method is based on the number counts and colors of distant background field galaxies that can be seen through the foreground object, and has been successfully applied to NGC 4536 and NGC 3664, two late-type galaxies located, respectively, at 16 and 11 Mpc. Here, we study the applicability of the SFM to HST images of galaxies in the Local Group, and show that background galaxies cannot be easily identified through these nearby objects, even with the best resolution available today. In the case of M 31, each pixel in the HST images contains 50 to 100 stars, and the background galaxies cannot be seen because of the intrinsic granularity due to strong surface brightness fluctuations. In the LMC, on the other hand, there is only about one star every six linear pixels, and the lack of detectable background galaxies results from a ``secondary'' granularity, introduced by structure in the wings of the point spread function. The success of the SFM in NGC 4536 and NGC 3664 is a natural consequence of the reduction of the intensity of surface brightness fluctuations with distance. When the dominant confusion factor is structure in the PSF wings, as is the case of HST images of the LMC, and would happen in M 31 images obtained with a 10-m diffraction- limited optical telescope, it becomes in principle possible to improve the detectability of background galaxies by subtracting the stars in the foreground object. However, a much better characterization of optical PSFs than is currently available would be required for an adequate subtraction of the wings. Given the importance of determining the dust content of Local Group galaxies, efforts should be made in that direction.Comment: 45 pages, 10 Postscript figure