You said it before and you'll say it again: Expectations of consistency in communication.

Repeated reference creates strong expectations in addressees that a speaker will continue to use the same expression for the same object. The authors investigate the root reason for these expectations by comparing a cooperativeness-based account (Grice, 1975) with a simpler consistency-based account. In two eye-tracking experiments, the authors investigated the expectations underlying the effect of precedents on comprehension. The authors show that listeners expect speakers to be consistent in their use of expressions even when these expectations cannot be motivated by the assumption of cooperativeness. The authors conclude that though this phenomenon seems to be motivated by cooperativeness, listeners' expectation that speakers be consistent in their use of expressions is governed by a general expectation of consistency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Model-based design and test of vibration energy harvester for aircraft application

This paper deals with a development process of a vibration energy harvesting device in aircraft applications. The vibration energy harvester uses ambient energy of mechanical vibration and it provides an autonomous source of energy for wireless sensors or autonomous applications. This application presents a complex engineering problem and the vibration energy harvester consists of precise mechanical part, electro-mechanical converter, electronics and a powered application. It can be perceive as a mechatronic system and a mechatronic approach was used for development of our vibration energy harvester. An essential step of development process is simulation modeling which is based on mechatronic approach. Presented model-based design of vibration energy harvester is very useful during development process and the whole development process of the autonomous energy source is presented in this paper. The main aim of the paper is an introduction of our development methodology and our approach is presented on a sample of the vibration energy harvester for aircraft applications under project ESPOSA.     

External sorting on flash storage: reducing cell wearing and increasing efficiency by avoiding intermediate writes

This paper studies the problem of how to conduct external sorting on flash drives while avoiding intermediate writes to the disk. The focus is on sort in portable electronic devices, where relations are only larger than the main memory by a small factor, and on sort as part of distributed processes where relations are frequently partially sorted. In such cases, sort algorithms that refrain from writing intermediate results to the disk have three advantages over algorithms that perform intermediate writes. First, on devices in which read operations are much faster than writes, such methods are efficient and frequently outperform Merge Sort. Secondly, they reduce flash cell degradation caused by writes. Thirdly, they can be used in cases where there is not enough disk space for the intermediate results. Novel sort algorithms that avoid intermediate writes to the disk are presented. An experimental evaluation, on different flash storage devices, shows that in many cases the new algorithms can extend the lifespan of the devices by avoiding unnecessary writes to the disk, while maintaining efficiency, in comparison with Merge Sort.     

Experimental Evaluation and Formal Analysis of High‐Level Tasks with Dynamic Obstacle Anticipation on a Full‐Sized Autonomous Vehicle

Certifying the behavior of autonomous systems is essential to the development and deployment of systems in safety‐critical applications. This paper presents an approach to using a correct‐by‐construction controller with the probabilistic results of dynamic obstacle anticipation, and validates the approach with experimental data obtained from Cornell's full‐scale autonomous vehicle. The obstacle anticipation (used to calculate the probability of collision with dynamic obstacles around the vehicle) is abstracted to a set of Boolean observations, which are then used by the synthesized controller (a state machine generated from temporal logic task specifications). The obstacle anticipation, sensor abstraction, and synthesized controller are implemented on a full‐scale autonomous vehicle, and experimental data are collected and compared with a formal analysis of the probabilistic behavior of the system. A comparison of the results shows good agreement between the formal analysis and the experimental results.     

The linear city: linearity without a city

Similar to linear cities of the early 1960s, especially that of the British town of Hook (which was not built), two linear towns were planned in Israel during the years 1960–1962: Arad (completed) and Ir HaBesor (remained on paper).

The two Israeli towns highly resembled the British town, at least regarding the basic linear scheme of traffic separation, phased town growth and planning based on walking distances. However, a more thorough examination reveals an essential difference between the British linear cities and the Israeli ones, especially concerning their technological components, which were absent from the Israeli planning.

This paper examines the difference between town planning models in passing from one culture to another, while focusing on the desire to impart an ‘urban character’ to the new cities. The paper claims that ideological contents negating urbanism as a concept stood behind the Israeli linear town model, and that this fact surprisingly preserved the town's vitality for many years.     

Analyses of activity design in geometry in the light of student actions

Abstract

The goal of this study is to show that inquiry activities in a dynamic geometry environment, intentionally designed to confront students with contradictions and uncertainties, push them towards explanations that include deductive elements. Three different but dependent aspects of the activities are characterized and analysed: The epistemological, which includes all possible inquiry paths; the didactic, which involves only those paths that reflect the intention of the designer; and the cognitive, which accounts for actual student actions (conjectures and explanations) and their analyses. The research conclusions are based on the interplay among these three aspects. The analysis of students’ investigations and the analysis of their explanations fulfil, to a broad extent, the design goals.     

Oscillations of the band gap of single-walled carbon nanotubes in the range of very small diameters

The electronic properties of carbon nanotubes with controllable chirality indices are studied in the range of very small diameters (0.3?C2.0 nm) of semiconductor single-walled carbon nanotubes. The density functional theory (DFT) in the local density approximation (LDA) (DFT-LDA) method and Gaussian and TubeGen software are used in the study. An unsteady oscillatory variation in the band gap is established. Such behavior is due to the small chirality indices that define the symmetry and curvature of nanotubes. It is found that, for semiconductor nanotubes with very small diameters and (0, 4) and (0, 5) chirality indices, the band structure is degenerate and this degeneracy is responsible for the metal properties and violation of the rule of the 3k classification of single-walled nanotubes according to their electrical properties.     

Perceived density of road maps

Maps should be designed so that users can comprehend and use the information. Display decisions, such as choosing the scale at which an area is shown, depend on properties of the displayed information such as the perceived density (PD) of the information. Taking a psychophysical approach we suggest that the PD of information in a road map is related to the scale and properties of the mapped area. 54 participants rated the PD of 60 maps from different regions. We provide a simple model that predicts the PD of electronic road map displays, using the logarithm of the number of roads, the logarithm of the number of junctions and the length of the shown roads. The PD model was cross-validated using a different set of 60 maps (n = 44). The model can be used for automatically adjusting display scales and for evaluating map designs, considering the required PD to perform a map-related task.     

Quorum-sensing Cascades Governing Bacterial Multicellular Communities

Quorum sensing (QS) is an efficient mode of intercellular communication between bacteria. This mode is regulated by self-produced small chemical signals, activating dedicated receptors once accumulated. Numerous architecturally complex QS cascades are cardinal for governing bacterial behaviors, such as pathogenicity, luminescence, and bacterial competence. Importantly, QS cascades are essential for the formation of bacterial multicellular communities. Once informed via QS cascades, motile cells often organize themselves into conspicuous multicellular structures that carry out specialized tasks. This review focuses on the major QS systems, playing an active role in the rise of complex bacterial communities in different bacterial models.