Substation ground grids intertied with buried conductors

A fault current at a substation injected into a grounding grid that is intertied with the grounding grid of another station with buried conductors is dissipated to the ground by the grids at both the stations and by the intertie. The authors present a direct, simple, an easy-to-use approximate method to determine the ground resistance of the system as seen from the station where the current is injected and the ground potential rise at both the stations. A comparison of the results obtained with the approximate method and from the accurate method has been made. An expression for the length constant of the intertie as a function of the resistivity of the soil has been derived. The concept is useful for estimating the distance beyond which the two grids intertied with buried conductors will have a negligible effect on each other     

Systematic method for determining intravenous drug treatment strategies aiding the humoral immune response

During murine Trypanosoma brucei infection, macrophages contribute significantly to the inhibition of T cell responses. Although nitric oxide (NO) was shown to play a central role in macrophage-mediated splenic suppression, macrophage-mediated lymph node suppression occurred in an interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma)-dependent manner. In this study, using NO inhibitor NG-monomethyl-L-arginine and anti-IFN-gamma antibodies, the relative contribution of NO and IFN-gamma to the active inhibition of ex vivo concanavalin A-induced T cell proliferation taking place in the spleen and the lymph nodes of T. brucei-infected mice was investigated. NO contributes to the suppressive activity of spleen and lymph node cells only during early-stage infection. The existence of NO-independent suppressive pathway was further evidenced in IFN-gamma(-/-)-infected mice. Spleen cells from such animals do not produce NO but exert significant suppressive activity during the whole course of infection. In contrast in the lymph nodes, no suppressive activity is recorded at any moment of infection. Moreover, addition of exogenous IFN-gamma to cultures containing lymph node cells from IFN-gamma(-/-)-infected mice does not impair proliferation despite NO production in such cultures. Thus during late-stage infection, an IFN-gamma-independent suppressive mechanism is elicited in the spleen, whereas in the lymph nodes, IFN-gamma is required yet not sufficient to inhibit T cell proliferation.     

An analysis of the congestion effects of link failures in wide areanetworks

The authors present the results of a study to determine the effects of link failures on the performance of a network in terms of the occurrence of congestion due to traffic restoration after a failure. The network studied is a virtual circuit based packet switched wide area network. A generic queueing framework is developed to study the effect of failures and the subsequent traffic restoration on network performance. In general, the congestion resulting after a failure is a transient phenomenon. Hence, a numerical methods based nonstationary queueing analysis is conducted in order to quantify the effects of failures in terms of the transient behavior of queue lengths and packet loss probabilities. A bounding relationship is developed whereby a network node can determine whether or not congestion will occur as the result of traffic restoration after a failure     

Variable-rate tree-structured vector quantizers

In general, growth algorithms for optimal tree-structured vector quantizers do not exist. In this paper we show that if the source satisfies certain conditions; namely, that of diminishing marginal returns; optimal growth algorithms do exist. We present such an algorithm and compare its performance with that of other tree growth algorithms. Even for sources that do not meet the necessary conditions for the growth algorithm to be optimal, such as for speech with unknown statistics, it is seen by simulation that the algorithm outperforms other known growth algorithms, For sources that do not satisfy the required conditions, the algorithm presented here can also be used to grow the initial tree for the pruning process. The performance of such pruned trees is superior to that of trees pruned from full trees of the same rate     

Pervaporation separation of pentane-alcohol mixtures through ionically crosslinked blended membranes. I. Thermal measurements,electron microscopy and tensile studies

Ionically crosslinked blended membranes were prepared from blends of nylon 6 and poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) with the proportion of PAA ranging from 25 to 45 wt.-%. The technique consists of casting a film of the blend, followed by drying and immersion in an aluminum salt crosslinking solution for a predetermined time. The glass transition temperature (T_g) of the membranes was determined by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). All the samples exhibited a single T_g, which is higher than that of either polymer. There is also a shift in the T_g with increasing scanning time. This phenomenon is attributed to the elimination of water molecules and the formation of anhydrides in the non-crosslinked PAA portion of the membrane. The membrane morphology was studied using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and shows a dense structure without any pores. No phase separation is observed by scanning cross-sections of the samples, indicating that nylon 6 and PAA are completely miscible in the ranges studied. The membrane material strength lies in the range of 5 to 26 MPa and varies with the amount of PAA in the membrane. Samples with higher PAA content show lower tensile strength in spite of increased crosslinking density. This is due to the inherent low strength of PAA, coupled with increasing swelling of the membrane with increasing PAA content. The latter is confirmed by the measurement of water uptake into a dry membrane which increases from 23.6% to 76.3% with the membrane PAA content increasing from 25 to 45 wt.%.     

Lyapunov functionals in complex /spl mu/ analysis

Conditions for robust stability of linear time-invariant systems subject to structured linear time-invariant uncertainties can be derived in the complex /spl mu/ framework, or, equivalently, in the framework of integral quadratic constraints. These conditions can be checked numerically with linear matrix inequality (LMI)-based convex optimization using the Kalman-Yakubovich-Popov lemma. We show how LMI tests also yield a convex parametrization of (a subset of) Lyapunov functionals that prove robust stability of such uncertain systems. We show that for uncertainties that are pure delays, the Lyapunov functionals reduce to the standard Lyapunov-Krasovksii functionals that are encountered in the stability analysis of delay systems. We demonstrate the practical utility of the Lyapunov functional parametrization by deriving bounds for a number of measures of robust performance (beyond the usual H/sub /spl infin// performance); these bounds can be efficiently computed using convex optimization over linear matrix inequalities.     

Improved stability analysis and gain-scheduled controller synthesisfor parameter-dependent systems

We present new algorithms for robust stability analysis and gain-scheduled controller synthesis for linear systems affected by time-varying parametric uncertainties. These new techniques can also be applied to parameter-dependent nonlinear systems with real-rational nonlinearities. Sufficient conditions for robust stability, as well as conditions for the existence of a robustly stabilizing gain-scheduled controller, are given in terms of a finite number of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs); explicit formulas for constructing robustly stabilizing gain-scheduled controllers are given in terms of the feasible set of these LMIs. The improvement offered by our approach over existing methods for stability analysis and gain-scheduled controller synthesis for parameter-dependent linear systems are analyzed in theory. Numerical examples demonstrate that our approach can offer significant improvement in practice     

Form and objective of the decision rule in absolute identification

In several conditions of a line length identification experiment, the subjects' decision making strategies were systematically biased against the responses on the edges of the stimulus range. When the range and number of the stimuli were small, the bias caused the percentage of correct responses to be highest in the center and lowest on the extremes of the range. Two general classes of decision rules that would explain these results are considered. The first class assumes that subjects intend to adopt an optimal decision rule, but systematically misrepresent one or more parameters of the decision making context. The second class assumes that subjects use a different measure of performance than the one assumed by the experimenter: instead of maximizing the chances of a correct response, the subject attempts to minimize the expected size of the response error (a "fidelity criterion"). In a second experiment, extended experience and feedback did not diminish the bias effect, but explicitly penalizing all response errors equally, regardless of their size, did reduce or eliminate it in some subjects. Both results favor the fidelity criterion over the optimal rule.     

An automatic non-English sentiment lexicon builder using unannotated corpus

The Journal of Supercomputing - Sentiment lexicons in the English language are widely accessible while in many other languages, these resources are extremely deficient. Current techniques and...     

Mobile Technology in the Classroom: What Drives Student-Lecturer Interactions?

Online learning when combined with mobile technology transforms the traditional classrooms from teacher-centered to student-centered classrooms. Despite the widespread use of mobile technology among students and educators today, limited researches have been conducted to study the effects of using mobile technology to enhance student–lecturer interactions. In addition, existing theories of technology acceptances, chiefly Information System Success Model (ISSM), Motivational Model (MM), Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), and Cultural Dimension Theory (CDT) are widely recognized for their predictive power in determining adoption intentions. In this study, determinants from all five theories were unified and examined, namely system quality and information quality from ISSM, enjoyment from MM, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use from TAM, self-efficacy from SCT, and uncertainty avoidance from CDT as predictors of adoption intention in the context of predicting student–lecturer interactions. This empirical study was conducted using an online survey. Data collected from the samples (n = 328) were analyzed using PLS-SEM. Results obtained exhibited adequate explanatory power, where information quality, system quality, enjoyment, and uncertainty avoidance significantly predict adoption intention, while perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and self-efficacy were insignificant. Secondly, each theory was independently analyzed, and the predictive power and relevance of ISSM, MM, TAM, and UDT confirmed the importance and relevance of these theories. Results obtained provided a comprehensive understanding of the factors that significantly affect students’ intentions to use mobile technology to interact with their lecturers on academic matters. The discussions and implications of this study are crucial for researchers and practitioners of educational technologies in higher education.