Gaming Social Capital: Exploring Civic Value in Multiplayer Video Games

Recent research suggests that social interactions in video games may lead to the development of community bonding and prosocial attitudes. Building on this line of research, a national survey of U.S. adults finds that gamers who develop ties with a community of fellow gamers possess gaming social capital, a new gaming‐related community construct that is shown to be a positive antecedent in predicting both face‐to‐face social capital and civic participation.     

An Experimental Study on Three General Interface Layout Designs for Chemical Process Plants

The human‐machine interface design is not a new problem; however, existing knowledge appears to be focused either on interface conceptual design, which determines what information at what time needs to be displayed, or on interface detailed design, which determines the form of display elements. This article presents a study on interface layout design. Three interface layout designs were proposed based on the proximity compatibility priniciple, which were on the same interface conceptual design. In particular, the first interface layout design is with the highest degree of proximity cognition and the second and third with a reduced degree of proximity cognition. They are called sophisticated, semisophisticated, and nonsophisticated interfaces, respectively. An experiment with a simple process plant was conducted to understand user behaviors on the three interfaces. It is noted that in order to provide an unbiased comparative evaluation of these interfaces the same application problem and similar look‐and‐feel forms of interfaces were designed. In the experiment, three general classes of tasks were considered, namely, normal control operation, fault detection (or monitoring), and fault diagnosis. Two categories of measures were used: the performance measure and the subjective measure. The major results obtained from the experiment are 1) the nonsophisticated interface is the best for fault detections in terms of performance measure; besides, this interface has the lowest mental workload for fault detection; 2) the sophisticated interface is the best for normal operation in terms of performance measure; 3) there appears no significant difference for fault diagnosis in terms of performance measures for all these three interfaces; 4) for normal operation and fault diagnosis, the mental workloads for the three interfaces have no significant difference. Overall, the experiment suggests that the nonsophisticated interface be used in practice with additional two reasons: 1) most of time in the chemical process plant today is the fault detection or operation monitoring task, and 2) it is relatively easier for the nonsophisticated interface to adapt to changes in the chemical process plant design, which are common in today's manufacturing environments.     

On ADRC for non-minimum phase systems: canonical form selection and stability conditions

Active disturbance rejection control (ADRC), as proposed by Prof. Jingqing Han, reduces first the plant dynamics to its canonical form, normally in the form of cascade integrators, for which the standard controller can be employed to meet the design specifications. This paper concerns with the selection of the canonical form for non-minimum phase systems. In particular, it is shown that, by employing the well known controllable canonical form, the uncertainties of such systems can be divided into two terms in the state space model, one in the control channel and the other in the output channel. The necessary and sufficient condition is obtained for the stability of the closed-loop system with the proposed canonical form and ADRC. Also, by showing the necessity of the detectability of the extended system as well as certain information of the systemˉs “zeros”, we present the fundamental guidelines of design ADRC for non-minimum phase uncertain systems.     

Active disturbance rejection control: between the formulation in time and the understanding in frequency

With the rapid deployments of the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) as a bonafide industrial technology in the background, this paper summarizes some recent results in the analysis of linear ADRC and offers explanations in the frequency response language with which practicing engineers are familiar. Critical to this endeavor is the concept of bandwidth, which has been used in a more general sense. It is this concept that can serve as the link between the otherwise opaque state space formulation of the ADRC and the command design considerations and concerns shared by practicing engineers. The remarkable characteristics of a simple linear ADRC was first shown in the frequency domain, followed by the corresponding analysis in time domain, where the relationship between the tracking error and the ADRC bandwidth is established. It is shown that such insight is only possible by using the method of solving linear differential equations, instead of the more traditional techniques such as the Lyapunov methods, which tend to be more conservative and difficult to grasp by engineers. The insight obtained from such analysis is further demonstrated in the simulation validation.     

Error quantification of the normalised right graph symbol for an errors-in-variables system

This paper proposes a novel method to quantify the error of a nominal normalized right graph symbol (NRGS) for an errors-in-variables (EIV) system corrupted with bounded noise. Following an identification framework for estimation of a perturbation model set, a worst-case v-gap error bound for the estimated nominal NRGS can be first determined from \textit{a priori} and \textit{a posteriori} information on the underlying EIV system. Then, an NRGS perturbation model set can be derived from a close relation between the v-gap metric of two models and ${\rm H}_\infty$-norm of their NRGSs' difference. The obtained NRGS perturbation model set paves the way for robust controller design using an ${\rm H}_\infty$ loop-shaping method because it is a standard form of the well-known NCF (normalized coprime factor) perturbation model set. Finally, a numerical simulation is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed identification method.     

基于碳纳米管阴极的多光束 X 射线源技术

以碳纳米管材料作为场致发射电子源的 X 射线源是近几年国际上的研究前沿。相比传统热电子发射 X 射线源而 言,碳纳米管 X 射线源具有结构紧凑、高时间分辨、可编程发射等优势。面向静态扫描成像系统的多光束 X 射线源是 碳纳米管 X 射线源的重要发展方向之一。文章将介绍基于碳纳米管阴极的多光束 X 射线源技术。     

Development of the heat treatment system for the 40 T hybrid magnet superconducting outsert

The heat treatment of Nb(3)Sn coil with the glass fabric insulation is one of the key and critical processes for the outsert solenoids of the 40 T hybrid magnet, which could be wound with cable-in-conduit conductors using the insulation-wind-and-react technique. The manufacturing of the large vertical type vacuum/Ar atmosphere-protection heat treatment system has been completed and recently installed in the High Magnetic Filed Laboratory, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The heat treatment system composed mainly the furnace, the purging gas supply system, the control system, the gas impurities monitoring system, and so on. At present, the regulation and testing of the heat treatment system has been successfully finished, and all of technical parameters meet or exceed specifications.     

Note: Temperature derivative of the refractive index of binary mixtures measured by using a new thermodiffusion cell

A thermodiffusion cell is developed for performing Soret experiments on binary mixtures at high pressure and in the presence of a porous medium. The cell is validated by performing experiments at atmospheric pressure. The experiments are performed by applying different temperature gradients to binary mixtures in order to determine their thermal contrast factor. These measurements provide a first demonstration of the good reproducibility of this kind of measurements upon calibration.