ETWEEN 1947 AND 1962, the population of the United States grew at an average annual rate near 2 percent, a large increase from the average annual growth rate near 1 percent during the 20 years prior to World War II. Moreover, since 1962, the average population growth rate has fallen to its pre-war level. This large but temporary increase in the population growth rate, more familiarly called the...

Although forest fragmentation and degradation have been recognized as one of major threats to wild panda population, little is known about the relationship between panda distribution and forest fragmentation. This study is unique as it presents a first attempt at understanding the effects of forest fragmentation on panda spatial distribution for the entire wild panda population. Using a moving ...

This paper presents new tuning rules for PI and fractional PI control of processes that are typically found in process control. The rules are based on characterization of process dynamics by three parameters that can be obtained from a simple step response experiment. The rules are obtained by minimizing a frequency objective function subject to a constraint on the maximum sensitivity. Comparis...

The magnitude optimum multiple integration (MOMI) tuning method for the PID controllers provides nonoscillatory closed-loop response for a large class of process models. However, one must account for certain additional obstacles that have to be overcome to enable application of the method in practice. A few practical guidelines for performing multiple integrations (MI) from the process step res...

This paper presents an approach to PID controller tuning based on a simple plant model description; First Order plus Time Delay (FOPTD). The approach is based on the formulation of an optimal approximation problem in the frequency domain for the Sensitivity transfer function of the closed loop. The inclusion of the Sensitivity function allows for a disturbance attenuation specification. The sol...

This paper presents a practical experiment on the use of visual servoing for robotic tracking and manipulation of objects moving on a plane. In this work, the image is acquired from the camera mounted on the end-effector of a 6 DOF industrial robot, and processed on a standard PC-based vision system in order to close the Visual Servoing loop with a PID based controller. The PID has been impleme...

The non-linear nature of string theory on non-trivial backgrounds related to the AdS/CFT correspondence suggests to look for simplifications. Two such simplifications proved to be useful in studying string theory. These are the pp-wave limit which describes point-like strings and the so called “near flat space” limit which connects two different sectors of string theory – pp-waves and “giant ma...

We investigate giant magnons from classical rotating strings in two different backgrounds. First we generalize the solution of Hofman and Maldacena and investigate magnon excitations of a spin chain which are dual to a string on R× S with three nonvanishing angular momenta. We find a dispersion relation similar to that of Hofman and Maldacena and to the one found by Dorey for the two spin case ...

This paper describes a study conducted in the summer of 2006 aimed at exploring the play patterns and lifestyles of gamers who fall into the loose demographic of “Baby Boomers,” typically defined as people born between 1946 and 1964. This independent study, including over 300 participants, combined quantitative and qualitative techniques in order paint a multi-faceted picture of the gaming life...

This review is dedicated to electric field effects on giant unilamellar vesicles, a cell-size membrane system. We summarize various types of behavior observed when vesicles are subjected either to weak AC fields at various frequency, or to strong DC pulses. Different processes such as electrodeformation, -poration and -fusion of giant vesicles are considered. We describe some recent development...