This study deals with artificial neural network (ANN) modeling of a spark ignition engine to predict engine thermal balance. To acquire data for training and testing of ANN, a fourcylinder, four-stroke test engine was fuelled with ethanol-gasoline blended fuels with various percentages of ethanol and operated at different engine speeds and loads. The performance of the ANN was validated by comp...

Measuring and comparing performance in local government is controversial for good reasons. When these initiatives expand beyond purely academic considerations and are implemented in practice, several unintended consequences are likely to arise. These include an excessive focus on particular aspects of governance, strategic responses to maximise scores, unaccounted effects of exogenous variables...

Measuring the productivity of employees has been one of the concerns of IT organisations globally. It is indispensable to calculate the cost of the project vis-a-vis the time estimate. While calculating the lines of coding (Loc) has generally been the common criteria for programmers, it is not always considered an effective measure of the actual work done. The time spent on activities like atte...

Visuo-spatial skills are believed to be enhanced in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). This meta-analysis tests the current state of evidence for Figure Disembedding, Block Design, Mental Rotation and Navon tasks in ASD and neurotypicals. Block Design (d = 0.32) and Figure Disembedding (d = 0.26) showed superior performance for ASD with large heterogeneity that is unaccounted for. No clear diffe...

The association of very-high energy (VHE; E > 100GeV) sources with regions of the sky rich in dust and gas has been noticed in the study of individual VHE sources. However, the statistical significance of this correlation for the whole population of TeV detections has not been assessed yet. To trace the material content, we make use of the publicly released all-sky maps of astrophysical foregro...

Trees with sufficient nutrition are known to allocate carbon preferentially to aboveground plant parts. Our global study of 49 forests revealed an even more fundamental carbon allocation response to nutrient availability: forests with high-nutrient availability use 58 ± 3% (mean ± SE; 17 forests) of their photosynthates for plant biomass production (BP), while forests with low-nutrient availabi...

Robotic manipulators are highly nonlinear and coupled dynamic systems, which may be subject to different types of unknown disturbances such as joint frictions and end-effector external payloads. Such disturbances, when unaccounted for, cause poor tracking performance of the robot and may even destabilize the robot control system. In this paper we propose a novel nonlinear control scheme for rob...

In an ensemble of identical atoms, cooperative effects like subor superradiance may alter the decay rates and the energy of specific transitions may be shifted from the single-atom value by the so-called collective Lamb shift. So far, one has considered these effects in ensembles of two-level systems only. In this work we show that in a system with atoms or nuclei under the action of an externa...

GPS ambiguity resolution is the key to fast and high precision relative GPS positioning. Since unsuccessful ambiguity resolution, when passed unnoticed, will often lead to unacceptable errors in the positioning results, very high success rates are required for ambiguity resolution to be reliable. Biases which are unaccounted for will lower the level of the ambiguity success rate and thus increa...

The LLL algorithm (from Lenstra, Lenstra and Lovász) and its generalization BKZ (from Schnorr and Euchner) are widely used in cryptanalysis, especially for lattice-based cryptography. Precisely understanding their behavior is crucial for deriving appropriate key-size for cryptographic schemes subject to lattice-reduction attacks. Current models, e.g. the Geometric Series Assumption and Chen-Ngu...