In November 1998, a coalition of state negotiators and five tobacco companies reached an agreement in which the cigarette makers would pay out the biggest financial settlement in history, $206 billion over the next 25 years to 46 states, to compensate for the medical treatment of patients suffering from tobacco-related health problems. Critics of the settlement say the tobacco companies are get...

The oil sands mining and extraction processes in Canada produce large volumes of tailings that are a mixture of mainly water, clay, sand, chemicals and bitumen. This residue is deposited into tailings ponds where sand settles faster than fine clays which require many years to fully consolidate. Therefore, land reclamation and water recirculation become significant environmental impacts. The tai...

A design strategy for minimizing a feedback amplifier’s step-response settling time is introduced. Central to this approach is the clear identification of the independent design parameters characterizing the amplifier and the introduction of a figure of merit for assessing the settling performance of an amplifier that is independent of power, supply voltage and capacitive loading. With this app...

Megaturbidites are commonly used to reconstruct the seismic history (palaeoseismology) of areas where large earthquakes occur. However, depositional mechanisms and sedimentary characteristics these deposits not yet fully understood. This study unravels sequence sediment deposition that occurred in Lake Lucerne (Vitznau Basin) following 1601 ce earthquake central Switzerland. During this event, ...

We report direct observations of the structure factor in a settling suspension, using numerical simulations based on a lattice-Boltzmann model of the fluid. We find that the horizontal density fluctuations in bounded suspensions are strongly suppressed by the settling process, vanishing as k(2) at long wavelengths. Our measurements of the structure factor confirm the qualitative predictions of ...

Abstract: In this brief, a modification of Lagrangian networks given in (Xia Y., 2003) is presented. This modification improves the settling time of the convergence of Lagrangian networks to a stationary point; which is the optimal solution to the nonlinear convex programming problem with linear equality constraints. This is important because, in many real-time applications where Lagrangian net...

Negative conductance voltage gain enhancement techniques which substantially increases the dc gain of an operational amplifier without degrading speed are discussed. Three fully differential CMOS op amps using the negative conductance gain enhancement technique are presented. Simulations show that for a 0.35um CMOS technology with a power supply of 3V, a dc gain of more than 94dB is achievable ...

Chaotic transients occur in many experiments including those in fluids, in simulations of the plane Couette flow, and in coupled map lattices and they are a common phenomena in dynamical systems. Superlong chaotic transients are caused by the presence of chaotic saddles whose stable sets have fractal dimensions that are close to phase-space dimension. For many physical systems chaotic saddles h...