Impulsive noise is often encountered in the practical active noise control (ANC) applications. Traditional ANC algorithms fail to control such noise. Derived by minimizing the l1 norm of an estimated a posteriori error vector, a new filtered-x affine projection sign algorithm (NFxAPSA) is proposed to efficiently and effectively suppress impulsive noise. Two typical extensions, such as variable ...

In this paper, we will derive some twist criteria for the periodic solution of a periodic scalar Newtonian equation using the third order approximation. As an application to the forced pendulum ẍ + ω2 sinx = p(t), we will find an explicit bound P (ω) for the L1 norm, ‖p‖1, of the periodic forcing p(t) using the frequency ω as a parameter such that the least amplitude periodic solution of the fo...

In this paper, we consider the stability of an inverse spectral problem for a nonsymmetric ordinary differential operator. We give an estimate for deviation in the coefficients of this operator when the spectral data perturb. Our result shows that if two spectral data are sufficiently close to one another, then the corresponding two differential operators must be close each other in the sense o...

Navigation of novel environments requires an ability to acquire, store, and recall spatial information. A navigator can use this information to generate novel, efficient paths between arbitrarily-chosen locations in the environment. In the first section of this thesis I review relevant recent research into exploration and spatial learning. I examine biologically-inspired computational models of...

Given an embedding f: G -+ 2 of a graph G in the two-dimensional lattice, let Iff be the maximum L1 distance between points f(x) and f(y) where xy is an edge of G. Let B2 ( G) be the minimum Ifl over all embeddings f. It is shown that the determination of B2 ( G ) for arbitrary G is NP-complete. Essentially the same proof can be used in showing the NP-completeness of minimizing If I over all em...

In an unfamiliar environment, searching for and navigating to a target requires that spatial information be acquired, stored, processed, and retrieved. In a study encompassing all of these processes, participants acted as taxicab drivers who learned to pick up and deliver passengers in a series of small virtual towns. We used data from these experiments to refine and validate MAGELLAN, a cognit...

The relationship between employment in occupations with potential exposure to motor exhaust and bladder cancer risk was examined based on interviews conducted with 1909 white male bladder cancer patients and 3569 population controls during the National Bladder Cancer Study, a population-based, case-control study conducted in ten areas of the United States. Our findings indicated that males usua...

We are interested in the convergence of the value of n-stage games as n goes to infinity and the existence of the uniform value in stochastic games with a general set of states and finite sets of actions where the transition is commutative. This means that playing an action profile a1 followed by an action profile a2, leads to the same distribution on states as playing first the action profile ...