Railways were originally uniquely identified with the material of their initial construction and now are technically identified by the characteristic contact of ‘steel wheel on steel rail’. Over 160 years ago failures of iron railway axles led to research into what we now know as metal fatigue. Accidents throughout the ages have acted as catalysts for research and improvements: this lecture wil...

The Speech Cycling Task (SCT) is a novel experimental paradigm developed together with Robert Port and Keiichi Tajima at Indiana University. In a SCT, subjects repeat a phrase containing multiple prominent, or stressed, syllables in time with an external timer, which can be simple or complex. A phase-based collective variable is deened in the acoustic signal. This paper reports on two experimen...

The use of motor primitives for the generation of complex movements is a relatively new and interesting idea for dimensionality reduction in robot control. We propose a framework in which adaptive primitives learn and represent synergetic arm movements. A simple and fixed set of postural and oscillatory primitives form the substrate through which all control is elicited. Higher level adaptive p...

Biodiesel, produced by the transesterification of vegetable oils or animal fats with methanol, is a promising alternative diesel fuel. In this study, a series of strong base anion resins with different basicity, pore structure, degree of cross-linking, and particle size were investigated as heterogeneous catalysts for the transesterification of soybean oil with methanol. A trace amount of CH3ON...

We represent a theory of polymer gelation as an analogue of liquid-glass transition in which elastic fields of stress and strain shear components appear spontaneously as a consequence of the cross-linking of macromolecules. This circumstance is explained on the basis of obvious combinatoric arguments as well as a synergetic Lorenz system, where the strain acts as an order parameter, a conjugate...

The value of synergy degree represents the operating condition of Industry-University-Research Institute (IUR) synergetic innovation (SI) composite system, we build up a set of synergy degree evaluation index system and an evaluation model for IURSI based on the principle of order parameter and slaving of synergetics, which divides the synergy process of IURSI complex system into six subsystems...

UNLABELLED We demonstrate electrically and ionically conducting nacre-mimetic nanocomposites prepared using self-assembly of synthetic nanoclay in combination with PEDOT PSS and a poly(ionic liquid) polymer from aqueous dispersions. The resulting nacre-mimetics show high degrees of mesoscale order and combine high stiffness and high strength. In terms of conductivities, the resulting hybrids ...

A synergetic model (DWT-LSSVM) is presented in this paper. First of all, the raw data is decomposed into approximate coefficients and the detail coefficients at different scales by discrete wavelet transforms (DWT). These coefficients obtained by previous phase are then used for prediction independently using least squares support vector machines (LSSVM). Finally, these predicted coefficients a...