In this column we provide a context for many of the types of data collection techniques used with human participants. We will not discuss methods for assessing diagnostic status, but we will provide some information about developing or evaluating a questionnaire, test, or other data collection technique. Research approaches or designs are approximately orthogonal to the techniques of data colle...

This purpose of this paper is to both demonstrate the importance of qualitative methods in travel behaviour research and explore the challenges researchers face in employing them. Qualitative methods offer a powerful tool for helping us understand the complexities of travel behavior. Methods such as focus groups, interviews, and participant-observer techniques can be used in conjunction with qu...

in this paper, an observer based fuzzy adaptive controller (fac) is designed fora class of large scale systems with non-canonical non-affine nonlinear subsystems. it isassumed that functions of the subsystems and the interactions among subsystems areunknown. by constructing a new class of state observer for each follower, the proposedconsensus control method solves the problem of unmeasured sta...

This paper introduces a robust task-space control scheme for a robotic system with an adaptive observer. The proposed approach does not require the availability of the system states and an adaptive observer is developed to estimate the state variables. These estimated states are then used in the control scheme. First, the dynamic model of a robot is derived. Next, an observer-based robust contr...

This paper fully discusses how to design an observer based decentralized fuzzy adaptive controller for a class of large scale multivariable non-canonical nonlinear systems with unknown functions of subsystems’ states. On-line tuning mechanisms to adjust both the parameters of the direct adaptive controller and observer that guarantee the ultimately boundedness of both the tracking error and tha...

In the last chapter we introduced a model for local translation detection we called a ’planar power detector’. The purpose of this chapter is to experimentally test several qualitative properties of the model. The experiments involve comparing detection performance across a novel set of stochastic stimuli buried in white noise. The chapter is divided into several sections. In the first section,...

I investigate the relative importance of social-signaling versus self-signaling in driving giving. I derive specific qualitative predictions about how the response of an image-motivated dictator to a change in the probability that her choice will be implemented depends crucially on the information available to the relevant observer. A probabilistic dictator-game experiment tests the joint, rela...

Over the past decade, automated systems dedicated to geopositioning have been the object of considerable development. Despite the success of these systems for many applications, they cannot be directly applied to qualitative descriptions of space. The research presented in this paper introduces a visibility and constraint-based approach whose objective is to locate an observer from the verbal d...