here are many contexts, from space structures to disk drive heads, from medical mechanisms to long-arm manipulators, from cranes to robots, in which it is desired to achieve rapid and accurate position control of a system end-point by an actuator working through a flexible system. The system’s actuator must then attempt to reconcile two, potentially conflicting, demands: position control and ac...

The language of mathematical Finance allows to express many results of martingale theory via trading arguments, which makes it somehow easier to appreciate their contents. Just to provide one illustrative example: let X = (Xn)n≥0 be a martingale and let N b a(t) count the upcrossings over the interval [a, b], then we can find a predictable process V = (Vn)n≥0 such that (b− a)N b a(t) ≤ (a−Xt) +...

The use of hierarchical Chamfer Matching (CM) to match die patterns on VLSI wafers for the alignment of semiconductor chips is presented. This method can extract images with non-umform lighting (without loss) for matching, and somehow it is invariant to some environment changes. Here, it is applied to align IC patterns under non-uniform lighting while the normalized correlation method fails. Ex...

Quantum entropy is a fundamental concept for quantum information recently developed in various directions. We will review the mathematical aspects of quantum entropy (entropies) and discuss some applications to quantum communication, statistical physics. All topics taken here are somehow related to the quantum entropy that the present authors have been studied. Many other fields recently develo...

for an m-state homogeneous irreducible Markov chain with transition probability matrix Qm×m is known, but the chain requires updating by altering some of its transition probabilities or by adding or deleting some states. Suppose that the updated transition probability matrix Pn×n is also irreducible. The updating problem is to compute the updated stationary distribution π = (π1, π2, . . . , πn)...

Diagnosis is the missing link in person-centered care. Person-centered care has covered many different aspects of such important areas as treatment, resource allocation, and ethical practice (particularly concerned with patient autonomy). But with important exceptions [1, 2], diagnosis has been widely assumed to be, somehow, reserved to the scientific and other skills of doctors and healthcare ...

Monte Carlo simulations are a classical tool to analyse physical systems. When unlikely events are to be simulated, the importance sampling technique is often used instead of Monte Carlo. Importance sampling has some drawbacks when the problem dimensionality is high or when the optimal importance sampling density is complex to obtain. In this paper, we focus on a quite novel but somehow confide...

Koko is merely non-fundamental. She is a gorilla, and like all biological organisms, she is presumably dependent on the physical. Perhaps the fundamental entities are spacetime with certain physical fields. However exactly that story goes, it seems clear that if and when final physics is done, Koko the gorilla won’t be part of that story. Rather she must somehow be understood as grounded in spa...

This is a slightly altered portion of an expert report I wrote recently, released with permission, that I thought might serve as an example of how to go about seeking the truth and presenting the state of the science when truly definitive statements based on first principles are not available. Of course, I look forward to the readership proving me wrong with real-world examples, but somehow, I ...

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? . . . They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. . . . [I]t happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it . . . and warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one. . . . There is a communion of more than ...