Abstract Three local bifurcations in DC-DC converters are reviewed. They are period-doubling bifurcation, saddle-node bifurcation, and Neimark bifurcation. A general sampled-data model is employed to study types of loss of stability of the nominal (periodic) solution and their connection with local bifurcations. More accurate prediction of instability and bifurcation than using the averaging ap...

Nonsymmetric algebraic Riccati equations for which the four coefficient matrices form an irreducible M -matrix M are considered. The emphasis is on the case where M is an irreducible singular M -matrix, which arises in the study of Markov models. The doubling algorithm is considered for finding the minimal nonnegative solution, the one of practical interest. The algorithm has been recently stud...

Even though the (untwisted) Whitehead doubling operation kills all known abelian invariants of knots (and makes them topologically slice), we show that it does not kill the rational function that equals to the 2-loop part of the Kontsevich integral.

The present study examined adult age differences in processing emotional faces using a psychological refractory period paradigm. We used both behavioral and event-related potential (P1 component) measures. Task 1 was tone discrimination (fuzzy vs. pure tones) and Task 2 was emotional facial discrimination ("happy" vs. "angry" faces). The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the two tasks was...

In many situations people need to mentally adopt the (spatial) perspective of other persons, an ability that is referred to as "Level 2 perspective taking." Its underlying processes have been ascribed to mental self-rotation that can be dissociated from mental object-rotation. Recent findings suggest that perspective taking/self-rotation may not require central capacity. By using the psychologi...

The psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm is a dominant research tool in the literature on dual-task performance. In this paradigm a first and second component task (i.e., Task 1 and Task 2) are presented with variable stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) and priority to perform Task 1. The main indicator of dual-task impairment in PRP situations is an increasing Task 2-RT with decreasin...

Four reaction time experiments examined the mental rotation process using a psychological refractory period paradigm. On each trial, participants made speeded responses to both a tone (S1) and a rotated letter (S2), presented with varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). If mental rotation of the stimulus letter can proceed while central mechanisms are busy with S1, then the effect of orient...

We present a new methodology to derive faster composite operations of the form dP + Q, where d is a small integer ≥ 2, for generic ECC scalar multiplications over prime fields. In particular, we present an efficient Doubling-Addition (DA) operation that can be exploited to accelerate most scalar multiplication methods, including multiscalar variants. We also present a new precomputation scheme ...

We extend the theory of quasipotentials in dynamical systems by calculating an exact potential for the critical fluctuations of pitchfork bifurcations of period-doubling maps in the weak noise limit. These far-from-equilibrium fluctuations are described by finite-size mean field theory, placing their static properties in the same universality class as the Ising model on a complete graph. We dem...

In a parity judgment task, the ERPs at parietal electrode sites become more negative as more mental rotation has to be executed. This article provides a review of the empirical evidence regarding this amplitude modulation. More specifically, experiments are reported that validate both the functional relationship between mental rotation and the amplitude modulation as well as the temporal relati...