Georg Simon Ohm's work in the field of electricity led to what is now considered to be the most fundamental law of electrical circuits, Ohm's Law. Much less known is that only months earlier, Ohm had published another law—one that differed significantly from the now accepted one. The latter entailed a logarithmic relation between the length of the conductor and a parameter that Ohm called “loss of force.” This paper discusses how Ohm came up with an initial law (...) that he felt compelled to correct a few months later. We analyze Ohm's publication as well as his laboratory notes, relating them to our own laboratory experiences while using the replication method to study his work. We also discuss the conceptual background of Ohm's work. We conclude that he was significantly influenced by French studies in the field of electricity, most notably the ones by Charles Augustin Coulomb. (shrink)

What does quilting have to do with electric circuit theory? The answer is just one of the fascinating ways that best-selling popular math writer Paul Nahin illustrates the deep interplay of math and physics in the world around us in his latest book of challenging mathematical puzzles, Mrs. Perkins's Electric Quilt. With his trademark combination of intriguing mathematical problems and the historical anecdotes surrounding them, Nahin invites readers on an exciting and informative exploration of some of the many ways math (...) and physics combine to create something vastly more powerful, useful, and interesting than either is by itself. In a series of brief and largely self-contained chapters, Nahin discusses a wide range of topics in which math and physics are mutually dependent and mutually illuminating, from Newtonian gravity and Newton's laws of mechanics to ballistics, air drag, and electricity. The mathematical subjects range from algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and calculus to differential equations, Fourier series, and theoretical and Monte Carlo probability. Each chapter includes problems--some three dozen in all--that challenge readers to try their hand at applying what they have learned. Just as in his other books of mathematical puzzles, Nahin discusses the historical background of each problem, gives many examples, includes MATLAB codes, and provides complete and detailed solutions at the end. Mrs. Perkins's Electric Quilt will appeal to students interested in new math and physics applications, teachers looking for unusual examples to use in class--and anyone who enjoys popular math books. (shrink)

Between 1886 and 1889, the British scientific and engineering communities witnessed several controversies regarding the principles underlying certain components of electrical circuits. The purpose of this paper is to show that these controversies should be regarded as reflecting a stage in the emergence of basic industrial research as a mediating agency between practical engineering and pure science. It will be suggested that the resolution of these controversies required careful formulation of approximations guided by a practical familiarity with the (...) details of the relevant systems. This underscored an approach to basic engineering problems within which practical experience and scientific theory were regarded as equally fundamental. (shrink)

Wansing’s extended intuitionistic linear logic with strong negation, called WILL, is regarded as a resource-conscious refinment of Nelson’s constructive logics with strong negation. In this paper, (1) the completeness theorem with respect to phase semantics is proved for WILL using a method that simultaneously derives the cut-elimination theorem, (2) a simple correspondence between the class of Petri nets with inhibitor arcs and a fragment of WILL is obtained using a Kripke semantics, (3) a cut-free sequent calculus for WILL, called twist (...) calculus, is presented, (4) a strongly normalizable typed λ-calculus is obtained for a fragment of WILL, and (5) new applications of WILL in medical diagnosis and electric circuit theory are proposed. Strong negation in WILL is found to be expressible as a resource-conscious refutability, and is shown to correspond to inhibitor arcs in Petri net theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.1 (2002) 105-128 [Access article in PDF] The Metaphoric Circuit: Organic and Technological Communication in the Nineteenth Century Laura Otis [Figures]In a public lecture in 1851, Emil DuBois-Reymond proposed that the wonder of our time, electrical telegraphy, was long ago modeled in the animal machine. But the similarity between the two apparatus, the nervous system and the electric telegraph, has a much (...) deeper foundation. It is more than similarity; it is a kinship between the two, an agreement not merely of the effects, but also perhaps of the causes. 1In 1851 the telegraph and the nervous system appeared to be doing the same things and for the same reasons. Their common purpose was the transmission of information, and they both conveyed this information as alterations in electrical signals. By calling the nervous system a "model" for the telegraph, DuBois-Reymond suggested that organic communications systems offered solutions to problems encountered by technological ones.In the same decade, however, Claude Bernard remained skeptical about the epistemological value of metaphor. From the classical notion of nervous fluid to the more recent ones of animal spirits and animal electricity, he pointed out, people's "knowledge" of the nervous system had consisted largely of a series of comparisons, "the expression of a way of seeing meant to explain the facts." 2 Priding himself on his empiricism, Bernard mistrusted analogy as a means of constructing knowledge. Does one know more or less about something, if one asserts that it is like something else? What exactly is the relationship between metaphor and knowledge? [End Page 105]Many scientific investigators have shared Bernard's concern that claims of likeness will change their perceptions of physiological systems, but for the same reason some scholars of language are more optimistic about the epistemological possibilities of metaphor. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson assert that the role of metaphor in scientific thinking provides one of the best illustrations of how metaphors reflect and influence what we see and do. "Formal scientific theories are attempts to consistently extend a set of ontological and structural metaphors," they argue. 3 This "extension," though, is just what worried Bernard. Metaphors provoke and give birth to new images. By establishing and reinforcing connections, they encourage us to see in new ways. While Bernard is correct that assertions of likeness alter the way we see, Lakoff and Johnson are equally correct in claiming that "much of cultural change arises from the introduction of new metaphorical concepts and the loss of old ones." 4 Alterations in the way we see can be extremely productive.One of the most intriguing cases through which to study the epistemological role of metaphor is that of comparisons between physiological and technological communications systems. Throughout the nineteenth century scientists' electrophysiological understanding of the nervous system closely paralleled technological knowledge that allowed for the construction of telegraph networks. Timothy Lenoir has demonstrated that Hermann Helmholtz and Emil DuBois-Reymond, the nineteenth-century scientists who made some of the greatest contributions to neurophysiology, worked closely with communications engineers like Werner Siemens. By developing models that reflected the apparatus they had adapted from physics and media technology, Helmholtz, and DuBois-Reymond changed people's understanding of the way nerves transmitted impulses. I agree with Lenoir that these comparisons between organic and technological systems were not mere devices for popularization but became incorporated into the scientists' own vision and understanding of the nervous system. 5 When one reads the proposals of nineteenth-century engineers, one begins to suspect that communication in the body and in society can only be understood in terms of each other. But can one claim that comparisons of communication mediated by bodies and machines actually contributed to knowledge of the nervous system and of early telecommunications networks?From the late eighteenth century onward, scientists studying organic and technological communications systems continually inspired one another. As Friedrich Kittler argues in Discourse Networks, nineteenth-century media for writing and communication—the telegraph, typewriter, and telephone—affected not just the way people wrote and... (shrink)

Evolutionary computation has been applied to numerous design tasks, including design of electric circuits, neural networks, and genetic circuits. Though it is a very effective solution for optimizing network structures, genetic algorithm faces many difficulties, often referred to as the permutation problems, when both topologies and the weights of the network are the target of optimization. We propose a new crossover method used in conjunction with a genotype with information tags. The information tags allow GA to recognize and (...) preserve the common structure of parent chromosomes during genetic crossover. The method is implemented along with subpopulating strategies to make the parallel evolution of network topology and weights feasible and efficient. The proposed method is evaluated on a few typical and practical problems, and shows improvement from conventional methodologies and genotypes. (shrink)

This study describes the results of experiments motivated by an attempt to understand spectral processing in the cerebral cortex (DeValois and DeValois, 1988; Pribram, 1971, 1991). This level of inquiry concerns processing within a restricted cortical area rather than that by which spatially separate circuits become synchronized during certain behavioral and experiential processes. We recorded neural responses for 55 locations in the somatosensory (barrel) cortex of the rat to various combinations of spatial frequency (texture) and temporal frequency stimulation of (...) their vibrissae. The recordings obtained from single and multi-unit bursts of spikes were mapped as surface distributions of local dendritic potentials. The distributions showed a variety of patterns that are asymmetric with respect to the spatial and temporal parameters of stimulation, and were, therefore, not simply reflecting whisker flick rate. Next, a simulation of our results showed that these surface distributions of local dendritic potentials can be described by Gabor-like functions much as in the visual system. The results provide support for a model of distributed cortical processing that imposes a physiologically derived frame (the limited extent of a dendritic patch) and an anatomically derived (axonal) sampling of the distributed process. This combination provides a complex Gabor wavelet that encodes phase, which is necessary to processing such details as edges and texture in a scene. The synchronization across cortical areas that make the Gabor wavelet processes within restricted cortical areas available to one another (the binding problem) proceed at a ''higher order'' level of integration. Both levels of distributed processing accomplish computation in the conjoint spacetime and spectral domain. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the period that immediately followed the invention of the Leiden jar. Historians of science have developed narrations that emphasize the role of grounding during the process of charging the jar. In this respect, this episode shows significant aspects that can be used to characterize science, scientific knowledge production, and the nature of science. From our own experimentation, we learned that grounding was not necessary in order to produce the effect. These experiences inspired us to go (...) back to primary sources. In doing so, we came to a new understanding of the early period after Kleist’s and Musschenbroek’s initial creation of the effect. From our analysis, we conclude that it is not the grounding which was perceived as a major innovation (as well as a challenge) during this early period of the discussion but the concept of an electrical circuit. This understanding was fundamental in characterizing the Leiden jar as a new device challenging the then current knowledge of experimental practices in the field of electricity. (shrink)

A classic source for understanding the connections between information theory and physics, this text was written by one of the giants of 20th-century physics and is appropriate for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. Topics include the principles of coding, coding problems and solutions, the analysis of signals, a summary of thermodynamics, thermal agitation and Brownian motion, and thermal noise in an electric circuit. A discussion of the negentropy principle of information introduces the author's renowned examination of Maxwell's demon. Concluding chapters (...) explore the associations between information theory, the uncertainty principle, and physical limits of observation, in addition to problems related to computing, organizing information, and inevitable errors. 1962 ed. 81 figures. 14 tables. (shrink)

In this paper we will show that Hempel's covering law model can't deal very well with explanations that are based on incomplete knowledge. In particular the symmetry thesis, which is an important aspect of the covering law model, turns out to be problematic for these explanations. We will discuss an example of an electric circuit, which clearly indicates that the symmetry of explanation and prediction does not always hold. It will be argued that an alternative logic for causal explanation is (...) needed. And we will investigate to what extent non-monotonic epistemic logic can provide such an alternative logical framework. Finally we will show that our non-monotonic logical analysis of explanation is not only suitable for simple cases such as the electric circuit, but that it also sheds new light on more controversial causal explanations such as Milton Friedman's explanation of the business cycle. (shrink)

The paper introduces the concept of relativistic ontological realism, and the corresponding notion of relativistic realization of objects. The conditions that allow for the relativistic realization of objects are determined. In particular, the paper indicates the way the imposition of organizational structures on already existent objects supports the relativistic realization of new, more complex ones. A type-theoretic presentation of the principles of relativistic ontological realism is given in the language of predicate calculus, making use of the notion of typed world (...) and the condition of effectiveness in the determination of the existence of objects. Two case studies illustrating the way the notion of relativistic ontological realism supports ontological analysis are presented, both concerning the ontology of computations, more specifically, the relativistic realization of computational levels in computational systems. The first case study deals with the realization of logical circuits through structural arrangements of electrical circuits. The second, with the realization of software systems through computer programming. A conception of the mechanics of the relativistic realization of objects, taking the imposition of organizational structures on previously extant objects as its basis, is proposed and briefly analyzed. (shrink)

Multimedia learning theories suggest presenting associated pieces of information in spatial and temporal contiguity. New technologies like Augmented Reality allow for realizing these principles in science laboratory courses by presenting virtual real-time information during hands-on experimentation. Spatial integration can be achieved by pinning virtual representations of measurement data to corresponding real components. In the present study, an Augmented Reality-based presentation format was realized via a head-mounted display and contrasted to a separate display, which provided a well-arranged data matrix in spatial (...) distance to the real components and was therefore expected to result in a spatial split-attention effect. Two groups of engineering students performed six experiments exploring fundamental laws of electric circuits. Cognitive load and conceptual knowledge acquisition were assessed as main outcome variables. In contrast to our hypotheses and previous findings, the Augmented Reality group did not report lower extraneous load and the separate display group showed higher learning gains. The pre- and posttest assessing conceptual knowledge were monitored by eye tracking. Results indicate that the condition affected the visual relevancy of circuit diagrams to final problem completion. The unexpected reverse effects could be traced back to emphasizing coherence formation processes regarding multiple measurements. (shrink)

Error-based Simulation is a framework for assisting a learner to become aware of his error. It makes simulation based on his erroneous hypothesis to show what unreasonable phenomena would occur if the hypothesis were correct, which has been proved effective in causing cognitive conflict. In making EBS, it is necessary to make simulation by dealing with a set of inconsistent constraints because erroneous hypotheses often contradict the correct knowledge, and to estimate the 'unreasonableness' of phenomena in simulation because it must (...) be recognized to be 'unreasonable' by a learner. Since the method used in previous EBS-systems was much domain-dependent, this paper describes a method for making EBS based on any inconsistent simultaneous equations/inequalities by using TMS '). It also describes a set of general heuristics to estimate the 'unreasonableness' of physical phenomena. By using PCA and the heuristics, a prototype of EBS-system for elementary mechanics and electric circuit problems was implemented in which a learner is asked to set up equations of the systems. A preliminary test proved our method useful in which most of the subjects agreed that the EBSs and explanations made by the prototype were effective in making a learner be aware of his error. (shrink)

In 1918–1919 Walter G. Cady was the first to recognize the significant electrical consequences of the fact that piezoelectric crystals resonate at very sharp, precise and stable frequencies. Cady was also the first to suggest the employment of these properties, first as frequency standards and then to control frequencies of electric circuits—an essential component in electronic technology. Cady’s discovery originated in the course of research on piezoelectric ultrasonic devices for submarine detection (sonar) during World War I. However, for (...) the discovery Cady had to change his research programme to crystal resonance. This change followed Cady’s experimental findings and the scientific curiosity that they raised, and was helped by the termination of the war. Cady’s transition was also a move from “applied” research, aimed at improving a specific technology, to “pure” research lacking a clear practical aim. This article examines how Cady reached the discovery and his early ideas for its use. It shows that the discovery was not an instantaneous but a gradual achievement. It further suggests that disinterested “scientific” research (rather than “engineering” research) was needed in this process, while research aimed at design was required for the subsequent development of technological devices. (shrink)

Aberrations -- Absorption -- Accuracy and precision -- Alpha radiation -- Amplitude -- Angular forces -- Angular momentum -- Antenna -- Arago dot -- Aperture -- Archimedes's principle -- Band theory of solids -- Bernoulli's principle -- Beta radiation -- Blackbody radiation -- Bohr atom -- Bose condensation -- Bra-ket notation -- British thermal unit (BTU) -- Calculating system efficiency -- Circular motion -- Closed systems and isolated systems -- Concave and convex -- Conservation of charge -- Conservation of energy (...) -- Convection and conduction -- Cosmic radiation -- Crest and trough -- Density and specific gravity -- Diode -- Distance and area -- Distortion -- Doppler effect -- Dynamic systems theory -- Edison effect -- Eigenvectors -- Elastic and inelastic collisions -- Electric circuits: Parallel vs series, diagrams and components -- Electric potential -- Energy and power -- Enthalpy -- Entropy -- Euler's laws of motion -- Falling bodies and physics -- Faraday's law -- Feynman diagrams -- Flywheel -- Focal point -- Free body diagram -- Frequency -- Gamma radiation -- Gauss's law -- Gluon -- Gravitational potential energy -- Harmonic oscillator -- Harmonics -- Heisenberg uncertainty principle -- Higgs boson -- Horsepower -- Ideal gas law -- Joule --. (shrink)

In this paper a Knowledge-Based System (KBS) for determining the appropriate students major according to his/her preferences for sophomore student enrolled in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology in Al-Azhar University of Gaza was developed and tested. A set of predefined criterions that is taken into consideration before a sophomore student can select a major is outlined. Such criterion as high school score, score of subject such as Math I, Math II, Electrical Circuit I, and Electronics I taken (...) during the student freshman year, number of credits passed, student cumulative grade point average of freshman year, among others, were then used as input data to KBS. KBS was designed and developed using Simpler Level Five (SL5) Object expert system language. KBS was tested on three generation of sophomore students from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology of the Al-Azhar University, Gaza. The results of the evaluation show that the KBS is able to correctly determine the appropriate students major without errors. (shrink)

The scope of the thermodynamic theory of nonlinear irreversible processes is widened to include the nonlinear stability analysis of system motion. The emphasis is shifted from the analysis of instantaneous energy flows to that of the average work performed by periodic nonlinear processes. The principle of virtual work separates dissipative and conservative forces. The vanishing of the work of conservative forces determines the natural period of oscillation. Stability is then determined by the variations of the dissipative forces with amplitude of (...) oscillation. If the work is a minimum, under certain conditions, the motion is stable. Reduction to linear analysis shows the coincidence with the impedance analysis of electrical circuit theory. The theory is applied to the analysis of temporal interactions of nonlinear irreversible processes in the particular cases of synchronization and hysteresis. Characteristic nonequilibrium phenomena of directional energy transfers, self-excitation, system passivity, wave modulation, and “beat” phenomena are observed. Possible relationships with biological processes are discussed. (shrink)

The Oxford English Dictionary explains that the word “consent” originally derives from the “Latin consentīre to feel together, agree, accord harmonize”, further broken down into “con- together + sentīre to feel, think, judge, etc.” Thus, consent is originally a matter of mutual activity and receptivity, specifically a co-creating co-creation based on shared, ongoing feeling. What this seems to imply – and this is certainly always been true in my experiences with social Latin dance – is that consent is not a (...) static thing, not an object or product that has been definitively produced and recorded. Instead, consent is an ongoing process, a reciprocating experiencing that is crucially both beyond one individual dancer, and also simultaneously active and receptive. Altogether, then, consent in social Latin dance emerges as a process of doing and undergoing together. Thus, if the connection of dancing consent is broken, for example if one partner shifts from the acting/receiving balance to a state of exclusive acting (with no receiving), then consent is no longer transpiring, which greatly increases the risk of unwanted touch beginning and continuing. Put simply, wanted touch is consensual touch, and consensual touch is touch that is supported by an ongoing activity and receptivity of consent. Wanted touch in dance is thus analogous to a “closed” electrical circuit. (In fact, at the cellular level of a dancer’s body this truth is literal rather than merely analogous, given the neurochemical dimension of the body’s activities). A closed circuit, in this technical sense, refers to a circuit in which there is no break in the path (for example between a device and an outlet), an unbrokenness that sustains a live current in the circuit. By contrast, unwanted touch in social Latin dance is like an open circuit, involving a break in the path between the partners, which entails the absence of the necessary current of consent. (shrink)

Just as non-well-founded sets extend the usual sets of ZF, so do root reflexive propositional formulas extends the usual class of Boolean expressions. Though infinitary, these formulas are generated by finite patterns. They possess transition functions instead of truth values and have applications in electric circuit theory.

soft servants of durable material: they live without pretension in complicated relays and electrical circuits. Speed, docility are their strength. One asks: “What is 2 × 2?”—“Are you a machine?” They answer or refuse to answer, depending on what you demand. There are, however, other machines as well, more abstract automatons, bolder and more inaccessible, which eat their tape in mathematical formulae. They imitate in language. In infinite loops, farther and farther back in their retreat towards more subtle (...) algorithms, more recursive functions. They are logical and describe themselves. As when a man with a hand-mirror pressed against his nose in front of a mirror sees in infinite rows the same image multiplied in a shrinking, darkening corridor of glass. It is a Gödel theorem as good as any. He sees infinity, but what he does not see is his face. (From Göran Printz-Påhlson´s poem “The Turing Machine” published in Säg minns du skeppet Refanut? Samlade dikter 1950–1983 (1984) Bonniers, Stockholm). (shrink)

An increasing number of research teams are investigating the efficacy of brain-computer interface (BCI)-mediated interventions for promoting motor recovery following stroke. A growing body of evidence suggests that of the various BCI designs, most effective are those that deliver functional electrical stimulation (FES) of upper extremity (UE) muscles contingent on movement intent. More specifically, BCI-FES interventions utilize algorithms that isolate motor signals—user-generated intent-to-move neural activity recorded from cerebral cortical motor areas—to drive electrical stimulation of individual muscles or muscle (...) synergies. BCI-FES interventions aim to recover sensorimotor function of an impaired extremity by facilitating and/or inducing long-term motor learning-related neuroplastic changes in appropriate control circuitry. We developed a non-invasive, electroencephalogram (EEG)-based BCI-FES system that delivers closed-loop neural activity-triggered electrical stimulation of targeted distal muscles while providing the user with multimodal sensory feedback. This BCI-FES system consists of three components: (1) EEG acquisition and signal processing to extract real-time volitional and task-dependent neural command signals from cerebral cortical motor areas, (2) FES of muscles of the impaired hand contingent on the motor cortical neural command signals, and (3) multimodal sensory feedback associated with performance of the behavioral task, including visual information, linked activation of somatosensory afferents through intact sensorimotor circuits, and electro-tactile stimulation of the tongue. In this report, we describe device parameters and intervention protocols of our BCI-FES system which, combined with standard physical rehabilitation approaches, has proven efficacious in treating UE motor impairment in stroke survivors, regardless of level of impairment and chronicity. (shrink)

Giulio Tononi's integrated information theory (IIT) proposes explaining consciousness by directly identifying it with integrated information. We examine the construct validity of IIT's measure of consciousness,phi(Φ), by analyzing its formal properties, its relation to key aspects of consciousness, and its co-variation with relevant empirical circumstances. Our analysis shows that IIT's identification of consciousness with the causal efficacy with which differentiated networks accomplish global information transfer (which is what Φ in fact measures) is mistaken. This misidentification has the consequence of requiring (...) the attribution of consciousness to a range of natural systems and artifacts that include, but are not limited to, large-scale electrical power grids, gene-regulation networks, some electronic circuit boards, and social networks. Instead of treating this consequence of the theory as a disconfirmation, IIT embraces it. By regarding these systems as bearers of consciousnessex hypothesi, IIT is led toward the orbit of panpsychist ideation. This departure from science as we know it can be avoided by recognizing the functional misattribution at the heart of IIT's identity claim. We show, for example, what function is actually performed, at least in the human case, by the cortical combination of differentiation with integration that IIT identifies with consciousness. Finally, we examine what lessons may be drawn from IIT's failure to provide a credible account of consciousness for progress in the very active field of research concerned with exploring the phenomenon from formal and neural points of view. (shrink)

A central problem in the cognitive sciences is identifying the link between consciousness and neural computation. The key features of consciousness—including the emergence of representative information content and the initiation of volitional action—are correlated with neural activity in the cerebral cortex, but not computational processes in spinal reflex circuits or classical computing architecture. To take a new approach toward considering the problem of consciousness, it may be worth re‐examining some outstanding puzzles in neuroscience, focusing on differences between the cerebral (...) cortex and spinal reflex circuits. First, the mammalian cerebral cortex exhibits exascale computational power, a feature that is not strictly correlated with the number of binary computational units; second, individual computational units engage in noisy coding, allowing random electrical events to gate signaling outcomes; third, this noisy coding results in the synchronous firing of statistically random populations of cells across the neural network, at a range of nested frequencies; fourth, the system grows into a more ordered state over time, as it encodes the predictive value gained through observation; and finally, the cerebral cortex is extraordinarily energy efficient, with very little free energy lost to entropy during the work of information processing. Here, I argue that each of these five key features suggest the mammalian brain engages in probabilistic computation. Indeed, by modeling the physical mechanisms of probabilistic computation, we may find a better way to explain the unique emergent features arising from cortical neural networks. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

In the rapidly evolving field of wireless power transfer (WPT), achieving systems that combine efficiency with reliability is crucial. This paper presents a simulation-based approach using CST Studio Suite to optimize WPT systems for wireless battery chargers in electric bikes. The study fixes the size of both the transmitter and receiver coils, the spacing between turns, and the number of coil turns, with a set distance of 20mm between the transmitter and receiver coils. CST Studio Suite is employed to determine (...) the parameters of resonance capacitors and the optimal switching frequency to enhance WPT efficiency. This powerful simulation tool allows researchers and engineers to design resonance compensation circuits more effectively, optimizing power transfer efficiency. The simulation conducted with CST Studio Suite confirms its effectiveness in designing a WPT system, achieving an impressive peak efficiency of 99.61% at the resonant frequency. The paper demonstrates CST Studio Suite's capability to accurately predict WPT system performance by developing detailed electromagnetic models and fine-tuning simulation parameters to reflect real operating conditions. Iterative simulations resulted in optimized practices, validated by select results that highlight the method's effectiveness and showcase an optimal balance between system complexity and efficiency. These findings provide a strategic framework for future WPT system development, offering practical guidance for researchers and industry professionals aiming to advance WPT technology. (shrink)

Neurosemantics is not yet a common term and in current neuroscience and philosophy it is used with two different sorts of objectives. One deals with the meaning of the electrical and the chemical activities going on in neural circuits. This way of using the term regards the project of explaining linguistic meaning in terms of the computations done by the brain. This book explores this second sense of neurosemantics, but in doing so, it will address much of the (...) first as well, for we believe that the capacity of neural circuits to support linguistic meaning, hinges on their peculiar role in coding entities and facts of the world. It is an enterprise at the edge of the available state-of-the-art knowledge in neuroscience and specifically, in the growing understanding of brain computational mechanisms. We conceive neurosemantics, however, as the natural evolution of a long standing project that began in the early days of Boole’s logic, the idea that semantics can be construed and explained in mathematical terms. Classical formal semantics, for a very long time, excluded from the analysis of language any account of mental processes, which on the contrary, became the central focus during the cognitive turn. Cognitive semantics, however, failed to provide a rigorous mathematical framework for semantic processes. Today, it is possible to begin explaining language by way of a new mathematical foundation, one that is empirically grounded in how the brain computes: neurosemantics. The way this book intends to contribute is twofold. One is to present a series of existing examples of neurosemantics in practice: early models addressing aspects of linguistic semantics purely in neurocomputational terms. The other is to try to identify the principles upon which models of this kind can be constructed, and their corresponding neural bases. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 76-77. Please click to listen to the mp3 files of deep brain recordings of individual brain cells, the smallest unit of the brain, in a whole, intact living brain. Each brain region’s cells possess an electrical signature. During recordings electrical signals are transformed into sound to facilitate auditory identification of cells during a process called “mapping.” Subthalamic nucleus by continent Cortex by continent Mapping is an important step in successfully identifying and localizing the appropriate target (...) site in the brain for an experimental therapeutic procedure called deep brain stimulation which has been used for patients with movement disorders and, more recently, for patients with psychiatric disorders. Thalamus by continent I have pursued a career as a neuroscientist for the past decade because I wanted to learn about the mind. In my most recent research, I record electrical activity from individual cells in the brain, and look at individual brain cells with a high resolution, electron microscope. Globus Pallidus (internal segment) by continent Globus Pallidus (external segment) by continent The closer I examine the brain, the less I learn about the mind. Rather, what has been most informative about the mind is how people—neuroscientists and non-neuroscientists alike—interpret neuroscience data. Some cognitive neuroscientists have proposed the qualities we hold most precious as humans, like morality and free will, exist only in the context of human interaction. Likewise, I propose that the mind does not exist in a vacuum and one’s mind only necessitates distinction in a social context, and the mind’s existence may only be relevant due to its relative relationships. In sum, bodies have brains. People have minds. Striatum by continent I invite readers to reflect on and/or refute these statements after listening to these recordings of the brain in action. These regions are part of the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical circuit, which is thought to possess parallel, functionally segregated loops including a motor-movement circuit and limbic-emotional circuit which work together to generate behavior (e.g. motivated movements) and have been researched for their role in Parkinson’s disease as well as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. EDITOR'S SUGGESTED RESOURCES Michael Gazzaniga's lecture, “Free Yet Determined and Constrained” at Edinburgh University Gifford Lectures in 19 October, 2009 is an excellent discussion of the field. It can be viewed on Edinburgh University's Youtube channel . The Cognitive Neuroscience of the Mind . Eds. Patricia A. Reuter-Lorenz, Kathleen Baynes, George R. Mangun, and Elizabeth A. Phelps. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2010. Print. (shrink)

This paper studies the state of charge estimation of supercapacitors and lithium batteries in the hybrid energy storage system of electric vehicles. According to the energy storage principle of the electric vehicle composite energy storage system, the circuit models of supercapacitors and lithium batteries were established, respectively, and the model parameters were identified online using the recursive least square method and Kalman filtering algorithm. Then, the online estimation of SOC was completed based on the Kalman filtering algorithm and unscented Kalman (...) filtering algorithm. Finally, the experimental platform for SOC estimation was built and Matlab was used for calculation and analysis. The experimental results showed that the SOC estimation results reached a high accuracy, and the variation range of estimation error was [−0.94%, 0.34%]. For lithium batteries, the recursive least square method is combined with the 2RC model to obtain the optimal result, and the estimation error is within the range of [−1.16%, 0.85%] in the case of comprehensive weighing accuracy and calculation amount. Moreover, the system has excellent robustness and high reliability. (shrink)