This thesis deals with the develompent of Andrej Babiš's Czech. Babiš is a Slovak politician and businessman, who lives in the Czech Republic and whose speeches and media appearances have been part of Czech public discourse for the past few years. The aim of this thesis is to describe how Babiš's language changes over time and how Slovak interference influences it. Hypotheses focus on the number of errors in Babiš's speech, the specific types of errors he makes and the interlingual / intralingual error ratio. The theoretical part of the thesis introduces basic second-language acquisition terminology, which is later used in the practical part. The practical part consists mainly of an error analysis of recordings of interviews with Babiš. Lexical, syntactic, morphological, phonetic, phonological and other differences between Czech and Slovak, which are the source of negative language transfer in Babiš's Czech, are also described. The conclusion shows how parameters of the politician's speech changed over six years and offers an explanation of the change.

This thesis presents Monte Carlo methods for simulations of phase behaviors of Lennard-Jones fluids. The isobaric-isothermal (NPT) ensemble and Gibbs-NPT ensemble are introduced in detail. NPT ensemble is employed to determine the phase diagram of pure component. The reduced simulation results are verified by comparison with the equation of state by by Johnson et al. and results with L-J parameters of methane agree considerably with the experiment measurements. We adopt the blocking method for variance estimation and error analysis of the simulation results. The relationship between variance and number of Monte Carlo cycles, error propagation and Random Number Generator performance are also investigated. We review the Gibbs-NPT ensemble employed for phase equilibrium of binary mixture. The phase equilibrium is achieved by performing three types of trial move: particle displacement, volume rearrangement and particle transfer. The simulation models and the simulation details are introduced. The simulation results of phase coexistence for methane and ethane are reported with comparison of the experimental data. Good agreement is found for a wide range of pressures. The contribution of this thesis work lies in the study of the error analysis with respect to the Monte Carlo cycles and number of particles in some interesting aspects.

Platform trials evaluating multiple treatment arms against a shared control are an efficient alternative to multiple two-arm trials. Motivated by a randomized clinical trial of the effectiveness of two neuroprotection devices during aortic valve surgery against a control, this dissertation addresses two open questions in the optimal design of these trials. First, to explore whether multiplicity adjustments are necessary in a platform design, simulation studies evaluating the operating characteristics of platform designs relative to independent two-arm trials were conducted. Under the global null hypothesis, relative to a set of two-arm trials, we found that platform trials have slightly lower familywise error; however, conditional error rates for an experimental treatment being declared effective given another was declared effective are above the nominal alpha-level. Adjusting for multiplicity reduces familywise error, but has little impact on conditional error. These studies show that multiplicity adjustments are unnecessary in platform trials of unrelated treatments. Second, to determine the optimal approach for comparing delayed entry arms to the shared control, five methods for incorporating historical controls into two-arm trials were applied to the analyses of simulated open platform trials and compared to pooling all controls. We found that when response rates are constant, pooling yields the lowest error and most precise, unbiased estimates. However, if drift occurs, pooling results in type I error inflation or deflation depending on the direction of drift, as well as biased estimates. Although superior to naive pooling, none of the alternatives explored guarantee error control or unbiased estimates in the presence of drift. Thus, only concurrent controls should be used as comparators in the primary analysis of confirmatory studies. Finally, these findings were applied to assess the design and analysis of the neuroprotection trial.

Iterative Learning Control (ILC) considers systems which perform the given desired trajectory repetitively. The command for the upcoming iteration is updated after every iteration based on the previous recorded error, aiming to converge to zero error in the real-world. Iterative Learning Control can be considered as an inverse problem, solving for the needed input that produces the desired output. However, digital control systems need to convert differential equations to digital form. For a majority of real world systems this introduces one or more zeros of the system z-transfer function outside the unit circle making the inverse system unstable. The resulting control input that produces zero error at the sample times following the desired trajectory is unstable, growing exponentially in magnitude each time step. The tracking error between time steps is also growing exponentially defeating the intended objective of zero tracking error. One way to address the instability in the inverse of non-minimum phase systems is to use basis functions. Besides addressing the unstable inverse issue, using basis functions also has several other advantages. First, it significantly reduces the computation burden in solving for the input command, as the number of basis functions chosen is usually much smaller than the number of time steps in one iteration. Second, it allows the designer to choose the frequency to cut off the learning process, which provides stability robustness to unmodelled high frequency dynamics eliminating the need to otherwise include a low-pass filter. In addition, choosing basis functions intelligently can lead to fast convergence of the learning process. All these benefits come at the expense of no longer asking for zero tracking error, but only aiming to correct the tracking error in the span of the chosen basis functions. Two kinds of matched basis functions are presented in this dissertation, frequency-response based basis functions and singular vector basis functions, respectively. In addition, basis functions are developed to directly capture the system transients that result from initial conditions and hence are not associated with forcing functions. The newly developed transient basis functions are particularly helpful in reducing the level of tracking error and constraining the magnitude of input control when the desired trajectory does not have a smooth start-up, corresponding to a smooth transition from the system state before the initial time, and the system state immediately after time zero on the desired trajectory. Another topic that has been investigated is the error accumulation in the unaddressed part of the output space, the part not covered by the span of the output basis functions, under different model conditions. It has been both proved mathematically and validated by numerical experiments that the error in the unaddressed space will remain constant when using an error-free model, and the unaddressed error will demonstrate a process of accumulation and finally converge to a constant level in the presence of model error. The same phenomenon is shown to apply when using unmatched basis functions. There will be unaddressed error accumulation even in the absence of model error, suggesting that matched basis functions should be used whenever possible. Another way to address the often unstable nature of the inverse of non-minimum phase systems is to use the in-house developed stable inverse theory Longman JiLLL, which can also be incorporated into other control algorithms including One-Step Ahead Control and Indirect Adaptive Control in addition to Iterative Learning Control. Using this stable inverse theory, One-Step Ahead Control has been generalized to apply to systems whose discrete-time inverses are unstable. The generalized one-step ahead control can be viewed as a Model Predictive Control that achieves zero tracking error with a control input bounded by the actuator constraints. In situations where one feels not confident about the system model, adaptive control can be applied to update the model parameters while achieving zero tracking error.

A Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based Polymorphic Faddeev Systolic Array (PolyFSA) architecture is proposed to accelerate an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) algorithm. A system architecture comprising a software processor as the host processor, a hardware controller, a cache-based memory sub-system, and the proposed PolyFSA as co-processor, is presented. PolyFSA-based system architecture is implemented on a Xilinx Virtex 4 family of FPGAs. Results indicate significant speed-ups for the proposed architecture when compared against a space-based software processor. This dissertation proposes a comprehensive architecture analysis that is comprised of (i) error analysis, (ii) performance analysis, and (iii) area analysis. Results are presented in the form of 2-D pareto plots (area versus error, area versus time) and a 3-D plot (area versus time versus error). These plots indicate area savings obtained by varying any design constraints for the PolyFSA architecture. The proposed performance model can be reused to estimate the execution time of EKF on other conventional hardware architectures. In this dissertation, the performance of the proposed PolyFSA is compared against the performance of two conventional hardware architectures. The proposed architecture outperforms the other two in most test cases.

Thesis. 1977. M.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Meteorology. / Microfiche copy available in Archives and Science. / Bibliography : leaves 49-51. / M.S.

The present study investigates changes in subject-verb agreement (SVA) errors in young Norwegian EFL learners’ written production from 8th to 10th grade. The study aimed to see if the frequency and type of SVA errors changed as the learners became more proficient. An error analysis was conducted on texts from the TRAWL (Tracking Written Learner Language) online corpus. The analysis included 52 texts from 26 students, giving two texts from each student, one from 8th grade (Y8) and one from 10th grade (Y10). The SVA errors in the data were identified and categorized by the variables: verb type, subject type, and distance between the subject and the verb. Errors involving the verb BE were categorized as suppletive agreement errors and sorted based on the verb tense since the verb BE marks agreement with suppletive forms in both the past and the present tense. Meanwhile, errors related to other verbs, including lexical verbs and auxiliaries HAVE and DO, were categorized as affixal agreement errors. The affixal agreement errors were further divided into omission errors where the 3rd person singular -s was missing and overgeneralization errors where the -s ending was erroneously used on a verb with a plural subject. Previous corpus-based studies on SVA errors suggest that young Scandinavian EFL learners (ages 14-16) make more overgeneralization errors than omission errors. The results from this study indicate that the students make more omission errors which can be explained by language transfer in 8th grade, and more overgeneralization errors as their English production has developed in 10th grade. Moreover, the overall frequency of the SVA errors in the data increased from 8th to 10th grade.

No description available.

The accuracy of moment method solutions to electromagnetic scattering problems has been studied by many researchers. Error bounds for the moment method have been obtained in terms of Sobolev norms of the current solution. Motivated by the historical origins of Sobolev spaces as energy spaces, it is shown that the Sobolev norm used in these bounds is equivalent to the forward scattering amplitude, for the case of 2D scattering from a PEC circular cylinder. A slightly weaker relationship is obtained for 3D scattering from a PEC sphere. These results provide a physical meaning for abstract solution error bounds in terms of the power radiated by the error in the current solution. It is further shown that bounds on the Sobolev norm of the current error imply a bound on the error in the computed backscattering amplitude. Since Sobolev-based error bounds do not provide the actual error in a solution nor identify its source, the error in typical moment method scattering solutions for smooth cylindrical geometries is analyzed. To quantify the impact of mesh element size, approximate integration of moment matrix elements, and geometrical discretization error on the accuracy of computed surface currents and scattering amplitudes, error estimates are derived analytically for the circular cylinder. These results for the circular cylinder are empirically compared to computed error values for other smooth scatterer geometries, with consistent results obtained. It is observed that moment method solutions to the magnetic field integral equation are often less accurate for a given grid than corresponding solutions to the electric field integral equation. Building from the error analysis, the cause of this observation is proposed to be the identity operator in the magnetic formulation. A regularization of the identity operator is then derived that increases the convergence rate of the discretized 2D magnetic field integral equation by three orders.

No description available.