Purposeful Control

At present both management and biological sciences are faced with a common problem in methodology—how to model systems of organized complexity. In their approach to this problem the management sciences have adopted several concepts from the biological sciences, such as adaptation, goal-seeking, purposefulness, and so on, but have as yet donated little in return.This paper offers a contribution towards redressing the balance. A simple mathematical model of purposeful control is presented, and quantitative examples are then given to illustrate the application of the model to both living and practical systems.     

Frequency resolution and discrimination of constant and dynamic tones in normal and hearing-impaired listeners

Frequency resolution and three tasks of frequency discrimination were measured at 500 and 4000 Hz in 12 normal and 12 hearing-impaired listeners. A three-interval, two-alternative forced-choice procedure was used. Frequency resolution was measured with an abbreviated psychoacoustical tuning curve. Frequency discrimination was measured for (1) a fixed-frequency standard and target, (2) a fixed-frequency standard and a frequency-transition target, and (3) frequency-transition standard and a frequency-transition target. The 50-ms frequency transitions had the same final frequency as the standards, but the initial frequency was lowered to obtain about 79% discrimination performance. There was a strong relationship between poor frequency resolution and elevated pure-tone thresholds, but only a very weak relationship between poor frequency discrimination and elevated pure-tone thresholds. Several hearing-impaired listeners had normal discrimination performance together with pure-tone thresholds of 80-90 dB HL. A slight correlation was found between word recognition and frequency discrimination, but a detailed comparison of the phonetic errors and either the frequency-discrimination or frequency-resolution tasks failed to suggest any consistent interdependencies. These results are consistent with previous work that has suggested that frequency resolution and frequency discrimination are independent processes.     

Reaction of lithium dimethylcuprate with conformationally biased β-acyloxy enol esters - regio and stereocontrolled access to functionalized six-carbon chiral synthons

Alkyl 2-acyloxy α-D-erythro-hex-2-enopyranoside diesters, readily available from D-hexoses, are versatile intermediates fro the expeditious preparation of six-carbon chiral synthons containing alternating and/or consecutive C-methyl and hydroxyl groups.     

On the Computation of Eigenvalues of the Anharmonic Coulombic Potential

In this work, we propose a method combining the Sinc collocation method with the double exponential transformation for computing the eigenvalues of the anharmonic Coulombic potential. We introduce a scaling factor that improves the convergence speed and the stability of the method. Further, we apply this method to Coulombic potentials leading to a highly efficient and accurate computation of the eigenvalues.