Scale-, Base-, and Sum-lnvariance

This chapter establishes and illustrates three basic invariance properties of the Benford distribution that are instrumental in demonstrating whether or not certain datasets are Benford, and that also prove helpful for predicting which empirical data are likely to follow Benford's law closely. These are the scale-invariance property, base-invariance property, and sum-invariance property.

Superstatistics in Random Matrix Theory

Random matrix theory (RMT) provides a successful model for quantum systems, whose classical counterpart has chaotic dynamics. It is based on two assumptions: (1) matrix-element independence, and (2) base invariance. The last decade witnessed several attempts to extend RMT to describe quantum systems with mixed regular-chaotic dynamics. Most of the proposed generalizations keep the first assumption and violate the second. Recently, several authors have presented other versions of the theory that keep base invariance at the expense of allowing correlations between matrix elements. This is achieved by starting from non-extensive entropies rather than the standard Shannon entropy, or by following the basic prescription of the recently suggested concept of superstatistics. The latter concept was introduced as a generalization of equilibrium thermodynamics to describe non-equilibrium systems by allowing the temperature to fluctuate. We here review the superstatistical generalizations of RMT and illustrate their value by calculating the nearest-neighbor-spacing distributions and comparing the results of calculation with experiments on billiards modeling systems in transition from order to chaos.

Base invariance of the manipulability index

The manipulability index suggested by Yoshikava is an important tool for the design of mechanisms and their control. It represents a quantitative measure of the functionality and the ability for realizing some tasks or groups of tasks. This index is some kind of performance measure and should be taken into consideration in the design phase of a mechanism and also in the design of control algorithms.In this paper two important properties of the manipulability index are investigated. The first part of the present work demonstrates that manipulability of a mechanism is independent of task space coordinates. In the second part, a proof of the independency of the manipulability index on the first DOF is given.This invariance is important for simplification of the mechanism's Jacobian matrix and gives excellent insight into the dependences of configuration space coordinates on this index. Moreover, it proves that the manipulability index is determined only by relative positions of the mechanism itself and by the mechanism's geometry.Finally, the properties of the manipulability index are illustrated by some examples for fundamental open kinematical chain structures.