Amid the flames of the culture wars, politicians have taken up arms over controls on literary culture, spurred on in part by universities 'triggering' canonical texts. Jonathan Swift's 'Battle of the Books' has flared up again. But is 'triggering' utter wokery or responsible pedagogic practice? Through dozens of case studies of triggered works, from Romeo and Juliet to Gender Queer, John Sutherland explores the recent phenomenon of triggering and its consequences for university English departments and literature itself. He maintains that what is routinely overlooked in the heat of polemic is that triggering is categorically different from traditional institutional (religious, educational, dictatorial) controls on literature. Triggering is in essence an alert. Done responsibly it does not erase or meddle; it stimulates curiosity and thought. It honours the fact that great literature is great because it is, as Franz Kafka says, powerful. In this characteristically nuanced and calmly objective study, the witty literary critic guides us through the increasingly rocky terrain of triggering. His advice rings clear: literature matters, to us and what we make of our world, and it must be handled with critical care.

'Triggering'. When and where did the usage originate? No one is sure. There is, however, clear connection with the psychiatric term 'trauma trigger' - stimuli which can detonate unhealed wounds. The concept of triggering took off in feminist magazines and social media 'chat' around 2010. Around 2013/14 it moved, wholesale, into higher education. In May 2014, the New York Times reported that at scores of institutions student bodies were demanding trigger warnings in their courses for canonical texts. It reached a floodmark with a survey by The Times of London in August 2022 which found that British universities had covertly added trigger warnings to over a thousand texts, including the works of literary greats such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie. Politicians in the US, UK and Australia vilifies triggering with the sarcasms 'wokery' and 'snowflakery'. What is overlooked in the heat of the argument is that triggering is categorically different from traditional institutional controls on literature. Triggering, done responsibly, honours the fact that great literature is great because it is, as Kafka says, powerful. In this extraordinary polemic, John Sutherland - former Visiting Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology - takes a wide-ranging and characteristically nuanced look at the history of triggering and censorship in literature and shows how it has become a theatre of culture warfare. Politicians in the great sectors of the English-speaking world have taken up arms in that conflict. Jonathan Swift's 'Battle of the Books' has flared up again.

The past few years have seen the attention and rapid developments in event-triggered sampled-data systems, in which the effect of event-triggered sensor measurements and controller updates is explored in controller analysis and design. This book offers the first systematic treatment of event-triggered sampled-data control system design using active disturbance rejection control (ADRC), an effective approach that is popular in both theoretic research and industrial applications. Extensive application examples with numerous illustrations are included to show how the event-triggered ADRC with theoretic performance guarantees can be implemented in engineering systems and how the performance can be actually achieved. For theoretic researchers and graduate students, the presented results provide new directions in theoretic research on event-triggered sampled-data systems; for control practitioners, the book offers an effective approach to achieving satisfactory performance with limited sampling rates.

The book provides a systematic and in-depth introduction to distributed event-triggered cooperative control for multi-agent systems from a theoretical perspective, which will be of particular interest to the readers. The included major research topics include: a unified design and analysis framework for centralized, clustered and distributed event-triggered schemes; fully distributed design for event/self-triggered schemes; resilient event-triggered control under malicious attacks; and various methods to aovid Zeno behavior. The comprehensive and systematic treatment of event-triggered communication and control in multi-agent system is one of the major features of the book, which is particularly suited for readers who are interested in learning principles and methods to deal with communication constraints in multi-agent systems and to design energy-saving control protocols. The book can benefit researchers, engineers, and graduate students in the fields of complex networks, smart grids, applied mathematics, electrical and electronic engineering, and computer engineering, etc.

This book focuses on distributed event-triggered control of multi-agent systems, in which the event-triggering mechanism is utilized to reduce the communication frequencies in order to compensate for constrained network bandwidths, an aspect that poses significant challenges for distributed control design. The book summarizes the authors’ original, systematic contributions on scalability and robustness, two core issues in distributed event-triggered control. Specifically, the book presents fully distributed adaptive event-triggered control laws; as they rely on neither continuous communications nor global information on the network, these laws are scalable with regard to network size and topology. Moreover, the book provides novel and robust event-triggered algorithms, which can accommodate various frequency-domain and matching uncertainties. The results presented here are applicable to UAV swarms, automobile systems, aerospace systems, vehicle platooning, and more, and will be of considerable interest to graduate students, researchers, and engineers working on network control systems.

Landslides triggered by rainfall cause significant damage to infrastructure annually and affect many lives in several parts of the world, including Switzerland. These landslides are initiated by a decrease in the effective stresses, and hence the shear strength of the soil, as a result of the increase in pore water pressure. The frequency of their occurrence is directly affected by the climatic and hydrological conditions in the region. Therefore, it is expected that the predicted rise in the number of extreme meteorological events, accompanied by the concentration of population and infrastructure in mountainous regions, will result in an increased number of casualties associated with landslides in the future. The main goal of this doctoral project was to study the effects of pore water pressure perturbations on the stability of unsaturated silty sand slopes and to investigate the mechanisms leading to the initiation and propagation of the shear deformations and eventually possible rapid mass movements. The behaviour of the test slope prior to the failure induced by the artificial rainfall event was investigated using analytical and numerical methods. The mechanical features of unsaturated soils and reinforcing effects of the vegetation were implemented in 2D and 3D limit equilibrium analysis. The possible depth of the failure surface was calculated based on these simplified models and was compared with the depth of the real failure surface in the landslide triggering experiment. The soil-bedrock interactions, in terms of the pattern of pore pressure distributions and their influence on stabilising or destabilising the slope, were studied and the results were compared to the field measurements.

This edited monograph provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of sliding mode control, focusing on event-triggered implementation. The technique allows to prefix the steady-state bounds of the system, and this is independent of any boundary disturbances. The idea of event-triggered SMC is developed for both single input / single output and multi-input / multi-output linear systems. Moreover, the reader learns how to apply this method to nonlinear systems. The book primarily addresses research experts in the field of sliding mode control, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.