Translatio Andalusiae. Constructing Local Jewish Identity in Southern France

This article explores the question of national group cohesion among the Jews of southern France. The numerous political borders and the expulsion of the Jews from Languedoc (1306) afford us the opportunity to examine local – Provençal – Jewish group identity, in contrast to a broader Jewish conception of nationhood. An analysis of some Hebrew documents demonstrates the significance of the expulsion of the Jews as the “destruction of my native land”. This is one enlightening example of a unitary socio-cultural conception of the Provençal region, which did not recognize political borders. wThe primary marker of this Provençal identity was their Andalusian Jewish tradition.Cet article explore la question de la cohésion d’un groupe national parmi les Juifs du sud de la France. Les nombreuses frontières politiques et l’expulsion des Juifs du Languedoc (1306) nous offrent l’opportunité d’examiner localement l’identité de groupe de ces Juifs, par contraste avec une conception plus large de la nation juive. L’analyse de certains documents hébraïques présente l’expulsion des juifs comme la “destruction de mon pays natal”. Il y a là un exemple éclairant d’une conception socio-culturelle unitaire de la Provence qui ne reconnaissait pas les frontières politiques. La tradition juive andalouse constitue le premier marqueur de cette identité provençale

An Assessment of the Effectiveness of Anti-Poverty Programs in the United States

We assess the effectiveness of means-tested and social insurance programs in the United States. We show that per capita expenditures on these programs as a whole have grown over time but expenditures on some programs have declined. The benefit system in the U.S. has a major impact on poverty rates, reducing the percent poor in 2004 from 29 percent to 13.5 percent, estimates which are robust to different measures of the poverty line. We find that, while there are significant behavioral side effects of many programs, their aggregate impact is very small and does not affect the magnitude of the aggregate poverty impact of the system. The system reduces poverty the most for the disabled and the elderly and least for several groups among the non-elderly and non-disabled. Over time, we find that expenditures have shifted toward the disabled and the elderly, and away from those with the lowest incomes and toward those with higher incomes, with the consequence that post-transfer rates of deep poverty for some groups have increased. We conclude that the U.S. benefit system is paternalistic and tilted toward the support of the employed and toward groups with special needs and perceived deservingness.

Quantum hall response to time-dependent strain gradients in graphene

Mechanical deformations of graphene induce a term in the Dirac Hamiltonian that is reminiscent of an electromagnetic vector potential. Strain gradients along particular lattice directions induce local pseudomagnetic fields and substantial energy gaps as indeed observed experimentally. Expanding this analogy, we propose to complement the pseudomagnetic field by a pseudoelectric field, generated by a time-dependent oscillating stress applied to a graphene ribbon. The joint Hall-like response to these crossed fields results in a strain-induced charge current along the ribbon. We analyze in detail a particular experimental implementation in the (pseudo)quantum Hall regime with weak intervalley scattering. This allows us to predict an (approximately) quantized Hall current that is unaffected by screening due to diffusion currents

Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations in SrTiO3\LaAlO3 interface

Quantum magnetic oscillations in SrTiO3/\LaAlO3 interface are observed. The evolution of their frequency and amplitude at various gate voltages and temperatures is studied. The data are consistent with the Shubnikov de-Haas theory. The Hall resistivity rho exhibits nonlinearity at low magnetic field. It is fitted assuming multiple carrier contributions. The comparison between the mobile carrier density inferred from the Hall data and the oscillation frequency suggests multiple valley and spin degeneracy. The small amplitude of the oscillations is discussed in the framework of the multiple band scenario

Tuning spin-orbit coupling and superconductivity at the SrTiO3/LaAlO3 interface: a magneto-transport study

The superconducting transition temperature, Tc, of the SrTiO3/LaAlO3 interface was varied by the electric field effect. The anisotropy of the upper critical field and the normal state magneto-transport were studied as a function of gate voltage. The spin-orbit coupling energy is extracted. This tunable energy scale is used to explain the strong gate dependence of the mobility and of the anomalous Hall signal observed. The spin-orbit coupling energy follows Tc for the electric field range under study

Quantized Convolutional Neural Networks Through the Lens of Partial Differential Equations

Quantization of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is a common approach to ease the computational burden involved in the deployment of CNNs, especially on low-resource edge devices. However, fixed-point arithmetic is not natural to the type of computations involved in neural networks. In this work, we explore ways to improve quantized CNNs using PDE-based perspective and analysis. First, we harness the total variation (TV) approach to apply edge-aware smoothing to the feature maps throughout the network. This aims to reduce outliers in the distribution of values and promote piece-wise constant maps, which are more suitable for quantization. Secondly, we consider symmetric and stable variants of common CNNs for image classification, and Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) for graph node-classification. We demonstrate through several experiments that the property of forward stability preserves the action of a network under different quantization rates. As a result, stable quantized networks behave similarly to their non-quantized counterparts even though they rely on fewer parameters. We also find that at times, stability even aids in improving accuracy. These properties are of particular interest for sensitive, resource-constrained, low-power or real-time applications like autonomous driving