903 research outputs found
Normal Heat Conductivity in a strongly pinned chain of anharmonic oscillators
We consider a chain of coupled and strongly pinned anharmonic oscillators
subject to a non-equilibrium random forcing. Assuming that the stationary state
is approximately Gaussian, we first derive a stationary Boltzmann equation. By
localizing the involved resonances, we next invert the linearized collision
operator and compute the heat conductivity. In particular, we show that the
Gaussian approximation yields a finite conductivity
, for the anharmonic coupling
strength.Comment: Introduction and conclusion modifie
Towards an electronic marketplace for bricks-and-mortar services
Service provision of bricks-and-mortar services (e.g. cleaning, gardening) poses several challenges to the consumer. Finding a service provider as well as ordering and coordinating the service provision, requires intensive interaction between consumer and service provider. Due to the regional anchoring of these services, they are, to a large extent, provided by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This poses additional challenges to the consumer: the market is fragmented and processes differ across service providers and industries. This problem is well-solved for tangible goods: consumers buy goods from different sellers via one marketplace (such as Amazon marketplace, eBay, etc.) and a seller-independent process. For services a similar consumer support is lacking. In this paper we address the gap from a consumer’s perspective by proposing a software architecture that integrates standard applications and modules to support the consumer process. While the work is still in progress, first practice applications demonstrate the artifact’s usefulness and viability
Processing Issues in Top-Down Approaches to Quantum Computer Development in Silicon
We describe critical processing issues in our development of single atom
devices for solid-state quantum information processing. Integration of single
31P atoms with control gates and single electron transistor (SET) readout
structures is addressed in a silicon-based approach. Results on electrical
activation of low energy (15 keV) P implants in silicon show a strong dose
effect on the electrical activation fractions. We identify dopant segregation
to the SiO2/Si interface during rapid thermal annealing as a dopant loss
channel and discuss measures of minimizing it. Silicon nanowire SET pairs with
nanowire width of 10 to 20 nm are formed by electron beam lithography in SOI.
We present first results from Coulomb blockade experiments and discuss issues
of control gate integration for sub-40nm gate pitch levels
Preferred foliation effects in Quantum General Relativity
We investigate the infrared (IR) effects of Lorentz violating terms in the
gravitational sector using functional renormalization group methods similar to
Reuter and collaborators. The model we consider consists of pure quantum
gravity coupled to a preferred foliation, described effectively via a scalar
field with non-standard dynamics. We find that vanishing Lorentz violation is a
UV attractive fixed-point of this model in the local potential approximation.
Since larger truncations may lead to differing results, we study as a first
example effects of additional matter fields on the RG running of the Lorentz
violating term and provide a general argument why they are small.Comment: 12 pages, no figures, compatible with published versio
IO-Top-k: index-access optimized top-k query processing
Top-k query processing is an important building block for ranked retrieval, with applications ranging from text and data integration to distributed aggregation of network logs and sensor data. Top-k queries operate on index lists for a query's elementary conditions and aggregate scores for result candidates. One of the best implementation methods in this setting is the family of threshold algorithms, which aim to terminate the index scans as early as possible based on lower and upper bounds for the final scores of result candidates. This procedure performs sequential disk accesses for sorted index scans, but also has the option of performing random accesses to resolve score uncertainty. This entails scheduling for the two kinds of accesses: 1) the prioritization of different index lists in the sequential accesses, and 2) the decision on when to perform random accesses and for which candidates. The prior literature has studied some of these scheduling issues, but only for each of the two access types in isolation. The current paper takes an integrated view of the scheduling issues and develops novel strategies that outperform prior proposals by a large margin. Our main contributions are new, principled, scheduling methods based on a Knapsack-related optimization for sequential accesses and a cost model for random accesses. The methods can be further boosted by harnessing probabilistic estimators for scores, selectivities, and index list correlations. We also discuss efficient implementation techniques for the underlying data structures. In performance experiments with three different datasets (TREC Terabyte, HTTP server logs, and IMDB), our methods achieved significant performance gains compared to the best previously known methods: a factor of up to 3 in terms of execution costs, and a factor of 5 in terms of absolute run-times of our implementation. Our best techniques are close to a lower bound for the execution cost of the considered class of threshold algorithms
Early Influences and Entrepreneurial Intent: Examining the Roles of Education, Experience, and Advice Networks
The independent effects of education, personal experience, and advice networks in the development of new venture creation intent is of considerable interest to educators, researchers, practitioners, and policy makers. Little research, however, has systematically considered the possibility that the relative importance of these factors varies in the early stages of entrepreneurial intent formation. Using a unique dataset (n=963), this study investigates these key relationships at two different points in time. Our results suggest that personal start-up experience and advice networks are particularly influential on the formation of intent to start a new venture, and that a marked shift in significance occurs from the former to the latter
Financing Complexity and Sophistication in Nascent Ventures
Although scholars have considered the financing challenges facing small businesses for some time, little work has focused on financing issues at the venture's nascent stage. In this study, we investigate the sources of funding sought by nascent entrepreneurs and the relationship between the complexity of these funding sources, business plan formalization, and expectations of future firm growth. Using data from the Entrepreneurship Research Consortium/Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, we find that nascent entrepreneurs, even those associated with high-growth ventures, favor simple rather than complex sources of funding at the nascent stage. Funding complexity and business plan formalization are also found related to expectation of firm growth. An additional contribution is the development of a funding complexity continuum scale, which should be useful in future studies of nascent as well as later stage entrepreneurial finance and firm growth
QFT on homothetic Killing twist deformed curved spacetimes
We study the quantum field theory (QFT) of a free, real, massless and
curvature coupled scalar field on self-similar symmetric spacetimes, which are
deformed by an abelian Drinfel'd twist constructed from a Killing and a
homothetic Killing vector field. In contrast to deformations solely by Killing
vector fields, such as the Moyal-Weyl Minkowski spacetime, the equation of
motion and Green's operators are deformed. We show that there is a *-algebra
isomorphism between the QFT on the deformed and the formal power series
extension of the QFT on the undeformed spacetime. We study the convergent
implementation of our deformations for toy-models. For these models it is found
that there is a *-isomorphism between the deformed Weyl algebra and a reduced
undeformed Weyl algebra, where certain strongly localized observables are
excluded. Thus, our models realize the intuitive physical picture that
noncommutative geometry prevents arbitrary localization in spacetime.Comment: 23 pages, no figures; v2: extended discussion of physical
consequences, compatible with version to be published in General Relativity
and Gravitatio
Distributed top-k aggregation queries at large
Top-k query processing is a fundamental building block for efficient ranking in a large number of applications. Efficiency is a central issue, especially for distributed settings, when the data is spread across different nodes in a network. This paper introduces novel optimization methods for top-k aggregation queries in such distributed environments. The optimizations can be applied to all algorithms that fall into the frameworks of the prior TPUT and KLEE methods. The optimizations address three degrees of freedom: 1) hierarchically grouping input lists into top-k operator trees and optimizing the tree structure, 2) computing data-adaptive scan depths for different input sources, and 3) data-adaptive sampling of a small subset of input sources in scenarios with hundreds or thousands of query-relevant network nodes. All optimizations are based on a statistical cost model that utilizes local synopses, e.g., in the form of histograms, efficiently computed convolutions, and estimators based on order statistics. The paper presents comprehensive experiments, with three different real-life datasets and using the ns-2 network simulator for a packet-level simulation of a large Internet-style network
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