49,439 research outputs found
Reliability study of refractory gate gallium arsenide MESFETS
Refractory gate MESFET's were fabricated as an alternative to aluminum gate devices, which have been found to be unreliable as RF power amplifiers. In order to determine the reliability of the new structures, statistics of failure and information about mechanisms of failure in refractory gate MESFET's are given. Test transistors were stressed under conditions of high temperature and forward gate current to enhance failure. Results of work at 150 C and 275 C are reported
Alternative statistical-mechanical descriptions of decaying two-dimensional turbulence in terms of "patches" and "points"
Numerical and analytical studies of decaying, two-dimensional (2D)
Navier-Stokes (NS) turbulence at high Reynolds numbers are reported. The effort
is to determine computable distinctions between two different formulations of
maximum entropy predictions for the decayed, late-time state. Both formulations
define an entropy through a somewhat ad hoc discretization of vorticity to the
"particles" of which statistical mechanical methods are employed to define an
entropy, before passing to a mean-field limit. In one case, the particles are
delta-function parallel "line" vortices ("points" in two dimensions), and in
the other, they are finite-area, mutually-exclusive convected "patches" of
vorticity which in the limit of zero area become "points." We use
time-dependent, spectral-method direct numerical simulation of the
Navier-Stokes equations to see if initial conditions which should relax to
different late-time states under the two formulations actually do so.Comment: 21 pages, 24 figures: submitted to "Physics of Fluids
Incentivizing High Quality Crowdwork
We study the causal effects of financial incentives on the quality of
crowdwork. We focus on performance-based payments (PBPs), bonus payments
awarded to workers for producing high quality work. We design and run
randomized behavioral experiments on the popular crowdsourcing platform Amazon
Mechanical Turk with the goal of understanding when, where, and why PBPs help,
identifying properties of the payment, payment structure, and the task itself
that make them most effective. We provide examples of tasks for which PBPs do
improve quality. For such tasks, the effectiveness of PBPs is not too sensitive
to the threshold for quality required to receive the bonus, while the magnitude
of the bonus must be large enough to make the reward salient. We also present
examples of tasks for which PBPs do not improve quality. Our results suggest
that for PBPs to improve quality, the task must be effort-responsive: the task
must allow workers to produce higher quality work by exerting more effort. We
also give a simple method to determine if a task is effort-responsive a priori.
Furthermore, our experiments suggest that all payments on Mechanical Turk are,
to some degree, implicitly performance-based in that workers believe their work
may be rejected if their performance is sufficiently poor. Finally, we propose
a new model of worker behavior that extends the standard principal-agent model
from economics to include a worker's subjective beliefs about his likelihood of
being paid, and show that the predictions of this model are in line with our
experimental findings. This model may be useful as a foundation for theoretical
studies of incentives in crowdsourcing markets.Comment: This is a preprint of an Article accepted for publication in WWW
\c{opyright} 2015 International World Wide Web Conference Committe
FRW and domain walls in higher spin gravity
We present exact solutions to Vasiliev's bosonic higher spin gravity
equations in four dimensions with positive and negative cosmological constant
that admit an interpretation in terms of domain walls, quasi-instantons and
Friedman-Robertson-Walker (FRW) backgrounds. Their isometry algebras are
infinite dimensional higher-spin extensions of spacetime isometries generated
by six Killing vectors. The solutions presented are obtained by using a method
of holomorphic factorization in noncommutative twistor space and gauge
functions. In interpreting the solutions in terms of Fronsdal-type fields in
spacetime, a field-dependent higher spin transformation is required, which is
implemented at leading order. To this order, the scalar field solves
Klein-Gordon equation with conformal mass in (anti) de Sitter space. We
interpret the FRW solution with de Sitter asymptotics in the context of
inflationary cosmology and we expect that the domain wall and FRW solutions are
associated with spontaneously broken scaling symmetries in their holographic
description. We observe that the factorization method provides a convenient
framework for setting up a perturbation theory around the exact solutions, and
we propose that the nonlinear completion of particle excitations over FRW and
domain wall solutions requires black hole-like states.Comment: 63 page
Cooling curves for neutron stars with hadronic matter and quark matter
The thermal evolution of isothermal neutron stars is studied with matter both
in the hadronic phase as well as in the mixed phase of hadronic matter and
strange quark matter. In our models, the dominant early-stage cooling process
is neutrino emission via the direct Urca process. As a consequence, the cooling
curves fall too fast compared to observations. However, when superfluidity is
included, the cooling of the neutron stars is significantly slowed down.
Furthermore, we find that the cooling curves are not very sensitive to the
precise details of the mixing between the hadronic phase and the quark phase
and also of the pairing that leads to superfluidity.Comment: 19 pages, 25 figure
NMR Investigation of the Low Temperature Dynamics of solid 4He doped with 3He impurities
The lattice dynamics of solid 4He has been explored using pulsed NMR methods
to study the motion of 3He impurities in the temperature range where
experiments have revealed anomalies attributed to superflow or unexpected
viscoelastic properties of the solid 4He lattice. We report the results of
measurements of the nuclear spin-lattice and spin-spin relaxation times that
measure the fluctuation spectrum at high and low frequencies, respectively, of
the 3He motion that results from quantum tunneling in the 4He matrix. The
measurements were made for 3He concentrations 16<x_3<2000 ppm. For 3He
concentrations x_3 = 16 ppm and 24 ppm, large changes are observed for both the
spin-lattice relaxation time T_1 and the spin-spin relaxation time T_2 at
temperatures close to those for which the anomalies are observed in
measurements of torsional oscillator responses and the shear modulus. These
changes in the NMR relaxation rates were not observed for higher 3He
concentrations.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figure
Multiple case-study analysis of quality management practices within UK Six Sigma and non-Six Sigma manufacturing small- and medium-sized enterprises
This paper examines multiple case-study analysis of quality management practices within UK Six Sigma and non-Six Sigma manufacturing small- and medium-sized enterprises
Excluded-Volume Effects in Tethered-Particle Experiments: Bead Size Matters
The tethered-particle method is a single-molecule technique that has been
used to explore the dynamics of a variety of macromolecules of biological
interest. We give a theoretical analysis of the particle motions in such
experiments. Our analysis reveals that the proximity of the tethered bead to a
nearby surface (the microscope slide) gives rise to a volume-exclusion effect,
resulting in an entropic force on the molecule. This force stretches the
molecule, changing its statistical properties. In particular, the proximity of
bead and surface brings about intriguing scaling relations between key
observables (statistical moments of the bead) and parameters such as the bead
size and contour length of the molecule. We present both approximate analytic
solutions and numerical results for these effects in both flexible and
semiflexible tethers. Finally, our results give a precise,
experimentally-testable prediction for the probability distribution of the
distance between the polymer attachment point and the center of the mobile
bead.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
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