Out of the musical box

The present paper explores the correlations of music and architecture through a design studio project carried out by second year students of the Architecture programme at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom. In addition the paper looks into some of the most representative architects and composers who have materialized this connectivity between space and music. Last but not least this appraisal intends to illustrate how the students’ creative process and spatial understanding may be influenced by introducing music as an analogue to understand architecture

The development of four hotel companies in the UK, 1979-2004

The evolution of big business in manufacturing and some service industries, together with the role played in this by merger and acquisition (M&A) activity has been thoroughly researched and is well documented. However, despite' the increasing economic and social importance of the UK hotel industry, its development has been largely neglected. Therefore, this thesis set out to explore the development of big business in the hotel industry through the study of M&A activities. This study employs the multiple case study approach (four UK hotel companies), using M&A theory as the theoretical framework; extensive historical secondary data and semi-structured interviews were carried out for the study, covering a period of 26 years. The analysis was conducted by synthesising data with the M&A theory, in terms of two levels, organisational motives and macro environmental factors. The findings confirm those in the existing literature on what is encompassed by the term big business and the part played by M&A activity in the creation of big business. They also suggest that in the hotel industry the acquisition of brand name and brand rights is an important motive, one which has been neglected in the general M&A literature discussion. These findings added several new dimensions to big business concepts, through illuminating the role of brand and brand right acquisition in the context of the UK hotel industry. This thesis confirms the utility of deploying the wide range and large quantity of publicly available historical secondary information, which is rarely used. In addition, the application of a qualitative and longitudinal approach, applied to management theory, has broadened the research agenda in the study of hotel business, business history and business management theory

Rare fruits conservation: the case for public participation

Poster presented at 2nd International Symposium on Underutilised Plant Species: Crops for the Future - Beyond Food Security. Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) 27 Jun - 1 Jul 201

Entropy Bound for the Classical Capacity of a Quantum Channel Assisted by Classical Feedback

We prove that the classical capacity of an arbitrary quantum channel assisted by a free classical feedback channel is bounded from above by the maximum average output entropy of the quantum channel. As a consequence of this bound, we conclude that a classical feedback channel does not improve the classical capacity of a quantum erasure channel, and by taking into account energy constraints, we conclude the same for a pure-loss bosonic channel. The method for establishing the aforementioned entropy bound involves identifying an information measure having two key properties: 1) it does not increase under a one-way local operations and classical communication channel from the receiver to the sender and 2) a quantum channel from sender to receiver cannot increase the information measure by more than the maximum output entropy of the channel. This information measure can be understood as the sum of two terms, with one corresponding to classical correlation and the other to entanglement.Comment: v2: 6 pages, 1 figure, final version published in conference proceeding

Review: Object vision in a structured world

In natural vision, objects appear at typical locations, both with respect to visual space (e.g., an airplane in the upper part of a scene) and other objects (e.g., a lamp above a table). Recent studies have shown that object vision is strongly adapted to such positional regularities. In this review we synthesize these developments, highlighting that adaptations to positional regularities facilitate object detection and recognition, and sharpen the representations of objects in visual cortex. These effects are pervasive across various types of high-level content. We posit that adaptations to real-world structure collectively support optimal usage of limited cortical processing resources. Taking positional regularities into account will thus be essential for understanding efficient object vision in the real world

Control of Diffusion Processes in Multi-agent Networks

Diffusion processes are instrumental in describing the movement of a continuous quantity in a generic network of interacting agents. Here, we present a probabilistic framework for diffusion in networks and propose to classify agent interactions according to two protocols where the total network quantity is conserved or variable. For both protocols, our focus is on asymmetric interactions between agents involving directed graphs. Specifically, we define how the dynamics of conservative and non-conservative networks relate to the weighted in-degree Laplacian and the weighted out-degree Laplacian. We show how network diffusion can be externally manipulated by applying time-varying input functions at individual nodes. The network control and design schemes enable flow modifications that allow the alteration of the dynamic and stationary behavior of the network in conservative and non-conservative networks. The proposed framework is relevant in the context of group coordination, herding behavior, distributed algorithms, and network control

Multivariate trace estimation in constant quantum depth

There is a folkloric belief that a depth-$\Theta(m)$ quantum circuit is needed to estimate the trace of the product of $m$ density matrices (i.e., a multivariate trace). We prove that this belief is overly conservative by constructing a constant quantum-depth circuit for the task, inspired by the method of Shor error correction. Furthermore, our circuit demands only local gates in a two dimensional circuit -- we show how to implement it in a highly parallelized way on an architecture similar to that of Google's Sycamore processor. With these features, our algorithm brings the task of multivariate trace estimation, crucial to applications in condensed matter and estimating nonlinear functions of quantum states, closer to the capabilities of near-term quantum processors. We instantiate the latter application with a theorem on estimating nonlinear functions of quantum states with ``well-behaved" polynomial approximations.Comment: v2: 17 pages, 3 figures, includes application to estimation of Schatten-k distances between states for even

Energy Efficiency of Distributed Signal Processing in Wireless Networks: A Cross-Layer Analysis

In order to meet the growing mobile data demand, future wireless networks will be equipped with a mulitude of access points (APs). Besides the important implications for the energy consumption, the trend towards densification requires the development of decentralized and sustainable radio resource management techniques. It is critically important to understand how the distribution of signal processing operations affects the energy efficiency of wireless networks. In this paper, we provide a cross-layer framework to evaluate and compare the energy efficiency of wireless networks under different levels of distribution of the signal processing load: 1) hybrid, where the signal processing operations are shared between nodes and APs; 2) centralized, where signal processing is entirely implemented at the APs; and 3) fully distributed, where all operations are performed by the nodes. We find that in practical wireless networks, hybrid signal processing exhibits a significant energy efficiency gain over both centralized and fully distributed approaches

Quantum algorithm for Petz recovery channels and pretty good measurements

The Petz recovery channel plays an important role in quantum information science as an operation that approximately reverses the effect of a quantum channel. The pretty good measurement is a special case of the Petz recovery channel, and it allows for near-optimal state discrimination. A hurdle to the experimental realization of these vaunted theoretical tools is the lack of a systematic and efficient method to implement them. This paper sets out to rectify this lack: using the recently developed tools of quantum singular value transformation and oblivious amplitude amplification, we provide a quantum algorithm to implement the Petz recovery channel when given the ability to perform the channel that one wishes to reverse. Moreover, we prove that our quantum algorithm's usage of the channel implementation cannot be improved by more than a quadratic factor. Our quantum algorithm also provides a procedure to perform pretty good measurements when given multiple copies of the states that one is trying to distinguish.Comment: 6 page