1,977 research outputs found
Employee voice and collective formation in the Indian ITES-BPO industry
The growth of the information technology enabled services-business process outsourcing industry calls for attention to employees' working conditions and rights. Can an independent organisation such as unites Pro (the union of information technology enabled services professionals) represent employees' interests and effectively work towards protecting their rights and improving their working conditions? A survey of unites members indicates that they identify with the need for such an organisation to deal with poor supervisory and managerial treatment, concerns for employee safety, grievances related to pay and workload, and even the indignities of favouritism
Spatial analysis for policy evaluation of the rural world: Portuguese agriculture in the last decade
Jet Quenching in Non-Conformal Holography
We use our non-conformal holographic bottom-up model for QCD described in
1012.0116 to further study the effect of the QCD trace anomaly on the energy
loss of both light and heavy quarks in a strongly coupled plasma. We compute
the nuclear modification factor for bottom and charm quarks in an
expanding plasma with Glauber initial conditions. We find that the maximum
stopping distance of light quarks in a non-conformal plasma scales with the
energy with a temperature (and energy) dependent effective power.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. Proceedings for Quark Matter 201
Polyakov Loops in Strongly-Coupled Plasmas with Gravity Duals
We study the properties of the Polyakov loop in strongly-coupled gauge
plasmas that are conjectured to be dual to five dimensional theories of gravity
coupled to a nontrivial single scalar field. We find a gravity dual that can
describe the thermodynamic properties and also the expectation value of the
Polyakov loop in the deconfined phase of quenched SU(3) QCD up to .Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, talk presented at the International Conference on
Strangeness in Quark Matter, Buzios, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sept. 27 - oct.
2, 200
Di-Jet Conical Correlations Associated with Heavy Quark Jets in anti--de Sitter Space/Conformal Field Theory Correspondence
We show that far zone Mach and diffusion wake ``holograms'' produced by
supersonic strings in anti--de Sitter space/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT)
correspondence do not lead to observable conical angular correlations in the
strict supergravity limit if Cooper-Frye hadronization is
assumed. However, a special {\em nonequilibrium} ``neck'' zone near the jet is
shown to produce an apparent sonic boom azimuthal angle distribution that is
roughly independent of the heavy quark's velocity. Our results indicate that a
measurement of the dependence of the away-side correlations on the velocity of
associated identified heavy quark jets at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider and CERN LHC will provide a direct test of the nonperturbative
dynamics involved in the coupling between jets and the strongly-coupled
Quark-Gluon Plasma (sQGP) implied by AdS/CFT correspondence.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, version published in Physical Review Letter
Analysis of Regional Innovation Performance in Portugal - Results from an External Logistic Biplot Method
Portuguese strategic choices regarding innovation and R&D policy have, over the past
two decades, produced various positive achievements, in which the regions of Lisbon
and Algarve have taken the lead, and are the only ones in the country to converge
towards the European average growth rate. Regarding the other Portuguese regions –
despite significant national growth rates in the 1990s as well as a successful attempt to
cope with the EMU –, these are lagging behind the EU average with respect to gross
production, investment or employment generation. Meanwhile, one of the greatest
public policy efforts was to diffuse much of the European funds across the
entrepreneurial sector. After a long pathway, it is now timely to evaluate the firms‟
contribution to national and regional growth, their obstacles and impacts.
For the purpose of this paper, innovation is used here as a major contributor to the
policy evaluation process referred to above. Our investigation aims to explain the
present performance of Portuguese firms located throughout the country and to explore
those innovation determinants that have a region-specific connotation. To provide a
thorough investigation, our analysis defines, on a regional basis, a set of firms‟
behavioural patterns regarding innovation. In our modelling, we employ a new methodology, viz. the External Logistic Biplot
method, which is applied to an extensive sample of innovative institutions in Portugal.
Variables such as „Promoting knowledge‟, „Management skills‟, „Promoting R&D‟,
„Knowledge transfer‟, „Promoting partnership & cooperation‟, and „Orientation of
public measures‟ have been identified as crucial determinants in earlier studies and are
now used to describe regional institutional profiles. Such profiles exhibit a great variety
in the way they combine these determinants to promote regional innovation. The
creation of a gradient of capacity to dynamically innovate associated with each firm
makes it possible to analyse the innovation gradient of each region in Portugal. Our
paper presents and systematically investigates these findings and then reaches some
policy conclusions.PTDC/CS-GEO/102961/200
Near Zone Navier-Stokes Analysis of Heavy Quark Jet Quenching in an =4 SYM Plasma
The near zone energy-momentum tensor of a supersonic heavy quark jet moving
through a strongly-coupled SYM plasma is analyzed in terms of
first-order Navier-Stokes hydrodynamics. It is shown that the hydrodynamical
description of the near quark region worsens with increasing quark velocities.
For realistic quark velocities, , the non-hydrodynamical region is
located at a narrow band surrounding the quark with a width of approximately
in the direction parallel to the quark's motion and with a length of
roughly in the perpendicular direction. Our results can be
interpreted as an indication of the presence of coherent Yang-Mills fields
where deviation from hydrodynamics is at its maximum. In the region where
hydrodynamics does provide a good description of the system's dynamics, the
flow velocity is so small that all the nonlinear terms can be dropped. Our
results, which are compatible with the thermalization timescales extracted from
elliptic flow measurements, suggest that if AdS/CFT provides a good description
of the RHIC system, the bulk of the quenched jet energy has more than enough
time to locally thermalize and become encoded in the collective flow. The
resulting flow pattern close to the quark, however, is shown to be considerably
different than the superposition of Mach cones and diffusion wakes observed at
large distances.Comment: new revised version, 11 figures, as published in PR
Hardware-Accelerated Machine Vision using Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA)
A hardware-accelerated vision system for object tracking was developed and implemented using FPGAs. Based on Amdahl’s Law equation, the final hardware design outperformed a similar software implementation by a factor of 7.7
- …