Very Fast Chip-level Thermal Analysis

We present a new technique of VLSI chip-level thermal analysis. We extend a newly developed method of solving two dimensional Laplace equations to thermal analysis of four adjacent materials on a mother board. We implement our technique in C and compare its performance to that of a commercial CAD tool. Our experimental results show that our program runs 5.8 and 8.9 times faster while keeping smaller residuals by 5 and 1 order of magnitude, respectively.Comment: Submitted on behalf of TIMA Editions (http://irevues.inist.fr/tima-editions

Beauty hinders attention switch in change detection: the role of facial attractiveness and distinctiveness.

BACKGROUND: Recent research has shown that the presence of a task-irrelevant attractive face can induce a transient diversion of attention from a perceptual task that requires covert deployment of attention to one of the two locations. However, it is not known whether this spontaneous appraisal for facial beauty also modulates attention in change detection among multiple locations, where a slower, and more controlled search process is simultaneously affected by the magnitude of a change and the facial distinctiveness. Using the flicker paradigm, this study examines how spontaneous appraisal for facial beauty affects the detection of identity change among multiple faces. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Participants viewed a display consisting of two alternating frames of four faces separated by a blank frame. In half of the trials, one of the faces (target face) changed to a different person. The task of the participant was to indicate whether a change of face identity had occurred. The results showed that (1) observers were less efficient at detecting identity change among multiple attractive faces relative to unattractive faces when the target and distractor faces were not highly distinctive from one another; and (2) it is difficult to detect a change if the new face is similar to the old. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The findings suggest that attractive faces may interfere with the attention-switch process in change detection. The results also show that attention in change detection was strongly modulated by physical similarity between the alternating faces. Although facial beauty is a powerful stimulus that has well-demonstrated priority, its influence on change detection is easily superseded by low-level image similarity. The visual system appears to take a different approach to facial beauty when a task requires resource-demanding feature comparisons

Policy Studies Economics and Business Administration

Abstract The phrase “add them up and divide by two (Tashite Ni De Waru, in Japanese) ” is an established maxim in Japanese society, and has its historical roots in Japanese culture. This means adopting a middle course between two competing proposals in order to avoid a conflict. In the spirit of Max Weber (1949), this paper establishes a systematically correct scientific proof of “add them up and divide by two ” (Add-Div), by using conceptions of the two OR methodologies, data envelopment analysis (DEA) and cooperative game theory. More specifically, in the DEA game scheme of Nakabayashi and Tone (2006), we study an allocation problem with two criteria, in which game-theoretic solutions such as the Shapley value and the nucleolus prove coincident with the result of the Add-Div method. While today some brilliant minds may propose that people should abandon the Add-Div mentality, this paper enables one to re-consider the concept of Add-Div not only as a matter of mentality but also as an application of OR methods. We also illustrate the use of the Add-Div concept where the “assurance region ” (AR) method of DEA is incorporated

Theoretical Study on Transport Properties of Normal Metal - Zigzag Graphene Nanoribbon - Normal Metal Junctions

We investigate transport properties of the junctions in which the graphene nanoribbon with the zigzag shaped edges consisting of the $N$ legs is sandwiched by the two normal metals by means of recursive Green's function method. The conductance and the transmission probabilities are found to have the remarkable properties depending on the parity of $N$. The singular behaviors close to E=0 with $E$ being the Fermi energy are demonstrated. The channel filtering is shown to occur in the case with $N=$ even.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Spin Currents Induced by Nonuniform Rashba-Type Spin-Orbit Field

We study the spin relaxation torque in nonmagnetic or ferromagnetic metals with nonuniform spin-orbit coupling within the Keldysh Green's function formalism. In non-magnet, the relaxation torque is shown to arise when the spin-orbit coupling is not uniform. In the absence of an external field, the spin current induced by the relaxation torque is proportional to the vector chirality of Rashba-type spin-orbit field (RSOF). In the presence of an external field, on the other hand, spin relaxation torque arises from the coupling of the external field and vector chirality of RSOF. Our result indicates that spin-sink or source effects are controlled by designing RSOF in junctions.Comment: 3 figure

Developmental differences in holistic interference of facial part recognition.

Research has shown that adults' recognition of a facial part can be disrupted if the part is learnt without a face context but tested in a whole face. This has been interpreted as the holistic interference effect. The present study investigated whether children of 6- and 9-10-year-olds would show a similar effect. Participants were asked to judge whether a probe part was the same as or different from a test part whereby the part was presented either in isolation or in a whole face. The results showed that while all the groups were susceptible to a holistic interference, the youngest group was most severely affected. Contrary to the view that piecemeal processing precedes holistic processing in the cognitive development, our findings demonstrate that holistic processing is already present at 6 years of age. It is the ability to inhibit the influence of holistic information on piecemeal processing that seems to require a longer period of development into at an older and adult age