26,300 research outputs found
A five-year profile of employee satisfaction for UK local government buildings
A substantial five-year database, totalling over 20,000 responses across more than four hundred UK local government office buildings, is used to analyse employee satisfaction towards their work environment. Within this database, twenty-seven employee satisfaction attributes have been collected, for different sets of individuals and buildings, by an annual online survey for five years. The collective views of these responses in each of those years have been compared. The results have been strikingly consistent. The problematic areas are persistently the same. They appear to be the control of heating and ventilation and the need for, and ability to use, quiet areas for concentration, followed by document storage facilities, provision of meeting rooms, car parking facilities, and other personal needs related facilities, such as toilets and kitchen facilities. These areas are important concerns which need to be brought to the attention of local authorities and should not be neglected by decision makers. The findings by the comparison should also stimulate the proposals of improvement initiatives. This five-year profile provides a baseline against which the future investigations can be compared in the same sector. This study also provides an analytic method for performing other satisfaction related investigations.
Keywords: employee satisfaction, work environment, local governmen
Inner and Inter Label Propagation: Salient Object Detection in the Wild
In this paper, we propose a novel label propagation based method for saliency
detection. A key observation is that saliency in an image can be estimated by
propagating the labels extracted from the most certain background and object
regions. For most natural images, some boundary superpixels serve as the
background labels and the saliency of other superpixels are determined by
ranking their similarities to the boundary labels based on an inner propagation
scheme. For images of complex scenes, we further deploy a 3-cue-center-biased
objectness measure to pick out and propagate foreground labels. A
co-transduction algorithm is devised to fuse both boundary and objectness
labels based on an inter propagation scheme. The compactness criterion decides
whether the incorporation of objectness labels is necessary, thus greatly
enhancing computational efficiency. Results on five benchmark datasets with
pixel-wise accurate annotations show that the proposed method achieves superior
performance compared with the newest state-of-the-arts in terms of different
evaluation metrics.Comment: The full version of the TIP 2015 publicatio
Stable isotope (δ18O and δ13C) sclerochronology of Callovian (Middle Jurassic) bivalves (Gryphaea (Bilobissa) dilobotes) and belemnites (Cylindroteuthis puzosiana) from the Peterborough Member of the Oxford Clay Formation (Cambridgeshire, England): Evidence of palaeoclimate, water depth and belemnite behaviour
Incremental δ18O and δ13C signals were obtained from three well-preserved specimens of Cylindroteuthis puzosiana and from three well-preserved specimens of Gryphaea (Bilobissa) dilobotes from the Peterborough Member of the Oxford Clay Formation (Cambridgeshire, England). Through-ontogeny (sclerochronological) δ18O data from G. (B.) dilobotes appear to faithfully record seasonal temperature variations in benthic Callovian waters of the study area, which range from c. 14 °C to c. 17 °C (arithmetic mean temperature c. 15 °C). Water depth is estimated to have been in the region of c. 50 m, based upon comparisons between these data, previously published non-incremental sea surface δ18O values, and a modern analogue situation. Productivity in Callovian waters was comparable with that in modern seas, based upon δ13C data from G. (B.)dilobotes, with 13C depletion occurring during warmer periods, possibly related to an interaction between plankton blooms and intra-annual variations in mixing across a thermocline. Incremental δ18O data from C.puzosiana provide temperature minima of c.11 °C for all specimens but with maxima varying between c.14 °C and c.16 °C for different individuals (arithmetic mean values c. 13 °C). Temperatures for late ontogeny, when the C. puzosiana individuals must have been living close to the study site and hence the analysed specimens of G. (B.) dilobotes, are closely comparable to those indicated by the latter. However, for significant portions of ontogeny C. puzosiana experienced temperatures between c. 2 °C and c. 3 °C cooler than the winter minimum as recorded by co-occurring G. (B.) dilobotes. Comparisons with modern seas suggest that descent to a depth of c. 1000 m would be necessary to explain such cool minimum temperatures. This can be discounted due to the lack of deep waters locally and due to estimates of the depth tolerance of belemnites. The most likely cause of cool δ18O signals from C. puzosiana is a cosmopolitan lifestyle including migration to more northerly latitudes. Mean δ13C values from C. puzosiana are comparable with those from G.(B.)dilobotes. However, the incrementally acquired data are highly variable and probably influenced by metabolic effects.The probable identification of migratory behaviour in C. puzosiana calls into question the reliability of some belemnite species as place-specific palaeoenvironmental archives and highlights the benefits of adopting a sclerochronological approach
Magnetic fields and the dynamics of spiral galaxies
We investigate the dynamics of magnetic fields in spiral galaxies by
performing 3D MHD simulations of galactic discs subject to a spiral potential.
Recent hydrodynamic simulations have demonstrated the formation of inter-arm
spurs as well as spiral arm molecular clouds provided the ISM model includes a
cold HI phase. We find that the main effect of adding a magnetic field to these
calculations is to inhibit the formation of structure in the disc. However,
provided a cold phase is included, spurs and spiral arm clumps are still
present if in the cold gas. A caveat to two phase
calculations though is that by assuming a uniform initial distribution, in the warm gas, emphasizing that models with more consistent
initial conditions and thermodynamics are required. Our simulations with only
warm gas do not show such structure, irrespective of the magnetic field
strength. Furthermore, we find that the introduction of a cold HI phase
naturally produces the observed degree of disorder in the magnetic field, which
is again absent from simulations using only warm gas. Whilst the global
magnetic field follows the large scale gas flow, the magnetic field also
contains a substantial random component that is produced by the velocity
dispersion induced in the cold gas during the passage through a spiral shock.
Without any cold gas, the magnetic field in the warm phase remains relatively
well ordered apart from becoming compressed in the spiral shocks. Our results
provide a natural explanation for the observed high proportions of disordered
magnetic field in spiral galaxies and we thus predict that the relative
strengths of the random and ordered components of the magnetic field observed
in spiral galaxies will depend on the dynamics of spiral shocks.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figures, accepted by MNRA
Equilibrium asset pricing evaluation of real estate risk and return across four quadrants
Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2005.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 38-40).The major objective of this study is to test equilibrium asset pricing models with respect to how well they price risk across multiple asset classes; including the four quadrants of real estate. While using the Geltner (1999) paper as a springboard for our approach, this thesis both updates Professor Geltner's earlier work and extends its scope through the testing of additional models and asset classes. Using historical data to derive beta estimates, we empirically test several variations of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). These variations include the traditional, single-beta, Sharpe-Lintner CAPM, as well as the multi-beta, Fama-French CAPM. For the single-factor formula we explore the use of two different market portfolio proxies, the S&P 500 Index and the National Wealth Portfolio (NWP). We also apply the single-factor formula to a non-wealth based, consumption oriented approach. Test results show the NWP based CAPM to be the strongest model, being both robust and statistically significant in its pricing of asset volatility. When using the traditional S&P 500 index as the market proxy, the basic CAPM performs surprisingly well, though not as well as the NWP version. The multi-beta Fama-French model explains a large amount of price variation, however, only the market and size factors prove to be statistically significant at the 95% confidence level.(cont.) In a dramatic departure from what was found roughly fifteen years ago, the consumption model's performance was lackluster; supporting a widespread belief that there may be empirical issues with the measurement of quarterly consumption. The most interesting finding across all models tested was the behavior of the housing asset class. Housing appears to be an outlier that doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the asset classes using linear pricing models. All the models display a statistically significant intercept, suggesting that there is a component of risk, perhaps a significant component (as perceived by investors relative to treasury bills), that is not captured in any of these risk models.by Nan Li and Steven McKay Price.S.M
Numerical simulation of Quasi-Normal Modes in time-dependent background
We study the massless scalar wave propagation in the time-dependent
Schwarzschild black hole background. We find that the Kruskal coordinate is an
appropriate framework to investigate the time-dependent spacetime. A
time-dependent scattering potential is derived by considering dynamical black
hole with parameters changing with time. It is shown that in the quasinormal
ringing both the decay time-scale and oscillation are modified in the
time-dependent background.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures; reference adde
Multi-task Learning of Histology and Molecular Markers for Classifying Diffuse Glioma
Most recently, the pathology diagnosis of cancer is shifting to integrating
molecular makers with histology features. It is a urgent need for digital
pathology methods to effectively integrate molecular markers with histology,
which could lead to more accurate diagnosis in the real world scenarios. This
paper presents a first attempt to jointly predict molecular markers and
histology features and model their interactions for classifying diffuse glioma
bases on whole slide images. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical multi-task
multi-instance learning framework to jointly predict histology and molecular
markers. Moreover, we propose a co-occurrence probability-based label
correction graph network to model the co-occurrence of molecular markers.
Lastly, we design an inter-omic interaction strategy with the dynamical
confidence constraint loss to model the interactions of histology and molecular
markers. Our experiments show that our method outperforms other
state-of-the-art methods in classifying diffuse glioma,as well as related
histology and molecular markers on a multi-institutional dataset
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