Relevant economic issues concerning the optimal rate of inflation

JEL Classification: D60, E31, E41, E61, H21deflation, downward nominal rigidities, inflation costs and benefits, inflation differentials, price stability

X-PARADE: Cross-Lingual Textual Entailment and Information Divergence across Paragraphs

Understanding when two pieces of text convey the same information is a goal touching many subproblems in NLP, including textual entailment and fact-checking. This problem becomes more complex when those two pieces of text are in different languages. Here, we introduce X-PARADE (Cross-lingual Paragraph-level Analysis of Divergences and Entailments), the first cross-lingual dataset of paragraph-level information divergences. Annotators label a paragraph in a target language at the span level and evaluate it with respect to a corresponding paragraph in a source language, indicating whether a given piece of information is the same, new, or new but can be inferred. This last notion establishes a link with cross-language NLI. Aligned paragraphs are sourced from Wikipedia pages in different languages, reflecting real information divergences observed in the wild. Armed with our dataset, we investigate a diverse set of approaches for this problem, including classic token alignment from machine translation, textual entailment methods that localize their decisions, and prompting of large language models. Our results show that these methods vary in their capability to handle inferable information, but they all fall short of human performance

Propuesta de mejora en el área de calidad basada en la norma ISO 9001:2015 para aumentar la rentabilidad de la ferretería Dino Alca E.I.R.L

RESUMEN El presente trabajo tuvo como objetivo general determinar cómo influye la propuesta de Propuesta de mejora en el área de Calidad basada en la norma ISO 9001:2015 para aumentar la rentabilidad de la ferretería Dino – Alca E.I.R.L Para iniciar el proyecto se realizó un diagnóstico sobre la situación actual de la empresa, en la cual se seleccionó el área de Calidad; ya que se diagnosticó que era un punto crítico para la empresa, debido a la devolución de productos que estaban quebrados, rotos, húmedos, etc. Luego de realizado de identificar los problemas en la empresa se procedió a redactar el diagnóstico de la empresa, para lo cual se tomaron evidencias para demostrar los expresado anteriormente. De la misma manera se realizaron cálculos de las pérdidas que económicas que generan a la empresa, representando una perdida monetaria de S/. 66 182.80 nuevos soles anuales. El proyecto presenta evidencias del mal servicio ofrecido por la empresa, dando así una propuesta de mejora y su evaluación financiera de la propuesta. La empresa se ve afectada en la rentabilidad por problemas en: Falta de capacitación y experiencia del personal Falta distribución del almacén No existe un Área de Calidad No existe un procedimiento estandarizado de calidad. No existe Control de Calidad en la empresa. No se mide el desempeño de los trabajadores. La propuesta de mejora contiene metodologías y herramientas que permiten controlar los procesos que se deben desarrollar para el servicio con el fin de garantizar que los productos se mantengan y entreguen en óptimas condiciones evitando así defectos en los productos. Logrando así que se obtenga un beneficio anual de S/. 65 794.30 nuevos soles. Finalmente teniendo la información recolectada y analizada de acuerdo al diagnóstico elaborado, se presenta un análisis de los resultados para corroborar con los datos cuantitativos de las evidencias que se presentan y lograr con la propuesta de mejora en Calidad incrementar la rentabilidad de la empresa. Dando como resultado un VAN de S/. 64 091.19, un TIR 72.10%, PRI de 1.58 años y un Beneficio/Costo de 1.39.ABSTRAC The general objective of this paper was to determine how the proposed Improvement Proposal influences in the area of Quality based on the ISO 9001: 2015 standard to increase the profitability of the Dino - Alca E.I.R.L hardware store. To start the project, a diagnosis was made about the current situation of the company, in which the Quality area was selected; since it was diagnosed as a critical point for the company, due to the return of products that were broken, broken, wet, etc. After having identified the problems in the company, the diagnosis of the company was drawn up, for which evidence was taken to demonstrate the above. In the same way calculations were made of the economic losses that they generate to the company, representing a monetary loss of S /. 66 182.80 soles per year. The project presents evidence of the poor service offered by the company, thus giving a proposal for improvement and its financial evaluation of the proposal. The company is affected in profitability due to problems in: • Lack of staff training and experience • Warehouse distribution is missing • There is no Quality Area • There is no standardized quality procedure. • There is no Quality Control in the company. • The performance of workers is not measured. The improvement proposal contains methodologies and tools that allow controlling the processes that must be developed for the service in order to guarantee that the products are maintained and delivered in optimal conditions, thus avoiding defects in the products. Thus achieving an annual benefit of S /. 65 794.30 soles. Finally, having the information collected and analyzed according to the elaborated diagnosis, an analysis of the results is presented to corroborate with the quantitative data of the evidences that are presented and to achieve with the proposal of improvement in Quality to increase the profitability of the company. Resulting in a NPV of S /. 64 091.19, a TIR 72.10%, PRI of 1.58 years and a Benefit / Cost of 1.39

Propuesta de mejora en el área de calidad basada en la norma ISO 9001:2015 para aumentar la rentabilidad de la ferretería Dino Alca E.I.R.L

RESUMEN El presente trabajo tuvo como objetivo general determinar cómo influye la propuesta de Propuesta de mejora en el área de Calidad basada en la norma ISO 9001:2015 para aumentar la rentabilidad de la ferretería Dino – Alca E.I.R.L Para iniciar el proyecto se realizó un diagnóstico sobre la situación actual de la empresa, en la cual se seleccionó el área de Calidad; ya que se diagnosticó que era un punto crítico para la empresa, debido a la devolución de productos que estaban quebrados, rotos, húmedos, etc. Luego de realizado de identificar los problemas en la empresa se procedió a redactar el diagnóstico de la empresa, para lo cual se tomaron evidencias para demostrar los expresado anteriormente. De la misma manera se realizaron cálculos de las pérdidas que económicas que generan a la empresa, representando una perdida monetaria de S/. 66 182.80 nuevos soles anuales. El proyecto presenta evidencias del mal servicio ofrecido por la empresa, dando así una propuesta de mejora y su evaluación financiera de la propuesta. La empresa se ve afectada en la rentabilidad por problemas en: Falta de capacitación y experiencia del personal Falta distribución del almacén No existe un Área de Calidad No existe un procedimiento estandarizado de calidad. No existe Control de Calidad en la empresa. No se mide el desempeño de los trabajadores. La propuesta de mejora contiene metodologías y herramientas que permiten controlar los procesos que se deben desarrollar para el servicio con el fin de garantizar que los productos se mantengan y entreguen en óptimas condiciones evitando así defectos en los productos. Logrando así que se obtenga un beneficio anual de S/. 65 794.30 nuevos soles. Finalmente teniendo la información recolectada y analizada de acuerdo al diagnóstico elaborado, se presenta un análisis de los resultados para corroborar con los datos cuantitativos de las evidencias que se presentan y lograr con la propuesta de mejora en Calidad incrementar la rentabilidad de la empresa. Dando como resultado un VAN de S/. 64 091.19, un TIR 72.10%, PRI de 1.58 años y un Beneficio/Costo de 1.39.ABSTRACT The general objective of this paper was to determine how the proposed Improvement Proposal influences in the area of Quality based on the ISO 9001: 2015 standard to increase the profitability of the Dino - Alca E.I.R.L hardware store. To start the project, a diagnosis was made about the current situation of the company, in which the Quality area was selected; since it was diagnosed as a critical point for the company, due to the return of products that were broken, broken, wet, etc. After having identified the problems in the company, the diagnosis of the company was drawn up, for which evidence was taken to demonstrate the above. In the same way calculations were made of the economic losses that they generate to the company, representing a monetary loss of S /. 66 182.80 soles per year. The project presents evidence of the poor service offered by the company, thus giving a proposal for improvement and its financial evaluation of the proposal. The company is affected in profitability due to problems in: • Lack of staff training and experience • Warehouse distribution is missing • There is no Quality Area • There is no standardized quality procedure. • There is no Quality Control in the company. • The performance of workers is not measured. The improvement proposal contains methodologies and tools that allow controlling the processes that must be developed for the service in order to guarantee that the products are maintained and delivered in optimal conditions, thus avoiding defects in the products. Thus achieving an annual benefit of S /. 65 794.30 soles. Finally, having the information collected and analyzed according to the elaborated diagnosis, an analysis of the results is presented to corroborate with the quantitative data of the evidences that are presented and to achieve with the proposal of improvement in Quality to increase the profitability of the company. Resulting in a NPV of S /. 64 091.19, a TIR 72.10%, PRI of 1.58 years and a Benefit / Cost of 1.39

WiCE: Real-World Entailment for Claims in Wikipedia

Textual entailment models are increasingly applied in settings like fact-checking, presupposition verification in question answering, or summary evaluation. However, these represent a significant domain shift from existing entailment datasets, and models underperform as a result. We propose WiCE, a new fine-grained textual entailment dataset built on natural claim and evidence pairs extracted from Wikipedia. In addition to standard claim-level entailment, WiCE provides entailment judgments over sub-sentence units of the claim, and a minimal subset of evidence sentences that support each subclaim. To support this, we propose an automatic claim decomposition strategy using GPT-3.5 which we show is also effective at improving entailment models' performance on multiple datasets at test time. Finally, we show that real claims in our dataset involve challenging verification and retrieval problems that existing models fail to address.Comment: EMNLP 202

SuperJunction cascode, a configuration to break the silicon switching frequency limit

This paper evaluates the SuperJunction MOSFET in cascode configuration with a low-voltage silicon MOSFET. The structure combines the good switching performance provided by the cascode configuration with advantages of the silicon technology as the robustness, the maturity and the low-cost. The objective of this paper is to elucidate and to demonstrate the reduction of switching losses of SuperJunction MOSFETs in cascode configuration with respect to their standalone counterparts (directly driven). A detailed simulation analysis of power loss contributions is carried out under hard-switching operation. Eventually, experimental evidence is provided by using a boost converter (100 V-to-400 V) in continuous conduction mode for a wide range of switching frequency (100 kHz-to-400 kHz) and output power (180W-to-500W).This work has been supported by the Spanish Government under Project MINECO-13-DPI2013-47176-C2-2-R, MINECO-15-DPI2014-56358-JIN, the scholarship FPU14/03268 and the Principality of Asturias under the grants “Severo Ochoa” BP14-140 and by the Project FC-15- GRUPIN14-143 and by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) grants

Lil-Bevo: Explorations of Strategies for Training Language Models in More Humanlike Ways

We present Lil-Bevo, our submission to the BabyLM Challenge. We pretrained our masked language models with three ingredients: an initial pretraining with music data, training on shorter sequences before training on longer ones, and masking specific tokens to target some of the BLiMP subtasks. Overall, our baseline models performed above chance, but far below the performance levels of larger LLMs trained on more data. We found that training on short sequences performed better than training on longer sequences.Pretraining on music may help performance marginally, but, if so, the effect seems small. Our targeted Masked Language Modeling augmentation did not seem to improve model performance in general, but did seem to help on some of the specific BLiMP tasks that we were targeting (e.g., Negative Polarity Items). Training performant LLMs on small amounts of data is a difficult but potentially informative task. While some of our techniques showed some promise, more work is needed to explore whether they can improve performance more than the modest gains here. Our code is available at https://github.com/venkatasg/Lil-Bevo and out models at https://huggingface.co/collections/venkatasg/babylm-653591cdb66f4bf68922873aComment: Proceedings of the BabyLM Challeng

Fecal sacs attract insects to the nest and provoke an activation of the immune system of nestlings

Background: Nest sanitation is a widespread but rarely studied behavior in birds. The most common form of nest sanitation behavior, the removal of nestling feces, has focused the discussion about which selective pressures determine this behavior. The parasitism hypothesis, which states that nestling fecal sacs attract parasites that negatively affect breeding birds, was proposed 40 years ago and is frequently cited as a demonstrated fact. But, to our knowledge, there is no previous experimental test of this hypothesis. Results: We carried out three different experiments to investigate the parasitism hypothesis. First, we used commercial McPhail traps to test for the potential attraction effect of nestling feces alone on flying insects. We found that traps with fecal sacs attracted significantly more flies (Order Diptera), but not ectoparasites, than the two control situations. Second, we used artificial blackbird (Turdus merula) nests to investigate the combined attraction effect of feces and nest materials on arthropods (not only flying insects). Flies, again, were the only group of arthropods significantly attracted by fecal sacs. We did not detect an effect on ectoparasites. Third, we used active blackbird nests to investigate the potential effect of nestling feces in ecto- and endoparasite loads in real nestlings. The presence of fecal sacs near blackbird nestlings did not increase the number of louse flies or chewing lice, and unexpectedly reduced the number of nests infested with mites. The endoparasite prevalence was also not affected. In contrast, feces provoked an activation of the immune system as the H/L ratio of nestlings living near excrements was significantly higher than those kept under the two control treatments. Conclusions: Surprisingly, our findings do not support the parasitism hypothesis, which suggests that parasites are not the main reason for fecal sac removal. In contrast, the attraction of flies to nestling feces, the elevation of the immune response of chicks, and the recently described antimicrobial function of the mucous covering of fecal sacs suggest that microorganisms could be responsible of this important form of parental care behavior (microbial hypothesisPeer reviewe