Decomposition of the efficiency of the Chinese state-owned commercial banks at the provincial level

This study adopts a bank production function approach to the measurement of banking efficiency at the provincial level in the Chinese state-owned commercial banking sector from 1998 to 2003. Applying Data Envelopment Analysis and efficiency decomposition analysis, this paper has revealed a significant level of pure technical input inefficiency and, to a lesser extent, scale inefficiency across the provincial branches of all the banking groups. The study has also uncovered the extent of inefficiency in individual banking inputs and provincial branches. Finally, the provincial-level efficiency is further decomposed into within-banking-group and between-banking-group effects

Acylsulfonamide safety-catch linker : promise and limitations for solid-phase oligosaccharide synthesis

Safety-catch linkers are useful for solid-phase oligosaccharide synthesis as they are orthogonal to many common protective groups. A new acylsulfonamide safety-catch linker was designed, synthesized and employed during glycosylations using an automated carbohydrate synthesizer. The analysis of the cleavage products revealed shortcomings for oligosaccharide synthesis

Reliability study of refractory gate gallium arsenide MESFETS

Refractory gate MESFET's were fabricated as an alternative to aluminum gate devices, which have been found to be unreliable as RF power amplifiers. In order to determine the reliability of the new structures, statistics of failure and information about mechanisms of failure in refractory gate MESFET's are given. Test transistors were stressed under conditions of high temperature and forward gate current to enhance failure. Results of work at 150 C and 275 C are reported

Incentivizing High Quality Crowdwork

We study the causal effects of financial incentives on the quality of crowdwork. We focus on performance-based payments (PBPs), bonus payments awarded to workers for producing high quality work. We design and run randomized behavioral experiments on the popular crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk with the goal of understanding when, where, and why PBPs help, identifying properties of the payment, payment structure, and the task itself that make them most effective. We provide examples of tasks for which PBPs do improve quality. For such tasks, the effectiveness of PBPs is not too sensitive to the threshold for quality required to receive the bonus, while the magnitude of the bonus must be large enough to make the reward salient. We also present examples of tasks for which PBPs do not improve quality. Our results suggest that for PBPs to improve quality, the task must be effort-responsive: the task must allow workers to produce higher quality work by exerting more effort. We also give a simple method to determine if a task is effort-responsive a priori. Furthermore, our experiments suggest that all payments on Mechanical Turk are, to some degree, implicitly performance-based in that workers believe their work may be rejected if their performance is sufficiently poor. Finally, we propose a new model of worker behavior that extends the standard principal-agent model from economics to include a worker's subjective beliefs about his likelihood of being paid, and show that the predictions of this model are in line with our experimental findings. This model may be useful as a foundation for theoretical studies of incentives in crowdsourcing markets.Comment: This is a preprint of an Article accepted for publication in WWW \c{opyright} 2015 International World Wide Web Conference Committe

Observation of giant positive magnetoresistance in a Cooper pair insulator.

Ultrathin amorphous Bi films, patterned with a nanohoneycomb array of holes, can exhibit an insulating phase with transport dominated by the incoherent motion of Cooper pairs (CP) of electrons between localized states. Here, we show that the magnetoresistance (MR) of this Cooper pair insulator (CPI) phase is positive and grows exponentially with decreasing temperature T, for T well below the pair formation temperature. It peaks at a field estimated to be sufficient to break the pairs and then decreases monotonically into a regime in which the film resistance assumes the T dependence appropriate for weakly localized single electron transport. We discuss how these results support proposals that the large MR peaks in other unpatterned, ultrathin film systems disclose a CPI phase and provide new insight into the CP localization

Superfluid phases of fermions with hybridized ss and pp orbitals

We explore the superfluid phases of a two-component Fermi mixture with hybridized orbitals in optical lattices. We show that there exists a general mapping of this system to the Lieb lattice. By using simple multiband models with hopping between $s$ and $p$-orbital states, we show that superfluid order parameters can have a $\pi$-phase difference between lattice sites, which is distinct from the case with hopping between $s$-orbitals. If the population imbalance between the two spin species is tuned, the superfluid phase may evolve through various phases due to the interplay between hopping, interactions and imbalance. We show that the rich behavior is observable in experimentally realizable systems.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures. Published versio