14,952 research outputs found
Motivations for choosing librarianship as a second career among students at the University of British Columbia and the University of Hong Kong
The pathway to a career in the Library and Information Science field is rarely straightforward and unidirectional, but is often multi-faceted, with many circuitous detours along the way. There has been an increasing number of second-career in LIS emerging from many other non-LIS-related professions over the years. Many of these newcomers have made significant contributions to the LIS profession as they transfer their years of professional experiences, expertise, knowledge and skills from their former careers into the field. The purpose of this paper is to understand the perceptions and perspectives of the LIS students, and the various factors that influenced these midlife graduate students to consider switching from their current occupations to LIS as a second career.preprin
Why Librarianship? A Comparative Study Between University of Tsukuba, University of Hong Kong, University of British Columbia and Shanghai University
Career decisions are motivated in part by our internal values, but also are influenced strongly by innumerable external forces perceived in the context of our lives. In the research reported here, we explore various social, cultural, economic, and educational factors, as well as personal and professional reasons that influence students in choosing library and information science professions as a career. Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) students from four universities located in four different regions were invited to take part in an online questionnaire survey. The universities were Shanghai University (SHU), the University of British Columbia (UBC), the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and the University of Tsukuba (UT). 175 self-completed questionnaires were collected in total. Survey results indicated that students enrolled in MLIS programmes were predominately female. Differences and similarities were encountered for the different sites. For example HKU and UBC had the largest number of students with graduate-level qualifications prior to entering the MLIS programme and students at HKU and UBC tended to vary widely in terms of their educational and occupational backgrounds. For the majority of the HKU and UBC respondents, the decision to obtain a professional qualification in LIS was driven by the desire to maximize the benefits of a career change or for career advancement, while the majority of respondents at the UT and SHU did not already have a job or much working experience. While the total surveyed populations are small; the study will be of interest and value to LIS educators and administrators responsible for recruiting MLIS graduates and hiring LIS professions.postprin
Ensemble of Hankel Matrices for Face Emotion Recognition
In this paper, a face emotion is considered as the result of the composition
of multiple concurrent signals, each corresponding to the movements of a
specific facial muscle. These concurrent signals are represented by means of a
set of multi-scale appearance features that might be correlated with one or
more concurrent signals. The extraction of these appearance features from a
sequence of face images yields to a set of time series. This paper proposes to
use the dynamics regulating each appearance feature time series to recognize
among different face emotions. To this purpose, an ensemble of Hankel matrices
corresponding to the extracted time series is used for emotion classification
within a framework that combines nearest neighbor and a majority vote schema.
Experimental results on a public available dataset shows that the adopted
representation is promising and yields state-of-the-art accuracy in emotion
classification.Comment: Paper to appear in Proc. of ICIAP 2015. arXiv admin note: text
overlap with arXiv:1506.0500
Nonequilibrium phase transition in the kinetic Ising model: Is transition point the maximum lossy point ?
The nonequilibrium dynamic phase transition, in the kinetic Ising model in
presence of an oscillating magnetic field, has been studied both by Monte Carlo
simulation (in two dimension) and by solving the meanfield dynamical equation
of motion for the average magnetization. The temperature variations of
hysteretic loss (loop area) and the dynamic correlation have been studied near
the transition point. The transition point has been identified as the
minimum-correlation point. The hysteretic loss becomes maximum above the
transition point. An analytical formulation has been developed to analyse the
simulation results. A general relationship among hysteresis loop area, dynamic
order parameter and dynamic correlation has also been developed.Comment: 8 pages Revtex and 4 Postscript figures; To appear in Phys. Rev.
Security Analysis of an Untrusted Source for Quantum Key Distribution: Passive Approach
We present a passive approach to the security analysis of quantum key
distribution (QKD) with an untrusted source. A complete proof of its
unconditional security is also presented. This scheme has significant
advantages in real-life implementations as it does not require fast optical
switching or a quantum random number generator. The essential idea is to use a
beam splitter to split each input pulse. We show that we can characterize the
source using a cross-estimate technique without active routing of each pulse.
We have derived analytical expressions for the passive estimation scheme.
Moreover, using simulations, we have considered four real-life imperfections:
Additional loss introduced by the "plug & play" structure, inefficiency of the
intensity monitor, noise of the intensity monitor, and statistical fluctuation
introduced by finite data size. Our simulation results show that the passive
estimate of an untrusted source remains useful in practice, despite these four
imperfections. Also, we have performed preliminary experiments, confirming the
utility of our proposal in real-life applications. Our proposal makes it
possible to implement the "plug & play" QKD with the security guaranteed, while
keeping the implementation practical.Comment: 35 pages, 19 figures. Published Versio
Overview on the phenomenon of two-qubit entanglement revivals in classical environments
The occurrence of revivals of quantum entanglement between separated open
quantum systems has been shown not only for dissipative non-Markovian quantum
environments but also for classical environments in absence of back-action.
While the phenomenon is well understood in the first case, the possibility to
retrieve entanglement when the composite quantum system is subject to local
classical noise has generated a debate regarding its interpretation. This
dynamical property of open quantum systems assumes an important role in quantum
information theory from both fundamental and practical perspectives. Hybrid
quantum-classical systems are in fact promising candidates to investigate the
interplay among quantum and classical features and to look for possible control
strategies of a quantum system by means of a classical device. Here we present
an overview on this topic, reporting the most recent theoretical and
experimental results about the revivals of entanglement between two qubits
locally interacting with classical environments. We also review and discuss the
interpretations provided so far to explain this phenomenon, suggesting that
they can be cast under a unified viewpoint.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures. Chapter written for the upcoming book "Lectures
on general quantum correlations and their applications
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