One Arizona: Evaluation Executive Brief

At a time when an extraordinary rhetoric of hate and intolerance defines our political climate, a narrative of fear towards newcomers threatens to divide us, and the Supreme Court is deadlocked on moving forward President Obama's Executive Actions on immigration, we are deeply moved and lifted up by the story of One Arizona. This is a story of a standout coalition of community partners that is transforming Arizona into a model for Latino civic engagement and political empowerment. Against the heated debate of building more walls along the southern border, One Arizona is a bright light and a reason for hope

Relocating empowerment as a management concept for Asia

Management theories, especially those in the area of human resource management, are predominantly Western-centric in origin and in the empirical testing that underpins them. The purpose of this paper is to explore perceptions of one such theory, employee empowerment, in an Asian context. Information gathered from an open ended questionnaire and focus groups provide an in-depth examination of hotel managers' perceptions and practice of empowerment in the workplace. This study provides tentative indicators of significant culturally-driven differences in the understanding and application of employee empowerment (in terms of both research and practice) between Western and Asian contexts. The results of this study indicate that empowerment in Asian cultures relates much more to the individual and his/her merits, in contrast to organizationally-driven empowerment in Western countries. The findings also indicate that empowerment by hotel managers is related to the level of personal trust the manager has in an employee

Modeling and measurement of a micro-optic beam deflector

The use is studied of a unity-magnification micro-optic beam deflector. The defelector consists of two arrays of positively powered lenslets. The lenslets on each array are arranged in a square grid. Design criteria are based on usefulness in optical data storage devices. The deflector is designed to operate over a + or - 1.6 range of deflection angles. Modeling results are compared with interferometric analysis of the wavefront from a single lenslet pair. The results indicate that the device is nearly diffraction limited, but there are substantial wavefront errors at the edges and corners of the lenslets

Immigration reform is far from a done deal in 2014

Last June, the U.S. Senate passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, a bill which included a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, however, has refused to take the bill to the floor of the House, instead advocating a more ‘step-by-step’ approach to immigration reform. Tom K Wong looks at the potential for reform in 2014, saying that much depends on how the House looks after the mid-term elections in November, and on the on the efforts of reform advocates who are working outside of the realm of D.C.-based politics

Egocentric Perception using a Biologically Inspired Software Retina Integrated with a Deep CNN

We presented the concept of of a software retina, capable of significant visual data reduction in combination with scale and rotation invariance, for applications in egocentric and robot vision at the first EPIC workshop in Amsterdam [9]. Our method is based on the mammalian retino-cortical transform: a mapping between a pseudo-randomly tessellated retina model (used to sample an input image) and a CNN. The aim of this first pilot study is to demonstrate a functional retina-integrated CNN implementation and this produced the following results: a network using the full retino-cortical transform yielded an F1 score of 0.80 on a test set during a 4-way classification task, while an identical network not using the proposed method yielded an F1 score of 0.86 on the same task. On a 40K node retina the method reduced the visual data bye×7, the input data to the CNN by 40% and the number of CNN training epochs by 36%. These results demonstrate the viability of our method and hint at the potential of exploiting functional traits of natural vision systems in CNNs. In addition, to the above study, we present further recent developments in porting the retina to an Apple iPhone, an implementation in CUDA C for NVIDIA GPU platforms and extensions of the retina model we have adopted

Robust cryogenic ab-initio quantum transport simulation for L\u3csub\u3eG\u3c/sub\u3e = 10 nm nanowire

In this paper, we propose a simulation methodology for robust and accurate ab-initio quantum transport simulation down to 3 K of an n-type Si nanowire. This is important to understand the subthreshold swing (SS) at cryogenic temperature. We show that for LG = 10 nm, the SS is fully dominated by direct tunneling at cryogenic temperature, which is the first time to be demonstrated using ab-initio simulation, to the best of our knowledge. We propose a method to achieve more than 2x speed up in the simulation time and achieve convergence at high gate biases. It is also shown that from the leakage perspective, there is no advantage in operating LG = 10 nm transistor below 77 K

Precise LIGO Lensing Rate Predictions for Binary Black Holes

We show how LIGO is expected to detect coalescing binary black holes at $z>1$, that are lensed by the intervening galaxy population. Gravitational magnification, $\mu$, strengthens gravitational wave signals by $\sqrt{\mu}$, without altering their frequencies, which if unrecognised leads to an underestimate of the event redshift and hence an overestimate of the binary mass. High magnifications can be reached for coalescing binaries because the region of intense gravitational wave emission during coalescence is so small ($\sim$100km), permitting very close projections between lensing caustics and gravitational-wave events. Our simulations incorporate accurate waveforms convolved with the LIGO power spectral density. Importantly, we include the detection dependence on sky position and orbital orientation, which for the LIGO configuration translates into a wide spread in observed redshifts and chirp masses. Currently we estimate a detectable rate of lensed events \rateEarly{}, that rises to \rateDesign{}, at LIGO's design sensitivity limit, depending on the high redshift rate of black hole coalescence.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure