The Influence of Social Networking Technology in an Engineering Organization

Computer facilitated Social Networking (SN) is becoming more prevalent in our society, both in our personal and professional lives. As its use grows, there is a desire to determine how it will impact an organization. If it can positively impact an organization then it is an initiative that could be embraced and leveraged for any number of business related activities from marketing to engineering. This project develops and implements a social networking treatment for an engineering organization in order to determine how it impacts the responsiveness and performance of the organization. The treatment includes an online tool, a training package, and organizational support throughout the study. The analysis of the data showed that, within the scope of this study, when an organization is provided with a social networking program and associated training and resource allocation there is no apparent impact on the organization. The tool was not used enough to itself have a significant impact on the organization however, subtle changes in the organization as a result of the overall treatment process are noticeable. Some factors that may have impacted the results were a lack of usefulness of the SN tool, the adequacy of the training was insufficient, and participants didn\u27t see the instilled benefit in using the SN tool. This paper presents the methodology, results, conclusions, and courses of action for follow up research

Economic Problems of Florida Governors, 1700-1763

Many problems plagued the eighteenth-century Florida governor, but none vexed him more than the economic plight of his settlement. Florida was a poverty-stricken military outpost of the Spanish Empire on the northeastern fringe of New Spain. It was unable to sustain itself with mining or agricultural enterprises and was wholly dependent upon outside aid for its existence. Want, misery, and destitution were the lot of the soldiers and their families living in this unpopular community. Securing money and supplies for them was the governor’s greatest single responsibility; no colonial question received his more devoted attention

Modern techniques and applications for (imaginary-)time evolution of quantum spin systems

Causality is at the core of physics, with any physical phenomena boiling down to a sequence of states related by causality. If the sequence is repeating itself, it is in equilibrium, whereas a changing sequence indicates a dynamical non-equilibrium process, where a state is being reconfigured according to the forces that act on it. In the context of quantum many-body physics, we consider quantum particles that exert forces on each other, such that initializing the particles in a particular state and then leaving them to themselves can result in a complex dynamical process. This induces a notion of time, which is elegantly captured by the Hamiltonian formulation of mechanics. Here, a recipe for the time evolution of a state follows immediately from the interactions of the particles. All potential sequences of states that can be generated by the interactions can be encoded into a fundamental object: The time-evolution operator. It maps any state to a time-evolved state, making it the starting point for any simulation algorithm. On a classical computer, the simulation of quantum many-body systems is inherently limited, with many interesting phenomena out of reach. Nonetheless, by approximating the time-evolution operator we can still consider particular cases in great detail. Alternatively, we could use a quantum computer, where quantum time evolution is performed naturally. Also here, controlled approximations of the time-evolution operator are crucial. But this technology is still in an early stage of development, leaving many areas where classical simulation methods are still unrivaled. In this thesis we will explore various approximation schemes for the time-evolution operator, with applications that range from the finite-temperature equilibrium physics of large experimentally-realizable magnets, to the zero-temperature non-equilibrium physics of small quantum computers. Along the way, we will naturally be driven to test the limits of the approximations. We want to know: How high can we get the accuracy for a fixed number of computational resources? We will use numerical optimization to determine approximations with higher accuracy than any known analytical approximation. This is of utmost concern for modern-day quantum computers, as well as modern classical algorithms that deal with highly-entangled states. Each chapter is focused on a specific aspect of time evolution, where the machinery is developed and a survey is made of its applications. Each chapter apart from the introduction is furthermore accompanied by one or two published articles, where the subject matter is further developed in novel ways and applied to the simulation of condensed-matter systems

Influence of Gibberellic Acid and Indole-3-Acetic Acid on the Morphology and Population Dynamics of Eudorina elegans

Assuming optical density to be a function of population density, colorimetric techniques were used to determine the effects of two growth regulator substances, indole-3-acetic acid and gibberellic acid, on the morphology and population dynamics of Eudorina elegans. A tube of culture medium without organisms was used as a reference point to calibrate the colorimeter. Chemically-treated cultures and soil-water control cultures were compared to the reference reading and growth curves were plotted. Colony counts were made at the termination of the experiment and comparisons were made with the colorimeter readings. Results demonstrated gibberellic acid to be a promoter of cell division and/or growth in concentrations below 75 ppm and to be inhibitory at concentrations of 75 ppm and above. Indole-3-acetic acid produced little effect on populations at low concentrations and was strongly inhibitory above concentrations of 5 ppm

Reviews - Vistas of Science Books

The National Science Teachers Association has conceived and developed the Vistas of Science series. In so doing, NSTA advances its own central purpose: improvement of the teaching of science. In addition, Vistas books provide scientific background for those who would be well-informed, responsible citizens

Optimal compression of constrained quantum time evolution

The time evolution of quantum many-body systems is one of the most promising applications for near-term quantum computers. However, the utility of current quantum devices is strongly hampered by the proliferation of hardware errors. The minimization of the circuit depth for a given quantum algorithm is therefore highly desirable, since shallow circuits generally are less vulnerable to decoherence. Recently, it was shown that variational circuits are a promising approach to outperform current state-of-the-art methods such as Trotter decomposition, although the optimal choice of parameters is a computationally demanding task. In this work, we demonstrate a simplification of the variational optimization of circuits implementing the time evolution operator of local Hamiltonians by directly encoding constraints of the physical system under consideration. We study the expressibility of such constrained variational circuits for different models and constraints. Our results show that the encoding of constraints allows a reduction of optimization cost by more than one order of magnitude and scalability to arbitrary large system sizes, without loosing accuracy in most systems. Furthermore, we discuss the exceptions in locally-constrained systems and provide an explanation by means of an restricted lightcone width after incorporating the constraints into the circuits.Comment: 16 pages, 17 figure

Review - Laboratory Manual, Basic Life Science

High schools and colleges alike are challenged again to review course content in Life Sciences in light of this forward looking science course at the junior high school level. This manual synthesizes traditional and experimental life science activities into 31 functional laboratory activities