During the last four decades, digital technologies have disrupted many industries. Car control systems have gone from mechanical to digital. Telephones have changed from sound boxes to portable computers. But have the firms that digitized their products and services become more valuable than firms that didn’t? Here we introduce the construct of digital proximity, which considers the interdependent activities of firms linked in an economic network. We then explore how the digitization of products and services affects a company’s Tobin’s q—the ratio of market value over assets—a measure of the intangible value of a firm. Our panel regression methods and robustness tests suggest the positive influence of a firm’s digital proximity on its Tobin’s q. This implies that firms able to come closer to the digital sector have increased their intangible value compared to those that have failed to do so. These findings contribute a new way of measuring digitization and its impact on firm performance that is complementary to traditional measures of information technology (IT) intensity.
D. Vernooy, Vladimir S. Ilchenko, H. Mabuchi
et al.
Measurements of the quality factor Q approximately 8x10(9) are reported for the whispering-gallery modes (WGM's) of quartz microspheres for the wavelengths 670, 780, and 850 nm; these results correspond to finesse f approximately 2.2x10(6) . The observed independence of Q from wavelength indicates that losses for the WGM's are dominated by a mechanism other than bulk absorption in fused silica in the near infrared. Data obtained by atomic force microscopy combined with a simple model for surface scattering suggest that Q can be limited by residual surface inhomogeneities. Absorption by absorbed water can also explain why the material limit is not reached at longer wavelengths in the near infrared.
Using a photoalignment technique with a sulphonic azo-dye as the surfactant aligning material, we fabricated electrically tunable liquid crystal q-plates with topological charge 0.5, 1.5 and 3 for generating optical vortex beams with definite orbital angular momentum (OAM) 1,3 and 6 per photon (in units of ¯h), respectively. We carried out several tests on our q-plates, including OAM tomography, finding excellent performances. These devices can have useful applications in general and quantum optics.
In clinical practice, physicians make a series of treatment decisions over the course of a patient's disease based on his/her baseline and evolving characteristics. A dynamic treatment regime is a set of sequential decision rules that operationalizes this process. Each rule corresponds to a decision point and dictates the next treatment action based on the accrued information. Using existing data, a key goal is estimating the optimal regime, that, if followed by the patient population, would yield the most favorable outcome on average. Q- and A-learning are two main approaches for this purpose. We provide a detailed account of these methods, study their performance, and illustrate them using data from a depression study.
For H. Exton's q-analogue of the Bessel function (going back to W. Hahn in a special case, but different from F. H. Jackson's q-Bessel functions) we derive Hansen-Lommel type orthogonality relations, which, by a symmetry, turn out to be equivalent to orthogonality relations which are q-analogues of the Hankel integral transform pair. These results are implicit, in the context of quantum groups, in a paper by Vaksman and Korogodskii. As a specialization we get q-cosines and q-sines which admit q-analogues of the Fourier-cosine and Fourier-sine transforms
In this paper we study the theory Q. We prove a basic result that says that, in a sense explained in the paper, Q can be split into two parts. We prove some consequences of this result. (i) Q is not a poly-pair theory. This means that, in a strong sense, pairing cannot be defined in Q. (ii) Q does not have the Pudlák Property. This means that there two interpretations of $$\mathsf{S}^1_2$$S21 in Q which do not have a definably isomorphic cut. (iii) Q is not sententially equivalent with $$\mathsf{PA}^-$$PA-. This tells us that we cannot do much better than mutual faithful interpretability as a measure of sameness of Q and $$\mathsf{PA}^-$$PA-. We briefly consider the idea of characterizing Q as the minimal-in-some-sense theory of some kind modulo some equivalence relation. We show that at least one possible road towards this aim is closed.
Q fever is an ubiquitous zoonosis caused by an resistant intracellular bacterium, Coxiella burnetii. In certain areas, Q fever can be a severe public health problem, and awareness of the disease must be promoted worldwide. Nevertheless, knowledge of Coxiella burnetii remains limited to this day. Its resistant (intracellular and environmental) and infectious properties have been poorly investigated. Further understanding of the interactions between the infected host and the bacteria is necessary. Domestic ruminants are considered as the main reservoir of bacteria. Infected animals shed highly infectious organisms in milk, feces, urine, vaginal mucus, and, very importantly, birth products. Inhalation is the main route of infection. Frequently asymptomatic in humans and animals, Q fever can cause acute or chronic infections. Financial consequences of infection can be dramatic at herd level. Vaccination with inactive whole-cell bacteria has been performed and proved effective in humans and animals. However, inactive whole-cell vaccines present several defects. Recombinant vaccines have been developed in experimental conditions and have great potential for the future. Q fever is a challenging disease for scientists as significant further investigations are necessary. Great research opportunities are available to reach a better understanding and thus a better prevention and control of the infection.
Optical microresonators hold great potential for many fields of research and technology. However, due to their small dimensions typical microresonators exhibit a large frequency spacing between resonances and a limited tunability. This impedes their use in a large class of applications which either require a resonance of the microcavity to coincide with a predetermined frequency, e.g., an optical transition in atoms, or a tailored frequency spacing between resonances, e.g., for the generation of optical frequency combs. Here, we present a fully tunable ultra-high-Q whispering-gallery-mode “bottle microresonator”, fabricated from standard optical glass fibres. Due to its highly prolate shape, the bottle microresonator gives rise to a class of whispering-gallery-modes (WGMs) with advantageous properties, see Fig. 1. In addition to the radial confinement by continuous total internal reflection at the resonator surface, the light in these “bottle modes” oscillates back and forth along the resonator axis between two turning-points which are defined by an angular momentum barrier [1]. The resulting axial standing wave structure can be compared to the one observed in Fabry-Pérot microresonators.