Carsten F. Schmidt, Sophie Petzolt, Wolfgang Beinhauer
et al.
The study analyzes the introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot in a non-university research organization using a repeated cross-sectional employee survey. We assess usefulness, ease of use, output quality and reliability, and usefulness for typical knowledge-work activities. Administrative staff report higher usefulness and reliability, whereas scientific staff develop more positive assessments over time, especially regarding productivity and workload reduction. Copilot is widely viewed as user-friendly and technically reliable, with greatest added value for clearly structured, text-based tasks. The findings highlight learning and routinization effects when embedding generative AI into work processes and stress the need for context-sensitive implementation, role-specific training and governance to foster sustainable acceptance of generative AI in knowledge-intensive organizations.
Since the emergence of generative AI, creative workers have spoken up about the career-based harms they have experienced arising from this new technology. A common theme in these accounts of harm is that generative AI models are trained on workers' creative output without their consent and without giving credit or compensation to the original creators. This paper reports findings from 20 interviews with creative workers in three domains: visual art and design, writing, and programming. We investigate the gaps between current AI governance strategies, what creative workers want out of generative AI governance, and the nuanced role of creative workers' consent, compensation and credit for training AI models on their work. Finally, we make recommendations for how generative AI can be governed and how operators of generative AI systems might more ethically train models on creative output in the future.
By decoupling forward and backward stochastic trajectories, we construct a family of martingales and work theorems for both overdamped and underdamped Langevin dynamics. Our results are made possible by an alternative derivation of work theorems that uses tools from stochastic calculus instead of path-integration. We further strengthen the equality in work theorems by evaluating expectations conditioned on an arbitrary initial state value. These generalizations extend the applicability of work theorems and offer new interpretations of entropy production in stochastic systems. Lastly, we discuss the violation of work theorems in far-from-equilibrium systems.
This work introduces an 11-level switched-capacitor multilevel inverter (SCMLI) designed for solar photo-voltaic (PV) applications, capitalizing on the growing popularity of multilevel inverters due to their superior power quality. With a 1.67-times boosting capability, the proposed SCMLI employs 10 switches, 2 DC supplies, and 2 capacitors to achieve an 11-level output voltage waveform. The topology requires only seven driver circuits, incorporating 2 bidirectional switches and 3 complementary pairs of switches. The proposed inverter has intrinsic capacitor self-balancing features since the capacitors are connected across the DC voltage source at different times throughout a basic cycle to charge the capacitors at a level of input voltage. A thorough comparison between the topology and recently developed SCMLI’s has been presented. The comparison demonstrates the effectiveness in terms of switches, capacitors, sources, efficiency, total standing voltage (TSV), and boosting capacity. To experimentally validate its performance, the suggested SCMLI undergoes testing using a frequency-based switching method. The topology exhibits low total harmonic distortion (THD) of 7.65% in its output voltage waveform and 0.89% in the output current waveform.
Tohr Nilsson, Jens Wahlström, Eirik Reierth
et al.
This systematic review covering publications in the Medline and Embase databases for the period 1946 to 2020 revealed a higher prevalence of Dupuytren’s disease among men exposed to vibration compared to men not exposed to vibration. The risk assessment, also considering the risk of bias, corresponded to a roughly doubled risk of Dupuytren’s disease when working with vibrating machines. The supplementary meta-analysis confirmed a more than doubled risk. A possible exposure–response relation was supported by the result from the meta-analysis, which showed a doubled risk for high exposure relative to low exposure.
Prof. K.G Ramanathan was a legendary Indian Mathematician, working in Number Theory and a prolific Institution builder. Apart from this, he was an excellent teacher and influenced several brilliant students. In this article, we overview his life and discuss some of his significant mathematical contributions
The systematic expansion method of the solution of the Fokker-Planck equation is developed by generalizing the formulation proposed in [J. Phys. A50, 325001 (2017)]. Using this method, we obtain a new formula to calculate the mean work perturbatively which is applicable to systems with degeneracy in the eigenvalues of the Fokker-Planck operator. This method enables us to study how the geometrical symmetry affects thermodynamic description of a Brownian particle. To illustrate the application of the derived theory, we consider the Fokker-Planck equation with a two-dimensional harmonic potential. To investigate the effect of symmetry of the potential, we study thermodynamic properties in symmetric and asymmetric deformation processes of the potential: the rotational symmetry of the harmonic potential is held in the former, but it is broken in the latter. Optimized deformations in these processes are defined by minimizing mean works. Comparing these optimized processes, we find that the difference between the symmetric and asymmetric processes is maximized when the deformation time of the potential is given by a critical time which is characterized by the relaxation time of the Fokker-Planck equation. This critical time in the mean work is smaller than that of the change of the mean energy because of the hysteresis effect in the irreversible processes.
The characterization of open quantum systems is a central and recurring problem for the development of quantum technologies. For time-independent systems, an (often unique) steady state describes the average physics once all the transient processes have faded out, but interesting quantum properties can emerge at intermediate timescales. Given a Lindblad master equation, these properties are encoded in the spectrum of the Liouvillian whose diagonalization, however, is a challenge even for small-size quantum systems. Here, we propose a new method to efficiently provide the Liouvillian spectral decomposition. We call this method an Arnoldi-Lindblad time evolution, because it exploits the algebraic properties of the Liouvillian superoperator to efficiently construct a basis for the Arnoldi iteration problem. The advantage of our method is double: (i) It provides a faster-than-the-clock method to efficiently obtain the steady state, meaning that it produces the steady state through time evolution shorter than needed for the system to reach stationarity. (ii) It retrieves the low-lying spectral properties of the Liouvillian with a minimal overhead, allowing to determine both which quantum properties emerge and for how long they can be observed in a system. This method is $\textit{general and model-independent}$, and lends itself to the study of large systems where the determination of the Liouvillian spectrum can be numerically demanding but the time evolution of the density matrix is still doable. Our results can be extended to time evolution with a time-dependent Liouvillian. In particular, our method works for Floquet (i.e., periodically driven) systems, where it allows not only to construct the Floquet map for the slow-decaying processes, but also to retrieve the stroboscopic steady state and the eigenspectrum of the Floquet map. Although the method can be applied to any Lindbladian evolution (spin, fermions, bosons, …), for the sake of simplicity we demonstrate the efficiency of our method on several examples of coupled bosonic resonators (as a particular example). Our method outperforms other diagonalization techniques and retrieves the Liouvillian low-lying spectrum even for system sizes for which it would be impossible to perform exact diagonalization.
El desarrollo de la investigación desde contextos universitarios angolanos ha sido intencionado paulatinamente, para lo cual existen diversos pronunciamientos ministeriales. No obstante las investigaciones generadas desde contextos universitarios angolanos, precisan perfeccionar su dinámica. Esa problemática estimuló una indagación a partir del siguiente objetivo: analizar el basamento legal angolano en relación al desarrollo de la investigación y su implementación en contextos universitarios entre 2005 y 2020. Este estudio fue desarrollado mediante métodos analítico-hermenéuticos, aplicados en revisiones documentales de documentos legales tales como: estrategias, programas, reglamentos, decretos, estatutos, artículos y libros; a partir de criterios relacionados con los aspectos estratégicos, operativos y de estructura organizacional-funcional, lo cual permitió estudiar políticas educativas, normativas institucionales y procesos universitarios. Los principales referentes teóricos fueron: Fuentes (2004), Tobón (2005), Gungula; Castillero; Mendes (2017); Gungula; Suárez; Artigas (2020) y Gungula; Artigas; Faustino (2020); quienes abordaron diversos enfoques epistemológicos relacionados con el desarrollo de la investigación. Los resultados alcanzados indican la existencia de intenciones ministeriales hacia el desarrollo de la investigación, posibilitando la creación de infraestructuras y procesos investigativos; no obstante persisten las dificultades al planificar, organizar, ejecutar, controlar y evaluar las investigaciones, donde se hace necesaria la sistematización de las competencias investigativas en los profesores, que le permitan desarrollar dinámicamente las investigaciones.
Both Stefan-Boltzmann law and the Casimir effect, in a universe described by the FRW metric with zero curvature, are calculated. These effects are described by Thermo Field Dynamics (TFD). The gravitational energy-momentum tensor is defined in the context of Teleparallel Equivalent to General Relativity (TEGR). Each of the two effects gives a consistent prediction with what is observed on a cosmological scale. One of the effect establishes a minimum range for the deceleration parameter. While another leads to the conclusion that a possible cosmological constant has a very small order of magnitude.
Ruggero Amaduzzi, Ruggero Amaduzzi, Marco Ferrarotti
et al.
In this present work, simulations of 20 kW furnace were carried out with hydrogen-enriched methane mixtures, to identify optimal geometrical configurations and operating conditions to operate in flameless combustion regime. The objective of this work is to show the advantages of flameless combustion for hydrogen-enriched fuels and the limits of current typical industrial designs for these mixtures. The performances of a semi-industrial combustion chamber equipped with a self-recuperative flameless burner are evaluated with increasing H2 concentrations. For highly H2-enriched mixtures, typical burners employed for methane appear to be inadequate to reach flameless conditions. In particular, for a typical coaxial injector configuration, an equimolar mixture of hydrogen and methane represents the limit for hydrogen enrichment. To achieve flameless conditions, different injector geometries and configuration were tested. Fuel dilution with CO2 and H2O was also investigated. Dilution slows the mixing process, consequently helping the transition to flameless conditions. CO2, and H2O are typical products of hydrogen generation processes, therefore their use in fuel dilution is convenient for industrial applications. Dilution thus allows the use of greater hydrogen percentages in the mixture.
The article analyzes the Caucasian direction of the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the post-Soviet period; the study reveals the problems faced by the country's leadership in the course of its implementation. Tehran's high interest in strengthening Iranian influence in the South Caucasus after the collapse of the USSR and the weakening of Russia's positions in the region is revealed. The sharp rivalry between Iran and Turkey for the predominant influence in the South Caucasus and the strengthening of its political and economic positions in the region are shown. The author analyzes the actions of the Iranian leadership during the armed conlict in Nagorno-Karabakh and notes the concern over the possible expansion of the conflict and the involvement of the Azerbaijani ethnic minority living in the north-west of Iran. The role of the "Azerbaijani factor" in Iran's policy in the South Caucasus is revealed; the reasons for the complex relations of the Islamic Republic with Azerbaijan, on the one hand, and its high interest in establishing close ties with Armenia, on the other hand, are given. The impact of various factors on the ambivalent position of the Iranian leadership on the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conlict is analyzed. The necessity of making qualitative changes in Iran's foreign policy in the South Caucasus direction, giving its policy in the region a more balanced character is proved. At the same time, it is emphasized that the balanced foreign policy of the Iranian leadership was in the interests of the national security of the country, focused on reducing the overall level of tension in the South Caucasus region.
Law, History of scholarship and learning. The humanities
Roman Korolev, Francisco S. N. Lobo, Sergey V. Sushkov
In this work, we consider the full Horndeski Lagrangian applied to wormhole geometries and present the full gravitational field equations. We analyse the general constraints imposed by the flaring-out conditions at the wormhole throat and consider a plethora of specific subclasses of the Horndeski Lagrangian, namely, quintessence/phantom fields, $k$-essence, scalar-tensor theories, covariant galileons, nonminimal kinetic coupling, kinetic gravity braiding, and the scalar-tensor representation of Gauss-Bonnet couplings, amongst others. The generic constraints analysed in this work serve as a consistency check of the main solutions obtained in the literature and draws out new avenues of research in considering applications of specific subclasses of the Horndeski theory to wormhole physics.
Cristian Homar Blacio-Aguilar, Cecilia Ivonne Narváez-Zurita, Juan Carlos Erazo-Álvarez
This research aims to design a guide of accounting procedures for the soccer players’ recognition and measurement in sport clubs in Ecuador. To achieve this, a qualitative approach of inquiry has been used; as well as an interview with the Cuenca sport Club and a document review form that have contributed significantly to this work and its proposal. The results of the investigation indicate that the clubs do not reflect their intangible assets in their financial statements. Based on international methodologies and guidelines of IFRS 38, a guide has been established for the accounting treatment of soccer players in their recognition and measurement stages. The first step would be the revaluation of their current workforce followed by all the processes established in this work to achieve the transparency, reasonableness and comparability which are essential characteristics in accounting.
The subject of the research presented here is the language and content of the definitional terms,
categories and concepts relating to museum education in the historiography of the topic. The article is
a review that provides an analysis of selected papers on museum education, surveying the categories,
terminology and definitions proposed by Polish, Ukrainian and Russian researchers. The study also
involved looking at museum websites to review the descriptive terms, concepts and categories used in
the sections relating to the museums’ educational activities. Finally, against this background the authors
present their own approaches and definitions relating to museum education. The work is partly a result
of the experience of the authors’ own common educational practice and investigations. The cultural
contexts of museum education are significant and influential in the quality of the services provided
in each of the surveyed countries and museums. The generalisations presented are appropriate to the
specific contexts of the research reports and educational projects quoted.
The mission of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is to coordinate and unify the petroleum policies of its Member Countries and ensure the stabilization of oil markets in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers and a fair return on capital for those investing in the petroleum industry. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is a permanent, intergovernmental Organization, created at the Baghdad Conference on
September 10–14, 1960, by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. OPEC's objective is to co-ordinate and unify petroleum policies among Member Countries, in order to secure fair and stable prices for petroleum producers; an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consuming nations; and a fair return on capital to those investing in the industry.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities
The rate of early marriage is 87% in northwest Nigeria, although it is 56% in Kaduna. One major issue is that early marriage is often rationalized as a religious norm. This study explores the role of faith leaders in advancing the cause of adolescent girls regarding the timing of marriage in Kaduna state. This qualitative study took place in three local government areas: Chikun (Mixed Christians and Muslims), Makarfi (majority Muslims), and Zangon-Kataf (majority Christians) were purposively selected to have a variety of mixed religious contexts. Using purposive sampling methods, the researcher conducted 24 focus group discussions with adolescent girls, 24 in-depth interviews with faith leaders, and 12 key informant interviews with other stakeholders. The study used a framework method for analyzing qualitative data. The study found that faith leaders play essential roles in rationalizing or discouraging early marriage through preaching and other activities. The study identifies three categories of faith leaders concerning early marriage. Some are proactive, discoursing about it. The second category is the passive faith leaders, somehow indifferent but has never preached against or in favor of early marriage. The last set consists of faith leaders promoting early marriage—who think early marriage is still beneficial. The study recommends that considering the social position of faith leaders and critical role in sanctioning marital unions, they could be considered as a vital link in efforts to curtail early marriage.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social Sciences