Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Determinants of Firm Performance : A Conceptual Analysis

What could be the sources of variation in firm performance have led a number of empirical studies in economics, strategy and corporate finance which investigate the impact of various factors on different measures of firm performance. The objective of this study is to review the factors which are considered as determinants of firm performance in empirical researches of these streams. In addition performances measures are also discussed. This issue is of immense value because resources are limited in supply and stakeholders interests used to be at risk. Optimum utilization of resources and appropriate strategy can make a company outperformer and a country prosperous.
HBTree: an Efficient Index Structure Based on Hybrid DRAM-NVM

Non-volatile Memory (NVM) with extremely high storage performance is the key storage device to build the next generation of storage systems. Various key-value (KV) store index structures have been designed for NVM, but these designs based on single level NVM suffer from significant write consistency overhead. The DRAM-NVM hybrid schemes improve the write performance but at the cost of very long recovery time. In this study, we proposed a novel DRAM-NVM hybrid index structure named HBTree (Hybrid B+ Tree), which not only achieves better basic KV operating performance, but also greatly shorten the reconstruction time. HBTree uses the hot and cold characteristics of data access in actual application scenarios to cache the hot data into DRAM, so that improving the efficiency of KV operation. Meanwhile, it applies logging to ensure the data reliability of the write operations on the cached data. To reduce the system’s failure recovery time, HBTree periodically backs up the index on DRAM to NVM. The experimental results indicate that for basic KV operation, the HBTree is $1.2 \sim 1.7$ times faster than FAST&FAIR and $1.1 \sim 1.8$ times faster than FPTree. Compared to FPTree, the recovery time of the HBTree is reduced by 70%.
In vitro Evaluation of Antioxidant and Anti-sickling properties of Theobroma Cacao (Sterculiaceae) extracts from East and South regions in Cameroon

Background: Sickle cell anaemia (SCA) is a genetic disease associated with increased mortality in Africa. It generates polymerization of haemoglobin, free radicals proliferation and antioxidants deficiencies. SCA management still needs new and safe drugs. The aim of this study is to evaluate the antioxidant and anti-sickling properties of cocoa extracts from two localities of Cameroon. Methods: T. cacao beans were collected in Bertoua and Mbalmayo/Ebolowa. They were dried, ground and then extracted with a mixture of ethanol/water (70/30), pH 3. The antioxidant activity of Mbalmayo/Ebolowa cocoa bean extract (EFCM) and Bertoua cocoa bean extract (EFCB) were determine by measuring some phenolic group content, the DPPH°, NO°, OH° scavenging property and the total antioxidant capacity (FRAP). Moreover, the antisickling and the red blood cells (RBC) stabilization of extracts was performed. Results: EFCM and EFCB extracts showed a high level of total polyphenols, flavonols respectively, an increase ferric ions reducing antioxidant power (FRAP), a strong radical scavenging properties, with IC50s between 4.17 and 6.75 μg/mL. EFCM extract showed a better ability to reduce RBC sickling and to protect the erythrocyte membrane
Mechanical Engineering for Society and Industry

This study aims at discussing several methods to produce aluminum oxide (Al2O3) synthesis methods along with the advantages and disadvantages of each method used. In general, several methods are available: (1) precipitation, (2) combustion, (3) sol-gel, (4) wet chemical, (5) synthesis in supercritical water conditions, (6) microwave, (7) mechanochemical, and (8) hydrolysis, and the most efficient method for synthesizing Al2O3 is precipitation because it is facile and the simplest method (compared to other methods), can be proceeded using inexpensive raw materials, produces less pollution, and has several advantages: high purity product, high thermal stability, nearly homogeneous nanoparticle in size, and control desired particle size. The results of the study help to provide comparisons in producing various Al2O3 synthesis methods.
Performances of electromagnetic finite element simulators in the presence of three-dimensional double-negative scatterers

The effects of the presence of double-negative (DNG) metamaterials on the accuracy of the results computed by finite element simulators are investigated. The performances of the iterative solver usually exploited by the same simulators are analysed, too. The outcome is that finite element simulators could require much finer meshes than usual when DNG metamaterials are involved, especially in regions containing and slightly surrounding the subregions occupied by DNG media. This effect is particularly important when the DNG metamaterials involved have not a very high magnetic or electric loss tangent. The effect on the most popular iterative solver is even more evident.
Genetic diversity, viability and conservation value of the global captive population of the Moroccan Royal lions

This study evaluates the diversity of the so-called ‘Moroccan Royal lions’ using genealogical information. Lions are no longer extant in North Africa, but the previous wild population was an important element of the now-recognised northern subspecies (Panthera leo leo) that ranged across West Africa, North Africa and the Middle East into India. The remaining captive population of ‘Moroccan Royal lions’ seems to be significantly endangered by the loss of diversity due to the effective population size decrease. The pedigree file of this captive lion population consisted of 454 individuals, while the reference population included 98 animals (47 males and 51 females). The completeness of the pedigree data significantly decreased with an increasing number of generations. The highest percentage of pedigree completeness (over 70%) was achieved in the first generation of the reference population. Pedigree-based parameters derived from the common ancestor and gene origin were used to estimate the state of diversity. In the reference population, the average inbreeding coefficient was 2.14%, while the individual increase in inbreeding over generations was 2.31%. Overall, the reference population showed lower average inbreeding and average relatedness compared with the pedigree file. The number of founders (47), the effective number of founders (24) and the effective number of ancestors (22) were estimated in the reference population. The effective population size of 14.02 individuals confirms the critically endangered status of the population and rapid loss of diversity in the future. Thus, continuous monitoring of the genetic diversity of the ‘Moroccan Royal lion’ group is required, especially for long-term conservation management purposes, as it would be an important captive group should further DNA studies establish an affinity to P. leo leo.
Moraxella-dominated pediatric nasopharyngeal microbiota associate with upper respiratory infection and sinusitis

Background Distinct bacterial upper airway microbiota structures have been described in pediatric populations, and relate to risk of respiratory viral infection and, exacerbations of asthma. We hypothesized that distinct nasopharyngeal (NP) microbiota structures exist in pediatric populations, relate to environmental exposures and modify risk of acute sinusitis or upper respiratory infection (URI) in children. Methods Bacterial 16S rRNA profiles from nasopharyngeal swabs (n = 354) collected longitudinally over a one-year period from 58 children, aged four to seven years, were analyzed and correlated with environmental variables, URI, and sinusitis outcomes. Results Variance in nasopharyngeal microbiota composition significantly related to clinical outcomes, participant characteristics and environmental exposures including dominant bacterial genus, season, daycare attendance and tobacco exposure. Four distinct nasopharyngeal microbiota structures (Cluster I-IV) were evident and differed with respect to URI and sinusitis outcomes. These clusters were characteristically either dominated by Moraxella with sparse underlying taxa (Cluster I), comprised of a non-dominated, diverse microbiota (Cluster II), dominated by Alloiococcus/Corynebacterium (Cluster III), or by Haemophilus (Cluster IV). Cluster I was associated with increased risk of URI and sinusitis (RR = 1.18, p = 0.046; RR = 1.25, p = 0.009, respectively) in the population studied. Conclusion In a pediatric population, URI and sinusitis associate with the presence of Moraxella-dominated NP microbiota.
Quantum violations of L u¨ ders bound Leggett–Garg inequalities for non-unitary quantum channel

Leggett Garg inequalities (LGIs) provides an elegant way for probing the incompatibility between the notion of macrorealism and quantum mechanics. For unitary dynamics the optimal quantum violation of a LGI is constrained by the L u¨ ders bound. In this paper, we have studied two formulations of LGIs in three-time LG scenario, viz, the standard LGIs and third-order LGIs both for unbiased and biased measurement settings. We show that if system evolves under non-unitary quantum channel between two measurements, the quantum violations of both forms of LGIs exceed their respective L u¨ ders bounds and can even reach their algebraic maximum in sharp measurement settings. We found that when the measurement is unsharp the quantum violations of both standard and third-order LGIs for non-unitary quantum channel can be obtained for lower value of the unsharpness parameter compared to the unitary dynamics. We critically examined the violation of L u¨ ders bound of LGIs and its relation to the violation of various no-signaling in time conditions, another formalism for testing macrorealism. It is shown that mere violations of no-signaling conditions are not enough to warrant the violation of standard LGIs, an interplay between the violations of various NSIT condition along with a threshold value play an important role. On the other hand violation of third-order LGI is obtained when the degree of violation of a specific no-signaling in time condition reaches a different threshold value.
Onsite Non-Line-of-Sight Imaging via Online Calibrations

There has been an increasing interest in deploying non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging systems for recovering objects behind an obstacle. Existing solutions generally pre-calibrate the system before scanning the hidden objects. Onsite adjustments of the occluder, object and scanning pattern require re-calibration. We present an online calibration technique that directly decouples the acquired transients at onsite scanning into the LOS and hidden components. We use the former to directly (re)calibrate the system upon changes of scene/obstacle configurations, scanning regions, and scanning patterns whereas the latter for hidden object recovery via spatial, frequency or learning based techniques. Our technique avoids using auxiliary calibration apparatus such as mirrors or checkerboards and supports both laboratory validations and real-world deployments.
Reliability of Event Timing in Silicon Neurons

Analog, low-voltage electronics show great promise in producing silicon neurons (SiNs) with unprecedented levels of energy efficiency. Yet, their inherently high susceptibility to process, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations, and noise has long been recognised as a major bottleneck in developing effective neuromorphic solutions. Inspired by spike transmission studies in biophysical, neocortical neurons, we demonstrate that the inherent noise and variability can coexist with reliable spike transmission in analog SiNs, similarly to biological neurons. We illustrate this property on a recent neuromorphic model of a bursting neuron by showcasing three different relevant types of reliable event transmission: single spike transmission, burst transmission, and the on-off control of a half-centre oscillator (HCO) network.
Effective single-mode model of a binary boson mixture in the quantum droplet region

In a binary quantum droplet, the interspecies attraction dominates over the intraspecies repulsions and the mean-field energy is unstable. The mechanical stability is restored by the repulsive Lee-Huang-Yang (LHY) energy [1]. In the Bogoliubov theory of the binary quantum droplet, there are two branches of gapless excitations. The lower branch describes the phonon excitation and its energy is imaginary in the long-wavelength limit, implying dynamical instability. Recently it is found that the phonon energy is renormalized by higher-order quantum fluctuations and the dynamical instability is removed [2]. In this work, we study a binary quantum droplet in the path integral formalism to construct an effective model with the correct phonon energy. By integrating out the upper excitation branch, we obtain an effective single-mode model describing density fluctuations, and derive the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation. In this approach, the LHY energy in the extended-GP equation is purely positive without any assumption of neglecting the imaginary part. This effective single-mode model can be also used outside and close to the quantum droplet region such as in the LHY gas.
Chaos by Magic

There is a property of a quantum state called magic. It measures how difficult for a classical computer to simulate the state. In this paper, we study magic of states in the integrable and chaotic regimes of the higher-spin generalization of the Ising model through two quantities called"Mana"and"Robustness of Magic"(RoM). We find that in the chaotic regime, Mana increases monotonically in time in the early-time region, and at late times these quantities oscillate around some non-zero value that increases linearly with respect to the system size. Our result also suggests that under chaotic dynamics, any state evolves to a state whose Mana almost saturates the optimal upper bound, i.e., the state becomes"maximally magical. "We find that RoM also shows similar behaviors. On the other hand, in the integrable regime, Mana and RoM behave periodically in time in contrast to the chaotic case. In the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence (AdS/CFT correspondence), classical spacetime emerges from the chaotic nature of the dual quantum system. Our result suggests that magic of quantum states is strongly involved behind the emergence of spacetime geometry.
Ultraviolet freeze-in dark matter through the dilaton portal

We study a class of models in which the Standard Model (SM) and dark matter (DM) belong to a conformal/scale-invariant theory at high energies. Scale invariance is spontaneously broken at scale $f$, giving rise to a dilaton as the corresponding Goldstone boson. In the low energy theory, we assume that DM interacts with the SM solely through the dilaton portal, which is suppressed by the conformal breaking scale $f$. For $f\gg{\rm TeV}$, the portal interactions are extremely weak, resulting in DM not being in thermal equilibrium with the SM. Thus, ultraviolet freeze-in production of DM occurs through the dilaton portal, being most effective at the maximum temperature of the SM bath. The temperature evolution is greatly impacted by the reheating dynamics, which we parametrize using a general equation of state $w$ and temperature at the end of reheating $T_{\rm rh}$. We analyze the implications of the reheating dynamics for DM production in this framework and identify regions of parameter space that result in the observed DM relic abundance for a wide range of DM masses and reheating temperatures for scalar, vector, or fermion DM.
StyleGAN-V: A Continuous Video Generator with the Price, Image Quality and Perks of StyleGAN2

Videos show continuous events, yet most - if not all - video synthesis frameworks treat them discretely in time. In this work, we think of videos of what they should be - time-continuous signals, and extend the paradigm of neural representations to build a continuous-time video generator. For this, we first design continuous motion representations through the lens of positional embeddings. Then, we explore the question of training on very sparse videos and demon-strate that a good generator can be learned by using as few as 2 frames per clip. After that, we rethink the traditional image + video discriminators pair and design a holistic dis-criminator that aggregates temporal information by simply concatenating frames' features. This decreases the training cost and provides richer learning signal to the generator, making it possible to train directly on 10242 videos for the first time. We build our model on top of StyleGAN2 and it is just ≈5% more expensive to train at the same resolution while achieving almost the same image quality. Moreover, our latent space features similar properties, enabling spa-tial manipulations that our method can propagate in time. We can generate arbitrarily long videos at arbitrary high frame rate, while prior work struggles to generate even 64 frames at a fixed rate. Our model is tested on four mod-ern 2562 and one 10242 -resolution video synthesis bench-marks. In terms of sheer metrics, it performs on average ≈30% better than the closest runner-up. Project website: https://universome.github. io/stylegan-v.
Nonlocality, nonlinearity, and time inconsistency in stochastic differential games

This paper studies the well‐posedness of a class of nonlocal fully nonlinear parabolic systems, which nest the equilibrium Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB) systems that characterize the time‐consistent Nash equilibrium point of a stochastic differential game (SDG) with time‐inconsistent (TIC) preferences. The nonlocality of the parabolic systems stems from the flow feature (controlled by an external temporal parameter) of the systems. This paper proves the existence and uniqueness results as well as the stability analysis for the solutions to such systems. We first obtain the results for the linear cases for an arbitrary time horizon and then extend them to the quasilinear and fully nonlinear cases under some suitable conditions. Two examples of TIC SDG are provided to illustrate financial applications with global solvability. Moreover, with the well‐posedness results, we establish a general multidimensional Feynman–Kac formula in the presence of nonlocality (time inconsistency).
Quantum symmetry on Potts model

We formulate the notion of quantum group symmetry of the Hamiltonian corresponding to the Potts model and compute it for few simple models. Our examples illustrate how a slight change of the model parameter may result in a drastic change of the quantum symmetry group (in some cases, the classical symmetry group remains unaffected), signifying a case of phase transition.
Exact quantum query complexity of computing Hamming weight modulo powers of two and three

We study the problem of computing the Hamming weight of an $n$-bit string modulo $m$, for any positive integer $m \leq n$ whose only prime factors are 2 and 3. We show that the exact quantum query complexity of this problem is $\left\lceil n(1 - 1/m) \right\rceil$. The upper bound is via an iterative query algorithm whose core components are the well-known 1-query quantum algorithm (essentially due to Deutsch) to compute the Hamming weight a 2-bit string mod 2 (i.e., the parity of the input bits), and a new 2-query quantum algorithm to compute the Hamming weight of a 3-bit string mod 3. We show a matching lower bound (in fact for arbitrary moduli $m$) via a variant of the polynomial method [de Wolf, SIAM J. Comput. , 32(3), 2003]. This bound is for the weaker task of deciding whether or not a given $n$-bit input has Hamming weight 0 modulo $m$, and it holds even in the stronger non-deterministic quantum query model where an algorithm must have positive acceptance probability iff its input evaluates to 1. For $m>2$ our lower bound exceeds $n/2$, beating the best lower bound provable using the general polynomial method [Theorem 4.3, Beals et al., J. ACM 48(4), 2001].
Printed organic TFTs for interfacing circuits and active matrix

This paper presents a printable organic complementary TFT technology suitable for low cost plastic substrates. By combining state of the art materials, printing technics and silicon-inspired compact modeling and simulation approach, we were able to fabricate circuits that provide the switching, digital and analog functions required for the development of Printed Systems on Foil.
Segmented strings, brane tilings, and the Y-system

I show that the motion of a closed string consisting of n segments in AdS3 can be embedded into the mutation dynamics of the Y n,0 brane tiling. The determinant of the Kasteleyn matrix computes the spectral curve. The dynamics is governed by a Y-system with additional constraints ensuring that the string closes in target space. The constraints can be deformed by coupling the worldsheet to a background two-form whose field strength is proportional to the volume form. ar X iv :2 11 2. 14 61 9v 1 [ he pth ] 2 9 D ec 2 02 1
Quantum Average-Case Distances

We introduce operational distance measures between quantum states, measurements, and channels based on their average-case distinguishability. To this end, we analyze the average Total Variation Distance (TVD) between statistics of quantum protocols in which quantum objects are intertwined with random circuits and subsequently measured in the computational basis. We show that for circuits forming approximate 4-designs, the average TVDs can be approximated by simple explicit functions of the underlying objects, which we call average-case distances. The so-deﬁned distances capture average-case distinguishability via moderate-depth random quantum circuits and satisfy many natural properties. We apply them to analyze effects of noise in quantum advantage experiments and in the context of efﬁcient discrimination of high-dimensional quantum states and channels without quantum memory. Furthermore, based on analytical and numerical examples, we argue that average-case distances are better suited for assessing the quality of NISQ devices than conventional distance measures such as trace distance and the diamond norm.
Embodied Learning for Lifelong Visual Perception

We study lifelong visual perception in an embodied setup, where we develop new models and compare various agents that navigate in buildings and occasionally request annotations which, in turn, are used to refine their visual perception capabilities. The purpose of the agents is to recognize objects and other semantic classes in the whole building at the end of a process that combines exploration and active visual learning. As we study this task in a lifelong learning context, the agents should use knowledge gained in earlier visited environments in order to guide their exploration and active learning strategy in successively visited buildings. We use the semantic segmentation performance as a proxy for general visual perception and study this novel task for several exploration and annotation methods, ranging from frontier exploration baselines which use heuristic active learning, to a fully learnable approach. For the latter, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning (RL) based agent which jointly learns both navigation and active learning. A point goal navigation formulation, coupled with a global planner which supplies goals, is integrated into the RL model in order to provide further incentives for systematic exploration of novel scenes. By performing extensive experiments on the Matterport3D dataset, we show how the proposed agents can utilize knowledge from previously explored scenes when exploring new ones, e.g. through less granular exploration and less frequent requests for annotations. The results also suggest that a learning-based agent is able to use its prior visual knowledge more effectively than heuristic alternatives.