Sharp Improvements Research Articles

Children's Memory for Events: The Challenge of Free Recall.

Early childhood is a critical period for episodic memory development, with sharp behavioral improvements between ages 4 to 7 years. Prior work has demonstrated this extensively with prompted memory tasks, but we explored performance on unprompted, free recall of a naturalistic experience in children, and how their performance relates to other cognitive measures. We asked children and adults to view a television episode, a naturalistic task for which there exists a ground truth, and assessed their free recall memory for the episode. Children's free recall performance improved dramatically with age, with many young children producing no verbal free recall whatsoever, although prompted recognition memory measures showed retention of material. However, the detail in free recall was related to both recognition and temporal order forced-choice memory performance in our full sample, showing agreement among memory measures. Free recall was strongly predicted by verbal skills, suggesting that children's sparse recall reflects verbal skill development rather than a pure mnemonic deficit. We propose that free recall has a more protracted developmental trajectory because it requires more substantial verbal skills as well as metacognitive skills that direct memory search, as compared with forced-choice memory tasks.

Sobolev improvements on sharp Rellich inequalities

There are two Rellich inequalities for the bilaplacian, that is, for \int (\Delta u)^{2}dx , the one involving |\nabla u| and the other involving |u| at the RHS. In this article, we consider these inequalities with sharp constants and obtain sharp Sobolev-type improvements. More precisely, in our first result, we improve the Rellich inequality with |\nabla u| obtained by Beckner in dimensions n=3,4 by a sharp Sobolev term, thus complementing existing results for the case n\geq 5 . In the second theorem, the sharp constant of the Sobolev improvement for the Rellich inequality with |u| is obtained.

AN INVESTIGATION OF A MULTIVARIATE SIMILARITY APPROACH FOR PEER SELECTION IN RELATIVE VALUATION

This study presents a multivariate similarity-based peers approach (MSBP) for the selection of peer firms in relative valuation. We select peer firms based on the collective similarity of ten variables which reflect firms’ expected profitability, risk and growth. We test this approach by comparing its valuation accuracy relative to the industry membership selection method. We measure accuracy based on the absolute percentage pricing error and the squared percentage pricing error. We conclude that selecting comparable firms based on our approach offers very sharp improvements in the accuracy of relative valuation using the price-to-book, enterprise-value-to sales and price-to-earnings ratios in comparison to the industry membership selection method. Also, we introduce the use of a multivariate similarity visualization tool which we believe will be very useful in finance research, in general, and firm valuation research in particular.JEL Classification: G320.

BDA-SketRet: Bi-level domain adaptation for zero-shot SBIR

The efficacy of zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR) models is governed by two challenges. The immense distributions-gap between the sketches and the images requires a proper domain alignment. Moreover, the fine-grained nature of the task and the high intra-class variance of many categories necessitates a class-wise discriminative mapping among the sketch, image, and the semantic spaces. Under this premise, we propose BDA-SketRet, a novel ZS-SBIR framework performing a bi-level domain adaptation for aligning the spatial and semantic features of the visual data pairs progressively. In order to highlight the shared features and reduce the effects of any sketch or image-specific artifacts, we propose a novel symmetric loss function based on the notion of information bottleneck for aligning the semantic features while a cross-entropy-based adversarial loss is introduced to align the spatial feature maps. Finally, our CNN-based model confirms the discriminativeness of the shared latent space through a novel topology-preserving semantic projection network. Experimental results on the extended Sketchy, TU-Berlin, and QuickDraw datasets exhibit sharp improvements over the literature.

Maximizing the spread of conservation initiatives in social networks

AbstractConservation programs and policies can preserve biodiversity and boost ecosystem services, but only when widely adopted. While thousands of conservation initiatives exist globally, most fail to spread beyond a few initial adopters. Here, we use network science to (1) determine the topology and structure of two networks of conservation actors (one regional, one national), (2) identify influential individuals in those networks, and (3) test whether the adoption of a conservation initiative by influential individuals could increase the spread of that initiative across the network. We find that initial adoption by influential individuals results in sharp improvements in the total number of adopters of a conservation initiative network‐wide, particularly when a linear threshold diffusion model is used. Under an independent cascade diffusion model, the benefits of targeting influencers are smaller but still substantial. These benefits occurred in both networks despite very different network structures: the regional network resembles a random network comprised mostly of state agencies and local entities, while the national network has a scale‐free structure with highly influential hubs of federal agency and NGO entities. Given that many conservation programs fail to reach critical mass, our findings highlight the importance of strategically targeting influential individuals to boost the spread of conservation initiatives.

Series expansion of weighted Finsler–Kato–Hardy inequalities

In this work we consider weighted anisotropic Hardy inequalities and trace Hardy inequalities involving a general Finsler metric. We follow a unifying approach, by establishing first a sharp interpolation between them, extending the corresponding nonweighted version, being established recently by a different approach. Then, passing to bounded domains, we obtain successive sharp improvements by adding remainder terms involving sharp weights and optimal constants, resulting in an infinite series-type improvement. The results extend, into the Finsler context, the earlier known ones within the Euclidean setting. We also discuss the extension of our method to the case of cones in place of the half-space.

Eco-friendly coating based on an intumescent flame-retardant system for viscose fabrics with multi-function properties: Flame retardancy, smoke suppression, and antibacterial properties

Ammonium phytate and chitosan were chosen as eco-friendly flame retardants to improve the flame retardancy and antibacterial properties of viscose fabrics. The flame-retardant viscose fabrics exhibited sharp improvements in thermal stability at the higher temperature zone, and 2BLviscose retained 39.0% char residues at 700 °C. 2BL/viscose obtained a limiting oxygen index value of 29% and self-extinguished in the vertical flame test. The fire behaviors of the flame-retardant viscose fabrics were also enhanced; even the addition of CS decreased the total smoke production value from 0.6 to 0.3 m2. Flame-retardant viscose fabrics released less flammable substances and more H2O, resulting in combustion choking. Meanwhile, the flame-retardant samples formed stable char residues, which were mainly constituted by graphite. Meanwhile, the viscose fabrics coated with CS/AP exhibited excellent antimicrobial properties, and 2BL/viscose obtained a 99.99% antibacterial rate for both Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and Escherichia coli (E. coli).

Adaptive hybrid attention network for hyperspectral image classification

Abstract The task of land cover classification from hyperspectral images (HSI) has recently witnessed sharp improvements with the applications of deep convolutional networks (CNN). This is mainly attributed to the hierarchical spectral-spatial feature learning capabilities of the CNN models. However, it is important to encode the short to long range spatial dependencies to predict the pixelwise labels without inducing additional redundancy at the feature level. The standard CNN based land cover classification models for HSI overlook this aspect in general. To overcome this, we propose a hybrid attention based 3D classification model for hyperspectral images. Our model comprises of 1D and 2D CNNs to individually generate the attention masks that respectively highlight the spectral and spatial characteristics of our input image. For optimal learning the spectral and spatial features in our model are combined adaptively with the original input and sent to the 3D classification module. To enhance the classification performance, we incorporate classwise Wasserstein loss alongwith the crossentropy loss. Our methods are evaluated on three widely used hyperspectral datasets: Houston datasets (DFC-2013 and DFC-2018) and Salinas dataset, and has satisfactorily outperformed all the prior benchmark methods.

China’s War on Pollution: Evidence from the First Five Years

The decade from 2010 to 2019 marked a significant turning point in China’s history of environmental regulation and pollution. This article describes the recent trends in air and water quality, with a focus on the five years since China declared a “war on pollution” in 2014. It summarizes the emerging literature that has taken advantage of accompanying improvements in data availability and accuracy to document sharp improvements in environmental quality, especially local air pollution, and understand their social, economic, and health consequences. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Revizija i poboljšanje nekih novih rezultata u F-metričkim prostorima

Introduction/purpose: This article establishes several new contractive conditions in the context of so-called F-metric spaces. The main purpose was to generalize, extend, improve, complement, unify and enrich the already published results in the existing literature. We used only the property (F1) of Wardowski as well as one well-known lemma for the proof that Picard sequence is an F-Cauchy in the framework of F-metric space. Methods: Fixed point metric theory methods were used. Results: New results are enunciated concerning the F-contraction of two mappings S and T in the context of F-complete F-metric spaces. Conclusions: The obtained results represent sharp and significant improvements of some recently published ones. At the end of the paper, an example is given, claiming that the results presented in this paper are proper generalizations of recent developments.

China's War on Pollution: Evidence from the First Five Years

The decade from 2010 to 2019 marked a significant turning point in China’s history of environmental regulation and pollution. This article describes the recent trends in air and water quality, with a focus on the five years since China declared a “war on pollution” in 2014. It summarizes the emerging literature that has taken advantage of accompanying improvements in data availability and accuracy to document sharp improvements in environmental quality, especially local air pollution, and understand their social, economic, and health consequences.

Grafting of the hierarchical natural tannic acid and polyethyleneimine onto carbon fiber for significantly improved surface/interface properties

The interfacial adhesion between carbon fibers (CFs) and matrix is mainly controlled by inherent surface structures and mutual wettability. However, CFs, with superior properties, have the low of surface wettability and activity. Changing the fiber surface can enhance the quality of interface, which expands the engineering application of CFs composites. Noticeably, the most traditional procedures involve the deterioration of fiber structure by multistep manipulation to introduce active sites, toxic reagents, high energy consumption, as well as the poor interfacial interaction between the fibers and the modified materials by the coating or deposition. Herein, an environmentally friendly and mild strategy was facilely designed via firmly coating tannic acid (TA, a renewable plant‐based polyphenol, the versatile adhesive) and then covalently grafted branched polyethyleneimine (PEI) onto the fiber surface. The novel grafting significantly increased fiber surface polarity, roughness and interfacial wettability without destroying surface microstructure, resulted in the sharp improvements in interlaminar shear strength (ILSS, 51.34 MPa) and interfacial shear strength (IFSS, 66.21 MPa). Impact strength and hydrothermal aging resistance of the resulting composites were also greatly increased. The hierarchical reinforcement arising from a promising and green strategy is facile to be prepared advanced polymer composites in multifunctional applications with the demand of highly interfacial properties and the usages of energy conservation.

Chemical grafting of salicylaldehyde onto carbon fiber for enhancing interfacial strength of silicone resin composites

AbstractChemical grafting of salicylaldehyde onto the surface of carbon fibers (CFs) via the bridging 3‐aminopropyltriethoxysilane was reported to improve interfacial properties of composites. Surface microstructures, compositions, wettability, and surface energy of CFs before and after modification were studied. Single‐fiber tensile strength (TS) was also determined to evaluate the damage degree brought by using the grafting strategy to the fiber intrinsic strength. The interfacial shear strength of composites was characterized to confirm interfacial compatibility and adhesion between CFs and matrix resin. Antihydrothermal aging experiments were also carried out to evaluate their environmental stability. As a result, the introduced salicylaldehyde molecules could increase polar functional groups, roughness, and interfacial wettability of CFs, and thus enhance interfacial strength as well as the hydrothermal aging resistance of the resulting composites significantly. Such sharp improvements could be due to the increases of interfacial compatibility, mechanical interlocking, and chemical bonding at the interfacial region via the formation of salicylaldehyde‐modified interface. Meanwhile, the modification procedure does not decrease fiber TS.

A nurse-delivered mental health intervention for obstetric fistula patients in Tanzania: results of a pilot randomized controlled trial

BackgroundObstetric fistula has severe psychological consequences, but no evidence-based interventions exist to improve mental health in this population. This pilot trial evaluated a psychological intervention for women receiving surgical care for obstetric fistula.MethodsA parallel two-armed pilot RCT was conducted between 2014 and 2016. The intervention was six individual sessions, based on psychological theory and delivered by a nurse facilitator. The study was conducted at a tertiary hospital in Moshi, Tanzania. Women were eligible if they were over age 18 and admitted to the hospital for surgical repair of an obstetric fistula. Sixty participants were randomized to the intervention or standard of care. Surveys were completed at baseline, post-treatment (before discharge), and 3 months following discharge. Standardized scales measured depression, anxiety, traumatic stress, and self-esteem. Feasibility of an RCT was assessed by participation and retention. Feasibility and acceptability of the intervention were assessed by fidelity, attendance, and participant ratings. Potential efficacy was assessed by exploratory linear regression and clinical significance analysis.ResultsEighty-five percent met criteria for mental health dysfunction at enrollment. All eligible patients enrolled, with retention 100% post and 73% at 3 months. Participants rated the intervention acceptable and beneficial. There were sharp and meaningful improvements in mental health outcomes over time, with no evidence of differences by condition.ConclusionsA nurse-delivered mental health intervention was feasible to implement as part of in-patient clinical care and regarded positively. Mental health treatment in this population is warranted given high level of distress at presentation to care.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.Gov NCT01934075.

Modification of interfacial performance of Fiber Bragg grating embedded in the composite materials

The interfacial performance of the Fiber Bragg grating (FGB) embedded in the composite was studied and the influence of interface modification on the final profile of the spectra of the FBG sensor was examined. A type of polyamine (Pentaethylenehexamine, PEHA) was proposed to modify the coating of PI on FBG, and the interfacial performance was evaluated by a pull-out test. Sharp improvements of the interfacial shear strength (77%) were obtained by 40 min treatment of PEHA. Compared with untreated specimen, FGB spectra of treated specimen in the tensile tests show improved linearity within the test regime, which proves that the enhanced interface is beneficial for the sensing performance.

Older Adults are Highly Responsive to Recent Events During Decision-Making.

Recent work suggests that older adults' decision-making behavior is highly affected by recent events. In the present work younger and older adults performed a two-choice task where one option provided a larger average reward, but there was a large amount of noise around the mean reward for each option which led to sharp improvements or declines in rewards over trials. Older adults showed greater responsiveness to recent events than younger adults as evidenced by fits of Reinforcement Learning (RL) models. Older adults were particularly sensitive to recent negative events, which was evidenced by a strong tendency for older adults to switch to the other option following steep declines in reward. This tendency led to superior performance for older adults in one condition where heightened sensitivity to recent negative events was advantageous. These results extend prior work that has found an older adult bias toward negative feedback, and suggest that older adults engage in more abrupt switching in response to negative outcomes than younger adults.

Growth, distortion and coefficient bounds for Carathéodory families in [formula omitted] and complex Banach spaces

Let X be a complex Banach space with the unit ball B. The family M is a natural generalization to complex Banach spaces of the well-known Carathéodory family of functions with positive real part on the unit disc. We consider subfamilies Mg of M depending on a univalent function g. We obtain growth theorems and coefficient bounds for holomorphic mappings in Mg, including some sharp improvements of existing results. When g is convex, we study the family Rg consisting of holomorphic mappings f:B→X which have the property that the mapping Df(z)(z) belongs to Mg. Further, we consider radius problems related to the family Rg, when X is a complex Hilbert space. In particular, if X is the Euclidean space Cn, we obtain some quasiconformal extension results for mappings in Rg. We also obtain some sufficient conditions for univalence and starlikeness in complex Banach spaces.

Use of Plasma Polymerization to Improve Adhesion Strength in Carbon Fiber Composites Cured by Electron Beam

Maleic anhydride plasma polymer was deposited at the surface of carbon fibers and functionalized with vinyl and thiol groups to improve its adhesion strength with an acrylate matrix cured by an electron beam. A characterization of the fiber surface properties was done before and after coating (topography, surface chemistry, and surface energy). Sharp improvements of the interfacial shear strength (+ 120%), measured by a micromechanical test derived from the pull-out test, were obtained and, to the best of our knowledge, never reported before. The values were close to the ones obtained with a thermal cure. The comparison of this approach with other types of surface treatments (oxidation, grafting of coupling agents) enabled the establishment of a general strategy for the improvement of the interfacial adhesion in carbon fiber composites cured by an electron beam and potentially the improvement of their mechanical properties. This strategy is based on a high surface density of functionalities that are generating covalent bonding during the polymerization of the matrix and on the insertion of a polymer layer strongly attached to the fiber surface and acting as a buffer between the fiber surface and the matrix to counteract the generation of stress in the interphase.

Mobilization of the Obese Patient and Prevention of Injury

Obese patients are difficult to transport between emergency departments, imaging facilities, operating rooms, intensive care units, acute care units, and rehabilitation facilities. Each move, along with turning, bathing, and access to bathrooms, poses risks of injury to patients and personnel. Similarly, inadequate mobilization raises the risk of pressure ulcers. The costs can be prohibitive. On 6 pilot units, mobilization of patients was delegated to trained lift team technicians who covered the units in pairs, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, to assist with moving and lifting of patients weighing 200 pounds or more, with a Braden Scale score of 18 or less and/or the presence of pressure ulcers. In fiscal year 2012, hospital-acquired pressure ulcers on pilot units decreased by 43% (from 61 to 35). Patient handling-related employee injuries on pilot units decreased by 38.5% (from 13 to 8). Employee satisfaction related to organizational commitment to employee safety and impact on job satisfaction was positively impacted by implementation of the lift team. With the reduction in employee injuries and the fall in the prevalence of pressure ulcers, the adoption of the lift team program decreased costs by $493,293.00. Implementation of lift teams on pilot nursing units decreased patient handling-related employee injuries, resulting in sharp improvements in quality patient care and reduced costs.

Enrichment of Functional Properties of Ice Cream with Pomegranate By‐products

Pomegranate peel rich in phenolics, and pomegranate seed which contain a conjugated fatty acid namely punicic acid in lipid fraction remain as by-products after processing the fruit into juice. Ice cream is poor in polyunsaturated fatty acids and phenolics, therefore, this study was conducted to improve the functional properties of ice cream by incorporating pomegranate peel phenolics and pomegranate seed oil. Incorporation of the peel phenolics into ice cream at the levels of 0.1% and 0.4% (w/w) resulted in significant changes in the pH, total acidity, and color of the samples. The most prominent outcomes of phenolic incorporation were sharp improvements in antioxidant and antidiabetic activities as well as the phenolic content of ice creams. Replacement of pomegranate seed oil by milk fat at the levels of 2.0% and 4.0% (w/w) increased the conjugated fatty acid content. However, perception of oxidized flavor increased with the additional seed oil. When one considers the functional and nutritional improvements in the enrichment of the ice cream together with overall acceptability results of the sensory analysis, then it follows from this study that ice creams enriched with pomegranate peel phenolics up to 0.4% (w/w) and pomegranate seed oil up to 2.0% (w/w) could be introduced to markets as functional ice cream. Enrichment of ice creams with pomegranate by-products might provide consumers health benefits with striking functional properties of punicalagins in pomegranate peel, and punicic acid in pomegranate seed oil.