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Conditions of coherent-phonon excitation in SrMnSb2 films and crystals
No full textExcitation of coherent phonons has the potential to dramatically alter the electronic structure of Dirac and Weyl semimetals, enabling sub-picosecond control of their optical and electronic properties. The Dirac semimetal SrMnSb is a candidate for such control, with a coherent-phonon mode that is predicted to close and reopen a gap at the Dirac node. Here, through a series of ultrafast pump-probe experiments, we establish suitable samples and conditions for driving the coherent phonon to high amplitude and attempting to observe the gap’s closure. Films of SrMnSb grown by molecular-beam epitaxy are shown to have phononic properties matching those of bulk crystals. We find that the phonon can be strongly excited by pump pulses with wavelength near 1500 nm, which will excite a 30-nm film almost uniformly and will penetrate the arsenic capping layers that protect the films. We find that samples withstand pump pulses of fluence up to 20 mJ/cm , and we demonstrate the potential for sequences of pulses to amplify the oscillation while suppressing other phonon modes. Armed with our new knowledge of the conditions for exciting the desired coherent phonon, future experiments will be well prepared to measure its motion and to observe phononic control of the Dirac-point gap
We Are Here Because of Them: Co-Creating a Native Cemetery Memorial at Mission Santa Clara
No full textTens of thousands of Native individuals perished in California’s twenty-one Franciscan missions that operated from the 1760s into the 1840s, but most public interpretive programs gloss over their lives and the cemeteries where they are interred. This has historically been the case at Mission Santa Clara, on the campus of Santa Clara University. In this article, we reflect on the process of co-creating an interactive memorial designed to honor the Native people buried in two colonial-era cemeteries related to the mission and link their lives to the descendant community today. Importantly, the co-creation process helped strengthen relationships in numerous directions, furthering the work of both commemoration and reconciliation
Assessing the Intellectual Capital of Value Creation Process of Commercial Banks in the European Union
No full textThis study examines the impact of intellectual capital on the overall value of commercial banks within the European Union (EU). The research aims to identify how these banks can evaluate and enhance their intellectual capital to improve operational performance. The study employs the value-added intellectual coefficient (VAIC) model to measure the efficiency of three types of capital: structural capital (SC), which is the value added by the company minus human capital; employed physical and financial capital (CE), representing the total financial capital available to the company; and human capital (HC), calculated based on employee costs. Data were sourced from the BankScope database, comprising published financial reports of 599 commercial banks. Control variables included loan quality, fund utilization ratio, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research identifies a significant positive correlation between financial capital, human capital, and the value-added function of banks. These findings suggest that financial and human capital are critical determinants of value addition in commercial banks within the EU. This study uniquely focuses on the intellectual capital performance of EU-based banks. To the best of our knowledge, such a comprehensive analysis on this subject within the context of EU banks has not been previously conducted
Soft prompt tuning for augmenting dense retrieval with large language models
No full textDense retrieval (DR) converts queries and documents into dense embeddings and measures the similarity between queries and documents in vector space. One of the major challenges in DR is the lack of domain-specific training data. While DR models can learn from large-scale public datasets like MS MARCO through transfer learning, evidence shows that not all DR models and domains can benefit from transfer learning. Recently, researchers have resorted to large language models (LLMs) to improve the zero-shot and few-shot DR models. However, the hard prompts or human-written prompts utilized in these works are suboptimal and the generated weak queries are often sensitive to the prompts. To tackle this, we propose soft prompt tuning for augmenting DR (SPTAR): for each task, we leverage soft prompt tuning to optimize a task-specific soft prompt on limited ground truth data and then prompt the LLMs to tag unlabeled documents with weak queries, yielding weak document–query pairs to train task-specific dense retrievers. We design a filter to select high-quality example document–query pairs in the prompt to further improve the quality of weak tagged queries. To the best of our knowledge, there is no prior work utilizing soft prompt tuning to augment DR models. Moreover, unlike much of the existing work, ours is based on popular open-source LLMs to ensure reproducible and deterministic results. Our experimental results demonstrate that SPTAR outperforms both unsupervised baselines and the recently proposed LLMs-based augmentation method for DR
The Legacy of Robert La Follette’s Progressive Vision
No full textPresident Donald Trump\u27s return to the White House has left many progressive Americans feeling disillusioned, resigned, and apathetic. Warnings about the dangers of the former president fell flat with a little more than half the electorate last fall. And many Trump supporters remain fiercely loyal—despite his most egregious violations of democratic principles.
Democrats have spent the last several months struggling to fight back against Trump\u27s policies—even those that are massively unpopular.
The story of Senator and Governor Robert M. La Follette, a Republican from Wisconsin who is widely regarded as one of the greatest progressive politicians in American history, might offer some inspiration for progressives struggling today. His legacy suggests that securing political change requires persistent activism, tempered by patience. La Follette’s history reminds activists that continuing to push steadily forward toward specific objectives offers them the best chance of eventually achieving their political goals
Jimenez, Francisco, Modern Languages and Literatures, interviewed by
No full textAuthor and educator, Francisco Jiménez emigrated with his family from Tlaquepaque, Mexico to California and as a child worked alongside his parents in the fields of California. He received his BA from Santa Clara University and an MA and Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Columbia University under a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Jiménez has published numerous award winning autobiographical works such as The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child (Cajas de cartón, Spanish edition), Breaking Through (Senderos fronterizos, Spanish edition), Reaching Out (Más allá de mí, Spanish edition), Taking Hold: From Migrant Childhood to Columbia University, (Pasos firmes , Spanish edition) La Mariposa, and The Christmas Gift/El regalo de Navidad have won several national literary awards, including the John Steinbeck Award, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, to name a few. He has also been recognized by the United States Congress, the United States Department of Education, the California State Senate and the Governor and Minister of Culture of the State of Jalisco. Previously, he served as the Fay Boyle Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and served as Director of the Ethnic Studies Department at Santa Clara University from 2000 to 2005. Today, he is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Santa Clara University
Santa Clara Radio Astronomy Project (SCRAP) IV - Data Processing
No full textThe Santa Clara Radio Astronomy Project (SCRAP) IV: Data Processing is the fourth year of a multi-year project that aims to provide SCU with a fully functioning radio telescope in a costefficient manner. The project aims to provide this radio telescope as a hands-on tool that can be used not just for scientific discovery, but also for SCU academic use in a wide variety of different subjects, such as electrical engineering and physics. This year, our SCRAP team aimed to bolster the long-term operation of the telescope, which is a key feature it must have for it to be considered fully functional. To do so, we provided the radio telescope with a long-term storage solution as well as a graphical user interface to allow users to interface with the telescope capture process and view the incoming data through a dynamically updating live feed and a search page
XMR: Extensible Model Representation
No full textIn safety critical industries, such as aerospace, verification and validation are crucial steps in system development. Validation begins with decomposing a system into its requirements. These requirements are used to create the high level model of the system. The low level system that is created from this must then be verified. Manually ensuring that the system being verified exactly matches the validated design is tedious, time consuming, and error prone. To solve this, we have created an open source tool that can automatically generate the code from UML models. This enables going from the high level model to the low level code without the risk of human error. This tool improves upon existing toolchains (namely MATLAB/Simulink) by being open source and therefore cheaper and more easily configuarable
