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No full textLayered 2D graphene oxide (GO) films are integrated with micro-ring
resonators (MRRs) to experimentally demonstrate enhanced nonlinear optics.
Both uniformly coated (1−5 layers) and patterned (10−50 layers) GO films are
integrated on complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible
doped silica MRRs using a large-area, transfer-free, layer-by-layer GO coating
method with precise control of the film thickness. The patterned devices further
employ photolithography and lift-off processes to enable precise control of the
film placement and coating length. Four-wave-mixing (FWM) measurements
for different pump powers and resonant wavelengths show a significant
improvement in efficiency of 7.6 dB for a uniformly coated device with 1 GO
layer and 10.3 dB for a patterned device with 50 GO layers. The measurements
agree well with theory, with the enhancement in FWM efficiency resulting
from the high Kerr nonlinearity and low loss of the GO films combined with
the strong light–matter interaction within the MRRs. The dependence of GO’s
third-order nonlinearity on layer number and pump power is also extracted
from the FWM measurements, revealing interesting physical insights about
the evolution of the GO films from 2D monolayers to quasi bulk-like behavior.
These results confirm the high nonlinear optical performance of integrated
photonic resonators incorporated with 2D layered GO films
Comparison between heterosis for yield exhibited by elite maize hybrids and contribution from dominance
No full textHeterosis in plants refers to the superiority of F1 hybrid over its inbred parents. Heterosis has contributed to reducing hunger and malnutrition over the past 100 years. To unlock the full potential of heterosis for use in crop production, efforts have been devoted to the investigations of its genetic basis. The dominance hypothesis mostly held sway before the modern techniques of genomics were initially employed in this field. The current view is that the dominance hypothesis is one of the non-mutually exclusive hypotheses and is even questioned. Here we perform a combined theoretical and experimental study to assess the contribution of dominance to heterosis. With the consideration that dominance alone contributes to heterosis, we derive the expression for calculating the ratio of heterosis to midparent value, and determine the maximum ratio. Using the maximum ratio as a standard of comparison, we compare the contribution from dominance with heterosis for yield exhibited by the elite maize hybrids and their parents. Our study indicates that dominance partially contributes to heterosis or is not a contributor. In other words, the contributions of other factors to heterosis are essential. For the last two decades, a few new mechanisms underlying heterosis have been proposed coupled with advances in genomics technologies. Because our knowledge regarding the genetic basis of heterosis still needs to be enriched, developing efficient strategies for hybrid breeding would be considerable challenges
The Evaluation of Harm and Purity Transgressions in Africans: A Paradigmatic Replication of Rottman and Young (2019)
No full textImproving the generalizability of psychology findings to a culture requires sampling participants in that culture. Yet psychology studies rarely sample from Africa, even though Africa represents 17% of the global population. While Africans can leverage the credibility revolution initiatives to increase rigor and global representation, capacity building might speed the spread of these initiatives. This study investigated an African-wide replication study to test whether Rottman and Young’s “mere-trace” hypothesis of moral reasoning (that people are more sensitive to the dosage of harm-based transgressions than purity transgressions) extends to several African communities. We used a training method developed by the Collaborative Replication and Education Project to train 23 African collaborators. During this process, we conducted a paradigmatic replication of Rottman’s and Young’s test of the mere trace hypothesis in twelve contributing African sites from Burkina Faso, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, and Tanzania that sampled 783 participants after exclusions. Consistent with the original claim using US samples, our African participants judged severe harm transgressions as more wrong than less severe ones but were not as sensitive to severity for purity transgressions (bdomain x dose = -4.63; p < .01). Moreover, the effect of dosage was smaller than reported among the US sample, and our African participants rated all transgression scenarios more wrong than the US sample. Resource constraints limited our sample to five African countries and to Africans dwelling in urban communities. Moral psychology should transcend the moral issues prioritized in the original study to include those considered important in African societies
Amors Leikir: The Reception of Ovid and the Poetics of Love Games in Late Medieval Iceland
No full textThis article explores the reception of Ovid’s amatory poetics in late medieval Icelandic romances, focusing on the concept of iocus amoris (“love games”). Through a close reading of Sigurðar saga þögla, it argues that Icelandic authors engaged creatively—and at times parodically — with Ovidian motifs mediated through French and Anglo-Norman courtly literature. The study proposes that direct cultural contacts with England played a crucial role in shaping Iceland’s distinctive adaptation of courtly love
Strategic Relocations: Case Studies Unravelling Motivations and Performance in Outsourced Reshoring Decisions
No full textGlobal supply chains, shaped by globalization and offshoring for cost efficiency, are now shifting due to rising complexities, geopolitical tensions, sustainability concerns, and disruptions. This study examines the underexplored topic of outsourced reshoring, where companies transition from international to domestic suppliers to reduce dependency and enhance resilience. Focusing on Italy’s machinery manufacturing sector, it analyses six case studies to uncover drivers, challenges, and benefits of outsourced reshoring. The research highlights relocations as a strategy for risk mitigation, sustainability, and innovation, offering insights for adapting to the evolving business landscape
Asset liability management under sequential stochastic dominance constraints
Full text linkWe consider a financial intermediary managing assets and liabilities exposed to several
risk sources and seeking an optimal portfolio strategy to minimise the initial capital invested
and the total risk associated with investment losses and financial debt. We formulate the
problem as a multistage stochastic programming (MSP) model, with a time-consistent dynamic
risk measure in the objective function to control the investment risk. To ensure that
the intermediary’s financial equilibrium is preserved, we introduce a funding constraint in
the model by enforcing in a time-consistent manner a sequential second-order stochastic
dominance (SSD) of the portfolio return distribution over the liability distribution. We
demonstrate that imposing the SSD constraint at the last-but-one stage is sufficient to
enforce the SSD ordering at each stage. To deal with the computational burden of associated
MSP, we develop a novel decomposition scheme integrating, for the first time in
the literature, time-consistent dynamic risk measures and sequential stochastic dominance
constraints. The proposed methodology is computationally validated on a case study developed
on a property and casualty asset-liability management problem
