Sharif Digital Repository

Ostracism has been recognized as conceptually and empirically distinct from harassment. Drawing from theory and research that suggests that employees have a strong need to belong in their organizations, we examine the comparative frequency and impact of ostracism and harassment in organizations across three field studies. Study 1 finds that a wide range of employees perceive ostracism, compared with harassment, to be more socially acceptable, less psychologically harmful, and less likely to be prohibited in their organization. Study 2 surveyed employees from a variety of organizations to test our theory that ostracism is actually a more harmful workplace experience than harassment.... 

An analytical method is presented that can be used to determine the behavior of a particular steel beam-to-column top and seat angle connection with double web angles. This article demonstrates a closed form solution of the equations of deformation, for this type of connection. Besides, a step-by-step analytical procedure for establishment of the linear part of M-θ curve of this form of connection is developed. However, this technique can properly be extended to the non-linear regions, which is not considered in this article. The correctness of the results has been ascertained by a comparison, using experimental approach as well as different analytical technique; and very good agreement has... 

Many jurisdictions around the world have deregulated utilities and opened retail markets to competition. However, inertial decision making can diminish consumer benefits of retail competition. Using household-level data from the Texas residential electricity market, we document evidence of consumer inertia. We estimate an econometric model of retail choice to measure two sources of inertia: search frictions/inattention and a brand advantage that consumers afford the incumbent. We find that households rarely search for alternative retailers, and when they do search, households attach a brand advantage to the incumbent. Counterfactual experiments show that low-cost information interventions... 

Taxonomy learning is one of the major steps in ontology learning process. Manual construction of taxonomies is a time-consuming and cumbersome task. Recently many researchers have focused on automatic taxonomy learning, but still quality of generated taxonomies is not satisfactory. In this paper we have proposed a new compound similarity measure. This measure is based on both knowledge poor and knowledge rich approaches to find word similarity. We also used Neural Network model for combination of several similarity methods. We have compared our method with simple syntactic similarity measure. Our measure considerably improves the precision and recall of automatic generated taxonomies. ©... 

In dual-beam optical tweezers, the accuracy of position and force measurements is often compromised by crosstalk between the two detected signals, this crosstalk leading to systematic and significant errors on the measured forces and distances. This is true both for dual-beam optical traps where the splitting of the two traps is done by polarization optics and for dual optical traps constructed by other methods, e.g., holographic tweezers. If the two traps are orthogonally polarized, most often crosstalk is minimized by inserting polarization optics in front of the detector; however, this method is not perfect because of the de-polarization of the trapping beam introduced by the required... 

Multiple-beam optical traps facilitate advanced trapping geometries and exciting discoveries. However, the increased manipulation capabilities come at the price of more challenging position and force detection. Due to unrivaled bandwidth and resolution, photodiode based detection is preferred over camera based detection in most single/dual-beam optical traps assays. However, it has not been trivial to implement photodiode based detection for multiple-beam optical traps. Here, we present a simple and efficient method based on spatial filtering for parallel photodiode detection of multiple traps. The technique enables fast and accurate 3D force and distance detection of multiple objects... 

In dual-beam optical traps, the precision of position/force measurements is often compromised by crosstalk, i.e. imperfect separation of the two signals. We devise a simple yet very efficient method to perform crosstalk eliminating spatial filtering  

The stability of the topological order phase induced by the Z3 Kitaev model, which is a candidate for fault-tolerant quantum computation, against the local order phase induced by the three-state Potts model is studied. We show that the low-energy sector of the Kitaev-Potts model is mapped to the Potts model in the presence of transverse magnetic field. Our study relies on two high-order series expansions based on continuous unitary transformations in the limits of small and large Potts couplings as well as mean-field approximation. Our analysis reveals that the topological phase of the Z3 Kitaev model breaks down to the Potts model through a first-order phase transition. We capture the phase... 

Microfluidic droplet generators excel in generating monodisperse micrometer-sized droplets and particles. However, the low throughput of conventional droplet generators hinders their clinical and industrial translation. Current approaches to parallelize microdevices are challenged by the two-dimensional nature of the standard fabrication methods. Here, we report the facile production of three-dimensionally (3D) parallelized microfluidic droplet generators consisting of stacked and radially multiplexed channel designs. Computational fluid dynamics simulations form the design basis for a microflow distributor that ensures similar flow rates through all droplet generators. Stereolithography is... 

Bridgehead C-H bond dissociation enthalpies of 105.7 ± 2.0, 102.9 ± 1.7, and 102.4 ± 1.9 kcal mol -1 for bicyclo[2.2.1]heptane, bicyclo[2.2.2]octane, and adamantane, respectively, were determined in the gas phase by making use of a thermodynamic cycle (i.e., BDE(R-H) = ΔH° acid(H-X) - IE(H •) + EA(X •)). These results are in good accord with high-level G3 theory calculations, and the experimental values along with G3 predictions for bicyclo[1.1.1]pentane, bicyclo[2.1.1]hexane, bicyclo[3.1.1]heptane, and bicyclo[4.2.1]nonane were found to correlate with the flexibility of the ring system. Rare examples of alkyl anions in the gas phase are also provided  

In this research, a manufacturing facility with independent workstations to remanufacture nonconforming products is investigated. Each workstation is first modeled as an M/M/m queuing system with m being a decision variable. Then, a tri-objective integer nonlinear programming models is developed to formulate the problem. The first objective tries to minimize the waiting times of products, while the second one tries to maximize the minimum reliability of machines at the workstations. Since minimization of the waiting times results in using a large number of machines with higher idle times, the third objective is considered to minimize the mean idle time of the machines. The aim is to... 

A new general semi-rigid beam-to-column connection for skeletal structures, also applicable to offshore platforms, was devised. In a previous paper (OMAE02-28264), the general features of this joint together with some proposed details for its use in fabricating new platforms, as well as retrofitting and repair of existing platforms, were introduced. Moreover, the results of some quasi-static tests on the 'original' version of the connection, in which the energy-dissipating elements (tubes) of the connection are laid in a parallel relation to the axis of bending, were reported. Here, in this paper, the results of recent experimental work on the 'alternate' version of the connection, in which... 

In order to generate adequate electricity energy, conventional power plants utilize dramatic volume of water resources. Different methods such as replacing cutting-edge technologies of facilities have been proposed to diminish water consumption in this industry. Most of the approaches are considered as medium or long-term solution which requires substantial investment costs. Meanwhile, because of the process and technology, natural gas-fired power plants need less water among conventional power plants. Therefore, shifting unit commitment planning toward these power plants would aid to save water consumption. Nevertheless, overlooking combined cycle power plants can perform negative impact on... 

We consider two ensembles of qubits dissipating into two overlapping environments, that is, with a certain number of qubits in common that dissipate into both environments. We then study the dynamics of bipartite entanglement between the two ensembles by excluding the common qubits. To get analytical solutions for an arbitrary number of qubits we consider initial states with a single excitation and show that the largest amount of entanglement can be created when excitations are initially located among side (noncommon) qubits. Moreover, the stationary entanglement exhibits a monotonic (nonmonotonic) scaling versus the number of common (side) qubits  

We consider a model of a bosonic memory channel, which induces correlations among the transmitted signals. The application of suitable unitary transformations at the encoding and decoding stages allows the complete removal of correlations, thereby mapping the memory channel into a memoryless one. However, such transformations, being global over an arbitrarily large number of bosonic modes, are not realistically implementable. We then introduce a family of efficiently realizable transformations, which can be used to partially remove correlations among errors, and we quantify the reduction of the gap with memoryless channels  

A novel electrode consisting of 3D porous nickel‒cobalt‒copper sulfide dendritic structures is synthesized, in which, for the first time ternary Ni–Co–Cu foam is constructed through hydrogen bubble template and followed by sulfidization via a hydrothermal reaction in thiourea. The 3D, porous Ni–Co–Cu dendritic sulfide electrode exhibits a high specific capacitance of 1203.75 F g−1 (0.963 F cm−2) at current of 1.0 mA and excellent cycling stability, excellent ratability along with high cycle stability. An asymmetric supercapacitor (ASC) using dendritic sulfide structures and reduced electro-etched carbon fiber paper (RECF) as the positive and negative electrodes, respectively is developed.... 

We study the quantum capacity of a continuous-variable dephasing channel, which is a notable example of a non-Gaussian quantum channel. We prove that a single-letter formula applies. The optimal input state is found to be diagonal in the Fock basis and with a distribution that is a discrete version of a Gaussian. We discuss how its mean and variance are related to the dephasing rate and input energy. We then show that by increasing the input energy, the capacity saturates to a finite value. We also show that it decays exponentially for large values of dephasing rates. © 2020 American Physical Society  

We study quantum information transmission in a Heisenberg-XY chain where qubits are affected by quasi-local environment action and compare it with the case of local action of the environment. We find that for open boundary conditions the former situation always improves quantum state transfer process, especially for short chains. In contrast, for closed boundary conditions quasi-local environment results advantageous in the strong noise regime. When the noise strength is comparable with the XY interaction strength, the state transfer fidelity through chain of odd/even number of qubits in presence of quasi-local environment results smaller/greater than that in presence of local environment. ©... 

Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs), despite being one of the most successful image classification methods, are not robust to most geometric transformations (rotation, isotropic scaling) because of their structural constraints. Recently, scale steerable filters have been proposed to allow scale invariance in CNNs. Although these filters enhance the network performance in scaled image classification tasks, they cannot maintain the scale information across the network. In this paper, this problem is addressed. First, a CNN is built with the usage of scale steerable filters. Then, a scale equivariat network is acquired by adding a feature map to each layer so that the scale-related features are... 

Deep neural networks have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial examples deliberately constructed to misclassify victim models. As most adversarial examples have restricted their perturbations to the Lp-norm, existing defense methods have focused on these types of perturbations and less attention has been paid to unrestricted adversarial examples; which can create more realistic attacks, able to deceive models without affecting human predictions. To address this problem, the proposed adversarial attack method generates an unrestricted adversarial example with a limited number of parameters. The attack selects three points on the input image and based on their locations transforms the...