Impact of noise on self-rated job satisfaction and health in open-plan offices: a structural equation modelling approach

This study uses a structural equation model to examine the effects of noise on self-rated job satisfaction and health in open-plan offices. A total of 334 employees from six open-plan offices in China and Korea completed a questionnaire survey. The questionnaire included questions assessing noise disturbances and speech privacy, as well as job satisfaction and health. The results indicated that noise disturbance affected self-rated health. Contrary to popular expectation, the relationship between noise disturbance and job satisfaction was not significant. Rather, job satisfaction and satisfaction with the environment were negatively correlated with lack of speech privacy. Speech privacy was found to be affected by noise sensitivity, and longer noise exposure led to decreased job satisfaction. There was also evidence that speech privacy was a stronger predictor of satisfaction with environment and job satisfaction for participants with high noise sensitivity. In addition, fit models for employees from China and Korea showed slight differences.

Practitioner Summary: This study is motivated by strong evidence that noise is the key source of complaints in open-plan offices. Survey results indicate that self-rated job satisfaction of workers in open-plan offices was negatively affected by lack of speech privacy and duration of disturbing noise.     

Scale‐aware Structure‐Preserving Texture Filtering

This paper presents a novel method to enhance the performance of structure‐preserving image and texture filtering. With conventional edge‐aware filters, it is often challenging to handle images of high complexity where features of multiple scales coexist. In particular, it is not always easy to find the right balance between removing unimportant details and protecting important features when they come in multiple sizes, shapes, and contrasts. Unlike previous approaches, we address this issue from the perspective of adaptive kernel scales. Relying on patch‐based statistics, our method identifies texture from structure and also finds an optimal per‐pixel smoothing scale. We show that the proposed mechanism helps achieve enhanced image/texture filtering performance in terms of protecting the prominent geometric structures in the image, such as edges and corners, and keeping them sharp even after significant smoothing of the original signal.     

Experimental analysis of naïve Bayes classifier based on an attribute weighting framework with smooth kernel density estimations

Naïve Bayes learners are widely used, efficient, and effective supervised learning methods for labeled datasets in noisy environments. It has been shown that naïve Bayes learners produce reasonable performance compared with other machine learning algorithms. However, the conditional independence assumption of naïve Bayes learning imposes restrictions on the handling of real-world data. To relax the independence assumption, we propose a smooth kernel to augment weights for the likelihood estimation. We then select an attribute weighting method that uses the mutual information metric to cooperate with the proposed framework. A series of experiments are conducted on 17 UCI benchmark datasets to compare the accuracy of the proposed learner against that of other methods that employ a relaxed conditional independence assumption. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed learning algorithm. The overall results also indicate the superiority of attribute-weighting methods over those that attempt to determine the structure of the network.     

A frame‐based EM‐simulation for design of LC oscillator with MoM capacitor banks

This article presents a simulation method for the design of a digitally controlled oscillator (DCO). Electromagnetic (EM) simulations are essential and inevitable for modern LC oscillator design. Although EM‐simulators provide high accuracy, the EM‐simulation time is very long when metal‐oxide‐metal (MoM) capacitors are present. The proposed frame‐based EM‐simulation can significantly reduce the EM‐simulation time even in the presence of MoM capacitors without influencing the accuracy. To verify the proposed method, a DCO was fabricated using a 55‐nm CMOS process. Measurements of the DCO are in good agreement with the frame‐based post‐layout simulation results. In addition, the DCO has good performances with a low power consumption of approximately 0.68 mW.     

Schemes generating entangled states and entanglement swapping between photons and three-level atoms inside optical cavities for quantum communication

We propose quantum information processing schemes based on cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) for quantum communication. First, to generate entangled states (Bell and Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger [GHZ] states) between flying photons and three-level atoms inside optical cavities, we utilize a controlled phase flip (CPF) gate that can be implemented via cavity QED). Subsequently, we present an entanglement swapping scheme that can be realized using single-qubit measurements and CPF gates via optical cavities. These schemes can be directly applied to construct an entanglement channel for a communication system between two users. Consequently, it is possible for the trust center, having quantum nodes, to accomplish the linked channel (entanglement channel) between the two separate long-distance users via the distribution of Bell states and entanglement swapping. Furthermore, in our schemes, the main physical component is the CPF gate between the photons and the three-level atoms in cavity QED, which is feasible in practice. Thus, our schemes can be experimentally realized with current technology.     

多核系统动态温度管理TAPE策略的形式化验证

多核系统中,分布式DTM策略因其良好的可扩展性得到了广泛应用。在 部署分布式DTM策略前,必须验证其可靠性。为了克服传统分析方法的局限,模型检测技术被应用于分布式DTM策略的分析中。提出使用统计模型检测技术来验证多核系统中分布式DTM策略(以TAPE策略为例)的方案。使用UPPAAL SMC对TAPE策略的验证证明了TAPE策略的安全性、有效性、活性以及稳定性,从而验证DTM策略方案的可靠性。