Computers Math

Researchers from the Centre for Audio, Acoustics and Vibration at the University of Technology Sydney are exploring technology for those wanting a quieter life!
Reporting in the journal Scientific Reports (a Nature Springer publication), the team of Tong Xiao, Xiaojun Qiu and Benjamin Halkon highlight the positive impacts for health and wellbeing of their ‘virtual Active Noise Control/Cancellation (ANC) headphone’ and its enhanced ability to reduce ambient noise.
By integrating laser-based technology — which can deal with high frequencies — into headrests they eliminate the need for users to wear head/ear phones or buds.
So, in an open plan or home office, you can cancel out colleagues’ chatter, ringing phones, the neigbour’s mower, the dog barking, and the kettle whistling while you work without the discomfort / inconvenience of a set of headphones…
And, in enclosed spaces such as cars and aircraft, the virtual headset can significantly reduce all the extraneous noises that can enter the environment, decreasing distractions and making work/rest easier. For machinery and equipment operators, it provides a solution that reduces fatigue often caused by enclosed wearable headphones.
“What we achieved for this ANC headrest/chair is that the ANC performance is significantly improved over the current state-of-the-art result. In particular, some of the high-pitched noise, previously difficult to cancel out, can now be reduced,” said Tong Xiao.
Attempts to deliver a practical ANC headset have been decades in progress.
The system they describe is a remote acoustic approach using a laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV) and a small, lightweight and retro-reflective membrane pick-up placed in the cavum concha of a user’s ear.
LDVs typically have very high sensitivity with commercially available instruments able to resolve vibration displacements down to pm and velocities down to nm/s resolution. The membrane pick-up can be designed to be small and lightweight and have a wide dynamic range.
“The results show that more than 10 dB sound attenuation can be obtained for an ultra-broadband frequency range up to 6 kHz in the ears for multiple sound sources and for various types of common environmental noise,” said Xiao.
“This virtual ANC headphone system has significantly better performance than any other virtual error sensing solution in the published literature thus far.”

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General smartphone usage is a poor predictor of anxiety, depression or stress say researchers, who advise caution when it comes to digital detoxes.
The study published in Technology, Mind, and Behavior was led by Heather Shaw and Kristoffer Geyer from Lancaster University with Dr David Ellis and Dr Brittany Davidson from the University of Bath and Dr Fenja Ziegler and Alice Smith from the University of Lincoln.
They measured the time spent on smartphones by 199 iPhone users and 46 Android users for one week. Participants were also asked about their mental and physical health, completing clinical scales that measure anxiety and depression symptoms. They also completed a scale which measured how problematic they perceived their smartphone usage to be.
Surprisingly, the amount of time spent on the smartphone was not related to poor mental health.
Lead author Heather Shaw of Lancaster University’s Department of Psychology said: “A person’s daily smartphone pickups or screen time did not predict anxiety, depression, or stress symptoms. Additionally, those who exceeded clinical ‘cut off points’ for both general anxiety and major depressive disorder did not use their phone more than those who scored below this threshold.”
Instead, the study found that mental health was associated with concerns and worries felt by participants about their own smartphone usage.
This was measured through their scores on a problematic usage scale where they were asked to rate statements such as “Using my smartphone longer than I had intended,” and “Having tried time and again to shorten my smartphone use time but failing all the time.”
Heather Shaw said: “It is important to consider actual device use separately from people’s concerns and worries about technology. This is because the former doesn’t show noteworthy relationships with mental health, whereby the latter does.”
Previous studies have focussed on the potentially detrimental impact of ‘screen time’, but the study shows that people’s attitudes or worries are likely to drive these findings.
Dr David Ellis, from the University of Bath’s School of Management, said: “Mobile technologies have become even more essential for work and day-to-day life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results add to a growing body of research that suggests reducing general screen time will not make people happier. Instead of pushing the benefits of digital detox, our research suggests people would benefit from measures to address the worries and fears that have grown up around time spent using phones.”

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Researchers are a step closer to realizing a new kind of memory that works according to the principles of spintronics which is analogous to, but different from, electronics. Their unique gallium arsenide-based ferromagnetic semiconductor can act as memory by quickly switching its magnetic state in the presence of an induced current at low power. Previously, such current-induced magnetization switching was unstable and drew a lot of power, but this new material both suppresses the instability and lowers the power consumption too.
The field of quantum computing often gets covered in the technical press; however, another emerging field along similar lines tends to get overlooked, and that is spintronics. In a nutshell, spintronic devices could replace some electronic devices and offer greater performance at far low power levels. Electronic devices use the motion of electrons for power and communication. Whereas spintronic devices use a transferable property of stationary electrons, their angular momentum, or spin. It’s a bit like having a line of people pass on a message from one to the other rather than have the person at one end run to the other. Spintronics reduces the effort needed to perform computational or memory functions.
Spintronic-based memory devices are likely to become common as they have a useful feature in that they are nonvolatile, meaning that once they are in a certain state, they maintain that state even without power. Conventional computer memory, such as DRAM and SRAM made of ordinary semiconductors, loses its state when it’s powered off. At the core of experimental spintronic memory devices are magnetic materials that can be magnetized in opposite directions to represent the familiar binary states of 1 or 0, and this switching of states can occur very, very quickly. However, there has been a long and arduous search for the best materials for this job, as magnetizing spintronic materials are no simple matter.
“Magnetizing a material is analogous to rotating a mechanical device,” said Associate Professor Shinobu Ohya from the Center for Spintronics Research Network at the University of Tokyo. “There are rotational forces at play in rotating systems called torques; similarly there are torques, called spin-orbit torques, in spintronic systems, albeit they are quantum-mechanical rather than classical. Among spin-orbit torques, ‘anti-damping torque’ assists the magnetization switching, whereas ‘field-like torque’ can resist it, raising the level of the current required to perform the switch. We wished to suppress this.”
Ohya and his team experimented with different materials and various forms of those materials. At small scales, anti-damping torque and field-like torque can act very differently depending on physical parameters such as current direction and thickness. The researchers found that with thin films of a gallium arsenide-based ferromagnetic semiconductor just 15 nanometers thick, about one-seven-thousandth the thickness of a dollar bill, the undesirable field-like torque became suppressed. This means the magnetization switching occurred with the lowest current ever recorded for this kind of process.

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People borrowing money for the first time should only be given small amounts until they have proved their competence, a new study says.
The paper argues that new borrowers — especially young people and those of an “impulsive” disposition — need protection to prevent them falling into long-term debt.
It says lenders should have a duty of care, requiring them to consider age, experience and personality traits, which can be detected by psychometric tests.
The study, by Professor Stephen Lea of the University of Exeter, reviews evidence on the psychology of debt, and makes recommendations to help reduce debt problems.
“I argue that — similar to obtaining a driving licence — people should have to demonstrate their competence before taking out debts that could have long-term negative consequences,” Professor Lea said.
“Some people are particularly susceptible to debt problems.

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“This includes those of an impulsive disposition, but it particularly applies to young people — and debts contracted early in life can have long-term ill effects.
“Accordingly, steps need to be taken to protect people at this vulnerable life stage.
“Although this would involve a restriction of the financial freedom of people who are legally adults, the evidence suggests that access to credit should be controlled more carefully.”
Speaking about rules relating to people of an “impulsive” disposition, Professor Lea said: “Lenders might well resist such regulations, but in fact financial advisors are already required to assess risk preference when advising people on investments.
“This shows that such a measure can be brought in without too much difficulty or expense to those who have to implement it.”
Professor Lea acknowledges that debt is heavily influenced by economic inequality, and that no psychological factor can prevent debt if excessive socio-economic disadvantage is not addressed.

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He also says the current Covid-19 pandemic is likely to increase debt problems.
His recommendations include tackling poverty (reducing the “decades-long drift towards greater inequality in almost all countries”) and intensifying regulation of high-cost lenders.
Recommending better financial education of children, Professor Lea said: “Many people are shockingly bad at assessing credit deals.
“What seems to be needed is fluency in seeing, without effortful calculation, what is or is not a good deal when borrowing money.”
The paper calls for policies to improve people’s awareness of their credit position, and says debtors should be advised to seek independent advice before dealing with lenders to whom they owe money.
He concludes: “If all these recommendations were adopted overnight, the problems of debt in society would not go away.
“Credit enhances consumer choice and is a necessary function in a modern economy, and so long is credit is available, some people will get into difficulties with debt.
“But, as is the case with poverty itself, neither the extent nor the level of debt is fixed.
“Appropriate policies, such as those proposed here, could reduce both.”

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Modern microscopes used for biological imaging are expensive, are located in specialized laboratories and require highly qualified staff. To research novel, creative approaches to address urgent scientific issues — for example in the fight against infectious diseases such as Covid-19 — is thus primarily reserved for scientists at well-equipped research institutions in rich countries. A young research team from the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology (Leibniz IPHT) in Jena, the Friedrich Schiller University and Jena University Hospital wants to change this: The researchers have developed an optical toolbox to build microscopes for a few hundred euros that deliver high-resolution images comparable to commercial microscopes that cost a hundred to a thousand times more. With open-source blueprints, components from the 3D printer and smartphone camera, the UC2 (You. See. Too.) modular system can be combined specifically in the way the research question requires — from long-term observation of living organisms in the incubator to a toolbox for optics education.
The basic building block of the UC2 system is a simple 3D printable cube with an edge length of 5 centimeters, which can host a variety of components such as lenses, LEDs or cameras. Several such cubes are plugged on a magnetic raster base plate. Cleverly arranged, the modules thus result in a powerful optical instrument. An optical concept according to which focal planes of adjacent lenses coincide is the basis for most of the complex optical setups such as modern microscopes. With the UC2 toolbox, the research team of PhD students at the lab of Prof. Dr. Rainer Heintzmann, Leibniz IPHT and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, shows how this inherently modular process can be understood intuitively in hands-on-experiments. In this way, UC2 also provides users without technical training with an optical tool that they can use, modify and expand — depending on what they are researching.
Monitor pathogens — and then recycle the contaminated microscope
Helge Ewers, Professor of Biochemistry at the Free University of Berlin and the Charité, is investigating pathogens usind the UC2 toolbox. “The UC2 system allows us to produce a high-quality microscope at low cost, with which we can observe living cells in an incubator,” he states. UC2 thus opens up areas of application for biomedical research for which conventional microscopes are not suitable. “Commercial microscopes that can be used to examine pathogens over a longer period of time cost hundreds or thousands of times more than our UC2 setup,” says Benedict Diederich, PhD student at Leibniz-IPHT, who developed the optical toolbox there together with René Lachmann. “You can hardly get them into a contaminated laboratory from which you may not be able to remove them because they cannot be cleaned easily.” The UC2 microscope made of plastic, on the other hand, can be easily burned or recycled after its successful use in the biological safety laboratory. For a study at Jena University Hospital, the UC2 team observed the differentiation of monocytes into macrophages in the incubator over a period of one week in order to gain insights into how the innate immune system fights off pathogens in the body.
Building according to the Lego principle: From the idea to the prototype
Building according to the Lego principle — this not only awakens the users’ inner play instinct, observes the UC2 team, but it also opens up new possibilities for researchers to design an instrument precisely tailored to their research question. “With our method, it is possible to quickly assemble the right tool to map specific cells,” explains Benedict Diederich. “If, for example, a red wavelength is required as excitation, you simply install the appropriate laser and change the filter. If an inverted microscope is needed, you stack the cubes accordingly. With the UC2 system, elements can be combined depending on the required resolution, stability, duration or microscopy method and tested directly in the “rapid prototyping” process.
The Vision: Open Science
The researchers publish construction plans and software on the freely accessible online repository GitHub, so that the open-source community worldwide can access, rebuild, modify and expand the presented systems. “With the feedback from users, we improve the system step by step and add ever new creative solutions,” reports René Lachmann. The first users have already started to expand the system for themselves and their purposes. “We are eager to see when we can present the first user solutions.”
The aim behind this is to enable open science. Thanks to the detailed documentation, researchers can reproduce and further develop experiments anywhere in the world, even beyond well-equipped laboratories. “Change in Paradigm: Science for a Dime” is what Benedict Diederich calls this vision: to herald a paradigm shift in which the scientific process is as open and transparent as possible, freely accessible to all, where researchers share their knowledge with each other and incorporate it into their work.
UC2 experiment box brings science to schools
In order to get especially young people interested in optics, the research team has developed a sophisticated tool set for educational purposes in schools and universities. With “The Box” UC2 introduces a kit that enables users to learn about and try out optical concepts and microscopy methods. “The components can be combined to form a projector or a telescope; you can build a spectrometer or a smartphone microscope,” explains Barbora Maršíková, who developed experiments and a series of ready-to-use documentations that the UC2 team already tested in several workshops in and around Jena as well as in the US, in Great Britain and Norway. In Jena, the young researchers have already used the UC2 toolbox in several schools and e.g. supported pupils to build a fluorescence microscope to detect microplastics. “We have combined UC2 with our smartphone. This enabled us to build our own fluorescence microscope cost-effectively without any major optical knowledge and to develop a comparably simple method for detecting plastic particles in cosmetics,” reports Emilia Walther from the Montessori School in Jena, who together with her group is pursuing an innovative interdisciplinary learning approach.
“We want to make modern microscopy techniques accessible to a broad public,” says Benedict Diederich, “and build up an open and creative microscopy community.” This build-it-yourself approach to teaching has a huge potential, especially at times of the Corona pandemics, when access to teaching material at home is severely limited. More

Multimaterial fibers that integrate metal, glass and semiconductors could be useful for applications such as biomedicine, smart textiles and robotics. But because the fibers are composed of the same materials along their lengths, it is difficult to position functional elements, such as electrodes or sensors, at specific locations. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have developed a method to pattern hundreds-of-meters-long multimaterial fibers with embedded functional elements.

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Youngbin Lee, Polina Anikeeva and colleagues developed a thiol-epoxy/thiol-ene polymer that could be combined with other materials, heated and drawn from a macroscale model into fibers that were coated with the polymer. When exposed to ultraviolet light, the polymer, which is photosensitive, crosslinked into a network that was insoluble to common solvents, such as acetone. By placing “masks” at specific locations along the fiber in a process known as photolithography, the researchers could protect the underlying areas from UV light. Then, they removed the masks and treated the fiber with acetone. The polymer in the areas that had been covered dissolved to expose the underlying materials.
As a proof of concept, the researchers made patterns along fibers that exposed an electrically conducting filament underneath the thiol-epoxy/thiol-ene coating. The remaining polymer acted as an insulator along the length of the fiber. In this way, electrodes or other microdevices could be placed in customizable patterns along multimaterial fibers, the researchers say.

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Journal Reference:
Youngbin Lee, Andres Canales, Gabriel Loke, Mehmet Kanik, Yoel Fink, Polina Anikeeva. Selectively Micro-Patternable Fibers via In-Fiber Photolithography. ACS Central Science, 2020; DOI: 10.1021/acscentsci.0c01188

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American Chemical Society. “Patterning method could pave the way for new fiber-based devices, smart textiles.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 25 November 2020. .
American Chemical Society. (2020, November 25). Patterning method could pave the way for new fiber-based devices, smart textiles. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 25, 2020 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201125091506.htm
American Chemical Society. “Patterning method could pave the way for new fiber-based devices, smart textiles.” ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201125091506.htm (accessed November 25, 2020). More

Researchers from Boston University and University of Virginia published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines how consumers respond to AI recommenders when focused on the functional and practical aspects of a product (its utilitarian value) versus the experiential and sensory aspects of a product (its hedonic value).
The study, forthcoming in the the Journal of Marketing, is titled “Artificial Intelligence in Utilitarian vs. Hedonic Contexts: The ‘Word-of-Machine’ Effect” and is authored by Chiara Longoni and Luca Cian.
More and more companies are leveraging technological advances in AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to provide recommendations to consumers. As these companies evaluate AI-based assistance, one critical question must be asked: When do consumers trust the “word of machine,” and when do they resist it?
A new Journal of Marketing study explores reasons behind the preference of recommendation source (AI vs. human). The key factor in deciding how to incorporate AI recommenders is whether consumers are focused on the functional and practical aspects of a product (its utilitarian value) or on the experiential and sensory aspects of a product (its hedonic value).
Relying on data from over 3,000 study participants, the research team provides evidence supporting a word-of-machine effect, defined as the phenomenon by which the trade-offs between utilitarian and hedonic aspects of a product determine the preference for, or resistance to, AI recommenders. The word-of-machine effect stems from a widespread belief that AI systems are more competent than humans at dispensing advice when functional and practical qualities (utilitarian) are desired and less competent when the desired qualities are experiential and sensory-based (hedonic). Consequently, the importance or salience of utilitarian attributes determine preference for AI recommenders over human ones, while the importance or salience of hedonic attributes determine resistance to AI recommenders over human ones.
The researchers tested the word-of-machine effect using experiments designed to assess people’s tendency to choose products based on consumption experiences and recommendation source. Longoni explains that “We found that when presented with instructions to choose products based solely on utilitarian/functional attributes, more participants chose AI-recommended products. When asked to only consider hedonic/experiential attributes, a higher percentage of participants chose human recommenders.”
When utilitarian features are most important, the word-of-machine effect was more distinct. In one study, participants were asked to imagine buying a winter coat and rate how important utilitarian/functional attributes (e.g., breathability) and hedonic/experiential attributes (e.g., fabric type) were in their decision making. The more utilitarian/functional features were highly rated, the greater the preference for AI over human assistance, and the more hedonic/experiential features were highly rated, the greater the preference for human over AI assistance.
Another study indicated that when consumers wanted recommendations matched to their unique preferences, they resisted AI recommenders and preferred human recommenders regardless of hedonic or utilitarian preferences. These results suggest that companies whose customers are known to be satisfied with “one size fits all” recommendations (i.e., not in need of a high level of customization) may rely on AI-systems. However, companies whose customers are known to desire personalized recommendations should rely on humans.
Although there is a clear correlation between utilitarian attributes and consumer trust in AI recommenders, companies selling products that promise more sensorial experiences (e.g., fragrances, food, wine) may still use AI to engage customers. In fact, people embrace AI’s recommendations as long as AI works in partnership with humans. When AI plays an assistive role, “augmenting” human intelligence rather than replacing it, the AI-human hybrid recommender performs as well as a human-only assistant.
Overall, the word-of-machine effect has important implications as the development and adoption of AI, machine learning, and natural language processing challenges managers and policy-makers to harness these transformative technologies. As Cian says, “The digital marketplace is crowded and consumer attention span is short. Understanding the conditions under which consumers trust, and do not trust, AI advice will give companies a competitive advantage in this space.”

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Magic squares belong to the imagination of humanity for a long time. The oldest known magic square comes from China and is over 2000 years old. One of the most famous magic squares can be found in Albrecht Dürer’s copper engraving Melencolia I. Another one is on the facade of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona. A magic square is a square of numbers such that every column and every row sums to the same number. For example, in the magic square of the Sagrada Família every row and column sums to 33.
If the magic square can contain real numbers, and every row and column sums to 1, then it is called a doubly stochastic matrix. One particular example would be a matrix that has 0’s everywhere except for one 1 in every column and every row. This is called a permutation matrix. A famous theorem says that every doubly stochastic matrix can be obtained as a convex combination of permutation matrices. In words, this means that permutation matrices “contain all the secrets” of doubly stochastic matrices — more precisely, that the latter can be fully characterized in terms of the former.
In a new paper in the Journal of Mathematical Physics, Tim Netzer and Tom Drescher from the Department of Mathematics and Gemma De las Cuevas from the Department of Theoretical Physics have introduced the notion of the quantum magic square, which is a magic square but instead of numbers one puts in matrices. This is a non-commutative, and thus quantum, generalization of a magic square. The authors show that quantum magic squares cannot be as easily characterized as their “classical” cousins. More precisely, quantum magic squares are not convex combinations of quantum permutation matrices. “They are richer and more complicated to understand,” explains Tom Drescher. “This is the general theme when generalizations to the non-commutative case are studied.”

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