What does it take to make a customer return? René van Pelt and Ida de Wit Sandström are retail workers in the specialist jewellery trade. They have been serving their customers together for more than fifteen years. In a world where digitalisation is changing the business conditions, demands regarding distinction and profiling are increasing and consumers are becoming ever more unpredictable , show

The need for comparative studies between experimental and numerical results exists due to the long lasting necessity for verification and validation. Accordingly, background oriented schlieren (BOS) provides a unique opportunity to perform non-intrusive quantification of density varying flows by means of an inexpensive and simple setup. As the optical flow based image processing algorithms are sho

Heart failure is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality1,2. Elevated intracardiac pressures and myocyte stretch in heart failure trigger the release of counter-regulatory natriuretic peptides, which act through their receptor (NPR1) to affect vasodilation, diuresis and natriuresis, lowering venous pressures and relieving venous congestion3–8. Recombinant natriuretic peptide infusions were deve

A comprehensive study of the local and nonlocal amplitudes contributing to the decay B0 → K*0(→ K+π−)μ+μ− is performed by analysing the phase-space distribution of the decay products. The analysis is based on pp collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 8.4 fb−1 collected by the LHCb experiment. This measurement employs for the first time a model of both one-particle and two-part

Inequalities of opportunity affect a person’s life expectancy and access to basic services and human rights through discrimination, abuse, and lack of access to justice. High levels of inequality of opportunity discourage skill accumulation, choke economic and social mobility, and, consequently, depress economic growth. Inequality also entrenches uncertainty, vulnerability, and insecurity; undermi

A growing body of studies focuses on sexual harassment and violence in nightlife venues, primarily as it affects adolescent and adult women. In these settings, the boundary between flirtation and unwanted sexual attention easily blurs. This study examines how young women reject such attention. It draws on in-depth interviews with 53 Spanish undergraduates aged 18 to 25 from a Madrid public univers

A lack of empathy, and particularly its affective components, is a core symptom of behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). Visual exposure to images of a needle pricking a hand (pain condition) and Q-tips touching a hand (control condition) is an established functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm used to investigate empathy for pain (EFP; pain condition minus control co

Innovation plays a crucial role in shaping technological, industrial, and social progress in modern societies. The quantification of the benefits technologies offer in specific decision-making scenarios can foster their innovation process providing a guide in their development and diffusion. Decision Value Analysis provides metrics to assess the value of technologies for increasing maturity levels

Hanna Poddig interviewed by Sophia New. As part of the research week at the HZT-Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin we were looking into different practices and contexts in which bodies turn into shields, either by choice or by force. The following conversation explores Hanna's experience as eco-activist and the body- based strategies that she shared during the workshop.

Since the 1970s the Swedish Government has been promoting social work based on research into methods which work in practice for practitioners and patients. IN 2015, the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment (SBU), a national government instigated in the 1987, was commissioned to expand its remit, to review empirical research on social work interventions and to disseminate the results to

In this work, we consider the problem of coordinating a collection of nth-order integrator systems. The coordination is achieved through the novel serial consensus design; this control design achieves a stable closed-loop system while adhering to the constraint of only using local and relative measurements. Earlier work has shown that second-order serial consensus can stabilize a collection of dou

This paper presents a novel control design for vehicular formations as an alternative to alignment through conventional consensus protocols for second-order systems. The design is motivated by the closed-loop system, which we construct as first-order systems connected in series, and is therefore called serial consensus. The serial consensus design will guarantee the stability of the closed-loop sy

High-dimensional problems have long been considered the Achilles' heel of Bayesian optimization. Spurred by the curse of dimensionality, a large collection of algorithms aim to make it more performant in this setting, commonly by imposing various simplifying assumptions on the objective. In this paper, we identify the degeneracies that make vanilla Bayesian optimization poorly suited to high-dimen