Paying at eftpos machine. Credit: Tracey Nearmy/ANU
Indigenous-owned businesses in Australia employ Indigenous staff at a rate 12 times higher than non-Indigenous-owned businesses, a new study from The Australian National University (ANU) has found.
According to lead researcher and Ph.D. candidate Christian Eva, the findings demonstrate that non-Indigenous-owned businesses must do more to better integrate Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices into the workplace and boost the number of Indigenous staff.
Eva said non-Indigenous-owned businesses should also acknowledge Indigenous peoples’ broader responsibilities within their communities by offering flexible working arrangements and cultural leave entitlements.
“The unique workplace practices of Indigenous businesses may explain their strong Indigenous employment rates. Our paper demonstrates it’s more likely workplace practices driving divergent Indigenous employment outcomes, rather than just local labor market conditions,” Eva said.
“This disparity is of national importance as Indigenous employment is part of Australia’s Closing the Gap framework. However, as with many Closing the Gap outcomes, the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous employment is failing to close. It’s evident we must do more.”
The researchers analyzed Supply Nation data of 2,291 Indigenous-owned businesses and compared it to a dataset of 680 non-Indigenous-owned businesses in Australia.
They asked non-Indigenous business owners whether they had a Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) or if they offered cultural competence training to staff. Businesses were also asked whether they had other forms of Indigenous-focused workplace policies and practices.
“Despite an increased focus on Indigenous employment, the national Indigenous employment rate is failing to increase substantially, and many Australian businesses are still struggling to reach their Indigenous employment targets,” Eva said.
“The findings highlight the crucial need for Australian businesses to incorporate Indigenous-led approaches to things such as organizational governance, human resource management and recruitment within Australian businesses.”
The recently published paper in The Economic and Labour Relations Review, also led by Eva, found that businesses with Indigenous staff in management positions had more than three times the number of Indigenous workers compared to businesses with no Indigenous management.
“It’s therefore key for non-Indigenous-owned businesses to identify how they can create those pathways for Indigenous employees to progress into senior management roles and ensure there are equitable opportunities for progression within organizations for all employees,” Eva said.
“Managers from an Indigenous background are also better placed to understand the unique cultural and personal tendencies of their Indigenous colleagues.”
More information:
Christian Eva et al, Closing the employment gap: Estimations of Indigenous employment in Indigenous- and non-Indigenous-owned businesses in Australia, The Economic and Labour Relations Review (2024). DOI: 10.1017/elr.2024.37
Citation:
Non-Indigenous businesses struggling to boost Indigenous staff numbers (2024, October 10)
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The region of the nuclear chart 87≤Z≤97 and 112≤N≤136 shows the new isotope plutonium-227 (red star) and the 12 nuclides (blue star) that were discovered at IMP. Credit: Yang Huabin
A research team led by researchers at the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has synthesized a new plutonium isotope, plutonium-227. Their study is published in Physical Review C.
The magic numbers of protons and neutrons, such as 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, or 126, are correlated with shell closures. In past studies, systematic analyses have revealed a persistent weakening of the neutron shell closure 126 up to uranium, which makes it fascinating to continue exploring whether the shell closure would fade in the transuranium region.
“We have discovered the presence of the shell closure in neptunium isotopes through a series of experiments. However, due to the absence of experimental data, the robustness of this closure in plutonium isotopes remains unknown,” said Prof. Gan Zaiguo from IMP.
To probe the unknown plutonium isotopes, the researchers at IMP and their collaborators carried out an experiment at the gas-filled recoil separator, Spectrometer for Heavy Atoms and Nuclear Structure, at the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL) in China.
Using the fusion evaporation reaction, the researchers synthesized plutonium-227, a very neutron-deficient plutonium isotope, for the first time. Plutonium-227 is the 39th new isotope discovered by IMP, and it is also the first plutonium isotope discovered by Chinese scientists.
From the nine observed decay chains, the researchers then measured the 𝛼-particle energy and half-life of plutonium-227 to be about 8191 keV and 0.78 s, respectively. The data fit quite well into the systematics of known plutonium isotopes.
The research team plans to investigate more plutonium isotopes, aiming to gain a deeper understanding of the shell evolution in plutonium.
“The newly discovered plutonium-227 is still seven neutrons away from the magic number of 126. To study the robustness of the shell closure in plutonium, it is necessary to continue research of even lighter plutonium isotopes, including plutonium-221 to plutonium-226,” said Dr. Yang Huabin from IMP, the first author of this study.
More information:
H. B. Yang et al, α decay of the new isotope Pu227, Physical Review C (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevC.110.044302
Citation:
Researchers discover new isotope plutonium-227 (2024, October 10)
retrieved 10 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-isotope-plutonium.html
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The semiconductor CuIn5Se8 is processed into large sheets by solution deposition, in which the material is dissolved in solution then spread over a large area. The process is far more efficient and scalable than standard vapor deposition techniques. Credit: University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering
Standard manufacturing techniques for semiconductor devices—the technologies that make electronics possible—involve processing raw materials at high temperatures in vacuum vessels. This fundamentally limits manufacturing efficiency and scalability.
Processes based on deposition from chemical solutions at lower temperatures and ambient pressure have long been pursued as a more efficient and scalable alternative, but such processes usually result in materials with large numbers of structural defects leading to inferior device performance.
The laboratory of Qing Cao, professor of materials science & engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has developed a process yielding the highest performing transistors from solution-deposited semiconductors to date. However, the research team was surprised to learn that the best semiconductor for this process has higher defect concentrations than its parent material.
“It’s remarkable that even though there are more defects, their organization into ordered defect pairs are the reason our materials have the record-high performances for those made with a solution deposition process,” Cao said.
“We went further than fundamental materials science and showed that functional circuits and systems like displays can be constructed, paving the road toward their adoption in many emerging applications requiring high-performance electronics covering large areas.”
The study, published in the journal Science Advances, outlines a procedure for fabricating devices from the ordered defect compound semiconductor CuIn5Se8 prepared by solution deposition.
They were used to form high-speed logic circuits operating in megahertz and a micro-display with a resolution of 508 pixels per inch. The transistors in the display drove inorganic micro-LEDs, a brighter and more durable alternative to the current standard of organic LEDs but requiring much more powerful transistors to drive each pixel.
Cao believes that the new material and process could scale to support next-generation inorganic micro-LED displays and high-speed printable electronics for health care, smart packaging, and internet of things.
The promise of solution deposition
The extreme conditions required for standard semiconductor manufacturing limit the surface areas of the processed materials. While this is acceptable for chips and microelectronics, it is economically prohibitive for applications requiring many devices coordinated and distributed over a large area, such as electronic displays.
Solution deposition, in which the semiconductors are dissolved in liquid and spread over a target substrate, would not only enable large-area applications but could also make processing more efficient.
“The fact that solution deposition can occur at atmospheric pressure and much lower temperatures alone makes it a desirable alternative to standard vapor deposition in terms of manufacturing throughput, cost and substrate compatibility,” Cao said.
However, vapor deposition techniques have been developed to the point where the processed materials have very few defects, leading to high-performance devices. Before solution deposition is used in commercial processing, it must be developed to the point where the materials it creates have the same performance levels.
A better semiconductor
Cao recalls that copper-indium-selenium materials first drew the attention of his lab for their tunability. Changing the exact proportions of each element in the material allowed a vast material design space for them to realize effective solar cells with a copper-indium-selenium ratio of 0.9:1:2.
“The thought was, ‘We have control over the material proportions, so can we adjust them to make good semiconductors for electronics instead of good solar cells?'” Cao said.
“We developed a solution deposition process for these materials, and we experimented with the proportions until we found a material good for electronics purposes, which has a copper-indium-selenium ratio of 1:5:8. In fact, the combination we found outperformed not only other solution processable semiconductors, but also most semiconductors currently used in displays.”
Semiconductor performance is often quantified with charge mobility, a measure of how easily electrons move through the material when voltage is applied. Compared to amorphous silicon semiconductors used in large LCD displays, the researchers’ material CuIn5Se8 has a mobility 500-times greater. Compared to metal oxide semiconductors used in state-of-the-art organic LED displays, the new material’s mobility is four times greater.
The mobility of CuIn5Se8 is comparable to low-temperature polycrystalline silicon which is used in smartphone displays. However, polycrystalline silicon processing requires laser annealing, making it difficult to scale up and include in larger devices. Solution-deposited CuIn5Se8 could facilitate larger high-performance displays.
More defects, surprisingly
The researchers’ next step was figuring out why CuIn5Se8 performs so well. They consulted Jian-Min Zuo, professor of materials science & engineering in Grainger Engineering and an expert in material characterization.
“Generally, as material scientists, we think that better performing materials have fewer defects, and that’s what we expected initially,” Cao said.
“But then, professor Zuo got back to us after using transmission electron microscopy to observe the microscopic structure. It turned out that there were not only more defects than the parent compound, but likely two types of defects co-existing.”
To resolve the apparent contradiction, the researchers turned to theorist André Schleife, professor of materials science & engineering in Grainger Engineering.
By simulating the new copper-indium-selenium material, Schleife’s group found that the two types of defects in CuIn5Se8 can combine to form a material system called an ordered defect compound. In such systems, different types of material defects organize into a regular pattern and “cancel out,” leading to an improved charge mobility.
A path to printing high-speed electronics and higher-performance displays
The researchers demonstrated the capabilities of their process by using their new defect-tolerant copper-indium-selenium semiconductors to construct a display together with gallium nitride-based micro-LEDs. The CuIn5Se8 material formed the basis of high-performance transistors which operated 8-by-8-micron LED pixels, closely packed to a resolution of 508 pixels per inch.
“While Organic LEDs are the standard in high-performance displays, LEDs based on inorganic substances such as gallium nitride are emerging as a faster, higher-brightness, and more energy efficient alternative,” Cao explained.
“However, since they are brighter, they require high-power electronics to operate and it is especially challenging if we would like to squeeze them within a smaller footprint for high resolution. We demonstrated that our new semiconductor is up to the task, and we’ve shown that it can be efficiently manufactured with solution deposition.”
In addition to driving LEDs, these transistors can be integrated to form logic circuits, again offering much better performance compared to what is constructed on other solution processable semiconductors. These circuits can operate at megahertz with delay down to 75 nanoseconds.
The compatibility with low-cost solution deposition processes without sacrificing performance is promising for future printable electronics. They could find use in continuous wellness monitoring, smart packing with integrated sensing and computing, and affordable internet of things devices.
Cao notes that while the process is sufficiently developed that it could be commercialized, they are holding off until it can be made more environmentally friendly.
“The process is currently based on hydrazine, which is used as rocket fuel,” he said. “It could be used in an industrial setting, but we first want to modify the process to use chemicals that are safer to work with and leave a smaller environmental footprint.”
More information:
Hsien-Nung Wang et al, Solution-processable ordered defect compound semiconductors for high-performance electronics, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr8636
Citation:
Ordered defects enhance solution-deposited semiconductors enabling larger high-performance displays (2024, October 10)
retrieved 10 October 2024
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Changes need to be made to the UK legal system to protect people from exploitative litigation designed to prey on vulnerabilities, a new study warns.
Reforms need to be made to protect adults from unfairness during copyright enforcement legal proceedings. This would also help to prevent children being exposed to adult pornography online.
The malicious litigation typically involves copyright holders or their agents of online pornographic works obtaining contact details of internet users via a court order to engage in mass letter writing campaigns demanding payment with the threat of potential court action.
The mere threat of litigation has forced some individuals to settle to avoid the intrusion into their sexual privacy, whether or not they have a legal case to answer.
The research says copyright infringement actions in pornographic works should be subject to more rigorous checks and balances. Sexual privacy should be protected by the courts for adults consuming lawful pornography. This will allow genuine copyright holders to enforce their copyright interest through bona fide actions, while deterring unscrupulous claimants.
The study by Professor Abhilash Nair and Professor James Griffin from the University of Exeter Law School, calls for a fundamental “reconceptualization” of the right to privacy. The study is published in the journal Computer Law & Security Review.
During cases, courts should do more to recognize and balance the sexual privacy rights of the alleged infringers of copyright in pornographic works with the interests of the right holders to ensure fair and equitable outcomes.
Professor Nair said, “My intention is not to prevent the enforcement of copyright altogether in pornographic works or to deter bona fide claims. There is a need to address the practice of speculative legal actions that target the embarrassment and sexual privacy of individuals to extract settlement.
“A fundamental lack of appreciation of sexual privacy at a conceptual level in the context of consumption of legal pornography is one of the main reasons why exploitative practices like speculative invoicing models continue to exist.”
“The current position is no longer tenable. Privacy generally, and sexual privacy in particular, deserves more recognition and consideration in court during copyright enforcement actions for pornographic works on the internet to ensure that the administration of the copyright balance remains in the hands of the legislature and courts, rather than in the hands of the speculative invoicer.”
The study says copyright should remain the appropriate regime for protecting pornographic works. However, the current enforcement regime for copyright is heavily imbalanced to the detriment of consumers of pornographic material online. Maintaining the status quo in this regard is no longer tenable.
The study recommends a new Practice Direction that clearly requires the consideration of sexual privacy in certain third-party disclosure applications for copyright infringement cases.
The Practice Direction should require that the interest of the copyright holder (or other interested third party) is to be balanced with the sexual privacy of the alleged infringer, where infringement is alleged of a pornographic work. In order that the process is meaningful and efficient, this should be carried out during third-party disclosure order proceedings before claimants are allowed to obtain the identity of the alleged infringers.
Section 171 of the CPDA 1988 should be amended to deter copyright enforcement of pornographic works that are unlawful to publish in the UK.
The current copyright regime allows right holders to enforce copyright for pornography published in the UK without measures such as age verification in place to prevent children’s access, thereby rendering it obscene with respect to children and therefore unlawful to publish in the first instance. Only pornography that is both lawful to publish and for adults to consume should be eligible for copyright enforcement.
More information:
Abhilash Nair et al, Pornography, sexual privacy and copyright, Computer Law & Security Review (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.clsr.2024.105990
Citation:
Legal system fails to protect people from malicious copyright cases at the cost of sexual privacy, study warns (2024, October 10)
retrieved 10 October 2024
from https://techxplore.com/news/2024-10-legal-people-malicious-copyright-cases.html
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Given robot images, RoVi-Aug uses state-of-the-art diffusion models to augment the data and generate synthetic images with different robots and viewpoints. Policy trained on the augmented dataset can be deployed on the target robots zero-shot or further finetuned, exhibiting robustness to camera pose changes. Credit: Chen et al.
In recent years, roboticists have developed a wide range of systems designed to tackle various real-world tasks, ranging from completing household chores to delivering packages or finding target objects in delineated environments.
A key objective in the field has been to develop algorithms that allow the reliable transfer of specific skills across robots with different bodies and characteristics, which would help to rapidly train robots on new tasks, broadening their capabilities.
Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed RoVi-Aug, a new computational framework designed to augment robotic data and facilitate the transfer of skills across different robots. Their proposed approach, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv and set to be presented at the 2024 Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), utilizes state-of-the-art generative models to augment image data and create synthesized visual task demonstrations with varying camera views for distinct robots.
“The success of modern machine learning systems, particularly generative models, demonstrates impressive generalizability and motivated robotics researchers to explore how to achieve similar generalizability in robotics,” Lawrence Chen (Ph.D. Candidate, AUTOLab, EECS & IEOR, BAIR, UC Berkeley) and Chenfeng Xu (Ph.D. Candidate, Pallas Lab & MSC Lab, EECS & ME, BAIR, UC Berkeley), told Tech Xplore.
“We have been investigating the problem of cross-viewpoint and cross-robot generalization since the start of this year.”
When conducting their previous research, Chen, Xu and their colleagues identified some of the challenges to the generalization of learning across different robots. Specifically, they found that when the scenes included in robotics datasets are unevenly distributed, for instance, containing a predominance of specific robot visuals and camera angles over others, this makes them less effective for teaching different robots the same skills.
Interestingly, the researchers found that many existing robot training datasets are unbalanced, including some of the most well-established. For instance, even the Open-X Embodiment (OXE) dataset, a dataset that is widely used for training robotics algorithms and contains demonstrations of different robots completing varying tasks, contains more data for some robots, such as the Franka and xArm manipulators.
“Such biases in the dataset make the robot policy model tend to overfit to specific robot types and viewpoints,” said Chen and Xu.
“To mitigate this issue, in February 2024, we proposed a test-time adaptation algorithm, Mirage, that uses ‘cross-painting’ to transform an unseen target robot into the source robot seen during training, creating the illusion that the source robot is performing the task at test time.”
Mirage, the algorithm that the researchers introduced in their previous paper, was found to attain the zero-shot transfer of skills to unseen target robots. Nonetheless, the model was found to come with various limitations.
Firstly, to work well, Mirage requires precise robot models and camera matrices. In addition, the algorithm does not support the fine-tuning of robot policies and is limited to processing images with few changes in camera pose, as it is prone to commit errors in the reprojection of image depth.
“In our latest work we present an alternative algorithm called RoVi-Aug,” said Chen and Xu. “The aim of this algorithm is to overcome the limitations of Mirage by enhancing the robustness and generalizability of policies during training, focusing on handling diverse robot visuals and camera poses, rather than relying on the test-time cross-painting approach with stringent assumptions on the known camera poses and robot URDFs (unified robot description formats).”
RoVi-Aug, the new robot data augmentation framework introduced by the researchers, is based on state-of-the-art diffusion models. These are computational models that can augment images of a robot’s trajectories, generating synthetic images showing different robots completing tasks, viewed from varying viewpoints.
Overview of the RoVi-Aug pipeline. Given an input robot image, we first segment the robot out using a finetuned SAM model, then use a ControlNet to transform the robot into another robot. After pasting the synthetic robot back into the background, we use ZeroNVS to generate novel views. Credit: Chen et al.
The researchers used their framework to compile a dataset containing a wide range of synthetic robot demonstrations and then trained robot policies on this dataset. This in turn allows the transfer of skills to new robots that have not been previously exposed to the task included in the demonstration, which is known as zero-shot learning.
Notably, the robot policies can also be fine-tuned to achieve increasingly better performances at a given task. In addition, contrarily to the Mirage model introduced in the team’s previous paper, their new algorithm can support drastic changes in camera angles.
“Unlike test-time adaptation methods like Mirage, RoVi-Aug doesn’t require any extra processing during deployment, doesn’t rely on knowing camera angles in advance, and supports policy fine-tuning,” explained Chen and Xu. “It also goes beyond traditional co-training on multi-robot, multi-task datasets by actively encouraging the model to learn the full range of robots and skills across the datasets.”
The RoVi-Aug model has two distinct components, namely the robot augmentation (Ro-Aug) and the viewpoint augmentation (Vi-Aug) modules. The first of these components is designed to synthesize demonstration data featuring different robotic systems, while the second can produce demonstrations viewed from different angles.
“Ro-Aug has two key features: a fine-tuned SAM model to segment the robot and a fine-tuned ControlNet to replace the original robot with a different one,” said Chen and Xu. “Meanwhile, Vi-Aug leverages ZeroNVS, a state-of-the-art novel view synthesis model, to generate new perspectives of the scene, making the model adaptable to various camera viewpoints.”
As part of their study, the researchers used their model to produce an augmented robot dataset and then tested the effectiveness of this dataset for training policies and transferring skills across different robots. Their initial findings highlight the potential of Rovi-Aug, as the algorithm was found to enable the training of policies that generalize well across different robots and camera set-ups.
“Its key innovation lies in applying generative models—such as image-to-image generation and novel view synthesis—to the challenge of cross-embodiment robot learning,” explained Chen and Xu.
“While previous work has used generative augmentation to improve policy robustness in the face of distracting objects and backgrounds, RoVi-Aug is the first to show how this approach can facilitate skill transfer between different robots.”
This recent work by Chen and Xu could contribute to the advancement of robots, by helping robotics researchers to easily broaden their systems’ skill set. In the future, it could be used by other teams to transfer skills between different robots or develop more effective general-purpose robotic policies.
“For instance, imagine a scenario where a researcher has spent significant effort collecting data and training a policy on a Franka robot to perform a task, but you only have a UR5 robot,” said Chen and Xu.
“RoVi-Aug allows you to repurpose the Franka data and deploy the policy on the UR5 robot without additional training. This is particularly useful because robot policies are often sensitive to camera viewpoint changes, and setting up identical camera angles across different robots is challenging. RoVi-Aug eliminates the need for such precise setups.”
As collecting large amounts of robot demonstrations in the real world can be very expensive and time-consuming, RoVi-Aug could be a cost-effective alternative for easily compiling reliable robot training datasets.
While the images in these datasets would be synthetic (i.e., generated by AI), they could still prove useful for producing reliable robot policies. The researchers are currently working with colleagues at Toyota Research Labs and other institutes on applying and extending their approach to other robot datasets.
“We now aim to further refine RoVi-Aug by incorporating recent developments in generative modeling techniques, such as video generation in place of image generation,” added Chen and Xu.
“We also plan to apply RoVi-Aug to existing datasets like the Open-X Embodiment (OXE) dataset, and we are excited about the potential to enhance the performance of generalist robot policies trained on this data. Expanding RoVi-Aug’s capabilities could significantly improve the flexibility and robustness of these policies across a wider range of robots and tasks.”
More information:
Lawrence Yunliang Chen et al, RoVi-Aug: Robot and Viewpoint Augmentation for Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2409.03403
Citation:
New data augmentation algorithm could facilitate the transfer of skills across robots (2024, October 10)
retrieved 10 October 2024
from https://techxplore.com/news/2024-10-augmentation-algorithm-skills-robots.html
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