University of Massachusetts Boston

About: University of Massachusetts Boston is a education organization based out in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Health care. The organization has 6541 authors who have published 12918 publications receiving 411731 citations. The organization is also known as: UMass Boston.

Versatile Polarization Generation with an Aluminum Plasmonic Metasurface

Abstract: All forms of light manipulation rely on light–matter interaction, the primary mechanism of which is the modulation of its electromagnetic fields by the localized electromagnetic fields of atoms. One of the important factors that influence the strength of interaction is the polarization of the electromagnetic field. The generation and manipulation of light polarization have been traditionally accomplished with bulky optical components such as waveplates, polarizers, and polarization beam splitters that are optically thick. The miniaturization of these devices is highly desirable for the development of a new class of compact, flat, and broadband optical components that can be integrated together on a single photonics chip. Here we demonstrate, for the first time, a reflective metasurface polarization generator (MPG) capable of producing light beams of any polarizations all from a linearly polarized light source with a single optically thin chip. Six polarization light beams are achieved simultaneously inclu...

Overyielding among plant functional groups in a long‐term experiment

Abstract: A recent debate among ecologists has focused on mechanisms by which species diversity might affect net primary productivity. Communities with more species could use a greater variety of resource capture characteristics, leading to greater use of limiting resources (complementarity) and therefore greater productivity (overyielding). Recent experiments, however, have shown a variety of relationships between diversity and productivity. In an experiment on serpentine grassland communities spanning 8 years, we found that overyielding increased several years after plot establishment. Overyielding varied greatly depending on the functional characteristics of the species involved and the biotic and abiotic environment (particularly water availability). While functional differences among species led to strong complementarity and facilitation, these effects were not sufficient to cause significant transgressive overyielding or consistent increases in productivity with increased plant diversity. These results suggest that greater absolute production with greater diversity may be restricted to particular species combinations or environmental conditions.

RJR Nabisco's cartoon camel promotes camel cigarettes to children.

Abstract: Objectives. —To determine if RJR Nabisco's cartoon-theme advertising is more effective in promoting Camel cigarettes to children or to adults. To determine if children see, remember, and are influenced by cigarette advertising. Design. —Use of four standard marketing measures to compare the effects of Camel's Old Joe cartoon advertising on children and adults. Subjects. —High school students, grades 9 through 12, from five regions of the United States, and adults, aged 21 years and over, from Massachusetts. Outcome Measures. —Recognition of Camel's Old Joe cartoon character, product and brand name recall, brand preference, appeal of advertising themes. Results. —Children were more likely to report prior exposure to the Old Joe cartoon character (97.7% vs 72.2%;P Conclusion. —Old Joe Camel cartoon advertisements are far more successful at marketing Camel cigarettes to children than to adults. This finding is consistent with tobacco industry documents that indicate that a major function of tobacco advertising is to promote and maintain tobacco addiction among children. (JAMA1991;266:3149-3153)

SceneNN: A Scene Meshes Dataset with aNNotations

Abstract: Several RGB-D datasets have been publicized over the past few years for facilitating research in computer vision and robotics. However, the lack of comprehensive and fine-grained annotation in these RGB-D datasets has posed challenges to their widespread usage. In this paper, we introduce SceneNN, an RGB-D scene dataset consisting of 100 scenes. All scenes are reconstructed into triangle meshes and have per-vertex and per-pixel annotation. We further enriched the dataset with fine-grained information such as axis-aligned bounding boxes, oriented bounding boxes, and object poses. We used the dataset as a benchmark to evaluate the state-of-the-art methods on relevant research problems such as intrinsic decomposition and shape completion. Our dataset and annotation tools are available at http://www.scenenn.net.