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Online Controlled Experiments (OCE) are the gold standard to measure impact and guide decisions for digital products and services. Despite many methodological advances in this area, the scarcity of public datasets and the lack of a systematic review and categorization hinder its development. We present the first survey and taxonomy for OCE datasets, which highlight the lack of a public dataset to support the design and running of experiments with adaptive stopping, an increasingly popular approach to enable quickly deploying improvements or rolling back degrading changes. We release the first such dataset, containing daily checkpoints of decision metrics from multiple, real experiments run on a global e-commerce platform. The dataset design is guided by a broader discussion on data requirements for common statistical tests used in digital experimentation. We demonstrate how to use the dataset in the adaptive stopping scenario using sequential and Bayesian hypothesis tests and learn the relevant parameters for each approach., 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021) Track on Datasets and Benchmarks. 17 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables. Dataset available on Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/64jsb/

The objective of this study was to determine the effects of liver abscess severity in beef cattle at slaughter on meat tenderness and sensory attributes of steaks from USDA Low Choice and Select quality grades. Liver abscesses at the time of slaughter have been shown to decrease hot carcass weight, dressing percentage, yield grade, and marbling scores. However, little research has focused on the effects of animal health and disease parameters, including liver abscesses, on meat tenderness and sensory attributes., American Association of Bovine Practitioners Proceedings of the Annual Conference, 2017

Veterinary graduates (n=489) from 39 universities across 4 continents participated in a survey to evaluate veterinary training of clinical skills and the monetary value of education for recent graduates. The objectives of this study were to conduct a survey of veterinarians and current veterinary students regarding the exposure to or ability to perform certain clinical skills during veterinary school that are important to beef cattle veterinary practice. Another objective was to survey veterinary practitioners regarding their willingness to pay a new graduate more if the new veterinarian could perform these skills on their first day of practice. Participants answered 111 questions in a web based survey system on their exposure to clinical skills and production concepts while veterinary students, and the value of these skills to new graduates. Eighty-four percent of surveyed veterinarians had adequate or excellent exposure to the calving process and knowledge of when to intervene while in veterinary school, but only 65% had adequate or excellent exposure to caesarian section utilizing a flank approach. Most surveyed veterinarians indicated that they would be willing to pay new graduates more if they entered the practice with competency in the surveyed clinical skills., The Bovine Practitioner, Vol. 51, No. 2 (2017 Summer)

This thesis details an exploration of the behaviour of spatial optical solitons (self-collimated, self-stabilising light beams) interacting with the interface between classes of nonlinear dielectric materials.\ud Chapter 1 gives the theoretical background to the thesis by introducing the soliton concept, material interfaces and the Helmholtz model. \ud The second chapter discusses the reflection and refraction characteristics of soliton beams incident on the planar boundary between dissimilar cubic-quintic materials. The deployment of Helmholtz soliton theory allows for the simultaneous consideration of: (i) arbitrary angles of incidence, reflection and refraction (relative to the interface), and (ii) finite beam waists (as opposed to infinitely-wide plane waves). Despite an abundance of literature concerning solitons at interfaces, there appears to be no published research addressing refraction in the presence of cubic-quintic optical nonlinearity (and certainly none in arbitrary-angle contexts). Excellent agreement is generally found between theoretical predictions from a generalised Snell’s law and results from extensive computer simulations. \ud In Chapter 3, these novel analyses have been complemented by further investigations into other fundamental aspects of optical refraction, namely Goos-Hänchen shifts and critical angle prediction. Both aspects are the first of their kind in the cubic-quintic regime.\ud The fourth chapter considers surface wave propagation along the interface between two dissimilar power-law materials; this research has already contributed to a published peer reviewed paper [J. M. Christian et al., "Helmholtz bright spatial solitons and surface waves at power-law optical interfaces," Journal of Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics 2012 (2012), art. no. 137967]. The chapter also expands upon that paper by giving a more detailed account of surface wave stability properties.\ud Chapter 5 provides an in-depth computational study into beam propagation in coupled waveguide arrays (materials whose refractive index is periodically patterned) and there appears to be a link between the beam's critical angle and the depth of the modulation of the array.\ud The thesis concludes with a summary of findings and suggestions surrounding the implications of this novel research.

The interaction between light beams and periodically-patterned host materials (such as coupled-waveguide arrays or photonic crystals) is a fundamental class of problem in nonlinear optics [1,2]. While oblique (off-axis) propagation effects play a central role in both these configurations (and lie at the heart of photonic device architectures generally), such considerations have been largely absent from the literature to date. In this presentation, we propose a new nonparaxial model capable of describing arbitrary-angle evolution of scalar beams in periodic optical systems. By retaining a more complete governing equation that is naturally of the inhomogeneous Helmholtz class [3,4], we have been able to capture configurations whereby, in the laboratory frame, the incident light beam may be inclined at any arbitrary angle with respect to the waveguide array. Simulations involving these geometrical considerations reveal that, in general, oblique propagation across a patterned optical structure involves elements of both coupled-waveguide and photonic-crystal physics. Paraxial theory, rooted firmly in the traditional nonlinear-Schrödinger formalism (with its slowly-varying envelopes and small-angle limitations), obscures such a connection [1,2].\ud \ud References\ud [1] D. Mandelik, R. Morandotti, J. S. Aitchison, and Y. Silberberg, Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 093904 (2004).\ud [2] D. N. Christodoulides, F. Lederer, and Y. Silberberg, Nature 424, 817 (2003).\ud [3] P. Chamorro-Posada, G. S. McDonald, and G. H. C. New, J. Mod. Opt. 45, 1111 (1998).\ud [4] J. Sánchez-Curto, P. Chamorro-Posada, and G. S. McDonald, Opt. Lett. 32, 1126 (2007).

It is shown that quantum-mechanical descriptors obtained as parameters from the one-dimensional radial distribution function of electron momentum can be used to predict molecular activities or properties to a precision that compares favorably with the more traditional QSAR/QSPR methods. The distribution function is derived from momentum space ab initio wave functions. The predictive value of the descriptors is illustrated by their application to the estimation of McGowan's volume, gas-chromatographic retention time, gas-hexadecane partition coefficient, second hyperpolarizability, and tadpole narcotic activity.