How strategic orientations influence the building of dynamic capability in emerging economies

Under the fierce pressures of the fast changing environments that characterize emerging economies, firms must develop dynamic capabilities to survive the competition. This study examines how strategic orientation helps build dynamic capability and its contingencies in China's emerging economy. A survey of 380 firms indicates strategic orientations are important drivers of adaptive capability, a key element of dynamic capabilities. The effectiveness of strategic orientations is contingent on market dynamics. In particular, when market demand becomes increasingly uncertain, customer orientation has a weaker impact, whereas technology orientation has a stronger effect on adaptive capability. As competition intensifies, both competitor and technology orientations build adaptive capability more effectively. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.postprin

Systemic effects of gut microbiota and its relationship with disease and modulation

published_or_final_versio

Proposed formulas for evaluation of the equivalent material properties of a multiholed structure

It is widely known that the development of fine mesh in the immediate vicinity of the holes in a multiholed plate is a challenging issue. In practice, due to the amount of time consumed and the quality of the modelling, it is not desirable to model the structural characteristics of a multiholed plate in detail. In this regard, an effective means by which to avoid the unnecessary work of simulating a multiholed plate is to replace it with an equivalent solid plate while considering the decrease in stiffness associated with the increasing area of the holes. The objective of this study is to numerically and experimentally investigate the equivalent material properties of a multiholed plate of stainless steel 316L with respect to ligament efficiencies. Simple design formulas are proposed to determine the equivalent material properties of a multiholed plate that is completely perforated with closely spaced circular holes in a square or diagonal pattern by means of nonlinear finite-element method computations. It is concluded that the proposed formulas are accurate for prediction of the equivalent material properties of multiholed structures for their design and engineering

3D Depthwise Convolution: Reducing Model Parameters in 3D Vision Tasks

Standard 3D convolution operations require much larger amounts of memory and computation cost than 2D convolution operations. The fact has hindered the development of deep neural nets in many 3D vision tasks. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of applying depthwise separable convolutions in 3D scenario and introduce the use of 3D depthwise convolution. A 3D depthwise convolution splits a single standard 3D convolution into two separate steps, which would drastically reduce the number of parameters in 3D convolutions with more than one order of magnitude. We experiment with 3D depthwise convolution on popular CNN architectures and also compare it with a similar structure called pseudo-3D convolution. The results demonstrate that, with 3D depthwise convolutions, 3D vision tasks like classification and reconstruction can be carried out with more light-weighted neural networks while still delivering comparable performances.Comment: Work in progres

HIV-1 Tat dysregulation of KSHV induced immune response through the production of IL-8

Poster PresentationHuman immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and is a major health issue around the world. HIV is known to induce a number of pathological problems in AIDS patients via the transactivator (Tat) protein that is expressed and released by infected cells. One of the most important function of Tat is the dysregulation of the immune response. IL-8 is a chemokine known to be highly expressed in AIDS patients and Tat plays a major role in its production. IL-8 increases the HIV transmission and replication rate; and plays a role in Kaposi's sarcoma associated herpesvirus (KSHV) infection, which is a major opportunistic pathogen that AIDS patients are at risk to. KSHV is also known to induce the expression of IL-8 in patients, and IL-8 is known to assist tumour development by increasing angiogenesis. In our study, we investigated the role that Tat may have in manipulating the expression of IL-8 induced by KSHV in primary blood monocyte derived macrophages (PBMac). The results showed that pretreatment of PBMac with Tat inhibited the expression of IL-8 induced by KSHV by approximately 40%. We also found that Tat was able to inhibit the phosphorylation of STAT-1 induced by KSHV, and the inhibition of STAT-1 phosporylation was related to the expression of IL-8 induced by KSHV. In conclusion, we found that Tat was able to manipulate the expression of IL-8 induced by KSHV in macrophages, and this inhibition of IL-8 expression was regulated through the STAT-1 related pathways.published_or_final_versio

MIMO Transmission for Single-fed ESPAR with Quantized Loads

Compact parasitic arrays in the form of electronically steerable parasitic antenna radiators (ESPARs) have emerged as a new antenna structure that achieves multipleinput- multiple-output (MIMO) transmission with a single RF chain. In this paper, we study the application of precoding on practical ESPARs, where the antennas are equipped with load impedances of quantized values. We analytically study the impact of the quantization on the system performance, where it is shown that while ideal ESPARs with ideal loads can achieve a similar performance to conventional MIMO, the performance of ESPARs will be degraded when only loads with quantized values are available. We further extend the performance analysis to imperfect channel state information (CSI). In order to alleviate the performance loss, we propose to approximate the ideal current vector by optimization, where a closed-form solution is further obtained. This enables the use of ESPARs in practice with quantized loads. Simulation results validate our analysis and show that a significant performance gain can be achieved with the proposed scheme over ESPARs with quantized loads. Finally, the tradeoff between performance and power consumption is shown to be favorable for the proposed ESPAR approaches compared to conventional MIMO, as evidenced by our energy efficiency results

Investigating the role of interleukin-17A on cytokines production by macrophages in response to bacterial infections

Poster PresentationInterleukin-17A (IL-17A) has been shown to associate with a variety of infection diseases. In this study, we investigate whether IL-17A affects cytokines production of human peripheral blood-derived macrophages during Mycobacteriun bovis BCG or Klebsiella pneumoniae infection. We observed that IL-17A-treated macrophages exhibited suppressed productions of TNF-α and IL-6 in response to BCG infection. The reduction of cytokines production was not associated with cell death. On the other hand, IL-17A promoted TNF-α and IL-6 production by macrophages during K. pneumoniae infection. Furthermore, IL-17A did not affect TNF-α production induced by LPS and Pam3 Cys, which are TLR4 and TLR2 agonists, respectively. The data suggest that the differential regulation of cytokines production by IL-17A requires whole bacterium infection.published_or_final_versio

Coupling-fed frequency agile monopole fluid antenna

A coupling-fed reconfigurable monopole fluid antenna is investigated. The proposed geometry separates the ionized fluid from the feed line to prevent leakage. The preliminary results show that the operating frequency of the antenna can be reconfigurable by changing the length of the ionized fluid through an external pump. The peak efficiency is about 75% antenna can