Tension, Adjustment Strategies, and Family Business Success for Single and Dual Role Managers

The purpose of this research was to understand if the family or business tension of Dual Role Managers (DRM) is different than that of Single Role Managers (SRM) of family business, and the influence of various adjustment strategies that could affect family and business success. A related goal was to understand the impact of gender on family business managers\u27 success. The study relied on data collected from 294 households collected at two time points--the 1997 Wave 1 and 2000 Wave 2 survey panels from the National Family Business Study (NFBS). In the NFBS, the household manager was identified as the person who takes care of most meal preparation, laundry, cleaning, scheduling and family activities, and oversees child care. Therefore DRM were both household manager and business manager for the family business. Prior research has not analyzed the potential influence of family business adjustment strategies for influencing conflict and tension that may vary between DRM and SRM and also predict family or business success. The causal model developed for the study posited that adjustment strategies established in Wave 1 influence tensions in Wave 2 that affect both family and business goal attainment. The main interest concerned whether DRM versus SRM status moderates the causal process, which was tested by comparing multiple regression coefficients for DRM/SRM subgroups. Multiple regression analysis procedures involved estimating the effects of adjustments on tensions, and also the effects of tensions and adjustments directly for family business success. Other predictors of family business success included family system and business system contextual variables such as managers\u27 characteristics and business size. Family success measures included family income, a scale for family functionality, and another scale for family goal achievement. Business success measures were business profit, perceptions of business success reported by the business manager, and another subjective measure concerning business goal achievement. By selecting those regression models that were statistically significant, six causal models for family business success were developed with path analysis. For DRM there was support for the hypothesis that tensions decrease family business success (family functionality, family goal achievement, and business goal achievement). However tension decreased SRM success only for family functionality, which suggested that DRM seemed to be more easily influenced by tension level for family business success than SRM. The effects of DRM adjustment strategies were more positive for family functionality than for SRM: for SRM the adjustment strategy of reallocating family resources to business increases unfairness tension and thus indirectly reduces family functionality; but for DRM using volunteer help did not affect unfairness tension, yet their use of volunteer help increased family functionality. With respect to business profit, SRM adjustment through hiring outside help was successful, whereas DRM use of intertwining tasks as an adjustment strategy reduced their business profit. Thus the main support for the hypothesis that DRM would be more able to manage both family and business than SRM was that DRM use of volunteer help had a direct positive effect on family functionality even though that strategy did not reduce unfairness tension. There were no results to support the hypothesis that female gender was associated with greater tensions and different adjustment strategies for success in the family and business. The implications for marital and family therapy with DRM include advice to rely on volunteer help instead of intertwining tasks for improving family functionality. For SRM, reallocating family resources to business should be avoided because household managers associate that reallocation with feelings of unfairness

Circle Object Recognition Based on Monocular Vision for Home Security Robot

[[abstract]]In this paper, a circle object recognition method based on monocular vision for the home security robots is proposed. This vision system is able to process image and recognize a colored ball rapidly. The proposed method consists of two submodules, which are the object segmentation module and the circle detection module. In order to implement the object segmentation, the color feature is applied to find out the region of the object. After the region of the object is determined, a fast randomized circle detection method is used by checks if there have enough number radius which are the same in a circle in the region. Because of the double recognition, this system can improve the precision for detecting a colored ball. The proposed method is tested on a home security robot to find a ball. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.[[sponsorship]]淡江大學電機工程學系[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20121104~20121107[[booktype]]電子版[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]New Taipei City, Taiwa

Hardware/Software Co-design for Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

[[abstract]]This paper presents a hardware/software (HW/SW) co-design approach using SOPC technique and pipeline design method to improve the performance of particle swarm optimization (PSO) for embedded applications. Based on modular design architecture, a particle updating accelerator module via hardware implementation for updating velocity and position of particles and a fitness evaluation module implemented on a soft-cored processor for evaluating the objective functions are respectively designed and work closely together to accelerate the evolution process. Thanks to a flexible design, the proposed approach can tackle various optimization problems of embedded applications without the need for hardware redesign. To compensate the deficiency in generating truly random numbers by hardware implementation, a particle re-initialization scheme is also presented in this paper to further improve the execution performance of the PSO. Experiment results have demonstrated that the proposed HW/SW co-design approach to realize PSO is capable of achieving a high-quality solution effectively.[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20101010~20101013[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]Istanbul, Turke

EVIDENCE FOR HAPLOTYPE-BASED ASSOCIATION IN SLE AT THE C-REACTIVE PROTEIN LOCUS: POPULATION-BASED AND FAMILY-BASED ASSOCIATION STUDIES

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a major public health problem in the U.S. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk increases significantly in SLE patients, resulting in serious morbidity and mortality. Accelerated atherosclerosis and markedly higher prevalence of CVD risk factors (intermediate phenotypes) are thought to directly contribute to these consequences. Given the significant mortality and morbidity associated with SLE and high prevalence of CVD in SLE, identifying genetic variation associated with both SLE risk and intermediate phenotypes of CVD is of significant importance.C-reactive protein (CRP) is a sensitive marker of inflammation. Increased CRP levels have been found to be associated with cardiovascular events in a large number of healthy populations and may contribute to atherosclerosis. The gene coding for CRP is located on chromosome 1q23.2, which falls within a linkage region thought to harbor a systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) susceptibility gene. Moreover, two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the CRP gene have recently been shown to be associated with CRP levels and/or SLE risk in a British family-based cohort. This study was aimed to assess the genetic association between five CRP tagSNPs with SLE risk and intermediate phenotypes of CVD.The association between CRP and SLE risk, assessed in two independently-ascertained SLE cohorts, was tested in a case-control Caucasian sample of 337 SLE and 448 healthy controls from Pittsburgh and a family-based sample of 203 Caucasian SLE trios from Los Angeles. While none of the SNPs were found to be associated with SLE risk individually, global haplotype statistics revealed significant association (p < 0.000001) in the Pittsburgh cohort whereas all those haplotypes containing two potentially functional SNPs (-390 and +90) showed association with SLE risk in the Los. Angeles cohort (p = 0.01 - 0.06). The association study between CRP and intermediate phenotypes of CVD and stroke risk was tested in 237 of the SLE women from the Pittsburgh cohort. Four of the five tagSNPs (-861, -390, +90, and +838) examined revealed significant association with risk of intermediate phenotypes of CVD (p < 0.001 to 0.04). In summary, our data did not confirm previously observed individual SNP association with SLE, but suggested that unique haplotype combinations in the CRP gene may modify the risk of developing SLE, and that variation in CRP may contribute to the accelerated atherosclerosis in SLE

Hardware/Software Co-design of Particle Filter and Its Application in Object Tracking

[[abstract]]This paper presents a hardware/software co-design method for particle filter based on System On Program Chip (SOPC) technique. Considering both the execution speed and design flexibility, we use a NIOS II processor to calculate weight for each particle and a hardware accelerator to update particles. As a result, execution efficiency of the proposed hardware/software co-design method of particle filter is significantly improved while maintaining design flexibility for various applications. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach, a real-time object tracking system is established and presented in this paper. Experimental results have demonstrated the proposed method have satisfactory results in real-time tracking of objects in video sequences.[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20110608~20110610[[conferencelocation]]Macao, Chin

FPGA-based hardware design for scale-invariant feature transform

[[abstract]]This paper proposes a novel hardware design method of scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm for implementation on field-programmable gate array (FPGA). To reduce the computing costs, Gaussian kernels are calculated offline for use in Gaussian filters. To eliminate low-contrast points, the inverse of a Hessian matrix is required for hardware implementation, which results in poor performance because dividers are needed. To solve this problem, this paper presents a new mathematical derivation model to implement the low-contrast detection, avoiding the use of any dividers. For the implementation of the normalization module, a large number of dividers are required by traditional methods, which adversely affects the computational efficiency. This paper presents a new architecture using only one divider to implement the normalization function in hardware. Thanks to the parallel processing architecture proposed to design the image pyramid, SIFT detection, and SIFT descriptor, the computational efficiency of the SIFT algorithm is significantly improved. As a result of the proposed design method, the requirement of logic elements in the FPGA hardware is greatly reduced and system frequency is significantly increased. Experimental results show that the proposed hardware architecture outperforms existing techniques in terms of resource usage and computational efficiency for real-time image processing.[[notice]]補正完

Modified Mediterranean Diet for Enrichment of Short Chain Fatty Acids: Potential Adjunctive Therapeutic to Target Immune and Metabolic Dysfunction in Schizophrenia?

Growing interest in gut and digestive processes and their potential link to brain and peripheral based inflammation or biobehavioral phenotypes has led to an increasing number of basic and translational scientific reports focused on the role of gut microbiota within the context of neuropsychiatric disorders. However, the effect of dietary modification on specific gut metabolites, in association with immune, metabolic, and psychopathological functioning in schizophrenia spectrum disorders has not been well characterized. The short chain fatty acids (SCFA) acetate, butyrate, and propionate, major metabolites derived from fermentation of dietary fibers by gut microbes, interact with multiple immune and metabolic pathways. The specific pathways that SCFA are thought to target, are dysregulated in cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes, and systemic inflammation. Most notably, these disorders are consistently linked to an attenuated lifespan in schizophrenia. Although, unhealthy dietary intake patterns and increased prevalence of immune and metabolic dysfunction has been observed in people with schizophrenia; dietary interventions have not been well utilized to target immune or metabolic illness. Prior schizophrenia patient trials primarily focused on the effects of gluten free diets. Findings from these studies indicate that a diet avoiding gluten benefits a limited subset of patients, individuals with celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity. Therefore, alternative dietary and nutritional modifications such as high-fiber, Mediterranean style, diets that enrich the production of SCFA, while being associated with a minimal likelihood of adverse events, may improve immune and cardiovascular outcomes linked to premature mortality in schizophrenia. With a growing literature demonstrating that SCFA can cross the blood brain barrier and target key inflammatory and metabolic pathways, this article highlights enriching dietary intake for SCFA as a potential adjunctive therapy for people with schizophrenia