Nucleation, Melting Behaviour and Mechanical Properties of Poly(L-lactic acid) Affected by The Addition of N, N’-Bis(benzoyl) Suberic Acid Dihydrazide

Anew category of nucleating agent for poly(L-lactic acid) (PLLA) was developed. An organic nucleating agent; N,N’-bis(benzoyl) suberic acid dihydrazide (NA) was synthesized from benzoyl hydrazine and suberoyl chloride which was deprived from suberic acid via acylation. The nucleation, melting behaviour and mechanical properties of the PLLA containing NA were investigated. NA showed excellent nucleating effects on PLLA crystallization. Compared to the neat PLLA, with the addition of 0.8 % NA, the crystallization temperature (To) increase from 105.88 °C to 125.57 °C and the crystallization enthalpy(ΔHc) increase from 1.379 J g–1 to 31.63 J g–1 at a cooling rate of 1 °C min–1 from melt. In the presence of NA, the melting behaviour of PLLA was affected significantly, and a double-melting peak resulted during melting-recrystallization. The tensile strengths and tensile modulus increase with the increase ofNAcontent and possesses a maximum value for the criticalNAloading of 0.8 %. However, the elongations at break of the samples decreased significantly.Keywords: Poly (L-lactic acid), crystallization, melting behaviour, benzoyl hydrazin

Long-Term Human Video Generation of Multiple Futures Using Poses

Predicting future human behavior from an input human video is a useful task for applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. While most previous works predict a single future, multiple futures with different behavior can potentially occur. Moreover, if the predicted future is too short (e.g., less than one second), it may not be fully usable by a human or other systems. In this paper, we propose a novel method for future human pose prediction capable of predicting multiple long-term futures. This makes the predictions more suitable for real applications. Also, from the input video and the predicted human behavior, we generate future videos. First, from an input human video, we generate sequences of future human poses (i.e., the image coordinates of their body-joints) via adversarial learning. Adversarial learning suffers from mode collapse, which makes it difficult to generate a variety of multiple poses. We solve this problem by utilizing two additional inputs to the generator to make the outputs diverse, namely, a latent code (to reflect various behaviors) and an attraction point (to reflect various trajectories). In addition, we generate long-term future human poses using a novel approach based on unidimensional convolutional neural networks. Last, we generate an output video based on the generated poses for visualization. We evaluate the generated future poses and videos using three criteria (i.e., realism, diversity and accuracy), and show that our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art works

Host country institutions and firm-level R&D influences: an analysis of European Union FDI in China

The paper investigates the effects of institutions and their interaction with firms’ research & development (R&D) levels on foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in China based on a sample of 680 European Union (EU) firms over the period of 1998–2008. Employing panel data estimation approaches and further augmented with the cross-validation technique, our results indicate that EU FDI in China is influenced by the host country’s institutions, rendering support to the institutional theory. Our analysis indicates that the rule of law, institutional reforms and the interaction between institutional reforms and R&D have significant effects on FDI inflows in China. Further analysis suggests that the coefficient for the interaction between the rule of law and R&D is positive and significant after World Trade Organisation (WTO) entry implying that the effects of reforms following the WTO entry much outweigh the impact of rule of law in EU firms’ decisions to invest in China. We also find evidence that EU firms tend to adjust their FDI levels in China in an attempt to reach the desired investment level

International intermediaries: A systematic literature review and research agenda

Intermediaries such as trading companies, agents and merchants have played a key role in international business for centuries. Despite the growing importance of understanding the phenomenon of intermediaries, there are misperceptions and confusions regarding the concept and value of intermediaries, which result in disconnected and fragmented research findings. This study – based on an analysis of 101 articles published between 1985 and 2021 – aims to synthesise the conceptual developments and provide a more integrated understanding of both sourcing and trading intermediaries whose activities extend across national borders. The findings help to pave the way for further academic research by highlighting what we currently know and do not know about intermediaries, outlining the theoretically grounded research agenda for each of the three identified themes: (1) What are intermediaries? (2) When should intermediaries be used? and (3) How do intermediaries work and develop? The study shows that despite decades of research on this topic, the literature to date has been limited and scattered. Researchers are encouraged to consider the role of intermediaries in a bigger picture where intermediated exchanges exist not only in dyadic relationships, but also in triads or even in broader webs of networks