Agile Supply Chain: competing in volatile markets

Abstract: Turbulent and volatile markets are becoming the norm as life-cycle shortens and global economic and competitive forces create additional uncertainty. Under uncertainty volatile competitive environment, supply chain are reaching the point where they need to be more agile-intelligent, fast in movement, flexible, and efficient customer responsive to changes, this paper suggests that the key to survival in these changed conditio ns is through agility- Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, especially, by the creation of efficient consumer responsive supply chain. A definition and the route are addres sed, meanwhile the paper discuss the approach that using agile supply chain to competitive in the volatile and turbulent markets. Key words: agile supply chain; information technolog

From Material Collection to Ideological Presentation: A Paradigm Shift in Museum Practice

Under the impetus of the New Museum Movement, the definition of museum has been updated. Museums are no longer merely places of “collection, storage and exhibition”, but also have functions of “research, education and pleasure”. Although “comprehensive and scarce” collection is important, it is no longer the only standard for museum exhibition. At the same time, new ideas have emerged that emphasize “human” subjectivity, multiple expressions, and situational narratives. As a result, the paradigm shift from material collection to ideological presentation has become a specific direction for museum practice in China today

Human Resource Management Strategies in the Chinese Multinational Corporations: Ideology, Institutions, and Culture

With the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) having inextricably been interconnected with the international economy and with the increasing footprints of the Chinese firms globally, management styles too needed to be evolved accordingly. The generic literature on internationalization of firms does not account for the ideological and institutional aspects specific to China and thus does not do justice to the way the Chinese Multinational Corporations (MNCs) have evolved. Unlike most Western MNCs, the Chinese MNCs keep their roots, in letter and spirit, as they expand internationally. That said, increasing global engagement means they somehow need to align and absorb globally recognized human resource management (HRM) practices. Differences in terms of industries, provincial regulations, national priorities as expressed in the communist party policies, etc., could also be observed. In this literature review, various key aspects of global human resource management that are applicable to the Chinese MNCs are presented

Mask-guided modality difference reduction network for RGB-T semantic segmentation

By exploiting the complementary information of RGB modality and thermal modality, RGB-thermal (RGB-T) semantic segmentation is robust to adverse lighting conditions. When fusing features from RGB images and thermal images, the existing methods design different feature fusion strategies, but most of these methods overlook the modality differences caused by different imaging mechanisms. This may result in insufficient usage of complementary information. To address this issue, we propose a novel Mask-guided Modality Difference Reduction Network (MMDRNet), where the mask is utilized in the image reconstruction to ensure that the modality discrepancy within foreground regions is minimized. Doing so enables the generation of more discriminative representations for foreground pixels, thus facilitating the segmentation task. On top of this, we present a Dynamic Task Balance (DTB) method to balance the modality difference reduction task and semantic segmentation task dynamically. The experimental results on the MFNet dataset and the PST900 dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed mask-guided modality difference reduction strategy and the effectiveness of the DTB method

OR-004 Changes in serum indexes of obese adolescents induced by closed weight loss summer camp

Objective A series of experiments were conducted to explore the changes of some serum indexes in obese adolescents induced by closed weight loss summer camp. Methods The 12 to 18 year old obese adolescents (BMI ≥ 28), who volunteered to participate in the Haoqian summer camp, were selected for 4 weeks of closed summer camp. The main activities of the summer camp included compound exercise (aerobic exercise + resistance exercise, 3 times / day, 6 days / week), Dietary intervention, fun activities and health knowledge lectures. In order to explore the changes of serum indexes of obese adolescents, glycolipid metabolism index, fatty acid components, inflammatory factors and oxidative stress markers were analyzed before and after 4 weeks. Results (1) The 4 week weight loss summer camp had no significant effect on blood sugar, but it can obviously reduce the level of serum total cholesterol, triglyceride and low density lipoprotein cholesterol, and significantly improve the abnormal lipid metabolism. (2) The level of serum total saturated fatty acid (P < 0.05), total monounsaturated fatty acid (P < 0.01) and total polyunsaturated fatty acid (P < 0.05) in obese adolescents were decreased significantly in the 4 week weight loss summer camp. (3) The 4 week weight loss summer camp significantly reduced serum inflammatory factors IL-6 and TN F- alpha in obese adolescents, increased the level of adiponectin per body fat mass (P < 0.05), and relieved the inflammatory state of the body. (4) After 4 weeks weight loss summer camp, the serum total antioxidant capacity T-AOC, antioxidant enzyme catalase CAT, superoxide dismutase SOD and glutathione peroxidase GPx activity in obese adolescents were significantly enhanced (P < 0.05); oxidative damage markers 8-iso-PGF2α, 8-OHdG, and MDA levels were not significantly changed (P > 0.05), while protein oxidation product protein carbohydrate PC content decreased significantly (P < 0.05). Conclusions 4 weeks weight loss summer camp can significantly alleviate the body's lipid metabolism abnormalities, change the serum fatty acid components, reduce the body's inflammatory state, enhance the body's antioxidant capacity, and reduce the body's oxidative damage