The Relationships Among Leadership Styles, Entrepreneurial Orientation, and Business Performance

This study aims to contribute to the knowledge of leadership styles and entrepreneurial orientation at small and medium enterprises as well as their effects on business performance. This study examines how leadership style can affect the development and implementation of entrepreneurial orientation in small and medium enterprises in Taiwan. It is also designed to examine the effects of leadership styles and entrepreneurial orientation on business performance. Significant conclusions from this study are that different leadership styles may affect business performance; that transformational leadership is significantly more correlated to the business performance than is transactional leadership and passive-avoidant leadership; that entrepreneurial orientation is positively related to performance; and that transformational leadership with higher entrepreneurial orientation can contribute to higher business performance.leadership styles, entrepreneurial orientation, business performance

Fabrication of Miniaturized Variable-focus Lens Using Liquid Filling Technique

This paper describes a simple method for fabricating a variable-focus lens by using PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) and filling with liquid for the variable-focus lens. The lens diameter of 2-mm was designed in this experiment and expected to reach the focal length in the range of 3 ~ 12 mm. The theoretical value between the liquid volume and the lens contact angle at different focal lengths were simulated and measured. The pumped-in volumes ranged from 200 to 1400 $\mu$l, the contact angles ranged from 14.25 degrees to 49.02 degrees. Changing the deformation of PDMS film using different micro-fluidic volume produces the variable focal length from 4 10 mm in this experiment. The proposed method successfully fabricated a variable-focus lens. Bonding PDMS only once using no expensive instrument such as oxygen plasma was accomplished. The final objective is to insert the variable focus lens into portable optical imagery products.Comment: Submitted on behalf of EDA Publishing Association (http://irevues.inist.fr/EDA-Publishing

Self-imitating Feedback Generation Using GAN for Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training

Self-imitating feedback is an effective and learner-friendly method for non-native learners in Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training. Acoustic characteristics in native utterances are extracted and transplanted onto learner's own speech input, and given back to the learner as a corrective feedback. Previous works focused on speech conversion using prosodic transplantation techniques based on PSOLA algorithm. Motivated by the visual differences found in spectrograms of native and non-native speeches, we investigated applying GAN to generate self-imitating feedback by utilizing generator's ability through adversarial training. Because this mapping is highly under-constrained, we also adopt cycle consistency loss to encourage the output to preserve the global structure, which is shared by native and non-native utterances. Trained on 97,200 spectrogram images of short utterances produced by native and non-native speakers of Korean, the generator is able to successfully transform the non-native spectrogram input to a spectrogram with properties of self-imitating feedback. Furthermore, the transformed spectrogram shows segmental corrections that cannot be obtained by prosodic transplantation. Perceptual test comparing the self-imitating and correcting abilities of our method with the baseline PSOLA method shows that the generative approach with cycle consistency loss is promising

What can we do to Attract and Retain Young People to our Company as we Find it Difficult to Attract Employees at all Levels?

Question: As the workforce ages we are finding it a challenge to recruit new employees at all levels. So our question involves what can we do to attract and retain young people to our company? We have some insight into how to attract employees but where we would like your help is how to design our work and career paths to maintain the employees

How Do Multinational Corporations Creatively Address D&I Initiatives Through Corporate Social Responsibility?

Question: What are the indicators of a world class Diversity &Inclusion (D&I) program? How do these correlate to business results? Revised Question: How do multinational corporations (MNCs) creatively address D&I initiatives through cultural competence and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Rankine-Hugoniot Relations in Relativistic Combustion Waves

As a foundational element describing relativistic reacting waves of relevance to astrophysical phenomena, the Rankine-Hugoniot relations classifying the various propagation modes of detonation and deflagration are analyzed in the relativistic regime, with the results properly degenerating to the non-relativistic and highlyrelativistic limits. The existence of negative-pressure downstream flows is noted for relativistic shocks, which could be of interest in the understanding of the nature of dark energy. Entropy analysis for relativistic shock waves are also performed for relativistic fluids with different equations of state (EoS), denoting the existence of rarefaction shocks in fluids with adiabatic index \Gamma < 1 in their EoS. The analysis further shows that weak detonations and strong deflagrations, which are rare phenomena in terrestrial environments, are expected to exist more commonly in astrophysical systems because of the various endothermic reactions present therein. Additional topics of relevance to astrophysical phenomena are also discussed.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Ap