Fostering Chinese firms through entrepreneurship, globalisation and international finance

The success of ventures that have pursued non traditional marketing approaches may be attributed to a range of forward thinking practices which it is argued here, should be the starting and finishing points for Chinese companies. Chinese multinationals need to develop entrepreneurial ability more compatible with their growth in the international markets. Chinas educational framework is still largely based on rote learning, which is a method typically seen as ill suited to modern needs. Many Chinese high tech sectors are still dominated by overseas know-how and the ongoing strength of wholly foreign- owned enterprises

Quantifying biosynthetic network robustness across the human oral microbiome

Metabolic interactions, such as cross-feeding, play a prominent role in microbial communitystructure. For example, they may underlie the ubiquity of uncultivated microorganisms. We investigated this phenomenon in the human oral microbiome, by analyzing microbial metabolic networks derived from sequenced genomes. Specifically, we devised a probabilistic biosynthetic network robustness metric that describes the chance that an organism could produce a given metabolite, and used it to assemble a comprehensive atlas of biosynthetic capabilities for 88 metabolites across 456 human oral microbiome strains. A cluster of organisms characterized by reduced biosynthetic capabilities stood out within this atlas. This cluster included several uncultivated taxa and three recently co-cultured Saccharibacteria (TM7) phylum species. Comparison across strains also allowed us to systematically identify specific putative metabolic interdependences between organisms. Our method, which provides a new way of converting annotated genomes into metabolic predictions, is easily extendible to other microbial communities and metabolic products.https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/392621v1First author draf

New Light through Old Windows:Restraint of Trade in English, Scottish, and Australian Employment Laws - Emerging and Enduring Issues

The nature of the study to be pursued in this article concerns the extent to which the common law systems of England and Australia contain principles or rules designed to impinge on an employer's freedom of contract or legitimate trading interests in order to promote the ability of an employee to trade, work freely, and enjoy the benefits of his/her labour and innovations. This will entail spelling out the principal elements of both the English and Australian concepts and outlining the differences between them in light of new problems that have emerged as a result of recent developments in economic and social conditions

Europe: is it ready for free movement of its workforce?

Purpose – To examine what could be achieved through workforce mobility in Europe. Design/methodology/approach – Literature and case review Findings – Findings indicate that full mobility of a European workforce is largely permitted and tolerated though a complex web of legal policy and constraints which need to be reviewed if full mobility is to be achieved within the EU. Practical implications – The paper draws on integration and trade theory to highlight the issues of mobility within the EU. The paper may prove useful to policy makers and researchers. Originality / value – This paper allows researchers to gain an understanding of the issues in workforce mobility within the EU and build a conceptual portrait of the challenges faced by policy makers

Metabolic network percolation quantifies biosynthetic capabilities across the human oral microbiome

The biosynthetic capabilities of microbes underlie their growth and interactions, playing a prominent role in microbial community structure. For large, diverse microbial communities, prediction of these capabilities is limited by uncertainty about metabolic functions and environmental conditions. To address this challenge, we propose a probabilistic method, inspired by percolation theory, to computationally quantify how robustly a genome-derived metabolic network produces a given set of metabolites under an ensemble of variable environments. We used this method to compile an atlas of predicted biosynthetic capabilities for 97 metabolites across 456 human oral microbes. This atlas captures taxonomically-related trends in biomass composition, and makes it possible to estimate inter-microbial metabolic distances that correlate with microbial co-occurrences. We also found a distinct cluster of fastidious/uncultivated taxa, including several Saccharibacteria (TM7) species, characterized by their abundant metabolic deficiencies. By embracing uncertainty, our approach can be broadly applied to understanding metabolic interactions in complex microbial ecosystems.T32GM008764 - NIGMS NIH HHS; T32 GM008764 - NIGMS NIH HHS; R01 DE024468 - NIDCR NIH HHS; R01 GM121950 - NIGMS NIH HHS; DE-SC0012627 - Biological and Environmental Research; RGP0020/2016 - Human Frontier Science Program; NSFOCE-BSF 1635070 - National Science Foundation; HR0011-15-C-0091 - Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; R37DE016937 - NIDCR NIH HHS; R37 DE016937 - NIDCR NIH HHS; R01GM121950 - NIGMS NIH HHS; R01DE024468 - NIDCR NIH HHS; 1457695 - National Science FoundationPublished versio

Seeing, Wind and Outer Scale Effects on Image Quality at the Magellan Telescopes

We present an analysis of the science image quality obtained on the twin 6.5 metre Magellan telescopes over a 1.5 year period, using images of ~10^5 stars. We find that the telescopes generally obtain significantly better image quality than the DIMM-measured seeing. This is qualitatively consistent with expectations for large telescopes, where the wavefront outer scale of the turbulence spectrum plays a significant role. However, the dominant effect is found to be wind speed with Magellan outperforming the DIMMs most markedly when the wind is strongest. Excluding data taken during strong wind conditions (>10 m/s), we find that the Magellan telescopes still significantly outperform the DIMM seeing, and we estimate the site to have L_0 ~ 25 m on average. We also report on the first detection of a negative bias in DIMM data. This is found to occur, as predicted, when the DIMM is affected by certain optical aberrations and the turbulence profile is dominated by the upper layers of the atmosphere.Comment: Accepted for publication in PASP. 10 pages, 12 figures

An Evaluation of the Effect of Discharging a High Quality Effluent into a Small Ozark Mountain Stream

Recently the newly constructed Fayetteville wastewater treatment plant went on line and directed a portion of its discharge to a point in the Mud Creek drainage basin that had previously not received any effluent. Prior to the discharge, a background study had been performed to establish the water quality in the basin. The background data, when compared to the data collected by this study, allowed any alteration of the stream water quality to be evaluated. Also the modeling procedure used to set the effluent limits for the treatment plant was analyzed. All stream data were compared to the limits set forth for surface water quality by the Department of Pollution Control and Ecology. The new discharge had some effect on the receiving stream, however, the stream still meets Arkansas water quality standards for all parameters

Rapid Prototyping at Zero Gravity for In-Flight Repairs and Fabrication on Space Station Freedom

The ability to perform in-flight rapid prototyping would be of great benefit to NASA in two ways. First, repair parts could be fabricated from CAD designs beamed up from earth based laboratories which might allow a failed experiment to proceed. The mission specialists themselves, under the creative influence of space flight, might design a new part or tool and fabricate it on board in a matter of hours. Second, with metal casting and ceramic sintering facilities on board, rapid prototyping would allow manufacturing in space. This paper presents some test criteria for evaluating two of the rapid prototyping techniques, stereolithography and fused deposition, in microgravity conditions. Effects of the variation of head speed and strip width for the fused deposition process on the resulting mechanical properties are presented. The mechanical strength of the polyamide test bars increased with both increasing head speed and strip width. Increasing head speed would be desirable in microgravity applications.Mechanical Engineerin