9,348 research outputs found
Large firms and catch-up in a transitional economy: the case of Shougang Group in China
This study examines the possibility of catch-up of the Chinese steel industry, in particular the Shougang Group, with the leading global steel giants. Shougang is one of the four steel companies that have been selected by the Chinese government to constitute the core of the future Chinese steel industry. The contract system at Shougang, which operated from 1979 to 1995, unleashed an extraordinary entrepreneurial energy in the formerly traditional state-run steel plant. In the post-contract system, Shougang's range of decision-making independence in respect to the purchase of inputs, its production structure and product marketing has increased substantially compared to the contract system, when the government still controlled many of the key decisions. As a result of institutional constraint, the low value-added steel products dominate Shougang's portfolio. To challenge the established giants in the steel industry, Shougang has to divest the loss-making non-core businesses, slowly downsize employment in the core business, raise capital on the stock market and generates the resources for continued upgrading of its steel technology and diversifying its product portfolio
Big business with Chinese characteristics: two paths to growth of the firm in China under reform
This paper presents a case study of two large firms which emerged from among the ranks of traditional state-owned enterprises and new entrants: Shougang (steel) and Sanjiu (pharmaceuticals). Rather than being irreconcilable with the market economy, the experience of these two firms suggests that the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army possessed a rich legacy of organisational and motivational skills. Moreover, Shougang and Sanjiu both grew rapidly through mergers and acquisitions in the absence of privatisation and a developed stock market. Furthermore, the main reason for Shougang and Sanjiu's success is not special help from the government or the army, but rather the fact that its leadership used their autonomy to construct a highly effective business organisation
Description of the resonance as the atom
We discuss the possibility that the recently reported resonance in the spectrum can be described in terms of residual interactions.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figur
Discovery of Two New Class II Methanol Maser Transitions in G345.01+1.79
We have used the Swedish ESO Submillimetre Telescope (SEST) to search for new
class II methanol maser transitions towards the southern source G345.01+1.79.
Over a period of 5 days we observed 11 known or predicted class II methanol
maser transitions. Emission with the narrow line width and characteristic
velocity of class II methanol masers (in this source) was detected in 8 of
these transitions, two of which have not previously been reported as masers.
The new class II methanol maser transitions are the 13(-3)-12(-4)E transition
at 104.1 GHz and the 5(1)-4(2)E transition at 216.9 GHz. Both of these are from
transition series for which there are no previous known class II methanol maser
transitions. This takes the total number of known class II methanol maser
series to 10, and the total number of transitions (or transition groups) to 18.
The observed 104.1 GHz maser suggests the presence of two or more regions of
masing gas with similar line of sight velocities, but quite different physical
conditions. Although these newly discovered transitions are likely to be
relatively rare, where they are observed combined studies using the Australia
Telescope Compact Array and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array offer the
prospect to be able to undertake multi-transition methanol maser studies with
unprecedented detail.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ Letter
Parallel Load Balancing on Constrained Client-Server Topologies
We study parallel \emph{Load Balancing} protocols for a client-server
distributed model defined as follows.
There is a set \sC of clients and a set \sS of servers where each
client has
(at most) a constant number of requests that must be assigned to
some server. The client set and the server one are connected to each other via
a fixed bipartite graph: the requests of client can only be sent to the
servers in its neighborhood . The goal is to assign every client request
so as to minimize the maximum load of the servers.
In this setting, efficient parallel protocols are available only for dense
topolgies. In particular, a simple symmetric, non-adaptive protocol achieving
constant maximum load has been recently introduced by Becchetti et al
\cite{BCNPT18} for regular dense bipartite graphs. The parallel completion time
is \bigO(\log n) and the overall work is \bigO(n), w.h.p.
Motivated by proximity constraints arising in some client-server systems, we
devise a simple variant of Becchetti et al's protocol \cite{BCNPT18} and we
analyse it over almost-regular bipartite graphs where nodes may have
neighborhoods of small size. In detail, we prove that, w.h.p., this new version
has a cost equivalent to that of Becchetti et al's protocol (in terms of
maximum load, completion time, and work complexity, respectively) on every
almost-regular bipartite graph with degree .
Our analysis significantly departs from that in \cite{BCNPT18} for the
original protocol and requires to cope with non-trivial stochastic-dependence
issues on the random choices of the algorithmic process which are due to the
worst-case, sparse topology of the underlying graph
Measuring and Understanding Throughput of Network Topologies
High throughput is of particular interest in data center and HPC networks.
Although myriad network topologies have been proposed, a broad head-to-head
comparison across topologies and across traffic patterns is absent, and the
right way to compare worst-case throughput performance is a subtle problem.
In this paper, we develop a framework to benchmark the throughput of network
topologies, using a two-pronged approach. First, we study performance on a
variety of synthetic and experimentally-measured traffic matrices (TMs).
Second, we show how to measure worst-case throughput by generating a
near-worst-case TM for any given topology. We apply the framework to study the
performance of these TMs in a wide range of network topologies, revealing
insights into the performance of topologies with scaling, robustness of
performance across TMs, and the effect of scattered workload placement. Our
evaluation code is freely available
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