419 research outputs found
National Income Inequality, Society, and Multinational Enterprises
This chapter calls for understanding the perspective of multinational enterprises (MNEs) on international differences in income inequality. The authors set a research agenda on how national differences in income inequality influence MNE expansion strategies. Applying a transaction cost framework, both negative and positive economic outcomes of income inequality, from the MNE\u27s perspective, are identified. Low levels of income inequality may deter foreign investment, as MNEs prefer countries where they incur lower levels of transaction costs arising from interactions with various market and non-market actors. However, the positive effect of income inequality on location attractiveness will likely diminish at higher levels of inequality when benefits are increasingly offset by additional monitoring, bargaining and security costs owing to instability and conflict. The chapter further explores the implications for level of MNE equity applied in the choice of entry mode under different levels of income inequality
National Income Inequality and International Business Expansion
We examine the extent to which host country income inequality influences multinational enterprises’ (MNE) expansion strategy for foreign production investment, depending on their specific strategic objectives. Applying a transaction cost framework, we predict that national income inequality has an inverted U-shaped relationship with foreign production investment. As inequality increases, MNEs accrue lower transaction costs arising from interactions with various local actors, leading to higher probability of investment. As income inequality increases further, its effect on location attractiveness will become negative, as its attraction effect is increasingly offset by additional monitoring, bargaining, and security costs owing to the more fractious nature of high inequality societies. In addition, we suggest that the impact of income inequality is contingent on investment objectives: The inverted U-shaped relationship is stronger for efficiency-seeking investment but weaker for market-seeking and competence-enhancing investments. We find substantial support for our hypotheses through an analysis of 27 years (1986-2012) of data on Japanese MNEs’ overseas production entries
Edge Accelerated Robot Navigation with Hierarchical Motion Planning
Low-cost autonomous robots suffer from limited onboard computing power,
resulting in excessive computation time when navigating in cluttered
environments. This paper presents Edge Accelerated Robot Navigation, or EARN
for short, to achieve real-time collision avoidance by adopting hierarchical
motion planning (HMP). In contrast to existing local or edge motion planning
solutions that ignore the interdependency between low-level motion planning and
high-level resource allocation, EARN adopts model predictive switching (MPS)
that maximizes the expected switching gain w.r.t. robot states and actions
under computation and communication resource constraints. As such, each robot
can dynamically switch between a point-mass motion planner executed locally to
guarantee safety (e.g., path-following) and a full-shape motion planner
executed non-locally to guarantee efficiency (e.g., overtaking). The crux to
EARN is a two-time scale integrated decision-planning algorithm based on
bilevel mixed-integer optimization, and a fast conditional collision avoidance
algorithm based on penalty dual decomposition. We validate the performance of
EARN in indoor simulation, outdoor simulation, and real-world environments.
Experiments show that EARN achieves significantly smaller navigation time and
collision ratios than state-of-the-art navigation approaches.Comment: 12 pages, 14 figures, 1 table, submitted to IEEE for possible
publicatio
Rapid faults detection for controlling multi-terminal high voltage DC grids under AC grid contingencies
To control power flow for integration of distributed energy onto urban power grids, rapid and accurate detection of the amplitude, phase-angle, and frequency offset of the grid voltage's positive and negative sequence components especially under grid fault conditions are more significant. This paper presents a new faults detection method that is capable of tracking signal deviations on the grid-voltage accurately and rapidly even in the case that bus-voltage contains high order harmonics and random noises. The experimental results verify the validity of the proposed method under various grid-fault conditions
Optimizing Two-Color Semiconductor Nanocrystal Immunoassays in Single Well Microtiter Plate Formats
The simultaneous detection of two analytes, chicken IgY (IgG) and Staphylococcal enterotoxin B (SEB), in the single well of a 96-well plate is demonstrated using luminescent semiconductor quantum dot nanocrystal (NC) tracers. The NC-labeled antibodies were prepared via sulfhydryl-reactive chemistry using a facile protocol that took <3 h. Dose response curves for each target were evaluated in a single immunoassay format and compared to Cy5, a fluorophore commonly used in fluorescent immunoassays, and found to be equivalent. Immunoassays were then performed in a duplex format, demonstrating multiplex detection in a single well with limits of detection equivalent to the single assay format: 9.8 ng/mL chicken IgG and 7.8 ng/mL SEB
ELUCID IV: Galaxy Quenching and its Relation to Halo Mass, Environment, and Assembly Bias
We examine the quenched fraction of central and satellite galaxies as a
function of galaxy stellar mass, halo mass, and the matter density of their
large scale environment. Matter densities are inferred from our ELUCID
simulation, a constrained simulation of local Universe sampled by SDSS, while
halo masses and central/satellite classification are taken from the galaxy
group catalog of Yang et al. The quenched fraction for the total population
increases systematically with the three quantities. We find that the
`environmental quenching efficiency', which quantifies the quenched fraction as
function of halo mass, is independent of stellar mass. And this independence is
the origin of the stellar mass-independence of density-based quenching
efficiency, found in previous studies. Considering centrals and satellites
separately, we find that the two populations follow similar correlations of
quenching efficiency with halo mass and stellar mass, suggesting that they have
experienced similar quenching processes in their host halo. We demonstrate that
satellite quenching alone cannot account for the environmental quenching
efficiency of the total galaxy population and the difference between the two
populations found previously mainly arises from the fact that centrals and
satellites of the same stellar mass reside, on average, in halos of different
mass. After removing these halo-mass and stellar-mass effects, there remains a
weak, but significant, residual dependence on environmental density, which is
eliminated when halo assembly bias is taken into account. Our results therefore
indicate that halo mass is the prime environmental parameter that regulates the
quenching of both centrals and satellites.Comment: 21 pages, 16 figures, submitted to Ap
ELUCID V. Lighting dark matter halos with galaxies
In a recent study, using the distribution of galaxies in the north galactic
pole of SDSS DR7 region enclosed in a 500\mpch box, we carried out our ELUCID
simulation (Wang et al. 2016, ELUCID III). Here we {\it light} the dark matter
halos and subhalos in the reconstructed region in the simulation with galaxies
in the SDSS observations using a novel {\it neighborhood} abundance matching
method. Before we make use of thus established galaxy-subhalo connections in
the ELUCID simulation to evaluate galaxy formation models, we set out to
explore the reliability of such a link. For this purpose, we focus on the
following a few aspects of galaxies: (1) the central-subhalo luminosity and
mass relations; (2) the satellite fraction of galaxies; (3) the conditional
luminosity function (CLF) and conditional stellar mass function (CSMF) of
galaxies; and (4) the cross correlation functions between galaxies and the dark
matter particles, most of which are measured separately for all, red and blue
galaxy populations. We find that our neighborhood abundance matching method
accurately reproduces the central-subhalo relations, satellite fraction, the
CLFs and CSMFs and the biases of galaxies. These features ensure that thus
established galaxy-subhalo connections will be very useful in constraining
galaxy formation processes. And we provide some suggestions on the three levels
of using the galaxy-subhalo pairs for galaxy formation constraints. The
galaxy-subhalo links and the subhalo merger trees in the SDSS DR7 region
extracted from our ELUCID simulation are available upon request.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, ApJ accepte
DNA Copy Number Analysis in Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumors Using Gene Expression Microarrays
We report a method, Expression-Microarray Copy Number Analysis (ECNA) for the detection of copy number changes using Affymetrix Human Genome U133 Plus 2.0 arrays, starting with as little as 5 ng input genomic DNA. An analytical approach was developed using DNA isolated from cell lines containing various X-chromosome numbers, and validated with DNA from cell lines with defined deletions and amplifications in other chromosomal locations. We applied this method to examine the copy number changes in DNA from 5 frozen gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST). We detected known copy number aberrations consistent with previously published results using conventional or BAC-array CGH, as well as novel changes in GIST tumors. These changes were concordant with results from Affymetrix 100K human SNP mapping arrays. Gene expression data for these GIST samples had previously been generated on U133A arrays, allowing us to explore correlations between chromosomal copy number and RNA expression levels. One of the novel aberrations identified in the GIST samples, a previously unreported gain on 1q21.1 containing the PEX11B gene, was confirmed in this study by FISH and was also shown to have significant differences in expression pattern when compared to a control sample. In summary, we have demonstrated the use of gene expression microarrays for the detection of genomic copy number aberrations in tumor samples. This method may be used to study copy number changes in other species for which RNA expression arrays are available, e.g. other mammals, plants, etc., and for which SNPs have not yet been mapped
A Model of Cancer Stem Cells Derived from Mouse Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells
Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are capable of continuous proliferation and self-renewal and are proposed to play significant roles in oncogenesis, tumor growth, metastasis and cancer recurrence. CSCs are considered derived from normal stem cells affected by the tumor microenvironment although the mechanism of development is not clear yet. In 2007, Yamanaka's group succeeded in generating Nanog mouse induced pluripotent stem (miPS) cells, in which green fluorescent protein (GFP) has been inserted into the 5′-untranslated region of the Nanog gene. Usually, iPS cells, just like embryonic stem cells, are considered to be induced into progenitor cells, which differentiate into various normal phenotypes depending on the normal niche. We hypothesized that CSCs could be derived from Nanog miPS cells in the conditioned culture medium of cancer cell lines, which is a mimic of carcinoma microenvironment. As a result, the Nanog miPS cells treated with the conditioned medium of mouse Lewis lung carcinoma acquired characteristics of CSCs, in that they formed spheroids expressing GFP in suspension culture, and had a high tumorigenicity in Balb/c nude mice exhibiting angiogenesis in vivo. In addition, these iPS-derived CSCs had a capacity of self-renewal and expressed the marker genes, Nanog, Rex1, Eras, Esg1 and Cripto, associated with stem cell properties and an undifferentiated state. Thus we concluded that a model of CSCs was originally developed from miPS cells and proposed the conditioned culture medium of cancer cell lines might perform as niche for producing CSCs. The model of CSCs and the procedure of their establishment will help study the genetic alterations and the secreted factors in the tumor microenvironment which convert miPS cells to CSCs. Furthermore, the identification of potentially bona fide markers of CSCs, which will help the development of novel anti-cancer therapies, might be possible though the CSC model
Galaxy Light profile neural Networks (GaLNets). II. Bulge-Disc decomposition in optical space-based observations
Bulge-disk (B-D) decomposition is an effective diagnostic to characterize the
galaxy morphology and understand its evolution across time. So far,
high-quality data have allowed detailed B-D decomposition to redshift below
0.5, with limited excursions over small volumes at higher redshifts.
Next-generation large sky space surveys in optical, e.g. from the China Space
Station Telescope (CSST), and near-infrared, e.g. from the space EUCLID
mission, will produce a gigantic leap in these studies as they will provide
deep, high-quality photometric images over more than 15000 deg2 of the sky,
including billions of galaxies. Here, we extend the use of the Galaxy Light
profile neural Network (GaLNet) to predict 2-S\'ersic model parameters,
specifically from CSST data. We simulate point-spread function (PSF) convolved
galaxies, with realistic B-D parameter distributions, on CSST mock observations
to train the new GaLNet and predict the structural parameters (e.g. magnitude,
effective radius, Sersic index, axis ratio, etc.) of both bulge and disk
components. We find that the GaLNet can achieve very good accuracy for most of
the B-D parameters down to an -band magnitude of 23.5 and redshift 1.
The best accuracy is obtained for magnitudes, implying accurate bulge-to-total
(B/T) estimates. To further forecast the CSST performances, we also discuss the
results of the 1-S\'ersic GaLNet and show that CSST half-depth data will allow
us to derive accurate 1-component models up to 24 and redshift
z1.7
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