Regulatory Pressure, Blockholders, and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Disclosures in China

Purpose - This paper investigates the relationship between external regulation pressure and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting decision and comprehensiveness, and the relationship between block ownership and CSR in China. Design/methodology/approach - This paper provides descriptive statistics of the current state of CSR reporting in China. In addition, regression models are utilized to analyze the behavior of CSR reporting of a sample of 5,334 listed firms in China. Findings - Our paper records a significant increase of CSR reporting in the period of 2008-2010. Using a sample of 5,334 listed firms in China, we find a positive yet weak association between centrally controlled State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and CSR reports. Moreover, we find that firms with more concentrated block ownership are less likely to issue CSR reports. Research limitations/implications - Taken as a whole, our analyses suggest that the entrenchment effect from blockholders seems to dominate the incentive effect and this depresses the quality of CSR reports. Practical implications - Despite the well known effect of economic factors on CSR decision, corporate governance such as ownership structure could complicate the final results. Furthermore, the institutional background of the country and its implications for corporate governance should be considered jointly and concurrently. Social implications - The positive effect from regulatory pressure on centrally owned SOEs suggests that regulation remains an effective tool to encourage CSR reporting in emerging markets. Originality/value - First, our study confirms prior research that CSR disclosure decision is primarily driven by economic and strategic considerations. Moreover, our results suggest that a country's institutional background, in addition to economic and strategic considerations, influences the decision and quality of CSR disclosures. Second, we extend the literature on ownership structure, particularly with respect to blockholders. Third, our research design addresses a weakness in earlier studies which are biased exclusively on state ownership to the exclusion of all other blockholders

KD_ConvNeXt: knowledge distillation-based image classification of lung tumor surgical specimen sections

Introduction: Lung cancer is currently among the most prevalent and lethal cancers in the world in terms of incidence and fatality rates. In clinical practice, identifying the specific subtypes of lung cancer is essential in diagnosing and treating lung lesions.Methods: This paper aims to collect histopathological section images of lung tumor surgical specimens to construct a clinical dataset for researching and addressing the classification problem of specific subtypes of lung tumors. Our method proposes a teacher-student network architecture based on a knowledge distillation mechanism for the specific subtype classification of lung tumor histopathological section images to assist clinical applications, namely KD_ConvNeXt. The proposed approach enables the student network (ConvNeXt) to extract knowledge from the intermediate feature layers of the teacher network (Swin Transformer), improving the feature extraction and fitting capabilities of ConvNeXt. Meanwhile, Swin Transformer provides soft labels containing information about the distribution of images in various categories, making the model focused more on the information carried by types with smaller sample sizes while training.Results: This work has designed many experiments on a clinical lung tumor image dataset, and the KD_ConvNeXt achieved a superior classification accuracy of 85.64% and an F1-score of 0.7717 compared with other advanced image classification method

High-Performance and Flexible Metamaterial Wave Absorbers with Specific Bandwidths for the Microwave Device

In this paper, we proposed a high-performance electromagnetic-wave metamaterial absorber which can be used directly for 5G technology. The absorber exhibits a high performance in a tailored frequency range of 28 ± 1 GHz. At both transverse-electric and transverse-magnetic polarization, the absorption exceeds 99% when the electromagnetic wave is incident normally, and the absorption keeps being over 97% as the incident angle increases even to 45 degrees. The absorber is flexible, and it is very suitable for mass production because the production process is simple. In addition, the minimum dimension of the meta-structure is only 0.2 mm, and the cost is relatively low. Similarly, another high-performance metamaterial absorber with a tailored bandwidth at the center frequency of 77 GHz, which is relevant to self-driving cars, was also prepared by a minimal adjustment to the original structure

Flexible Metamaterial Absorber with Tailored Bandwidth and High Absorption Performance

Different from previous works which have focused on broadening the bandwidth, we propose an electromagnetic absorber with a medium and tailored bandwidth absorption, which avoids the unnecessary absorption caused by the too-wide bandwidth. Nevertheless, absorption is extremely high to be more than 99% and 97% for the normal and even oblique (45°) incidence, respectively, in a tailored frequency range of 5.8 ± 0.25 GHz even for both TE and TM polarization. This means the absorber is insensitive to the polarization of incident electromagnetic wave. Furthermore, it is flexible, since the main portion of sample is soft and flexible polyimide. The same properties are also realized in a range of 10 ± 0.5 GHz through adjusting the parameters of structure. The center frequencies of 5.8 and 10 GHz are very useful in our daily life, and the cost of absorber is relative low. Therefore, we believe the absorber can be used in many practical fields such as vehicle high-pass applications and radars

Flexible Metamaterial Absorber with Tailored Bandwidth and High Absorption Performance

Different from previous works which have focused on broadening the bandwidth, we propose an electromagnetic absorber with a medium and tailored bandwidth absorption, which avoids the unnecessary absorption caused by the too-wide bandwidth. Nevertheless, absorption is extremely high to be more than 99% and 97% for the normal and even oblique (45°) incidence, respectively, in a tailored frequency range of 5.8 ± 0.25 GHz even for both TE and TM polarization. This means the absorber is insensitive to the polarization of incident electromagnetic wave. Furthermore, it is flexible, since the main portion of sample is soft and flexible polyimide. The same properties are also realized in a range of 10 ± 0.5 GHz through adjusting the parameters of structure. The center frequencies of 5.8 and 10 GHz are very useful in our daily life, and the cost of absorber is relative low. Therefore, we believe the absorber can be used in many practical fields such as vehicle high-pass applications and radars

A Compact 3.3–3.5 GHz Filter Based on Modified Composite Right-/Left-Handed Resonator Units

In the RF (Radio Frequency) front-end of a communication system, bandpass filters (BPFs) are used to send passband signals and reject stopband signals. Substrate-integrated waveguides (SIW) are widely used in RF filter designs due to their low loss and low cost and the flexibility of their integration properties. However, SIW filters under 6 GHz are still too large to meet the requirement of portable communication devices due to their long wavelength. In this paper, a very compact fully integrated SIW filter is proposed and designed with RT6010 dielectric material to meet the small size requirement of portable devices for next-generation sub-6 G applications. The proposed filter contains two sawtooth-shaped composite right-/left-handed (CRLH) resonator units, instead of traditional rectangular-shaped CRLH resonator units, which makes the filter more compact and cost effective. The filter is designed and fabricated on an RT6010 substrate, with a size of only 10 mm × 7.4 mm. The measurement results illustrated that the proposed BPF shows a passband covering the frequency range of 3.25–3.45 GHz; the minimum passband insertion loss is only 2.4 dB; the stopband rejection is better than −20 dB throughout the frequencies below 3.0 GHz and above 3.8 GHz; S11 is as low as −37 dB at 3.35 GHz; and the group delay variation is only 1.4 ns throughout the operation bandwidth