Business strategy and blockchain adoption

Although blockchain has drawn significant attention since its introduction in 2008, determinants of its adoption remain largely unknown. Relying on the Resource-Based View (hereafter, RBV) of the firm as a theoretical guide, we investigate whether a firm’s business strategy affects its decision on blockchain adoption. We split firms into prospectors (risk takers) and defenders (interested in cost stability) consistent with the business strategy framework to determine if the former group is more likely to adopt blockchain. Using a sample of 208 firms from 2015 to 2019, we find that prospectors are more likely to adopt blockchain than defenders. Results suggest blockchain brings more net benefits to prospectors than to defenders. The results support RBV and business strategy theories and are robust to the consistency test, factor analysis, and placebo test. The findings imply that the alignment between business strategy and technology characteristics motivates firms to adopt specific technology

Experimental Study on Cumulative Plastic Deformation of Coarse-Grained Soil High-Grade Roadbed under Long-Term Vehicle Load

According to the change characteristics of the subgrade moisture content and the mechanical calculation of several typical highways, the test scheme of the permanent deformation of coarse soil was formulated. The relationship between the permanent deformation of coarse-grained soil and the stress level, compaction degree, moisture content, and loading frequency was studied by cyclic loading triaxle testing. The results show that the permanent deformation of coarse-grained soil increases with the increase in partial stress and moisture content and decreases with the increase in compaction degree. The experimental data were fitted by the Tseng-Lytton model, and the correlation coefficients were 92%, which indicated that the model could be used to predict the permanent deformation of coarse soil. The relationships between the model coefficient and the moisture content and spring back modulus were obtained by the multiple regression method. Finally, the permanent deformation of the subgrade soil was calculated by using the layered summation method and a typical subgrade pavement structure

Adaptive authority allocation of human-automation shared control for autonomous vehicle

Great advances had been achieved in the discipline of environmental perception, motion planning and control strategy implementation, however, fully autonomous vehicle is still far from large-scale commercial application. The concept of “human-automation shared control” provides a promising solution to enhance autonomous driving safety, to which great research effort has been contributed in recent years. Nevertheless, more attention should be given to the following aspects. The present shared control strategy either only considers the discontinuous switching control between driver and ADS or investigates the simple effect of driver’s behavior in specific scenarios. The adaptive authority allocation between the driver’s active assistance and ADS hasn’t been investigated yet. In this paper, a shared control experiment with driver’s active assistance is conducted in scheduled traffic scenarios to observe the state of vehicle and arm’ EMG signal. After that, we construct a feature classification algorithm for shared control authority by clustering the experimental data. Then, a SCS with incremental PID controller and 2 DOF vehicle dynamic model is proposed. For validation of the SCS, the comparison of vehicle performance for different control authority illustrates that SCS can allocate appropriate control authority to improve the safety

Two-Step Solvothermal Synthesis of (Zn0.5Co0.5Fe2O4/Mn0.5Ni0.5Fe2O4)@C-MWCNTs Hybrid with Enhanced Low Frequency Microwave Absorbing Performance

In this study, the quaternary hybrid of (Zn0.5Co0.5Fe2O4/Mn0.5Ni0.5Fe2O4)@C-MWCNTs with high-performance in low frequency electromagnetic absorption was synthesized via a facile two-step solvothermal synthesis method. The physicochemical properties as well as electromagnetic parameters and microwave absorption performance were characterized by XRD, SEM, TEM, RS, TGA, and VNA, respectively. The results indicate a nuclear-shell morphology of this hybrid for amorphous carbon coated on the surface of Zn0.5Co0.5Fe2O4 and Mn0.5Ni0.5Fe2O4 mixed polycrystalline ferrites. In addition, the MWCNTs synchronously enwind in the nuclear-shell NPs to form a special cross-linking structure. The outstanding low frequency microwave absorption property is attributed to the synergistic effect of dielectric and magnetic loss, better impedance matching condition, and excellent attenuation characteristics of the as-prepared paramagnetic quaternary hybrid. Maximum RL of −35.14 dB at 0.56 GHz with an effective absorption bandwidth in the range of 0.27–1.01 GHz can be obtained with thickness of 5 mm. This hybrid exhibits superior low frequency microwave absorption properties compared with other ferrite-carbon nanocomposites. This investigation provides a new route to prepare suitable candidates for the absorption of electromagnetic waves in a low frequency band on account of its good performance and simple preparation process

Video anomaly detection using deep incremental slow feature analysis network

Existing anomaly detection (AD) approaches rely on various hand‐crafted representations to represent video data and can be costly. The choice or designing of hand‐crafted representation can be difficult when faced with a new dataset without prior knowledge. Motivated by feature learning, e.g. deep leaning and the ability to directly learn useful representations and model high‐level abstraction from raw data, the authors investigate the possibility of using a universal approach. The objective is learning data‐driven high‐level representation for the task of video AD without relying on hand‐crafted representation. A deep incremental slow feature analysis (D‐IncSFA) network is constructed and applied to directly learning progressively abstract and global high‐level representations from raw data sequence. The D‐IncSFA network has the functionalities of both feature extractor and anomaly detector that make AD completion in one step. The proposed approach can precisely detect global anomaly such as crowd panic. To detect local anomaly, a set of anomaly maps, produced from the network at different scales, is used. The proposed approach is universal and convenient, working well in different types of scenarios with little human intervention and low memory and computational requirements. The advantages are validated by conducting extensive experiments on different challenge datasets

Anti-PD-1 therapy achieves favorable outcomes in HBV-positive non-liver cancer

Abstract Anti-PD-1 therapy has shown promising outcomes in the treatment of different types of cancer. It is of fundamental interest to analyze the efficacy of anti-PD-1 therapy in cancer patients infected with hepatitis B virus (HBV) since the comorbidity of HBV and cancer is widely documented. We designed a multicenter retrospective study to evaluate the efficacy of anti-PD-1 therapy on non-liver cancer patients infected with HBV. We found anti-PD-1 therapy achieved much better outcomes in HBV+ non-liver cancer patients than their HBV– counterparts. We performed single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) on peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) patients. We found both cytotoxicity score of T cells and MHC score of B cells significantly increased after anti-PD-1 therapy in HBV+ ESCC patients. We also identified CX3CR1high TEFF, a subset of CD8+ TEFF, associated with better clinical outcome in HBV+ ESCC patients. Lastly, we found CD8+ TEFF from HBV+ ESCC patients showing higher fraction of Exhaustionhi T than their HBV– counterpart. In summary, anti-PD-1 therapy on HBV+ non-liver cancer patients is safe and achieves better outcomes than that on HBV– non-liver cancer patients, potentially because HBV+ patients had higher fraction of Exhaustionhi T, which made them more efficiently respond to anti-PD-1 therapy