Does culture diversity affect innovation? Evidence from Chinese business group affiliated firms

We analyze how intra-group culture diversity affect group affiliated firm’s innovation. Our findings suggest that the more inconsistency on risk preference among affiliated firms in one group, the less impact of affiliated firm’s own risk culture on innovation. Specifically, we document that intra-group culture diversity impedes individual affiliated firm’s innovation through managerial and controlling agency problems. The heterogeneity test shows that size, executives, headquarter connected, location, state ownership and information quality of affiliated firms can affect intragroup culture diversity on innovation. We prove that intra-group culture diversity impedes innovation on group affiliated firms, which means a dark side of business group affiliation

Bis[μ-2-(2-naphth­oxy)acetato]bis­{aqua[2-(2-naphth­oxy)acetato]zinc(II)}

The title binuclear ZnII compound, [Zn2(C12H9O3)4(H2O)2], is centrosymmetric. Each Zn atom is coordinated by two bridging 2-naphthoxyacetate anions, one terminal 2-naphth­oxy­acetate anion and one water mol­ecule in a distorted ZnO4 tetra­hedral geometry. The naphthalene system of the bridging ligand is nearly perpendicular to the naphthalene of the terminal ligand, with a dihedral angle of 78.26 (6)°. Within the binuclear mol­ecule the Zn⋯Zn separation is 3.815 (5) Å. In the crystal structure, inter­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bonding between the water mol­ecule and carboxyl­ate groups helps to stabilize the crystal structure

CPMR: Context-Aware Incremental Sequential Recommendation with Pseudo-Multi-Task Learning

The motivations of users to make interactions can be divided into static preference and dynamic interest. To accurately model user representations over time, recent studies in sequential recommendation utilize information propagation and evolution to mine from batches of arriving interactions. However, they ignore the fact that people are easily influenced by the recent actions of other users in the contextual scenario, and applying evolution across all historical interactions dilutes the importance of recent ones, thus failing to model the evolution of dynamic interest accurately. To address this issue, we propose a Context-Aware Pseudo-Multi-Task Recommender System (CPMR) to model the evolution in both historical and contextual scenarios by creating three representations for each user and item under different dynamics: static embedding, historical temporal states, and contextual temporal states. To dually improve the performance of temporal states evolution and incremental recommendation, we design a Pseudo-Multi-Task Learning (PMTL) paradigm by stacking the incremental single-target recommendations into one multi-target task for joint optimization. Within the PMTL paradigm, CPMR employs a shared-bottom network to conduct the evolution of temporal states across historical and contextual scenarios, as well as the fusion of them at the user-item level. In addition, CPMR incorporates one real tower for incremental predictions, and two pseudo towers dedicated to updating the respective temporal states based on new batches of interactions. Experimental results on four benchmark recommendation datasets show that CPMR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and achieves significant gains on three of them. The code is available at: https://github.com/DiMarzioBian/CPMR.Comment: Accepted by CIKM 2023. Alias: "Modeling Context-Aware Temporal Dynamics via Pseudo-Multi-Task Learning

A description of the transverse momentum distributions of charged particles produced in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies

By assuming the existing of memory effects and long-range interactions in the hot and dense matter produced in high energy heavy ion collisions, the nonextensive statistics together with the relativistic hydrodynamics including phase transition is used to discuss the transverse momentum distributions of charged particles produced in heavy ion collisions. It is shown that the combined contributions from nonextensive statistics and hydrodynamics can give a good description to the experimental data in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN )= 200 GeV and in Pb+Pb collisions at sqrt(s_NN) )= 2.76 TeV for pi^(+ -) , K^(+ -) in the whole measured transverse momentum region, and for p(p-bar) in the region of p_T<= 2.0 GeV/c. This is different from our previous work, where, by using the conventional statistics plus hydrodynamics, the describable region is only limited in p_T<= 1.1 GeV/c.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, 2 table

Lipophilic statins inhibit YAP nuclear localization, co-activator activity and colony formation in pancreatic cancer cells and prevent the initial stages of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma in KrasG12D mice.

We examined the impact of statins on Yes-associated Protein (YAP) localization, phosphorylation and transcriptional activity in human and mouse pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) cells. Exposure of sparse cultures of PANC-1 and MiaPaCa-2 cells to cerivastatin or simvastatin induced a striking re-localization of YAP from the nucleus to the cytoplasm and inhibited the expression of the YAP/TEAD-regulated genes Connective Tissue Growth Factor (CTGF) and Cysteine-rich angiogenic inducer 61 (CYR61). Statins also prevented YAP nuclear import and expression of CTGF and CYR61 stimulated by the mitogenic combination of insulin and neurotensin in dense culture of these PDAC cells. Cerivastatin, simvastatin, atorvastatin and fluvastatin also inhibited colony formation by PANC-1 and MiaPaCa-2 cells in a dose-dependent manner. In contrast, the hydrophilic statin pravastatin did not exert any inhibitory effect even at a high concentration (10 μM). Mechanistically, cerivastatin did not alter the phosphorylation of YAP at Ser127 in either PANC-1 or MiaPaCa-2 cells incubated without or with neurotensin and insulin but blunted the assembly of actin stress fiber in these cells. We extended these findings with human PDAC cells using primary KC and KPC cells, (expressing KrasG12D or both KrasG12D and mutant p53, respectively) isolated from KC or KPC mice. Using cultures of these murine cells, we show that lipophilic statins induced striking YAP translocation from the nucleus to the cytoplasm, inhibited the expression of Ctgf, Cyr61 and Birc5 and profoundly inhibited colony formation of these cells. Administration of simvastatin to KC mice subjected to diet-induced obesity prevented early pancreatic acini depletion and PanIN formation. Collectively, our results show that lipophilic statins restrain YAP activity and proliferation in pancreatic cancer cell models in vitro and attenuates early lesions leading to PDAC in vivo

Novel silica filled deep eutectic solvent based nanofluids for energy transportation

Liquid range of nanofluids is a crucial parameter as it intensively determines their application temperature scope. Meanwhile, improved thermal conductivity and stability are of great significances and comprise the main fundamental research topics of nanofluids. In this work, 2- butoxy-3,4-dihydropyran (DP), produced from a convenient one-pot three-component reaction in water, was employed as dual lipophilic brusher and metal nanoparticle anchor. It was found that DP was able to enhance the dispersing ability and thermal conductivity of SiO2 nanoparticle filled deep eutectic solvent (DES) based nanofluids simultaneously. The key to the success of this protocol mainly relies on the electrophilic property and acetylacetonate moiety of DP, which ensures the formation of DP surficial modified and copper nanoparticle coated silica. Molecular dynamics simulation revealed that the hydrogen bonding effect between base solvent and alkane chain of nanoparticle was responsible for the enhanced affinity, which thus resulted in an improved stability. Viscosities of the nanofluids dropped within a certain range owing to the ruin of hydrogen bonding association among solvent molecules resulted by the hydrogen bonding effect between nanoparticle and solvent. Thermal conductivity of the copper modified silica filled DES nanofluids exhibits a maximum 13.6% enhancement, which demonstrated the advantages of this chemical covalent protocol. Additionally, study upon viscosity and convective heat transfer coefficient of the nanofluids with varies types of silica nanoparticle and DES base solvents indicated that a 24.9% heat transfer coefficient enhancement was gained that further revealed the superiority of this protocol

Therapeutic effects of Saikosapoin D on bleomycininduced pulmonary fibrosis in mice via regulation of IL- 33/ST2 pathway

Purpose: To investigate the therapeutic effects of saikosapoin D (SSD) on bleomycin (BLM)-induced pulmonary fibrosis (PF) in mice and its probable mechanisms.Methods: PF mice were prepared by intraperitoneal (i.p.) injection of BLM (5 mg/kg). Twenty-four hours later, 72 mice in SSD group were administered SSD (1.8 mg/kg, ip). After 3, 7, 14 and 28 days of injection, the mice were sacrificed. Blood samples and lung tissues were collected from 6 mice in each group. The lung tissues were subjected to histological examination. In addition, expressions of MyD88, TRAF6, IL-33 and ST2 in lung tissue were determined by western blotting assay. Serum levels of hydroxyproline (HYP), interleukin (IL)-4, IL-13 and interferon (IFN)-γ were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA).Results: Pathological results showed that SSD treatment alleviated alveolitis and lung fibrosis (p &lt; 0.05) in lung tissues of PF mice at 14 and 28 days post-BLM injection. HYP and IL-13 levels of mice in SSD group were significantly lower than that in BLM group at days 14 and 28 post-BLM injection (p &lt; 0.05). Levels of IL-4 and IFN-γ were significantly lower when compared with values in BLM group on day 28 (p &lt; 0.05). Western blotting results revealed that expressions of MyD88, TRAF6, IL-33 and ST2 proteins were significantly decreased by SSD treatment (p &lt; 0.05).Conclusion: SSD exerts therapeutic effects on BLM-induced experimental PF in mice via regulation ofIL-33/ST2 pathway.Keywords: Saikosapoin D, Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, Myeloid differentiation factor, Hydroxyproline, Interleukin, Interferon, IL-33/ST2 pathwa