The role of data standards in supply chain management: a critical review

Entering the 21st century, the business environment is getting more and more competitive and organizations are increasingly focusing on operating as efficient as possible. One way for organizations to achieve superior efficiency and competitive advantages over their rivals is to implement an efficient and effective supply chain management (SCM). By implementing successful SCM, firms can capture benefits such as reduced inventories, reduce cost, increase inventory turns and eventually increase customer satisfactions. Supply chain integration and information sharing among supply chain partners are the keys to efficient and effective supply chain management. The implementation of a collaborative SCM system needs the integration of information exchanges which has been facilitated by data standards. Data standards reduce the transaction costs of information exchange and hence enhance supply chain integration. This study investigates the relationship between data standards, supply chain integration and supply chain performance. The overall objective is to exam the role of data standards on SCM. Based on multiple theoretical perspectives, a comprehensive theoretical framework of data standards is developed. Specifically, adoption of common data standards can facilitate inter-organizational integration and enhance supply chain performance. Game theory and literature review are conducted to further analyze these issues

RESIDUAL STRESS ANALYSIS OF CERAMIC COATINGS ON BIOCOMPATIBLE MAGNESIUM ALLOYS

poster abstractMagnesium and its alloys have gained special interest in medical applica-tions in recent years, as promising biodegradable metallic implant materials, due to their excellent mechanical properties and biocompatibilities. However, magnesium alloys rapidly corrode in human body. Therefore, a dense ceram-ic coating has been produced on the surface of the magnesium alloy through the method of microarc oxidation (MAO), which improves the corrosion re-sistance of the magnesium alloy. The objective of this study is to evaluate the residual stress of the ceramic coating on biocompatible AZ31 magnesium alloy. The corresponding residual stresses with different applied voltages have been examined in this study. An integrated experimental and modeling approach has been employed. Residual stresses attributed to the MgO constituent of the coatings at oxida-tion voltages between 250 V to 350 V have been evaluated by X-ray diffrac-tion (XRD) using sin2ψ method. An analytic model is also used to compute the stress distributions in the coatings. The residual stresses decreased with the increase of the applied voltage. The predicated stresses from the analytic model are in good agreement with the experimental measurements. At 350V, the coating has a uniform surface morphology and the lowest residual stress. This is the optimal voltage in the MAO process to produce the high-quality corrosion resistant coating. The measured stresses using sin2 ψ XRD method in the MgO constituent of the MAO coatings are tensile in nature. The voltage-dependent residual stress has been released during the microarc discharge process, which is attributed to the micro-pores and cracks formed in the coating

S2vNTM: Semi-supervised vMF Neural Topic Modeling

Language model based methods are powerful techniques for text classification. However, the models have several shortcomings. (1) It is difficult to integrate human knowledge such as keywords. (2) It needs a lot of resources to train the models. (3) It relied on large text data to pretrain. In this paper, we propose Semi-Supervised vMF Neural Topic Modeling (S2vNTM) to overcome these difficulties. S2vNTM takes a few seed keywords as input for topics. S2vNTM leverages the pattern of keywords to identify potential topics, as well as optimize the quality of topics' keywords sets. Across a variety of datasets, S2vNTM outperforms existing semi-supervised topic modeling methods in classification accuracy with limited keywords provided. S2vNTM is at least twice as fast as baselines.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, ICLR Workshop 2023. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2307.0122

vONTSS: vMF based semi-supervised neural topic modeling with optimal transport

Recently, Neural Topic Models (NTM), inspired by variational autoencoders, have attracted a lot of research interest; however, these methods have limited applications in the real world due to the challenge of incorporating human knowledge. This work presents a semi-supervised neural topic modeling method, vONTSS, which uses von Mises-Fisher (vMF) based variational autoencoders and optimal transport. When a few keywords per topic are provided, vONTSS in the semi-supervised setting generates potential topics and optimizes topic-keyword quality and topic classification. Experiments show that vONTSS outperforms existing semi-supervised topic modeling methods in classification accuracy and diversity. vONTSS also supports unsupervised topic modeling. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that vONTSS in the unsupervised setting outperforms recent NTMs on multiple aspects: vONTSS discovers highly clustered and coherent topics on benchmark datasets. It is also much faster than the state-of-the-art weakly supervised text classification method while achieving similar classification performance. We further prove the equivalence of optimal transport loss and cross-entropy loss at the global minimum.Comment: 24 pages, 12 figures, ACL findings 202

Solid-surface vitrification is an appropriate and convenient method for cryopreservation of isolated rat follicles

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Cryopreservation of isolated follicles may be a potential option to restore fertility in young women with cancer, because it can prevent the risks of cancer transmission. Several freezing protocols are available, including slow-rate freezing, open-pulled straws vitrification (OPS) and solid-surface vitrification (SSV, a new freezing technique). The purpose of our study was to investigate the effects of these freezing procedures on viability, ultrastructure and developmental capacity of isolated rat follicles.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Isolated follicles from female Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly assigned to SSV, OPS and slow-rate freezing groups for cryopreservation. Follicle viability assessment and ultrastructural examination were performed after thawing. In order to study the developmental capacity of thawed follicles, we performed <it>in vitro </it>culture with a three-dimensional (3D) system by alginate hydrogels.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our results showed that the totally viable rate of follicles vitrified by SSV (64.76%) was slightly higher than that of the OPS group (62.38%) and significantly higher than that of the slow-rate freezing group (52.65%; <it>P </it>< 0.05). The ultrastructural examination revealed that morphological alterations were relatively low in the SSV group compared to the OPS and slow-rate freezing groups. After <it>in vitro </it>culture within a 3D system using alginate hydrogels, we found the highest increase (28.90 ± 2.21 μm) in follicle diameter in follicles from the SSV group. The estradiol level in the SSV group was significantly higher than those in the OPS and slow-rate freezing groups at the end of a 72-hr culture period (<it>P </it>< 0.05).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our results suggest that the SSV method is an appropriate and convenient method for cryopreservation of isolated rat follicles compared with the conventional slow-rate freezing method and the OPS method.</p

Effect of different plant bio-stimulants in improving cucumber growth under soilless culture

There are more studies about plant bio-stimulants but no clear results about which is the best one in improving vegetable crops specially cucumber. The aim of this study is&nbsp; to screen the effect of various bio-stimulants in improving cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) growth under soilless culture via root application by modifying coco-peat culture media substrate. In the present study, we tested fifteen treatments as follow: T1 -control (CK); T2 - 10 mM putrescine (Put); T3 - 250 ppm seaweed (Sea); T4 - 0.02 ppm meta-topolin (MT); T5 - 100 ppm naphthalene acetic acid (NAA); T6 - 400 ppm polyaspartic acid (PAS); T7 - 50 ppm sodium nitrophenolate (98% NIT); T8 - 100 ppm tryptophan (AAF); T9 - 1% fulvic acid (FUL); T10 - 107 CFU/ml Bacillus subtilis (BAS); T11 - 106 CFU/ml Trichoderma (TRI); T12 - 50 ppm alanine (ALa); T13 - 150 ppm salicylic acid (SA); T14 - 1 mM silicon (SiO2) and T15 - 0.001 ppm 24-epibrassinolide (EBR). The results obviously showed that using all bio-stimulants significantly increased cucumber growth parameters (plant height, stem diameter, leaves number, leaf area, shoot fresh weight, and root fresh weight). Seedlings Vigor Index (SVI) increased multifold compared with control by all treatments. The increase in cucumber seedlings vigor had a highly significant effect compared with control and the increase was 55.9% followed by 55.2% and 53.4% by Put, MT, and EBR treatments respectively. Our study concluded that the application of plant bio-stimulants can be used to modify coco-peat substrate with a positive effect on plant growth and improvement of cucumber plants under soilless culture. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.442027

Re-evaluation of the carcinogenic significance of hepatitis B virus integration in hepatocarcinogenesis

To examine the role of hepatitis B virus (HBV) integration in hepatocarcinogenesis, a systematic comparative study of both tumor and their corresponding non-tumor derived tissue has been conducted in a cohort of 60 HBV associated hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients. By using Alu-polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and ligation-mediated PCR, 233 viral-host junctions mapped across all human chromosomes at random, no difference between tumor and non-tumor tissue was observed, with the exception of fragile sites (P = 0.0070). HBV insertions in close proximity to cancer related genes such as hTERT were found in this study, however overall they were rare events. No direct correlation between chromosome aberrations and the number of HBV integration events was found using a sensitive array-based comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) assay. However, a positive correlation was observed between the status of several tumor suppressor genes (TP53, RB1, CDNK2A and TP73) and the number of chromosome aberrations (r = 0.6625, P = 0.0003). Examination of the viral genome revealed that 43% of inserts were in the preC/C region and 57% were in the HBV X gene. Strikingly, approximately 24% of the integrations examined had a breakpoint in a short 15 nt viral genome region (1820-1834 nt). As a consequence, all of the confirmed X gene insertions were C-terminal truncated, losing their growth-suppressive domain. However, the same pattern of X gene C-terminal truncation was found in both tumor and non-tumor derived samples. Furthermore, the integrated viral sequences in both groups had a similar low frequency of C1653T, T1753V and A1762T/G1764A mutations. The frequency and patterns of HBV insertions were similar between tumor and their adjacent non-tumor samples indicating that the majority of HBV DNA integration events are not associated with hepatocarcinogenesis