Mimicry, Knowledge Spillover and Expatriate Assignment Strategy in Overseas Subsidiaries

Based on neo-institutional theory and knowledge spillover, we argue that the probability of a firm assigning an expatriate manager to a foreign subsidiary is influenced by a combination of mimicry and knowledge spillover from any existing expatriate community in the foreign location. The expatriate community's influence is hypothesized to be weaker when the firm's ownership share in its foreign subsidiary is greater but stronger when the cultural distance between a firm's home country and the foreign host country is greater. Data on 95,156 foreign-invested manufacturing ventures in China is used to test these predictions. The findings show an inverted U-shaped relationship between the assignment of expatriates and the number of expatriates previously sent to the same location by prior foreign investors. This relationship is shown to be moderated by subsidiary ownership, but not by the cultural distance between the investor's home country and the host country. Implications for research and practice are discussed

Research on Energy Response Characteristics of Rock under Harmonic Vibro-Impacting Drilling

Open access via Springer Compact Agreement The support of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51704074) and Youth Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province (No. QC2018049) are gratefully acknowledged. The work is also supported by Talent Cultivation Foundation (No. SCXHB201703; No. ts26180119; No. td26180141) and Youth Science Foundation (No. 2019QNL-07) of Northeast Petroleum University.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

CLUE: Calibrated Latent Guidance for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn an optimal policy from pre-collected and labeled datasets, which eliminates the time-consuming data collection in online RL. However, offline RL still bears a large burden of specifying/handcrafting extrinsic rewards for each transition in the offline data. As a remedy for the labor-intensive labeling, we propose to endow offline RL tasks with a few expert data and utilize the limited expert data to drive intrinsic rewards, thus eliminating the need for extrinsic rewards. To achieve that, we introduce \textbf{C}alibrated \textbf{L}atent g\textbf{U}idanc\textbf{E} (CLUE), which utilizes a conditional variational auto-encoder to learn a latent space such that intrinsic rewards can be directly qualified over the latent space. CLUE's key idea is to align the intrinsic rewards consistent with the expert intention via enforcing the embeddings of expert data to a calibrated contextual representation. We instantiate the expert-driven intrinsic rewards in sparse-reward offline RL tasks, offline imitation learning (IL) tasks, and unsupervised offline RL tasks. Empirically, we find that CLUE can effectively improve the sparse-reward offline RL performance, outperform the state-of-the-art offline IL baselines, and discover diverse skills from static reward-free offline data

Technical comparison of domestic hot water system which used in China and Denmark

AbstractRegardless of where they are in the world, people depend on a reliable and sufficient supply of domestic hot water (DHW) for daily use. Some countries, which have district heating infrastructure, combine spacing heating (SH) and DHW together, with the aim of having a smart, energy efficient and environmentally friendly energy-consumption system, such as Denmark and China. Nevertheless, the development of DHW networks in these two countries differs significantly. This article detailed the comparisons in technical aspect: common preparation methods of DHW through district heating was introduced in China and Denmark with the analysis on temperature level, hygienic situation of DHW system, circular system, flow capacity and heat metering

Direct numerical simulation of supersonic turbulent flows around a tandem expansion-compression corner

© 2015 AIP Publishing LLC. The M = 2.9 supersonic turbulent flows over a tandem expansion-compression corner configuration with a sharp deflection angle of 25° at three Reynolds numbers Reδ = 20 000, 40 000, and 80 000 were studied by using direct numerical simulation. The flow statistics were validated against available experimental measurements and other numerical predictions. The flow structures and turbulence statistics were detailed visualized and analysed for the Reδ = 40 000 case, especially in the interaction region where flow separation and reattachment occurred. It was found that during the expansion process, the boundary layer exhibited a characteristic two-layer structure also discovered in previous experimental studies, and the turbulence evolved differently within these two layers. In the outer layer, the turbulence was consistently suppressed along the ramp to a large extent, while in the inner layer, it was suppressed only in a small region around the expansion corner, and the near-wall quasi-streamwise vortices were well preserved. Flow patterns near the reattachment line have shown the existence of the Görtler-type vortices, which would largely amplify turbulence fluctuations in the near-wall region, thus promoting the regeneration of wall turbulence that in turn contributed to the redevelopment of a downstream turbulent boundary layer. The Reynolds number effects and the characteristics of coherent structures were also discussed. With the increase of the Reynolds number, the separation bubble size decreased, but the pattern and the characteristic size of wall streamlines near the reattachment line were preserved

Optimization of China´s centralized domestic hot water system by applying Danish elements

AbstractRegardless of where they are in the world, people depend on a reliable and sufficient supply of domestic hot water (DHW) for daily use. Some countries that have district heating (DH) infrastructure, such as Denmark and China, combine spacing heating (SH) and DHW together, with the aim of having a smart, energy efficient and environmentally friendly energy-consumption system. Nevertheless, the development of centralized DHW (CDHW) systems in these two countries differs significantly. This article details the challenges China's CDHW system is currently encountering and proposes to apply the flat station concept to improve China's CDHW system. Meanwhile, the technical advantages of the Danish CDHW, which would benefit China, are analyzed. Overall, from a technical point of view, the flat station concept is not only in line with China's current DH conditions but would compensate for some technical defects of the existing CDHW system

Dielectric Property of MoS2 Crystal in Terahertz and Visible Region

Two-dimensional materials such as MoS2 have attracted much attention in recent years due to their fascinating optoelectronic properties. Dielectric property of MoS2 is desired for the optoelectronic application. In this paper, terahertz (THz) time-domain spectroscopy and ellipsometry technology are employed to investigate the dielectric response of MoS2 crystal in THz and visible region. The real and imaginary parts of the complex dielectric constant of MoS2 crystal are found to follow a Drude model in THz region, which is due to the intrinsic carrier absorption. In visible region, the general trend of the complex dielectric constant is found to be described with a Lorentz model, while two remarkable peaks are observed at 1.85 and 2.03 eV, which have been attributed to the splitting arising from the combined effect of interlayer coupling and spin-orbit coupling. This work affords the fundamental dielectric data for the future optoelectronic applications with MoS2.Comment: 6 page

Facile synthesis of di-mannitol adipate ester-based zinc metal alkoxide as a bi-functional additive for poly(vinyl chloride)

A new di-mannitol adipate ester-based zinc metal alkoxide (DMAE-Zn) was synthesized as a bi-functional poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) thermal stabilizer for the first time. The materials were characterized with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Characterization results confirmed the formation of Zn–O bonds in DMAE-Zn, and confirmed that DMAE-Zn had a high decomposition temperature and a low melting point. The thermal stability of DMAE-Zn on PVC also was tested by a conductivity test, a thermal aging test, and a UV-visible spectroscopy (UV-VIS) test. PVC stabilized by DMAE-Zn had a good initial color and excellent long-term stability. UV-VIS also showed that the conjugated structure in PVC stabilized by DMAE-Zn was almost all of the triene, suggesting that the addition of DMAE-Zn would suppress the formation of conjugated structures above tetraene. The dynamic processing performance of PVC samples tested by torque rheometer indicated that, having a good compatibility with PVC chains in the amorphous regions, DMAE-Zn contributed a good plasticizing effect to PVC. DMAE-Zn thus effectively demonstrates bi-functional roles, e.g., thermal stabilizers and plasticizers to PVC. Furthermore, FT-IR, a HCl absorption capacity test, and a complex ZnCl2 test were also used to verify the thermal stability mechanism of DMAE-Zn for PVC