Analyzing Eaton's 2008 Phoenixtec Power Company Ltd. acquisition

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 74-77).Mergers and acquisitions are important ways for multinational companies to expand and grow their business. This thesis studies the role of product management in the success of mergers and acquisitions by analyzing Eaton's 2008 Phoenixtec Power Company Ltd. acquisition. Using public information, market reports, internal documents and insider interviews, I explore four components of product management in the integration process, including product portfolio management, sales and marketing reorganizations, channel integration and brand architecture. For each component, the objectives of the integration, the methodology used by Eaton and the outcomes are examined. Moreover, the performance of the merged company in terms of sales revenue, profitability, market share, customer satisfaction and employee engagement are analyzed to demonstrate the overall success of this acquisition. My thesis ends with findings and recommendations for building a standard framework to align activities with strategic drivers, maintaining competitive advantages of the acquired company, leveraging the acquired resources to enhance overall capabilities, and respecting and motivating individual talent with local know-how.by Lijuan Ren.S.M

Top-down and bottom-up stimulation techniques combined with action observation treatment in stroke rehabilitation: a perspective

Stroke is a central nervous system disease that causes structural lesions and functional impairments of the brain, resulting in varying types, and degrees of dysfunction. The bimodal balance-recovery model (interhemispheric competition model and vicariation model) has been proposed as the mechanism of functional recovery after a stroke. We analyzed how combinations of motor observation treatment approaches, transcranial electrical (TES) or magnetic (TMS) stimulation and peripheral electrical (PES) or magnetic (PMS) stimulation techniques can be taken as accessorial physical therapy methods on symptom reduction of stroke patients. We suggest that top-down and bottom-up stimulation techniques combined with action observation treatment synergistically might develop into valuable physical therapy strategies in neurorehabilitation after stroke. We explored how TES or TMS intervention over the contralesional hemisphere or the lesioned hemisphere combined with PES or PMS of the paretic limbs during motor observation followed by action execution have super-additive effects to potentiate the effect of conventional treatment in stroke patients. The proposed paradigm could be an innovative and adjunctive approach to potentiate the effect of conventional rehabilitation treatment, especially for those patients with severe motor deficits

High-Dielectric PVP@PANI/PDMS Composites Fabricated via an Electric Field-Assisted Approach

Polymer-based composite films with multiple properties, such as low dielectric loss tangent, high dielectric constant, and low cost are promising materials in the area of electronics and electric industries. In this study, flexible dielectric films were fabricated via an electric field-assisted method. Polyaniline (PANI) was modified by polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) to form a core–shell structure to serve as functional particles and silicone rubber polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) served as the matrix. The dielectric constant of the composites prepared under electric fields was improved by the micro-structures formed by external electric fields. With the addition of 2.5 wt% PVP@PANI, the dielectric constant could be significantly enhanced, up to 23; the dielectric loss tangent is only 1, which is lower than that of the aligned PANI samples. This new processing technology provides important insights for aligning fillers in polymer matrix to form composites with enhanced dielectric properties

Defect identification in adhesive structures using multi-Feature fusion convolutional neural network

The interface-debonding defects of adhesive bonding structures may cause a reduction in bonding strength, which in turn affects the bonding quality of adhesive bonding samples. Hence, defect recognition in adhesive bonding structures is particularly important. In this study, a terahertz (THz) wave was used to analyze bonded structure samples, and a multi-feature fusion convolutional neural network (CNN) was used to identify the defect waveforms. The pooling method of the squeeze-and-excitation (SE) attention mechanism was optimized, defect feature weights were adaptively assigned, and feature fusion was conducted using automatic label net-works to segment the THz waveforms in the adhesive bonding area with fine granularity waveforms as an input to the multi-channel CNN. The results revealed that the speed of the THz waveform labeling with the automatic labeling network was 10 times higher than that with traditional methods, and the defect-recognition accuracy of the defect-recognition network constructed in this study was up to 99.28%. The F1-score was 99.73%, and the lowest pre-embedded defect recognition error rate of the generalization experiment samples was 0.27%

The golden apple snail Pomacea canaliculata shifts primary production from benthic to pelagic habitats in simulated shallow lake systems

Biological invasions are among the most serious threats to ecosystems. The golden apple snail Pomacea canaliculata (Lamarck, 1822) is considered one of the top 100 worst invasive alien species in the world. These snails consume benthic primary producers, including submerged macrophytes, which may lead to an increase in nutrient concentration in the water, enhance growth of phytoplankton, and decrease growth of macrophytes, thereby shifting the primary production from benthic to pelagic habitats in shallow systems. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a short-term experiment with and without the invasive P. canaliculata in mesocosms with high abundance of the native submerged macrophyte Vallisneria natans (Lour.) Hara. Compared with snail-free control, the snail increased the concentrations of total nitrogen (TN), nitrate nitrogen (NO3-N), total and organic suspended solids (TSS and OSS), decreased the concentrations of soluble reactive phosphorous (SRP), but had no effect on total phosphorus (TP) and the TN:TP ratio. In addition, the snails decreased the biomass, leaf length and tiller number of V. natans, and decreased light intensity. Although snail presence did not change the biomasses of nanophytoplankton and picophytoplankton, it did increase the biomass of microphytoplankton leading to an increase in total phytoplankton biomass. Our study shows that P. canaliculata shifted primary production from benthic to pelagic habitats, altered the phytoplankton community size structure, and decreased water quality. The results add further evidence of negative ecosystem impacts of this invasive apple snail and call for its control in invaded shallow lake ecosystems