The Impact of Boundary Spanning Capability on Success of Offshore IS Outsourcing: From the Vendors’ Perspective

Past research has shown that most offshore IS outsourcing projects were failed. Communication and coordination problems caused by culture differences between clients and vendors are important reasons for the failures. The theory of boundary spanning capability provides a new theoretical perspective for research of coordination and communication mechanisms between clients and vendors in offshore IS outsourcing. This paper takes culture differences as mediator to study the impact mechanisms of vendors’ boundary spanning capability on success of offshore IS outsourcing. The research model is empirically tested on a sample of 102 offshore IS outsourcing projects from 20 vendors in China. The results suggest that vendors’ boundary spanning capability significantly improves outsourcing success. Moreover, vendors’ boundary spanning capability has a negative impact on culture differences and culture differences negatively influence the outsourcing success. Finally, we find that culture differences mediate partly the relationship between boundary spanning capability and outsourcing success

REACTIN: Regulatory Activity Inference of Transcription Factors Underlying Human Diseases with Application to Breast Cancer

Genetic alterations of transcription factors (TFs) have been implicated in the tumorigenesis of cancers. In many cancers, alteration of TFs results in aberrant activity of them without changing their gene expression level. Gene expression data from microarray or RNA-seq experiments can capture the expression change of genes, however, it is still challenge to reveal the activity change of TFs. Here we propose a method, called REACTIN (REgulatory ACTivity INference), which integrates TF binding data with gene expression data to identify TFs with significantly differential activity between disease and normal samples. REACTIN successfully detect differential activity of estrogen receptor (ER) between ER+ and ER- samples in 10 breast cancer datasets. When applied to compare tumor and normal breast samples, it reveals TFs that are critical for carcinogenesis of breast cancer. Moreover, Reaction can be utilized to identify transcriptional programs that are predictive to patient survival time of breast cancer patients

Witness of topological phase transition and Weyl points in an open topological system

Recently, the tunable Weyl-semimetal bands and the associate topological phase transition have been successfully simulated in superconducting quantum circuits [X. Tan, \textit{et al.} Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 122}, 010501 (2019)]. Since the superconducting quantum circuits inevitably couple to the environment, we here focus on the steady state and decoherence process by taking the reservoir into consideration via quantum master equation. Our results show that the purity of the steady state can be used to indicate the topological phase transition and Weyl points. Furthermore, the coherence will exponentially decay to zero at the Weyl points, and decay to a nonzero value with oscillation at other points in the momentum space. Our work may have significant impact on the study of quantum open topological system.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

A genome-wide transcriptome profiling reveals the early molecular events during callus initiation in Arabidopsis multiple organs

AbstractInduction of a pluripotent cell mass termed callus is the first step in an in vitro plant regeneration system, which is required for subsequent regeneration of new organs or whole plants. However, the early molecular mechanism underlying callus initiation is largely elusive. Here, we analyzed the dynamic transcriptome profiling of callus initiation in Arabidopsis aerial and root explants and identified 1342 differentially expressed genes in both explants after incubation on callus-inducing medium. Detailed categorization revealed that the differentially expressed genes were mainly related to hormone homeostasis and signaling, transcriptional and post transcriptional regulations, protein phosphorelay cascades and DNA- or chromatin-modification. Further characterization showed that overexpression of two transcription factors, HB52 or CRF3, resulted in the callus formation in transgenic plants without exogenous auxin. Therefore, our comprehensive analyses provide some insight into the early molecular regulations during callus initiation and are useful for further identification of the regulators governing callus formation

Rodent hole detection in a typical steppe ecosystem using UAS and deep learning

IntroductionRodent outbreak is the main biological disaster in grassland ecosystems. Traditional rodent damage monitoring approaches mainly depend on costly field surveys, e.g., rodent trapping or hole counting. Integrating an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) image acquisition platform and deep learning (DL) provides a great opportunity to realize efficient large-scale rodent damage monitoring and early-stage diagnosis. As the major rodent species in Inner Mongolia, Brandt’s voles (BV) (Lasiopodomys brandtii) have markedly small holes, which are difficult to identify regarding various seasonal noises in this typical steppe ecosystem.MethodsIn this study, we proposed a novel UAS-DL-based framework for BV hole detection in two representative seasons. We also established the first bi-seasonal UAS image datasets for rodent hole detection. Three two-stage (Faster R-CNN, R-FCN, and Cascade R-CNN) and three one-stage (SSD, RetinaNet, and YOLOv4) object detection DL models were investigated from three perspectives: accuracy, running speed, and generalizability.ResultsExperimental results revealed that: 1) Faster R-CNN and YOLOv4 are the most accurate models; 2) SSD and YOLOv4 are the fastest; 3) Faster R-CNN and YOLOv4 have the most consistent performance across two different seasons.DiscussionThe integration of UAS and DL techniques was demonstrated to utilize automatic, accurate, and efficient BV hole detection in a typical steppe ecosystem. The proposed method has a great potential for large-scale multi-seasonal rodent damage monitoring

Oscillation analysis of numerical solutions for nonlinear delay differential equations of population dynamics

This paper is concerned with oscillations of numerical solutions for the nonlinear delay differential equation of population dynamics. The equation proposed by Mackey and Glass for a ”dynamic disease” involves respiratory disorders and its solution resembles the envelope of lung ventilation for pathological breathing, called Cheyne-Stokes respiration. Some conditions under which the numerical solution is oscillatory are obtained. The properties of non-oscillatory numerical solutions are investigated. To verify our results, we give numerical experiments

Noise expresses exponential growth under regime switching

Consider a given system under regime switching whose solution grows at most polynomially, and suppose that the system is subject to environmental noise in some regimes. Can the regime switching and the environmental noise work together to make the system change signicantly? The answer is yes. In this paper, we will show that the regime switching and the environmental noise will make the original system whose solution grows at most polynomially become a new system whose solution will grow exponentially. In other words, we reveal that the regime switching and the environmental noise will exppress the exponential growth