Has China de-industrialised other developing countries?

China's opening to trade is interpreted as a shift in world average factor endowments, which altered the comparative advantage of other countries. In the rest of the world on average, this shift reduced the ratio of labour-intensive manufacturing to primary production by 7-10% for output and 10-15% for exports. China's impact is clearest on East Asian countries: in other developing regions, it was swamped by other causes of structural change. The de-industrialising effect was significant, but not big enough to be a serious threat to growth or equity in most other developing countries

Taking a New-Generation Manager Perspective to Develop Interface Designs

Digital natives are increasingly populating organizations’ management. As they have higher expectations with respect to IS accommodating their (non-functional) user preferences, interfaces of management support systems (MSS) are becoming more important. We develop design guidelines for new MSS interfaces from a new-generation manager perspective. We compile a set of requirements from a literature review and based on a multiple-case study we synthesize five guidelines: (1) use sparklines to present information at a glance and complement them with tooltips to access details, (2) support economic value-added concepts as a “must-have” and be aware that self-service predictive analyses make them more valuable, (3) draw managers’ attention to critical events in real-time by sending notifications to their smart devices, (4) to harvest the knowledge of different users, integrate collaboration capabilities into MSS interface designs, (5) align different information media with managers’ device selection and do not forget their mobile offline use situations

POWERING UP COMPANIES\u27 CRYSTAL BALLS: ANALYSIS OF A MULTI-CASE STUDY TOWARDS MORE APPLICABLE ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING SYSTEMS

The increasing volatility of their companies\u27 environment is a growing concern for executives. IS-based environmental scanning that complements the accounting information system domain can help to manage this challenge. A substantial body of knowledge on such information systems exists, but these concepts often go unused in practice. This article develops five design guidelines for environmental scanning systems that are more applicable than those outlined in previous research. In doing so, we first compile a set of requirements based on the principle of economic efficiency, and then use findings from the absorptive capacity theory to specify them. Challenging several implementations against these requirements in a multicase study generates findings that we synthesize into design guidelines. They address diverse areas: designing a more comprehensive model for information gathering, setting up a collective learning process for interpreting information, using IS to enable management techniques familiar to executives, designing processes for more interorganizational integration of environmental scanning systems, and accelerating prototyping

The impact of unemployment on the transition to parenthood

This paper seeks to advance our understanding about the impact of unemployment on fertility. From a theoretical perspective, both negative and positive effects might be expected. Existing empirical studies have produced contradictory results, partly because of varying institutional contexts, the use of different measures, and left-censoring problems. We address these theoretical and methodological problems in the extant literature. Our data comes from the German Life History Study (GLHS) and, in particular, the data on the 1971 cohort, which was collected in two representative and retrospective surveys conducted in East and West Germany in 1996-1998 and 2005. Using monthly information, we perform event history analysis to identify the timing of fertility for both men and women conditional on a number of covariates. We present our results as a comparison between East and West Germany, as the institutional contexts, the labour markets, and the value systems differ considerably between the two parts of the German state.parenthood, transition, unemployment

A Comparative Study Of Different Numerical Models For Flapper Valve Motion

Flapper valve design is critical for the reliability of a compressor and the performance of a compressor further the valve has to perform well under several operating conditions. However the movement of a valve is difficult to measure in a compressor running with refrigerant. For that reason numerical models of valve motion are inevitable when designing a new flapper valve. Probably the most promising and accurate way for simulating valve motion is 3D-Fluid-Structure-Interaction (FSI), however due to the large computational effort it is so far impossible to cover the whole operating range of a compressor. For this purpose so called 1D lumped-models are often used. In this study we compare a full 3D-FSI model and the valve dynamics simulation program KV-DYN, which is based on a 1D lumped model, with laser trigonometric measurements of the movement of a suction valve. Further we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the different simulation approaches

How could the South respond to secular stagnation in the North?

Developed countries face the risk of a sustained lack of aggregate demand, i.e. secular stagnation. Demand-oriented growth models emphasizing the balance-of-payments constraint raise concerns about attendant adverse growth impacts on developing countries from reduced export growth. These concerns are well-founded, albeit less serious than the simplest version of these models would imply. Relaxing their assumptions and emphasizing cumulative causation forces from domestic-demand growth and relative price effects indicates how changed policies can maintain rapid growth while reducing the import content of demand. Crucial is investment that reduces gaps between the composition of domestic production and domestic demand and emphasizes sectors with cumulative-causation effects, combined with incomes policy and capital-account management. Drawing down excessive foreign-exchange reserves and obtaining concessionary loans from development banks can finance required capital-goods imports. Enhanced South-South integration may be an important complement for small countries

Accurate cell segmentation in microscopy images using membrane patterns

Motivation: Identifying cells in an image (cell segmentation) is essential for quantitative single-cell biology via optical microscopy. Although a plethora of segmentation methods exists, accurate segmentation is challenging and usually requires problem-specific tailoring of algorithms. In addition, most current segmentation algorithms rely on a few basic approaches that use the gradient field of the image to detect cell boundaries. However, many microscopy protocols can generate images with characteristic intensity profiles at the cell membrane. This has not yet been algorithmically exploited to establish more general segmentation methods. Results: We present an automatic cell segmentation method that decodes the information across the cell membrane and guarantees optimal detection of the cell boundaries on a per-cell basis. Graph cuts account for the information of the cell boundaries through directional cross-correlations, and they automatically incorporate spatial constraints. The method accurately segments images of various cell types grown in dense cultures that are acquired with different microscopy techniques. In quantitative benchmarks and comparisons with established methods on synthetic and real images, we demonstrate significantly improved segmentation performance despite cell-shape irregularity, cell-to-cell variability and image noise. As a proof of concept, we monitor the internalization of green fluorescent protein-tagged plasma membrane transporters in single yeast cells. Availability and implementation: Matlab code and examples are available at http://www.csb.ethz.ch/tools/cellSegmPackage.zip. Contact: [email protected] or [email protected] Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics onlin

Are You Flippin’ the Classrooms Right – A Requirements Analysis of Two User Groups: Practitioners and Students

Inverting the knowledge transfer, flipped classrooms promise a richer learning experience and an enhanced learning process. The objective of this article is to contribute to more user-centric flipped classroom trainings by developing a spe-cific list of requirements criteria from “the other side of the school desk:” The participants’ perspective. We take an SAP S/4HANA lecture at university as our case example and consider two types of classmates for the same flipped classroom training: Practitioners and students. We examined significant differences between these two groups of participants: For example, practitioners high-lighted self-contained learning. In turn, students asked for a motivated lecturer. Our results can be clustered threefold: (1) User perspective – getting the method right is as important as the content; (2) Lecturers – developing new soft skills beyond the knowledge transfer; (3) Technology – setting the scene, however, there is not a second chance for a first bad impression

CNS progenitor cells and oligodendrocytes are targets of chemotherapeutic agents in vitro and in vivo

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Chemotherapy in cancer patients can be associated with serious short- and long-term adverse neurological effects, such as leukoencephalopathy and cognitive impairment, even when therapy is delivered systemically. The underlying cellular basis for these adverse effects is poorly understood.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We found that three mainstream chemotherapeutic agents – carmustine (BCNU), cisplatin, and cytosine arabinoside (cytarabine), representing two DNA cross-linking agents and an antimetabolite, respectively – applied at clinically relevant exposure levels to cultured cells are more toxic for the progenitor cells of the CNS and for nondividing oligodendrocytes than they are for multiple cancer cell lines. Enhancement of cell death and suppression of cell division were seen <it>in vitro </it>and <it>in vivo</it>. When administered systemically in mice, these chemotherapeutic agents were associated with increased cell death and decreased cell division in the subventricular zone, in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus and in the corpus callosum of the CNS. In some cases, cell division was reduced, and cell death increased, for weeks after drug administration ended.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Identifying neural populations at risk during any cancer treatment is of great importance in developing means of reducing neurotoxicity and preserving quality of life in long-term survivors. Thus, as well as providing possible explanations for the adverse neurological effects of systemic chemotherapy, the strong correlations between our <it>in vitro </it>and <it>in vivo </it>analyses indicate that the same approaches we used to identify the reported toxicities can also provide rapid <it>in vitro </it>screens for analyzing new therapies and discovering means of achieving selective protection or targeted killing.</p