How Can Multinational Corporations Retain Their Employees in China?

To address the headache encountered by many multinational companies in China retention of their Chinese employees, this study first examined the current Chinese labor market, identifying the unique characteristics of the market mainly comprised of university graduates and experienced white-collar employees; then tried to explain the reasons behind employees departures from a perspective of deep-rooted Chinese cultures; in the end, proposed effective and efficient solutions for retention purposes. All the proposed solutions aim to address key human resources management concerns, including compensation management, talent acquisition, performance management and communication. This study examined the best practices in employee retention adopted by a large number of successful multinational players in the Chinese market. Some of the names from the list are IBM, Motorola, Intel, HSBC, Shell and British Petroleum (BP)

Global current account adjustment: a decomposition

The rising current account deficit in the USA has attracted considerable attention in recent years. We use the “business cycle accounting” methodology to identify the principal distortions that have affected the external accounts of the US. In particular, we measure distortions in the optimality conditions of a simple two-country general equilibrium model using data from the US and the other G7 countries. We then feed these measured distortions into the model individually and use the simulated counterfactual paths of the current account to determine the contribution of each of these “wedges” to the overall external imbalance of the USA. We find that no single wedge in isolation can account closely for the observed current account. However, a combination of productivity differences and deviations from risk-sharing between the US and the rest of the G7 does the best job in accounting for most of the measured movement of the US current account.

Rich-club connectivity dominates assortativity and transitivity of complex networks

Rich-club, assortativity and clustering coefficients are frequently-used measures to estimate topological properties of complex networks. Here we find that the connectivity among a very small portion of the richest nodes can dominate the assortativity and clustering coefficients of a large network, which reveals that the rich-club connectivity is leveraged throughout the network. Our study suggests that more attention should be payed to the organization pattern of rich nodes, for the structure of a complex system as a whole is determined by the associations between the most influential individuals. Moreover, by manipulating the connectivity pattern in a very small rich-club, it is sufficient to produce a network with desired assortativity or transitivity. Conversely, our findings offer a simple explanation for the observed assortativity and transitivity in many real world networks --- such biases can be explained by the connectivities among the richest nodes.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, accepted by Phys. Rev.

Global current account adjustment: a decomposition

The rising current account deficit in the USA has attracted considerable attention in recent years. We use the "business cycle accounting" methodology to identify the principal distortions that have affected the external accounts of the US. In particular, we measure distortions in the optimality conditions of a simple two-country general equilibrium model using data from the US and the other G7 countries. We then feed these measured distortions into the model individually and use the simulated counterfactual paths of the current account to determine the contribution of each of these "wedges" to the overall external imbalance of the USA. We find that no single wedge in isolation can account closely for the observed current account. However, a combination of productivity differences and deviations from risk-sharing between the US and the rest of the G7 does the best job in accounting for most of the measured movement of the US current account.

Quantum walks on two kinds of two-dimensional models

In this paper, we numerically study quantum walks on two kinds of two-dimensional graphs: cylindrical strip and Mobius strip. The two kinds of graphs are typical two-dimensional topological graph. We study the crossing property of quantum walks on these two models. Also, we study its dependence on the initial state, size of the model. At the same time, we compare the quantum walk and classical walk on these two models to discuss the difference of quantum walk and classical walk

Sparse Attentive Backtracking: Temporal CreditAssignment Through Reminding

Learning long-term dependencies in extended temporal sequences requires credit assignment to events far back in the past. The most common method for training recurrent neural networks, back-propagation through time (BPTT), requires credit information to be propagated backwards through every single step of the forward computation, potentially over thousands or millions of time steps. This becomes computationally expensive or even infeasible when used with long sequences. Importantly, biological brains are unlikely to perform such detailed reverse replay over very long sequences of internal states (consider days, months, or years.) However, humans are often reminded of past memories or mental states which are associated with the current mental state. We consider the hypothesis that such memory associations between past and present could be used for credit assignment through arbitrarily long sequences, propagating the credit assigned to the current state to the associated past state. Based on this principle, we study a novel algorithm which only back-propagates through a few of these temporal skip connections, realized by a learned attention mechanism that associates current states with relevant past states. We demonstrate in experiments that our method matches or outperforms regular BPTT and truncated BPTT in tasks involving particularly long-term dependencies, but without requiring the biologically implausible backward replay through the whole history of states. Additionally, we demonstrate that the proposed method transfers to longer sequences significantly better than LSTMs trained with BPTT and LSTMs trained with full self-attention.Comment: To appear as a Spotlight presentation at NIPS 201

Is birthweight associated with total and aggressive/lethal prostate cancer risks? A systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: It has been hypothesised that intrauterine exposures are important for subsequent prostate cancer risk. Prior epidemiological studies have used birthweight as a proxy of cumulative intrauterine exposures to test this hypothesis, but results have been inconsistent partly because of limited statistical power. METHODS: We investigated birthweight in relation to prostate cancer in the Medical Research Council (MRC) National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD) using Cox proportional hazards models. We then conducted a meta-analysis of birthweight in relation to total and aggressive/lethal prostate cancer risks, combining results from the NSHD analysis with 13 additional studies on this relationship identified from a systematic search in four major scientific literature databases through January 2015. RESULTS: Random-effects models found that per kg increase in birthweight was positively associated with total (OR=1.02, 95% confidence interval (95% CI)=1.00, 1.05; I(2)=13%) and aggressive/lethal prostate cancer (OR=1.08, 95% CI=0.99, 1.19; I(2)=40%). Sensitivity analyses restricted to studies with birthweight extracted from medical records demonstrated stronger positive associations with total (OR=1.11, 95% CI=1.03, 1.19; I(2)=0%) and aggressive/lethal (OR=1.37, 95% CI=1.09, 1.74; I(2)=0%) prostate cancer. These studies heavily overlapped with those based in Nordic countries. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides evidence that heavier birthweight may be associated with modest increased risks of total and aggressive/lethal prostate cancer, which supports the hypothesis that intrauterine exposures may be related to subsequent prostate cancer risks