Technological Innovation Performance Analysis Using Multilayer Networks: Evidence from the Printer Industry

Department of Management EngineeringThe importance of collaboration and technology boundary spanning has been emphasized in other inquiries into technological innovation. Therefore, this research project first tried to investigate the effect of collaboration on technology boundary spanning. Then, we investigated the effect of collaboration and technology boundary spanning on technological innovation within a firm by using a multilayer network to analyze patent data. The aim of this paper is to provide new insight into the process of analyzing patent data using multilayer networks. This empirical study is based on a sample of 408 firms within the printer industry from 1996 to 2005. Starting with a theoretical discussion of R&D collaboration, technology boundary spanning and innovation performance, the importance of a firm???s collaboration and technology boundary spanning in its technology innovation performance was empirically analyzed using patent data. We followed changes in collaboration networks, technology class networks and the connection between them and tried to find the meaning of those changes in firms??? technology innovation performances. We used degree centrality within the collaboration network and the ratio of collaborated patents to the total number of patents in order to measure a firm???s collaboration and formulated technology boundary spanning represented by exploitation and exploration by using edges of the multilayer network. As dependent variables, we used the number of patents and the average number of citations received over three, five, and 10 years to measure the firm???s quantitative and qualitative innovation performance respectively. The results of the analysis can be summarized as follows: a firm???s collaboration has positive effects on both exploitation and exploration. Firms with more collaborations show higher quantitative innovation performances while firms with more collaborations exhibit lower qualitative innovation performance. Exploitation has a positive impact on a firm???s quantitative innovation performance while exploration has negative effects on a firm???s quantitative innovation performance. The relationship between a firm???s exploration activities and a firm???s qualitative innovation performance manifests as an inverted U-shape. On the other hand, a firm???s exploitation activities have a U-shape relationship with the firm???s qualitative innovation performance. The implication of this study is that multilayer networks can be used to analyze patent data. This study used multilayer networks to formulate the exploitation and exploration only. However, in further research it can be utilized to find the hub firms that fuse technologies.clos

The Role of Touch in the Care of Toddlers among Bofi Foragers in Central Africa

The current study examined three types of touch (caregiving, social-affectionate, and passive) and toddlers‟ daily experience of physical interaction with caregivers among Bofi foragers, a semi-nomadic group of hunter-gatherers in Central Africa. With the purpose of describing a more holistic view of touch interactions and childhood experience in toddlers, rather than the extant Western, single-caregiver, mother-centric view, this study described the stylistic touch patterns that Bofi forager children experience and the influence of child characteristic factors (age, gender, and birth order) and social ecological factors (four types of caregivers: mother, father, adult relatives, and juvenile relatives). Based on cultural characteristics of the Bofi foragers, it was hypothesized that each type of caregiver would show a different stylistic touch pattern toward toddlers and also that the age of the child and birth order would affect the frequency of each type of touch toddlers received. A total of 35 Bofi forager children (17 boys and 18 girls; 14 firstborn children), between 18 and 59 months-old, and their various caregivers participated in this study. Naturalistic observations were conducted with Bofi forager families over 12 daylight hours while they were engaged in normal activities, and a focal child sampling technique was used for the observation of one child at a time and the recording of that child\u27s behavior on a checklist. Frequencies of each type of touch and the rank order of types of touch that a toddler received were compared between caregivers and in relation to child characteristic factors. Results of the Bofi forager data suggest that compared to other types of caregivers, mothers have an important role in touch interactions with young children. Juvenile relatives also have a unique role in touch, which is more likely as playmates rather than alloparents. In addition, different child characteristic factors displayed different patterns in touch interactions. Children received different stylistic patterns of touch depending on age and birth order, but not gender as expected. The findings from the current study help to identify the stylistic touch pattern in Bofi forager society

The Role of an Intergenerational Acculturation Gap in the Adjustment of Immigrant Youth: A Meta-Analysis

Rapidly increasing numbers of immigrant families with children in the U.S. have led researchers to study the dynamics of immigrant families, focusing particularly on discrepancies in the acculturation levels of parents and children. Many studies have found such an acculturation gap to be associated with problematic functioning, such as conflicts between family members and poor adjustment outcomes among immigrant youth. Other studies have found no such associations. In order to clarify this association, this dissertation conducted a meta-analysis of available studies. Literature searches identified 63 qualifying studies, in which 117 separate effect sizes were reported. Concentrating on main effects, the findings of the meta-analysis revealed small but significant average effects between an acculturation gap and each of three dependent variables: youth internalizing problems (r=.1), youth externalizing problems (r=.06), and family conflict (r=.15). Thus, the higher the acculturation gap, the higher the level of individual and family difficulty. Next, a series of moderator analyses were conducted to test the degree to which these main effects might be contingent on a variety of study and personal characteristics, as well on methodological features of how an acculturation gap is perceived, measured, and calculated. No significant moderation effects were found for age or country of origin. There were not adequate studies that reported separate effect sizes to test for youth gender differences. For internalizing problems only, the mean effect was higher for studies published in journals than in dissertations. The only significant finding from analyses using methodological features as moderators was that studies that assessed an acculturation gap in the specific domain of cultural values had a higher mean effect than studies that assessed the acculturation gap with a global acculturation index. In sum, the study confirms that within the currently available empirical literature, an acculturation gap between immigrant parents and children in North America is significantly associated with poorer family and individual youth functioning. These effects are systematic in that they held regardless of differences in various individual and study characteristics. Implications for application and research refinement are discussed

Improving Multi-Scale Aggregation Using Feature Pyramid Module for Robust Speaker Verification of Variable-Duration Utterances

Currently, the most widely used approach for speaker verification is the deep speaker embedding learning. In this approach, we obtain a speaker embedding vector by pooling single-scale features that are extracted from the last layer of a speaker feature extractor. Multi-scale aggregation (MSA), which utilizes multi-scale features from different layers of the feature extractor, has recently been introduced and shows superior performance for variable-duration utterances. To increase the robustness dealing with utterances of arbitrary duration, this paper improves the MSA by using a feature pyramid module. The module enhances speaker-discriminative information of features from multiple layers via a top-down pathway and lateral connections. We extract speaker embeddings using the enhanced features that contain rich speaker information with different time scales. Experiments on the VoxCeleb dataset show that the proposed module improves previous MSA methods with a smaller number of parameters. It also achieves better performance than state-of-the-art approaches for both short and long utterances.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 202

Constructing probability density function of net-proton multiplicity distributions using Pearson curve method

The probability density functions of net-proton multiplicity distributions are constructed from the Beam Energy Scan results of the STAR experiment using the Pearson curve method for two different transverse momentum windows. The $6^{th}$ and $8^{th}$ order cumulants of net-proton multiplicity distributions are estimated from the constructed probability density functions. The beam energy dependence of $C_{6}/C_{2}$ and $C_{8}/C_{2}$ are found to be sensitive to the acceptance window. This method provides a unique opportunity to study the O(4) criticality near the chiral crossover transition and estimating the higher-order cumulants. In general, it is useful to determine the probability density function uniquely of a frequency data if the first four cumulants are known.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, text modifie