Developing Routinized Information Processing Capabilities for Operational Agility: Insights from China

Operational agility, which reflects the agile practices at business process level, is increasingly deemed as a significant determinant of business success in a turbulent business environment. Despite its importance, how operational agility can be attained is not answered by existing research. Drawing on the classic organization theory—information processing view of firms, the main contribution of this study is that it provides a process model of developing routinized information processing capabilities for operational agility in a turbulent business environment which fulfills this theoretical gap. It indicates the significant roles played by IT-enabled information processing networks and organizational controls during the process. It also identifies three routinized information processing capabilities including information sensitivity, information fluidity, and information decomposability. This is achieved by conducting a case study of Haier, one of the largest producers of household appliances in China. This paper concludes with a discussion of potential theoretical and practical contributions

Klippel–Trénaunay syndrome with profound abdominal lymphatic-venous malformation in a three-day-old newborn: a case report and literature review

BackgroundKlippel–Trénaunay syndrome, a kind of congenital limb-length-discrepancy disorder, is commonly associated with a variety of vascular anomalies.Case presentationWe present the case of a three-day-old newborn with a profound abdominal mass lesion during prenatal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examination. After delivery, physical examination revealed mild hemihypertrophy of the left lower extremity and red lesions on the left thigh. MRI of the abdomen showed a cyst-like lesion measuring 6.3 cm × 2.7 cm × 5.5 cm in the upper abdomen. Within the mass, there were also some possible calcified spots exhibiting high T1WI signals and low T2WI signals. A computed tomography (CT) scan of the abdomen was consistent with an ill-defined cystic tumor with small calcifications and encasement of mesenteric vessels. A MRI of the left lower extremity showed a tubular structure with a signal void and homogeneous strong enhancement located in the anterior subcutis of the left lower limb. The CT scan confirmed that the tubular structure was consistent with a venous malformation. This patient had features of Klippel–Trénaunay syndrome, including port-wine stains, a profound abdominal mass, and vascular malformations of the left lower extremity.ConclusionsIn this article, we presented a case of Klippel–Trénaunay syndrome, emphasizing both prenatal and confirmatory postnatal cross-sectional imaging findings. The rare presentation of an abdominal lymphatic-venous formation played a pivotal role as a crucial indicator for an early diagnosis of Klippel–Trénaunay syndrome

Speech2Lip: High-fidelity Speech to Lip Generation by Learning from a Short Video

Synthesizing realistic videos according to a given speech is still an open challenge. Previous works have been plagued by issues such as inaccurate lip shape generation and poor image quality. The key reason is that only motions and appearances on limited facial areas (e.g., lip area) are mainly driven by the input speech. Therefore, directly learning a mapping function from speech to the entire head image is prone to ambiguity, particularly when using a short video for training. We thus propose a decomposition-synthesis-composition framework named Speech to Lip (Speech2Lip) that disentangles speech-sensitive and speech-insensitive motion/appearance to facilitate effective learning from limited training data, resulting in the generation of natural-looking videos. First, given a fixed head pose (i.e., canonical space), we present a speech-driven implicit model for lip image generation which concentrates on learning speech-sensitive motion and appearance. Next, to model the major speech-insensitive motion (i.e., head movement), we introduce a geometry-aware mutual explicit mapping (GAMEM) module that establishes geometric mappings between different head poses. This allows us to paste generated lip images at the canonical space onto head images with arbitrary poses and synthesize talking videos with natural head movements. In addition, a Blend-Net and a contrastive sync loss are introduced to enhance the overall synthesis performance. Quantitative and qualitative results on three benchmarks demonstrate that our model can be trained by a video of just a few minutes in length and achieve state-of-the-art performance in both visual quality and speech-visual synchronization. Code: https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/Speech2Lip

Dynamic changes and convergence of China’s regional green productivity:A dynamic spatial econometric analysis

Low-carbon economic development is at the heart of the post-pandemic green recovery scheme worldwide. It requires economic recovery without compromising on the environment, implying a critical role that green productivity plays in achieving the carbon neutrality goal. Green productivity measures the quality of economic growth with consideration for energy consumption and environmental pollution. This study employs the slacks-based measure directional distance function (SBM-DDF) approach and the Malmquist-Luenberger (ML) index to calculate green productivity and its components of 30 provinces in China between 2001 and 2018. Using a spatial panel data model, we empirically analyzed the conditional β-convergence of China's green productivity. We found that overall, since 2001, China's green productivity has demonstrated a continuous upward trend. When taking into account spatial factors, China's green productivity demonstrates a significant conditional β-convergence. In terms of regional effects, the results indicate that the green productivity of the eastern and western regions demonstrates club convergence, implying a more balanced green economic development. Moreover, the convergence rate of China's green productivity increases with the addition of environmental regulation variable, and so the corresponding convergence time decreases. It indicates that environmental regulations help to facilitate the convergence of China's green productivity, narrowing the gap between the regional green economic development. The findings provide guideline for achieving a low-carbon development and carbon neutrality from a regional green productivity perspective

Prognostic factors associated with the survival of oral and pharyngeal carcinoma in Taiwan

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In Taiwan, a distinct ethnic group variation in incidence and mortality rates has been suggested for most carcinomas. Our aim is to identify the role of prognostic factors associated with the survival of oral and pharyngeal carcinoma in Taiwan.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Taiwan Cancer Registry records of 9039 subjects diagnosed with oral and pharyngeal carcinoma were analyzed. The population was divided into three ethnic groups by residence, which were Taiwanese aborigines, Hakka and Hokkien communities. Five-year survival rates were estimated by Kaplan-Meier methods. Ethnic curves differed significantly by log-rank test; therefore separate models for Taiwanese aborigines, Hakka and Hokkien were carried out. The Cox multivariate proportional hazards model was used to examine the role of prognostic factors on ethnic survival.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The five-year survival rates of oral and pharyngeal carcinoma were significantly poorer for Hokkien community (53.9%) and Taiwanese aborigines community (58.1%) compared with Hakka community (60.5%). The adjusted hazard ratio of Taiwanese aborigines versus Hakka was 1.07 (95%CI, 0.86–1.33) for oral and pharyngeal carcinoma mortality, and 1.16 (95%CI, 1.01–1.33) for Hokkien versus Hakka. Males had significantly poor prognosis than females. Subjects with tongue and/or mouth carcinoma presented the worst prognosis, whereas lip carcinoma had the best prognosis. Subjects with verrucous carcinoma had better survival than squamous cell carcinoma. Prognosis was the worst in elderly subjects, and subjects who underwent surgery had the highest survival rate.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our study presented that predictive variables in oral and pharyngeal carcinoma survival have been: ethnic groups, period of diagnosis, gender, diagnostic age, anatomic site, morphologic type, and therapy.</p