Strategic opportunities in information technology

In an empirical investigation affirms of all sizes within the manufacturing, service, and retail industries, the applications of information technology (IT) with respect to key external and internal strategic areas were examined. It was found that the effectiveness of IT in accomplishing strategic objectives varied among manufacturing, retail, small and medium-size companies, but not between service-oriented and large companies. Furthermore, the level of success in using IT applications, measured in terms of whether it has achieved organizational objectives, was not significantly different among industry sectors nor among organizations of different sizes

Top management perception of strategic information processing in a turbulent environment

Extant strategic management literature provides only partial answer to the important question: What variables affect top managers\u27 ability to process complicated, novel, ambiguous, or dynamic strategic information in a turbulent environment? Drawn upon cognitive psychology, personality theory, management theory, organizational theory, and management information systems literatures, this paper proposes that nine personal attributes and four contextual attributes affect top managers\u27 information processing capability. The nine personal attributes are: cognitive complexity, knowledge, mental model of success, open-mindedness, time orientation, personal values, tolerance for ambiguity, locus of control, and time devoted to environmental scanning. The four contextual attributes are: rewards and incentives, culture, structure of strategic planning process, and executive support systems. Thirteen propositions are postulated regarding the types of attributes that are conducive for top managers\u27 ability in processing complicated, novel, ambiguous, or dynamic information

Single Domain Generalization for Crowd Counting

Due to its promising results, density map regression has been widely employed for image-based crowd counting. The approach, however, often suffers from severe performance degradation when tested on data from unseen scenarios, the so-called "domain shift" problem. To address the problem, we investigate in this work single domain generalization (SDG) for crowd counting. The existing SDG approaches are mainly for image classification and segmentation, and can hardly be extended to our case due to its regression nature and label ambiguity (i.e., ambiguous pixel-level ground truths). We propose MPCount, a novel effective SDG approach even for narrow source distribution. MPCount stores diverse density values for density map regression and reconstructs domain-invariant features by means of only one memory bank, a content error mask and attention consistency loss. By partitioning the image into grids, it employs patch-wise classification as an auxiliary task to mitigate label ambiguity. Through extensive experiments on different datasets, MPCount is shown to significantly improve counting accuracy compared to the state of the art under diverse scenarios unobserved in the training data characterized by narrow source distribution. Code is available at https://github.com/Shimmer93/MPCount.Comment: Accepted by CVPR202

Corporate Ethics: China vs. USA

Fairness is one of the basic aspects of business exchange.  Ethics are principles used to establish fairness.  This study will look at background and origins for different American and Chinese ethical beliefs.  It is important for U.S. and Chinese firms to understand each other’s cultural perspectives, especially as the Chinese market opens up.  Methods to resolve ethical conflict will be reviewed.  Business agents from both cultures can relate and deal with each other if they have the knowledge, skills, and patience to do so.  This study builds on prior research that suggests that younger Chinese are more concerned with profit than with abiding by regulations or adhering to corporate ethics.  The major argument of this study is that future Chinese business leaders, born after China’s one-child policy was implemented in 1979, will be primarily concerned with self-interest and making decisions that will benefit them individually.  Guanxi (interpersonal connections or human relationships), corporate ethics and social responsibility (CESR) beliefs will be reduced in importance and influence.  American managers should incorporate this information when formulating a “China strategy”

Diversification, Relatedness, And Firm Performance: Empirical Evidence From China

The relationship between diversification, relatedness and performance has long been a controversial issue in mainstream strategic management research. Research in this area, however, has focused primarily on developed countries. This study argues that the conclusions drawn from developed countries may not apply to developing countries. In an investigation of 227 publicly-listed companies in China, this study found that: 1) firm scale significantly contributes to the improvement of economic performance; 2) relatedness correlates negatively with firm performance, and 3) the relationship between diversification and performance fits the intermediate model. This study also provided evidence to support the argument that differences do exist in the rationales between firms in developed and developing countries

Reward Strategies for Franchising Organizations

Franchising   organizations   have  peculiar   characteristics   that   distinguish  them  from   other organizations. In view of this, incentive systems that are effective in some organizations may not be appropriate to franchising organizations. In this article, a model is developed for rewarding managers and executives of franchising organizations. This model is based upon the concept of the organization life cycle, and examines reward strategies from the perspective  of both the franchisor and   the franchisee

Zero-field dissipationless chiral edge transport and the nature of dissipation in the quantum anomalous Hall state

The quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) effect is predicted to possess, at zero magnetic field, chiral edge channels that conduct spin polarized current without dissipation. While edge channels have been observed in previous experimental studies of the QAH effect, their dissipationless nature at a zero magnetic field has not been convincingly demonstrated. By a comprehensive experimental study of the gate and temperature dependences of local and nonlocal magnetoresistance, we unambiguously establish the dissipationless edge transport. By studying the onset of dissipation, we also identify the origin of dissipative channels and clarify the surprising observation that the critical temperature of the QAH effect is two orders of magnitude smaller than the Curie temperature of ferromagnetism.Comment: main text+supporting materials. This is the accepted version for PRL. Comments are welcom

Parkinson\u27s disease-related spatial covariance pattern identified with resting-state functional MRI

In this study, we sought to identify a disease-related spatial covariance pattern of spontaneous neural activity in Parkinson\u27s disease using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Time-series data were acquired in 58 patients with early to moderate stage Parkinson\u27s disease and 54 healthy controls, and analyzed by Scaled Subprofile Model Principal Component Analysis toolbox. A split-sample analysis was also performed in a derivation sample of 28 patients and 28 control subjects and validated in a prospective testing sample of 30 patients and 26 control subjects. The topographic pattern of neural activity in Parkinson\u27s disease was characterized by decreased activity in the striatum, supplementary motor area, middle frontal gyrus, and occipital cortex, and increased activity in the thalamus, cerebellum, precuneus, superior parietal lobule, and temporal cortex. Pattern expression was elevated in the patients compared with the controls, with a high accuracy (90%) to discriminate the patients from the controls. The split-sample analysis produced a similar pattern but with a lower accuracy for group discrimination in both the derivation (80%) and the validation (73%) samples. Our results showed that resting-state functional MRI can be potentially useful for identification of Parkinson\u27s disease-related spatial covariance patterns, and for differentiation of Parkinson\u27s disease patients from healthy controls at an individual level.Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism advance online publication, 3 June 2015; doi:10.1038/jcbfm.2015.118

Subcutaneous nerve activity is more accurate than heart rate variability in estimating cardiac sympathetic tone in ambulatory dogs with myocardial infarction

BACKGROUND: We recently reported that subcutaneous nerve activity (SCNA) can be used to estimate sympathetic tone. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that left thoracic SCNA is more accurate than heart rate variability (HRV) in estimating cardiac sympathetic tone in ambulatory dogs with myocardial infarction (MI). METHODS: We used an implanted radiotransmitter to study left stellate ganglion nerve activity (SGNA), vagal nerve activity (VNA), and thoracic SCNA in 9 dogs at baseline and up to 8 weeks after MI. HRV was determined based on time-domain, frequency-domain, and nonlinear analyses. RESULTS: The correlation coefficients between integrated SGNA and SCNA averaged 0.74 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.41-1.06) at baseline and 0.82 (95% CI, 0.63-1.01) after MI (P <.05 for both). The absolute values of the correlation coefficients were significantly larger than that between SGNA and HRV analysis based on time-domain, frequency-domain, and nonlinear analyses, respectively, at baseline (P <.05 for all) and after MI (P <.05 for all). There was a clear increment of SGNA and SCNA at 2, 4, 6, and 8 weeks after MI, whereas HRV parameters showed no significant changes. Significant circadian variations were noted in SCNA, SGNA, and all HRV parameters at baseline and after MI, respectively. Atrial tachycardia (AT) episodes were invariably preceded by SCNA and SGNA, which were progressively increased from 120th, 90th, 60th, to 30th seconds before AT onset. No such changes of HRV parameters were observed before AT onset. CONCLUSION: SCNA is more accurate than HRV in estimating cardiac sympathetic tone in ambulatory dogs with MI