Customer attractiveness, supplier satisfaction and preferred customer status: a review and a cycle model

In this paper, we introduce the concept of preferred customer status, i.e. a buyer is awarded preferential treatment of its important suppliers compared to their other customers. As there is a lack of knowledge of what motivates suppliers to serve selected buyers better than others, our research focuses on the suppliers’ evaluation of customers and how it can be influenced by buyers. Based on social exchange theory, we provide a conceptual model which proposes customer attractiveness, supplier satisfaction and knowledge of alternative customers as factors influencing suppliers to award preferred customer status. Subsequently, a literature review is provided to give an overview of the drivers of customer attractiveness, supplier satisfaction and preferred customer status already analysed in current literature. We conclude by providing a preliminary conceptual framework and suggesting future research directions in this field. This article proposes new insights into supplier relationship management and offers a state-of-the-art analysis as well as a theoretical base to this new research field

Prognos (R) in the diagnosis of amalgam hypersensitivity - A diagnostic case-control study

Objective: We aimed to investigate whether the Prognos (R) device might be a useful tool in the diagnosis of disorders suspected to be due to dental amalgam fillings. Participants and Methods: A diagnostic case-control study was performed in 27 patients who complained about health problems attributed to amalgam ( cases), 27 healthy volunteers with amalgam fillings ( controls I), and 27 healthy amalgam-free volunteers ( controls II). All participants were tested before and after application of 300 mg DMPS (2.3-dimercapto-1-propanesulfonic acid) with Prognos, a diagnostic device for the energetic measurement of Traditional Chinese Medicine meridians. In addition, mercury was measured in blood, urine, and saliva, and a lymphocyte transformation test (LTT) was performed. Results: Diagnoses derived from the first and second Prognos testing did not agree above chance (Cohen's Kappa = -0.11, 95% confidence interval -0.33 to 0.10; p = 0.30). Agreement for secondary outcome measures was poor, too. Prognos measurements did not differ between cases and controls. Correlations with measurements in urine, blood and saliva were low. Conclusion: In this study Prognos could not be shown to be a useful tool in the diagnosis of disorders suspected to be due to dental amalgam fillings

An Embarrassingly Simple Baseline for Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has shown great promise in leveragingunlabeled data to improve model performance. While standard SSL assumes uniformdata distribution, we consider a more realistic and challenging setting calledimbalanced SSL, where imbalanced class distributions occur in both labeled andunlabeled data. Although there are existing endeavors to tackle this challenge,their performance degenerates when facing severe imbalance since they can notreduce the class imbalance sufficiently and effectively. In this paper, westudy a simple yet overlooked baseline -- SimiS -- which tackles data imbalanceby simply supplementing labeled data with pseudo-labels, according to thedifference in class distribution from the most frequent class. Such a simplebaseline turns out to be highly effective in reducing class imbalance. Itoutperforms existing methods by a significant margin, e.g., 12.8%, 13.6%, and16.7% over previous SOTA on CIFAR100-LT, FOOD101-LT, and ImageNet127respectively. The reduced imbalance results in faster convergence and betterpseudo-label accuracy of SimiS. The simplicity of our method also makes itpossible to be combined with other re-balancing techniques to improve theperformance further. Moreover, our method shows great robustness to a widerange of data distributions, which holds enormous potential in practice. Codewill be publicly available.<br

Silicon nanoparticles with a polymer-derived carbon shell for improved lithium-ion batteries: Investigation into volume expansion, gas evolution, and particle fracture

Silicon (Si) and composites thereof, preferably with carbon (C), show favorable lithium (Li) storage properties at low potential, and thus hold promise for application as anode active materials in the energy storage area. However, the high theoretical specific capacity of Si afforded by the alloying reaction with Li involves many challenges. In this article, we report the preparation of small-size Si particles with a turbostratic carbon shell from a polymer precoated powder material. Galvanostatic charge/discharge experiments conducted on electrodes with practical loadings resulted in much improved capacity retention and kinetics for the Si/C composite particles compared to physical mixtures of pristine Si particles and carbon black, emphasizing the positive effect that the core−shell-type morphology has on the cycling performance. Using in situ differential electrochemical mass spectrometry, pressure, and acoustic emission measurements, we gain insights into the gassing behavior, the bulk volume expansion, and the mechanical degradation of the Si/C composite-containing electrodes. Taken together, our research data demonstrate that some of the problems of high-content Si anodes can be mitigated by carbon coating. Nonetheless, continuous electrolyte decomposition, particle fracture, and electrode restructuring due to the large volume changes during battery operation (here, ∼170% in the voltage range of 600−30 mV vs Li+/Li) remain as serious hurdles toward practical implementation

FreeMatch: Self-adaptive Thresholding for Semi-supervised Learning

Pseudo labeling and consistency regularization approaches based on confidencethresholding have made great progress in semi-supervised learning (SSL).However, we argue that existing methods might fail to adopt suitable thresholdssince they either use a pre-defined / fixed threshold or an ad-hoc thresholdadjusting scheme, resulting in inferior performance and slow convergence. Wefirst analyze a motivating example to achieve some intuitions on therelationship between the desirable threshold and model's learning status. Basedon the analysis, we hence propose FreeMatch to define and adjust the confidencethreshold in a self-adaptive manner according to the model's learning status.We further introduce a self-adaptive class fairness regularization penalty thatencourages the model to produce diverse predictions during the early stages oftraining. Extensive experimental results indicate the superiority of FreeMatchespecially when the labeled data are extremely rare. FreeMatch achieves 5.78%,13.59%, and 1.28% error rate reduction over the latest state-of-the-art methodFlexMatch on CIFAR-10 with 1 label per class, STL-10 with 4 labels per class,and ImageNet with 100 labels per class, respectively.<br

Generalization of Conditioned Contextual Anxiety and the Modulatory Effects of Anxiety Sensitivity

Anxiety patients overgeneralize fear responses, possibly because they cannot distinguish between cues never been associated with a threat (i.e., safe) and threat-associated cues. However, as contexts and not cues are discussed as the relevant triggers for prolonged anxiety responses characterizing many anxiety disorders, we speculated that it is rather overgeneralization of contextual anxiety, which constitutes a risk factor for anxiety disorders. To this end, we investigated generalization of conditioned contextual anxiety and explored modulatory effects of anxiety sensitivity, a risk factor for anxiety disorders. Fifty-five participants underwent context conditioning in a virtual reality paradigm. On Day 1 (acquisition), participants received unpredictable mildly painful electric stimuli (unconditioned stimulus, US) in one virtual office (anxiety context, CTX+), but never in a

Predictive preoperative clinical score for patients with liver-only oligometastatic colorectal cancer

BACKGROUND: Resection of liver metastases from colorectal cancer (CRC) in the oligometastatic stage improves survival and is a potentially curative treatment. Thus, predictive scores that reliably identify those patients who especially benefit from surgery are essential. PATIENTS AND METHODS: In this multicenter analysis, 512 patients had undergone surgery for liver metastases from CRC. We investigated distinct cancer-specific risk factors that are routinely available in clinical practice and developed a predictive preoperative score using a training cohort (TC), which was thereafter tested in a validation cohort (VC). RESULTS: Inflammatory response to the tumor, a right-sided primary tumor, multiple liver metastases, and node-positive primary tumor were significant adverse variables for overall survival (OS). Patients were stratified in five groups according to the cumulative score given by the presence of these risk factors. Median OS for patients without risk factors was 133.8 months [95% confidence interval (CI) 81.2-not reached (nr)] in the TC and was not reached in the VC. OS decreased significantly for each subsequent group with increasing number of risk factors. Median OS was significantly shorter (P < 0.0001) for patients presenting all four risk factors: 14.3 months (95% CI 10.5 months-nr) in the TC and 16.6 months (95% CI 14.6 months-nr) in the VC. CONCLUSIONS: Including easily obtainable variables, this preoperative score identifies oligometastatic CRC patients with prolonged survival rates that may be cured, and harbors potential to be implemented in daily clinical practice

The humanistic roots of Islamic administration and leadership for education : philosophical foundations for cross-cultural and transcultural teaching

For a number of decades, a humanistic approach has been a minor but persistent one in the Western field of administrative and leadership studies, and only recently has been broadening to include other humanist traditions (Dierksmeier et al., 2011) and has yet to be fully explored in educational administration and its pedagogy and curriculum although some foundational work has been done (e.g., Samier, 2005). The focus in this chapter is on the Islamic humanist tradition as it relates to the teaching of educational administration and leadership in a Muslim context, with implications for cross-cultural and transcultural use. The second purpose of the chapter is to show the correspondences that exist between the Islamic and Western humanist traditions in terms of human values, knowledge and educational ideal, which in this chapter are argued to be close to the Western Idealist tradition and the German Bildung conception of education as well as the strong interpretive and hermeneutic foundations that originated in the Islamic tradition and which influenced the foundations of many relevant European schools of thought, particularly in the Enlightenment.The initial section of the chapter is a comparative examination of the central principles of the Islamic humanist tradition from the classical through to contemporary times with the Western humanist tradition as they relate to conceptions of the good, ethics, the construction of meaning and a set of higher order values predicated upon human dignity, integrity, empathy, well-being, and the public good (Goodman, 2003) covering a number of important scholars like Al Farabi, al Isfanhani, and Edward Said (e.g., Kraemer, 1986). In both, professions are viewed as meaningful work that allow for large measures of decision making, and are grounded in human qualities and needs including autonomy, freedom and emancipation balanced with responsibilities, obligations and duties to society. These are compared with the corresponding principles of knowledge in Western humanism which includes a strong constructivist view of reality (Makdisi, 1990). Secondly, the chapter examines the principles of good or ideal leadership and administration that humanism aims at in its preparation of officials, including those in the educational sector in both the classical Islamic tradition (Hassi, 2012) and Western approaches to humanistic administration and leadership (Czarniawska-Joerges & Guillet de Monthoux, 1994; Gagliardi & Czarniawska, 2006; Leoussi, 2000). The third section focusses on close correspondences that exist between the Islamic (Afsaruddin, 2016; al-Attas, 1980; Yasin & Jani, 2013) and Western (Aloni, 2007; Veugelers, 2011) humanist education traditions in terms of educational ideal as well as the kind of teaching practices that distinguish these traditions (Daiber, 2013; Dossett, 2014) as they apply to educational administration and leadership (Greenfield & Ribbins, 1993). The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the Islamic humanist tradition can contribute to cross-cultural and transcultural graduate teaching in international educational administration (Khan & Amann, 2013)