Materialism, Social Stratification, and Ethics: Evidence from SME Owners in China

Purpose: The study of business ethics has seldom shed light on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) despite their theoretical and practical significance. Drawing from strain perspective, this research intends to address this insufficiency and investigate SME owners’ ethical attitudes towards money-related deviances. Design/methodology/approach: Based on a large sample of 741 Chinese SMEs, an OLS regression analysis was employed to test associated hypotheses. The robustness of results was additionally checked. Findings: Results suggest that for stratification variables, education level is positively related to ethical attitudes, whereas household income level is surprisingly negatively associated with ethical attitudes; for materialism facets, success and happiness exert a negative impact on ethical attitudes as hypothesized, but centrality has no associated impact. Research limitations/implications: This study has examined both structural and motivational sources of personal strains on the ethical attitude of SME owners, while the characteristics of these strains could be explored in the future studies. Originality/value: This study advances and complements the dominant behavior approach that emphasizes cognitive and other psychological processes in explaining individual ethical attitudes. It is also seemingly the first study to examine the influence of three materialism facets on entrepreneurial ethical attitudes

Estimation of component contributions to total terrestrial water storage change in the Yangtze River basin

Terrestrial water storage (TWS) is a key variable in global and regional hydrological cycles. In this study, the TWS changes in the Yangtze River Basin (YRB) were derived using the Lagrange multiplier method (LMM) from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data. To assess TWS changes from LMM, different GRACE solutions, different hydrological models, and in situ data were used for validation. Results show that TWS changes from LMM in YRB has the best performance with the correlation coefficients of 0.80 and root mean square error of 1.48 cm in comparison with in situ data. The trend of TWS changes over the YRB increased by 10.39 ± 1.27 Gt yr-1 during the 2003−2015 period. Moreover, TWS change is disintegrated into the individual contributions of hydrological components (i.e., glaciers, surface water, soil moisture, and groundwater) from satellite data, hydrologic models, and in situ data. The estimated changes in individual TWS components in the YRB show that (1) the contribution of glaciers, surface water, soil moisture, and groundwater to total TWS changes is 15%, 12%, 25% and 48%, respectively; (2) Geladandong glacier melt from CryoSat-2/ICESat data has a critical effect on TWS changes with a correlation coefficients of −0.51; (3) the Three Gorges Reservoir Impoundment has a minimal effect on surface water changes (mainly lake water storage), but it has a substantial effect on groundwater storage (GWS), (4) the Poyang and Doting Lake water storage changes are mainly caused by climate change, (5) soil moisture storage change is mainly influenced by surface water, (6) human-induced GWS changes accounted for approximately half of the total GWS. The results of this study can provide valuable information for decision-making in water resources management

E3 ubiquitin ligase CHIP facilitates Toll-like receptor signaling by recruiting and polyubiquitinating Src and atypical PKCζ

In mouse macrophages and dendritic cells, the CHIP E3 ubiquitin ligase is needed for transduction of signals initiated by TLR4 and TLR9 stimulation

The Experience, Dilemma, and Solutions of Sustainable Development of Inclusive Finance in Rural China: Based on the Perspective of Synergy

Inclusive finance is an important development direction in the future of finance. The development of inclusive finance in China’s rural areas has provided valuable experience as well as exposing the various limitations of sustainable development. One of the key reasons for such limitations is the existence of cooperative resistance from multiple parties in the finance system. In this study, relevant data from the World Bank Inclusive Finance Database 2011–2017 and the CBRC Website were selected to analyze the current development level of inclusive finance in China in order to perform longitudinal time and horizontal international comparisons. The article summarizes the Chinese experience with inclusive finance and points out the dilemma of sustainable development. Then, based on the new perspective of synergy, the article breaks down financial institutions by type and provides an analysis of the cooperative resistance among the three major parties considering their behavioral motivations. Finally, we put forward the corresponding countermeasures to the dilemma of the sustainable development of inclusive finance in rural China by numerical simulations

Engineering of An Assertion-based PSLSimple-Verilog Dynamic Verifier by Alternating Automata

AbstractAlternating Finite Automata (AFA) has linear space complexity in representing Linear-Time Temporal Logics. However, It is difficult to manipulate AFA in the run-time. In this paper, we focus on implementation methods to make alternating automata from static representation to run-time verification engines. 1) We have Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) represent all possible runs of a Local-variable-enhanced AFA (LAFA). The acceptance of universal choices is conditioned on successful synchronization of universal branches. 2) We encode states and local variables by symbolic approaches, and adopt historic trees in representing all possible parallel runs. The encoding enables multiple assignments to states and local variables in a configuration. By those methods, we are able to maintain the linear complexity of verification in both space and time

A new Arctic MSS model derived from combined Cryosat-2 and ICESat observations

Due to the existence of seasonal or perennial sea ice cover, the determination of the Arctic sea surface is more difficult than that of mid-low latitudinal oceans. Focusing on the sea surface height in the ice-covered region, this paper constructs a new Arctic mean sea surface (MSS) model, named SUST22, by combining the measurements from ICESat and Cryosat-2 missions. The lead detection methods of ICESat and Cryosat-2 are first studied and modified to acquire sea surface measurements with better accuracy. The results have shown that the standard deviation of Cryosat-2-derived Arctic sea surface height is about 3–4 cm in 10-km resolution grids, while the value of ICESat is 5–6 cm. Then the MSS construction procedure is discussed and the SUST22 MSS model is constructed. The new model is compared with the other four Arctic MSS models. The best agreement is found between SUST22 and DTU21 with an average difference of −4.0 ± 5.2 cm. These models are also validated by ICESat-2 samples. The average difference between ICESat-2 and SUST22 is 15.8 ± 7.4 cm, which shows that the new model SUST22 presents better consistency with the ICESat-2 than any of the other models