29,193 research outputs found
Sustainable Growth and Ethics: a Study of Business Ethics in Vietnam Between Business Students and Working Adults
Sustainable growth is not only the ultimate goal of business corporations but also the primary target of local governments as well as regional and global economies. One of the cornerstones of sustainable growth is ethics. An ethical organizational culture provides support to achieve sustainable growth. Ethical leaders and employees have great potential for positive influence on decisions and behaviors that lead to sustainability. Ethical behavior, therefore, is expected of everyone in the modern workplace. As a result, companies devote many resources and training programs to make sure their employees live according to the high ethical standards. This study provides an analysis of Vietnamese business students’ level of ethical maturity based on gender, education, work experience, and ethics training. The results of data from 260 business students compared with 704 working adults in Vietnam demonstrate that students have a significantly higher level of ethical maturity. Furthermore, gender and work experience are significant factors in ethical maturity. While more educated respondents and those who had completed an ethics course did have a higher level of ethical maturity, the results were not statistically significant. Analysis of the results along with suggestions and implications are provided
Differentially Private Publication of Sparse Data
The problem of privately releasing data is to provide a version of a dataset
without revealing sensitive information about the individuals who contribute to
the data. The model of differential privacy allows such private release while
providing strong guarantees on the output. A basic mechanism achieves
differential privacy by adding noise to the frequency counts in the contingency
tables (or, a subset of the count data cube) derived from the dataset. However,
when the dataset is sparse in its underlying space, as is the case for most
multi-attribute relations, then the effect of adding noise is to vastly
increase the size of the published data: it implicitly creates a huge number of
dummy data points to mask the true data, making it almost impossible to work
with.
We present techniques to overcome this roadblock and allow efficient private
release of sparse data, while maintaining the guarantees of differential
privacy. Our approach is to release a compact summary of the noisy data.
Generating the noisy data and then summarizing it would still be very costly,
so we show how to shortcut this step, and instead directly generate the summary
from the input data, without materializing the vast intermediate noisy data. We
instantiate this outline for a variety of sampling and filtering methods, and
show how to use the resulting summary for approximate, private, query
answering. Our experimental study shows that this is an effective, practical
solution, with comparable and occasionally improved utility over the costly
materialization approach
Unraveling the senses of Phytophthora; leads to novel control strategies?
Oomycetes cause devastating diseases on plants and animals. They cause major yield losses in many crop plants and their control heavily depends on agrochemicals. This is certainly true for the potato late blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans. Strong concerns about adverse effects of agrochemicals on food safety and environment are incentives for the development of novel, environmental friendly control strategies preferably based on natural products. Cyclic lipopeptides (CLPs) were recently discovered as a new class of natural compounds with strong activities against oomycetes including Phytophthora. CLPs lyse zoospores, inhibit mycelial growth and effectively reduce late blight disease. In order to unravel how Phytophthora senses CLPs and other environmental signals we follow two approaches. On the one hand, we monitor genome wide changes in gene expression induced by CLPs with the aim to identify the cellular pathways targeted by CLPs. On the other hand, we analyse components of ubiquitous signal transduction pathways with the aim to identify features that are unique for Phytophthora or oomycetes and, hence, could be suitable targets for novel anti-oomycete agents. Mining and comparing whole genome sequences have revealed that Phytophthora harbours many novel phospholipid modifying enzymes, unique for oomycetes. They have aberrant combinations of catalytic and regulatory domains occasionally combined with transmembrane domains. The latter resemble receptors that might be activated by extracellular ligands. Phospholipids, the substrates of these enzymes, are structural membrane components that also function in signalling. Together these findings open new avenues of research aimed at target-discovery in oomycetes
Thermal reaction of Al/Ti bilayers with contaminated interface
We have studied some new aspects of thermal reactions in Al/Ti bilayers in which the interface is purposely contaminated with oxygen. After annealing at a temperature of 460 °C, an Al_3Ti compound forms at the interface, moreover some Al diffuses through the Ti to form a compound at the free surface. The amount of aluminum at the free surface can be as large as at the interface. Nucleation and lateral growth of Al_3Ti at the interface are locally unfavorable. This results in a competition between the lateral growth of Al_3Ti at the Al/Ti interface and the diffusion of Al to the free surface. Once full coverage by Al_3Ti is obtained at the Al/Ti interface, the diffusion of Al to the surface becomes negligible
Immunity of intersubband polaritons to inhomogeneous broadening
We demonstrate that intersubband (ISB) polaritons are robust to inhomogeneous
effects originating from the presence of multiple quantum wells (MQWs). In a
series of samples that exhibit mid-infrared ISB absorption transitions with
broadenings varying by a factor of 5 (from 4 meV to 20meV), we have observed
polariton linewidths always lying in the 4 - 7 meV range only. We have
experimentally verified the dominantly inhomogeneous origin of the broadening
of the ISB transition, and that the linewidth reduction effect of the polariton
modes persists up to room-temperature. This immunity to inhomogeneous
broadening is a direct consequence of the coupling of the large number of ISB
oscillators to a single photonic mode. It is a precious tool to gauge the
natural linewidth of the ISB plasmon , that is otherwise masked in such MQWs
system , and is also beneficial in view of perspective applications such as
intersubband polariton lasers
Wearable Sensor Data Based Human Activity Recognition using Machine Learning: A new approach
Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of human activity
recognition (HAR) based on wearable sensor data. One can find many practical
applications in this area, especially in the field of health care. Many machine
learning algorithms such as Decision Trees, Support Vector Machine, Naive
Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbor, and Multilayer Perceptron are successfully used in
HAR. Although these methods are fast and easy for implementation, they still
have some limitations due to poor performance in a number of situations. In
this paper, we propose a novel method based on the ensemble learning to boost
the performance of these machine learning methods for HAR
Controlled cortical impact traumatic brain injury in 3xTg-AD mice causes acute intra-axonal amyloid-β accumulation and independently accelerates the development of tau abnormalities
Alzheimer\u27s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized pathologically by progressive neuronal loss, extracellular plaques containing the amyloid-β (Aβ) peptides, and neurofibrillary tangles composed of hyperphosphorylated tau proteins. Aβ is thought to act upstream of tau, affecting its phosphorylation and therefore aggregation state. One of the major risk factors for AD is traumatic brain injury (TBI). Acute intra-axonal Aβ and diffuse extracellular plaques occur in ∼30% of human subjects after severe TBI. Intra-axonal accumulations of tau but not tangle-like pathologies have also been found in these patients. Whether and how these acute accumulations contribute to subsequent AD development is not known, and the interaction between Aβ and tau in the setting of TBI has not been investigated. Here, we report that controlled cortical impact TBI in 3xTg-AD mice resulted in intra-axonal Aβ accumulations and increased phospho-tau immunoreactivity at 24 h and up to 7 d after TBI. Given these findings, we investigated the relationship between Aβ and tau pathologies after trauma in this model by systemic treatment of Compound E to inhibit γ-secretase activity, a proteolytic process required for Aβ production. Compound E treatment successfully blocked posttraumatic Aβ accumulation in these injured mice at both time points. However, tau pathology was not affected. Our data support a causal role for TBI in acceleration of AD-related pathologies and suggest that TBI may independently affect Aβ and tau abnormalities. Future studies will be required to assess the behavioral and long-term neurodegenerative consequences of these pathologies
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