The influence of employees’ parents on work-family balance in Taiwan: implications for organisational behaviour and wellbeing

Work-family research in Chinese societies often directly adopts the Western work-family model and rarely attempts to consider cultural differences in the importance of employees’ parents. Researchers infrequently address the role of parents in the work-family field. The aim of this thesis was to understand the influence of employees’ parents on work-family balance and its related outcomes in a Chinese society, Taiwan. A multi-method approach was employed consisting of three studies. First, the nature of the influence of employees’ parents in Taiwan was explored through interviews, followed by an online questionnaire survey with Taiwanese employees to examine the relationships between the influence of employees’ parents, work-family balance, organisational behaviour and wellbeing. Third, a secondary data analysis was used to provide triangulations for the findings of the questionnaire survey. The interview study explored the influence of employees’ parents as six types of demand and six types of support. It also found that parent demand had a negative effect on employees’ work-family balance, while parent support had a positive effect. In the questionnaire survey, parent demand and parent support measures were developed. Using these measures, the relationships between the influence of employees’ parents, work-family balance and outcomes were tested using regression analyses. The results showed that parent demand and parent support were significantly related to work-family balance. In addition, the structural models revealed mechanisms for predicting two types of outcome variables. For organisational behaviour, a full mediation model was identified, showing that the influence of parents had only indirect relationships (through the work-family balance variables) with job satisfaction, organisational commitment, and turnover intention. For wellbeing, a partial mediation model was identified, showing that the influence of parents had both indirect as well as direct relationships with life satisfaction, anxiety, and depression. Last, the analysis of secondary data also showed that parent demand and parent support had significant impacts on employees’ work-family balance, which supports the results of the questionnaire survey. The implications for work-family research were discussed

A generalized Gaussian process model for computer experiments with binary time series

Non-Gaussian observations such as binary responses are common in some computer experiments. Motivated by the analysis of a class of cell adhesion experiments, we introduce a generalized Gaussian process model for binary responses, which shares some common features with standard GP models. In addition, the proposed model incorporates a flexible mean function that can capture different types of time series structures. Asymptotic properties of the estimators are derived, and an optimal predictor as well as its predictive distribution are constructed. Their performance is examined via two simulation studies. The methodology is applied to study computer simulations for cell adhesion experiments. The fitted model reveals important biological information in repeated cell bindings, which is not directly observable in lab experiments.Comment: 49 pages, 4 figure

Regulation of CLC-1 chloride channel biosynthesis by FKBP8 and Hsp90β.

Mutations in human CLC-1 chloride channel are associated with the skeletal muscle disorder myotonia congenita. The disease-causing mutant A531V manifests enhanced proteasomal degradation of CLC-1. We recently found that CLC-1 degradation is mediated by cullin 4 ubiquitin ligase complex. It is currently unclear how quality control and protein degradation systems coordinate with each other to process the biosynthesis of CLC-1. Herein we aim to ascertain the molecular nature of the protein quality control system for CLC-1. We identified three CLC-1-interacting proteins that are well-known heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90)-associated co-chaperones: FK506-binding protein 8 (FKBP8), activator of Hsp90 ATPase homolog 1 (Aha1), and Hsp70/Hsp90 organizing protein (HOP). These co-chaperones promote both the protein level and the functional expression of CLC-1 wild-type and A531V mutant. CLC-1 biosynthesis is also facilitated by the molecular chaperones Hsc70 and Hsp90β. The protein stability of CLC-1 is notably increased by FKBP8 and the Hsp90β inhibitor 17-allylamino-17-demethoxygeldanamycin (17-AAG) that substantially suppresses cullin 4 expression. We further confirmed that cullin 4 may interact with Hsp90β and FKBP8. Our data are consistent with the idea that FKBP8 and Hsp90β play an essential role in the late phase of CLC-1 quality control by dynamically coordinating protein folding and degradation

ProTeCt: Prompt Tuning for Hierarchical Consistency

Large visual-language models, like CLIP, learn generalized representations and have shown promising zero-shot performance. Few-shot adaptation methods, based on prompt tuning, have also been shown to further improve performance on downstream datasets. However, these models are not hierarchically consistent. Frequently, they infer incorrect labels at coarser taxonomic class levels, even when the inference at the leaf level (original class labels) is correct. This is problematic, given their support for open set classification and, in particular, open-grained classification, where practitioners define label sets at various levels of granularity. To address this problem, we propose a prompt tuning technique to calibrate the hierarchical consistency of model predictions. A set of metrics of hierarchical consistency, the Hierarchical Consistent Accuracy (HCA) and the Mean Treecut Accuracy (MTA), are first proposed to benchmark model performance in the open-granularity setting. A prompt tuning technique, denoted as Prompt Tuning for Hierarchical Consistency (ProTeCt), is then proposed to calibrate classification across all possible label set granularities. Results show that ProTeCt can be combined with existing prompt tuning methods to significantly improve open-granularity classification performance without degradation of the original classification performance at the leaf level

The influence of employees’ parents on work-family balance in Taiwan: implications for organisational behaviour and wellbeing

Work-family research in Chinese societies often directly adopts the Western work-family model and rarely attempts to consider cultural differences in the importance of employees’ parents. Researchers infrequently address the role of parents in the work-family field. The aim of this thesis was to understand the influence of employees’ parents on work-family balance and its related outcomes in a Chinese society, Taiwan. A multi-method approach was employed consisting of three studies. First, the nature of the influence of employees’ parents in Taiwan was explored through interviews, followed by an online questionnaire survey with Taiwanese employees to examine the relationships between the influence of employees’ parents, work-family balance, organisational behaviour and wellbeing. Third, a secondary data analysis was used to provide triangulations for the findings of the questionnaire survey. The interview study explored the influence of employees’ parents as six types of demand and six types of support. It also found that parent demand had a negative effect on employees’ work-family balance, while parent support had a positive effect. In the questionnaire survey, parent demand and parent support measures were developed. Using these measures, the relationships between the influence of employees’ parents, work-family balance and outcomes were tested using regression analyses. The results showed that parent demand and parent support were significantly related to work-family balance. In addition, the structural models revealed mechanisms for predicting two types of outcome variables. For organisational behaviour, a full mediation model was identified, showing that the influence of parents had only indirect relationships (through the work-family balance variables) with job satisfaction, organisational commitment, and turnover intention. For wellbeing, a partial mediation model was identified, showing that the influence of parents had both indirect as well as direct relationships with life satisfaction, anxiety, and depression. Last, the analysis of secondary data also showed that parent demand and parent support had significant impacts on employees’ work-family balance, which supports the results of the questionnaire survey. The implications for work-family research were discussed

An increase in adenosine-5’-triphosphate (ATP) content in rostral ventrolateral medulla is engaged in the high fructose diet-induced hypertension

BACKGROUND: The increase in fructose ingestion has been linked to overdrive of sympathetic activity and hypertension associated with the metabolic syndrome. The premotor neurons for generation of sympathetic vasomotor activity reside in the rostral ventrolateral medulla (RVLM). Activation of RVLM results in sympathoexcitation and hypertension. Neurons in the central nervous system are able to utilize fructose as a carbon source of ATP production. We examined in this study whether fructose affects ATP content in RVLM and its significance in the increase in central sympathetic outflow and hypertension induced by the high fructose diet (HFD). RESULTS: In normotensive rats fed with high fructose diet (HFD) for 12 weeks, there was a significant increase in tissue ATP content in RVLM, accompanied by the increases in the sympathetic vasomotor activity and blood pressure. These changes were blunted by intracisternal infusion of an ATP synthase inhibitor, oligomycin, to the HFD-fed animals. In the catecholaminergic-containing N2a cells, fructose dose-dependently upregulated the expressions of glucose transporter 2 and 5 (GluT2, 5) and the rate-limiting enzyme of fructolysis, ketohexokinase (KHK), leading to the increases in pyruvate and ATP production, as well as the release of the neurotransmitter, dopamine. These cellular events were significantly prevented after the gene knocking down by lentiviral transfection of small hairpin RNA against KHK. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that increases in ATP content in RVLM may be engaged in the augmented sympathetic vasomotor activity and hypertension associated with the metabolic syndrome induced by the HFD. At cellular level, the increase in pyruvate levels via fructolysis is involved in the fructose-induced ATP production and the release of neurotransmitter