Developing the EBS Management Model to Assist SMEs to Evaluate E-Commerce Success

In the literature, a lack of strong consensus or well-known theoretical research framework exists to defining and evaluating e-commerce success among small to medium enterprises (SMEs). Exploring more effective methods to describe and evaluate e-commerce success becomes a challenging task. This research seeks to help fill the gap by proposing a new model to evaluate e-commerce success from a business perspective. This measure has been termed e-commerce business satisfaction (EBS). A total of 2401 surveys were successfully sent to SMEs. The usable response rate for the surveys was 7.54%. Principal component analysis with varimax rotation method was then adopted within the factor analysis. Using the 15 critical success factors (CSFs) obtained from previous research as a foundation, an EBS management model was finally simply developed to assist SMEs business managers in effectively adopting e-commerce systems or evaluating e-commerce success, which was categorised into five components including Marketing, Management Support and Customer Acceptance, Website Effectiveness and Cost, Managing Change and Knowledge and Skills. Further research is needed to determine the weighting of each CSF so that a yardstick measurement method might be further developed to assist SMEs in adopting e-commerce successfully

Diosmetin alleviates periodontitis by inhibiting oxidative stress and pyroptosis through Nrf2/NF κB/NLRP3 axis

Purpose: To investigate the therapeutic role of diosmetin in periodontitis and its probable mechanism of action.Methods: Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) was used to induce periodontitis in periodontal cells. Cell viability and apoptosis in response to LPS and diosmetin were evaluated using MTT and TUNEL assays. The oxidative stress and inflammatory responses in LPS-induced periodontitis and diosmetin effects in periodontal cells were detected using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). In addition, the roles of diosmetin in pyroptosis and Nrf2/NF-kappa B/NLRP3 pathway were analyzed by immunoblot assays.Results: Diosmetin increased the viability of LPS-induced periodontal cells (p < 0.01). Diosmetin also alleviated the oxidative stress of periodontal cells (p < 0.01), reduced the secretion of pro-inflammatory factors in periodontal cells, and inhibited cell pyroptosis (p < 0.01). Diosmetin also mediated Nrf2/NFkappa B/NLRP3 pathway (p < 0.01).Conclusion: Diosmetin alleviates periodontitis by inhibiting oxidative stress and pyroptosis through Nrf2/NF-κB/NLRP3 axis. However, in vivo studies are required to validate this finding

Internationalization of China’s E-Commerce Higher Education: A Review between 2001 and 2019

The purpose of this chapter is to review the development of China’s higher education in electronic commerce (e-commerce) and explore the requirements of the internationalization of China’s e-commerce higher education. The Benefit-Driving Model (BDM) was adopted to explain the reasons for the internationalization of China’s e-commerce higher education. The literature review spans 20 years from 2001 when the first 13 e-commerce programs were offered from China’s 597 universities. By 2019, 328 e-commerce programs were offered by 831 universities. There is a sustainable growth from 2001 (2.17%, 13 of 597) to 2019 (39.47%, 328 of 831). Currently, six universities offer two e-commerce programs with different majors. Eight universities established specialized e-commerce schools. There are also six jointly founded or cooperative e-commerce programs run in China with overseas universities. This research may be valuable for any international organization interested in collaboration with China’s e-commerce higher education. A limitation is that this research focuses only on bachelors of e-commerce programs. Further research will explore factors for success in jointly founded e-commerce programs with China’s e-commerce educators

Research on the application of smart supply chain finance in the financing of private scientific and technological enterprises in China

Supply chain finance (SCF) has experienced the development stages of offline SCF, online traditional SCF, and Internet SCF, and has developed to the stage of smart supply chain finance (SSCF) driven by digital technology in China. We analyze the theoretical framework of SSCF model from three aspects: loose coupling alliance organizational structure, visual operation and management process and symbiotic multi-agent coordination mechanism. In the financing of private scientific and technological enterprises, SSCF will show smart effects such as intelligent decision-making, harmonious service, penetrating management and digital risk control. Further, the process of SSCF providing financing services for private scientific and technological enterprises is designed. Finally, in view of the problems and challenges faced by private scientific and technological enterprises in the application of SSCF, we put forward countermeasures and suggestions from the aspects of expanding the dimension of smart transformation, building a perfect regulatory system and legal system, and strengthening the cultivation of compound talents in this paper

CSFs for SMEs in Measuring e-Commerce Success

For the last 20 years, while many electronic business (e‐business)/electronic commerce (e‐commerce) systems have been successfully adopted in businesses across different industries, a significant number have failed, especially in small to medium enterprises (SMEs). It is therefore necessary to explore critical success factors (CSFs) for SMEs in adopting e‐commerce success. A blend of quantitative and qualitative research methods were used, consisting of literature review, focus group studies, pilot tests, and surveys. Total survey was of 11.54% (277 out of 2401). Data analysis procedures were adopted, which comprised initial reliability analysis, validity analysis, t‐testing, factor analysis, and detailed reliability analysis. As a result, a total of 15 items were identified as common CSFs for SMEs successfully adopting e‐commerce system, which could be adopted as an effective tool for assisting SMEs in effectively adopting e‐commerce systems, and as a yardstick further to develop new methods for measuring e‐commerce success

Amplifying Non-Resonant Production of Dark Sector Particles in Scattering Dominance Regime

We investigate the enhancement of dark sector particle production within the scattering dominant regime. These particles typically exhibit a slight mixing with Standard Model particles through various portals, allowing for their generation through in-medium oscillation from Standard Model particle sources. Our analysis reveals that in the scattering dominance regime, with a significantly smaller scattering mean free path $\lambda_{\rm sca}$ compared to the absorption mean free path $\lambda_{\rm abs}$, the non-resonant production of sterile states can experience an enhancement by a factor of $\lambda_{\rm abs}/\lambda_{\rm sca}$. This phenomenon is demonstrated within the context of kinetic mixing dark photon production at a reactor, precisely satisfying this condition. By incorporating this collisional enhancement, we find that the current sensitivity to the mixing parameter $\epsilon$ for dark photons in the TEXONO experiment can be significantly improved across a range spanning from tens of eV to MeV. This advancement establishes the most stringent laboratory constraint within this mass spectrum for the dark photon. Sterile neutrino production, however, does not exhibit such enhancement, either due to the failure to meet the scattering dominance criterion or the neutrino damping in resonant production.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Biomass Gasification: An Overview of Technological Barriers and Socio-Environmental Impact

Biomass gasification has been regarded as a promising technology to utilize bioenergy sustainably. However, further exploitation of biomass gasification still needs to overcome a significant number of technological and logistic challenges. In this chapter, the current development status of biomass gasification, especially for the activities in China, has been presented. The biomass characters and the challenges associated with biomass collection and transportation are covered and it is believed that biomass gasification coupled with distributed power generation will be more competitive in some small communities with large amount of local biomass materials. The technical part of biomass gasification is detailed by introducing different types of gasifiers as well as investigating the minimization methods of tar, which have become more and more important. In fact, applying biomass gasification also needs to deal with other socio-environmental barriers, such as health concerns, environmental issues and public fears. However, an objective financial return can actually accelerate the commercialization of biomass gasification for power and heat generation, and in the meantime, it will also contribute to other technical breakthroughs

The Value of Combining Wu Ling San Plus and Minus with Repaglinide in the Treatment of Obese Type 2 Diabetes

Objective: To investigate the clinical value and practical effects of the treatment of obese type 2 diabetes mellitus patients with Wu Ling San plus and minus combined with Repaglinide. Methods: Twenty-two obese type 2 diabetic patients attending the outpatient clinic of Yixing Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital from September 2020 to March 2022 were randomly selected as the subjects of this study, and all of them were divided into treatment group (n=11, Wu Ling San plus and minus + Repaglinide) and control group (n=11, single Repaglinide) according to the computerized random series grouping method. The clinical data and overall efficacy of the two groups were compared. Results: After treatment, the treatment group had better blood glucose, blood lipids and other basic indicators than the control group (P<0.05); all Chinese medicine symptoms scores and complication rates of the treatment group were lower than those of the control group (P<0.05). Conclusion: The treatment of obese type 2 diabetes mellitus patients with Wu Ling San plus reduction + Repaglinide has significant efficacy and high drug safety, and can stabilize many indicators of blood glucose and blood lipids, reduce the risk of complications and control their body weight, which can be promoted and used in the treatment of related clinical conditions

Beyond Triplet: Leveraging the Most Data for Multimodal Machine Translation

Multimodal machine translation (MMT) aims to improve translation quality by incorporating information from other modalities, such as vision. Previous MMT systems mainly focus on better access and use of visual information and tend to validate their methods on image-related datasets. These studies face two challenges. First, they can only utilize triple data (bilingual texts with images), which is scarce; second, current benchmarks are relatively restricted and do not correspond to realistic scenarios. Therefore, this paper correspondingly establishes new methods and new datasets for MMT. First, we propose a framework 2/3-Triplet with two new approaches to enhance MMT by utilizing large-scale non-triple data: monolingual image-text data and parallel text-only data. Second, we construct an English-Chinese {e}-commercial {m}ulti{m}odal {t}ranslation dataset (including training and testing), named EMMT, where its test set is carefully selected as some words are ambiguous and shall be translated mistakenly without the help of images. Experiments show that our method is more suitable for real-world scenarios and can significantly improve translation performance by using more non-triple data. In addition, our model also rivals various SOTA models in conventional multimodal translation benchmarks.Comment: 8 pages, ACL 2023 Findin