The Will Not in Bondage: An Interpretation of Free Will in Shakespeare’s Pure Tragedies

The tension between Christian Predestination and Free Will is the theme Shakespearean tragedy frequently deals with. As it is the tragedy that often masterly generalizes the playwright’s ultimate concerns, the paper, based on a re-examination of the fates of the heroes and themes revealed in Shakespeare’s pure tragedies from the perspectives of Free Will as the gift of grace and that in man’s exertion and judgments, suggests that Shakespeare, though living and writing under Anglican circumstances, shows in great measure an anti-Calvinistic view of Free Will, to be elaborated clearly, that man’s will can be reconciled with God’s will, that the path toward eternity and redemption is neither simple nor clear, and that man is not saved by good works, but by grace through faith that works well. However, his lack of strong confidence in the infinite has constantly aroused controversies on the adherence of his Christian faith

Parameter Dependence of Positive Solutions for Second-Order Singular Neumann Boundary Value Problems with Impulsive Effects

The author considers the Neumann boundary value problem -y′′t+Myt=λωtft,yt,  t∈J,    t≠tk,  -Δy′|t=tk = λIktk,ytk,   k=1,2,…,m,  y′(0)=y′(1)=0 and establishes the dependence results of the solution on the parameter λ, which cover equations without impulsive effects and are compared with some recent results by Nieto and O’Regan

Chemical and Non-Chemical Control of Potato Pink Rot

Pink rot of potato (Solanum tuberosum) is a widespread soilborne disease that causes significant losses in the field and storage. It is caused by Phytophthora erythroseptica (Pethybr.), an oomycete pathogen that produces sexual spores that can survive in soil for years. The management of pink rot mainly relies on chemical control. However, the most effective chemical in pink rot control, mefenoxam, is losing its efficacy owing to the development of mefenoxam resistance in P. erythroseptica. To evaluate alternative fungicides (including chemical and biological fungicides) to mefenoxam in pink rot control, two greenhouse experiments and three field trials were conducted. Crop rotation experiments were performed in the field to investigate the rotation effects of alfalfa, barley-ryegrass, canola, red clover, onion, pumpkin, sweet corn and oats on pink rot of potato. Thirty-four wild-type isolates of P. erythroseptica were collected for fungicide sensitivity assay and fungicide-resistant P. erythroseptica selection, to predict the resistance risk of fluopicolide, an alternative chemical to mefenoxam. Field trials showed that biologicals including Bacillus subtilis (Serenade Soil, Taegro), Bacillus amyloliquifaciens (Double Nickel, MBI-110), and extract of Reynoutria sachalinensis (Regalia) did not significantly reduce pink rot severity in the harvested potato tubers. The sole application of fluopicolide, some combinations of chemical fungicides (mefenoxam and oxathiapiprolin) and some combinations of chemical and biological fungicides (oxathiapiprolin/fluopicolide and Bacillus sp.) significantly reduced pink rot severity in the presence of mefenoxam-resistant P. erythroseptica population. In crop rotation trials, alfalfa, canola and pumpkin significantly increased potato tuber yield. However, the rotation crops had no significant effect on pink rot of potato. The results of the fungicide resistance study suggested a medium risk of P. erythroseptica developing intermediate resistance to fluopicolide, and that there was a trade-off between fluopicolide resistance and biological fitness in P. erythroseptica

Digital Inequality in the Use of Mobile Business Supporting Features

Today, Internet has become an essential part of peoples’ daily lives. As the advancement of Internet technology, the phenomenon of digital inequality has received substantial attention. This study extended research on digital inequality to the field of mobile business. The paper aimed to investigate the impact of digital inequality in the use of mobile business supporting features in China. To address this, an empirical study with 258 subjects was carried out. The results indicated that perceived ease of use had a significant positive effect on the use of mobile business supporting features, while perceived risk had a significant negative effect on the use of mobile business supporting features. Furthermore, this study also revealed that socio-economically disadvantaged individuals were more likely to be influenced by perceived risks, while socio-economically advantaged individuals were more likely to be influenced by the utilitarian motivations

Influence of viral genes on the cell-to-cell spread of RNA silencing

The turnip crinkle virus-based vector TCV–GFPDCP had been devised previously to study cell-to-cell and long-distance spread of virus-induced RNA silencing. TCV–GFPDCP, which had been constructed by replacing the coat protein (CP) gene with a green fluorescent protein (GFP) coding sequence, was able to induce RNA silencing in single epidermal cells, from which RNA silencing spread from cell-to-cell. Using this unique local silencing assay together with mutagenesis analysis, two TCV genes, p8 and p9, which were involved in the intercellular spread of virus-induced RNA silencing, were identified. TCV–GFPDCP and its p8- or p9-mutated derivatives, TCVmp8–GFPDCP and TCVmp9–GFPDCP, replicated efficiently but were restricted to single Nicotiana benthamiana epidermal cells. TCV–GFPDCP, TCVmp8–GFPDCP, or TCVmp9–GFPDCP was able to initiate RNA silencing that targeted and degraded recombinant viral RNAs in inoculated leaves of the GFP-expressing N. benthamiana line 16c. However, cell-to-cell spread of silencing to form silencing foci was triggered only by TCV–GFPDCP. Non-replicating TCVmp88–GFPDCP and TCVmp28mp88–GFPDCP with dysfunctional replicase genes, and single-stranded gfp RNA did not induce RNA silencing. Transient expression of the TCV p9 protein could effectively complement TCVmp9–GFPDCP to facilitate intercellular spread of silencing. These data suggest that the plant cellular trafficking machinery could hijack functional viral proteins to permit cell-to-cell movement of RNA silencing

Performance Evaluation for the Sustainable Supply Chain Management

Supply chain SC activities transform natural resources, raw materials, and components into various finished products that are delivered to end customers. A high efficient SC would bring great benefits to an enterprise such as integrated resources, reduced logistics costs, improved logistics efficiency, and high quality of overall level of services. In contrast, an inefficient SC will bring additional transaction costs, information management costs, and resource waste, reduce the production capacity of all enterprises on the chain, and unsatisfactory customer relationships. So the evaluation of a SC is important for an enterprise to survive in a competitive market in a globalized business environment. Therefore, it is important to research the various methods, performance indicator systems, and technology for evaluating, monitoring, predicting, and optimizing the performance of a SC. A typical procedure of the performance evaluation (PE) of a SC is to use the established evaluation performance indicators, employ an analytical method, follow a given procedure, to carry out quantitatively or qualitatively comparative analysis to provide the objective and accurate evaluation of a SC performance in a selected operation period. Various research works have been carried out in proposing the performance indicator systems and methods for SC performance evaluations. But there are no widely accepted indicator systems that can be applied in practical SC performance evaluations due to the fact that the indicators in different systems have been defined without a common understanding of the meanings and the relationships between them, and they are nonlinear and very complicated