How China’s demand uncertainty moderates the respondence of operational performance to supply chain integration in automotive industry

This study aims at examining the dynamic response of the relationship between supply chain integration (SCI) and operational performance (OP) to demand uncertainty (DU). Based on a wide spectrum data sample with 357 participants in the China automotive supply chains, threshold regressions are used to examine the dynamic moderating effects. DU was found to moderate supplier integration (SI)–OP and customer integration (CI)–OP relationship. Internal integration (II)–OP relationship did not response to DU. The SI–OP relationship turned from negative to positive as DU increases, and CI–OP relationship responded to DU reversely compare to SI–OP relationship. Scholars now know the moderating effect of DU is not static and monotonic. Both of direction and magnitude of the correlations between SI, CI and OP change when DU changes. Managers of automotive supply chain recognize that their integrations’ strength should be properly managed subject to the level of DU for propose of achieving optimal OP. This study extends the current literature by delivering a field study of China and introducing dynamic capability theory for the first time to examine a dynamic response model that represents the SCI–OP relationships with respect to the DU as a moderating factor

Examining Scientific Writing Styles from the Perspective of Linguistic Complexity

Publishing articles in high-impact English journals is difficult for scholars around the world, especially for non-native English-speaking scholars (NNESs), most of whom struggle with proficiency in English. In order to uncover the differences in English scientific writing between native English-speaking scholars (NESs) and NNESs, we collected a large-scale data set containing more than 150,000 full-text articles published in PLoS between 2006 and 2015. We divided these articles into three groups according to the ethnic backgrounds of the first and corresponding authors, obtained by Ethnea, and examined the scientific writing styles in English from a two-fold perspective of linguistic complexity: (1) syntactic complexity, including measurements of sentence length and sentence complexity; and (2) lexical complexity, including measurements of lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical sophistication. The observations suggest marginal differences between groups in syntactical and lexical complexity.Comment: 6 figure

BIOMECHANICAL MEASUREMENT AND EVALUATION FOR WUSU COMPULSORY PROGRAM

INTRODUCTION: The Wusu compulsory program is a new form of competition. It differs from the Wusu optional program in that all the athletes must execute the same compulsory program. Following this, judges asses the level of expertise of athletes, by scores gained, based on their performance. The comparability and objectivity in grading a compulsory program is better than in an optional program. So it is feasible to analyze technique of the Wusu compulsory program using a biomechanical measuring method. The compulsory exercise described as, “the turn about for flying kick on the right“, was measured and analyzed quantitatively in this paper. With the calculations from this study, a new evaluation factor and advanced development of competitive Wusu wasdeveloped

Types of Scientific Collaborators: A Perspective of Author Contribution Network

The purpose of this study is to investigate interaction between collaborators within individual studies by measuring how they made contributions to their studies. Author contribution network is constructed based on the author contribution statements of 140,000 full-text articles in PloS by viewing every collaborator as a node and a shared contribution as an edge. Three types of contributors are identified: general team-players, factotums, and mavericks. The preliminary result suggests that division of labor widely exists in scientific re-search and the latter two types of collaborators are common in small teams

Pixel-wise Graph Attention Networks for Person Re-identification

Graph convolutional networks (GCN) is widely used to handle irregular data since it updates node features by using the structure information of graph. With the help of iterated GCN, high-order information can be obtained to further enhance the representation of nodes. However, how to apply GCN to structured data (such as pictures) has not been deeply studied. In this paper, we explore the application of graph attention networks (GAT) in image feature extraction. First of all, we propose a novel graph generation algorithm to convert images into graphs through matrix transformation. It is one magnitude faster than the algorithm based on K Nearest Neighbors (KNN). Then, GAT is used on the generated graph to update the node features. Thus, a more robust representation is obtained. These two steps are combined into a module called pixel-wise graph attention module (PGA). Since the graph obtained by our graph generation algorithm can still be transformed into a picture after processing, PGA can be well combined with CNN. Based on these two modules, we consulted the ResNet and design a pixel-wise graph attention network (PGANet). The PGANet is applied to the task of person re-identification in the datasets Market1501, DukeMTMC-reID and Occluded-DukeMTMC (outperforms state-of-the-art by 0.8\%, 1.1\% and 11\% respectively, in mAP scores). Experiment results show that it achieves the state-of-the-art performance. \href{https://github.com/wenyu1009/PGANet}{The code is available here}

Inequality trends of health workforce in different stages of medical system reform (1985-2011) in China

Introduction The aim of this study was to identify whether policies in different stages of medical system reform had been effective in decreasing inequalities and increasing the density of health workers in rural areas in China between 1985 and 2011. Methods With data from China Health Statistics Yearbooks from 2004 to 2012, we measured the Gini coefficient and the Theil L index across the urban and rural areas from 1985 to 2011 to investigate changes in inequalities in the distributions of health workers, doctors, and nurses by states, regions, and urban-rural stratum and account for the sources of inequalities. Results We found that the overall inequalities in the distribution of health workers decreased to the lowest in 2000, then increased gently until 2011. Nurses were the most unequally distributed between urban-rural districts among health workers. Most of the overall inequalities in the distribution of health workers across regions were due to inequalities within the rural-urban stratum. Discussions and conclusions Different policies and interventions in different stages would result in important changes in inequality in the distribution of the health workforce. It was also influenced by other system reforms, like the urbanization, education, and employment reforms in China. The results are useful for the Chinese government to decide how to narrow the gap of the health workforce and meet its citizens’ health needs to the maximum extent