A Comparative Study of Sino-U.S. Business Negotiation Strategy From the Perspective of Cultural Dimensions Theory

Business negotiation serves as an important activity in Sino-U.S. trade where Chinese companies pay much attention to the relations with their American counterparts. Due to the salient differences in cultures and ways of doing business, negotiating conflicts occur frequently, which impedes the smooth advance of business activities. This comparative research aims to analyze differences in Sino-U.S. business negotiation from an intercultural perspective, providing advice for Chinese negotiators in an attempt to reduce misunderstandings and disputes. The author has collected information about the definition of international negotiation as well as the current state of intercultural research and summarized previous related studies. This study employs Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory and conducts case analysis in ways that apply the theory into practical negotiation situation.The findings show that Chinese negotiators value long-term business partnership; in addition, they often consult their superiors when the expected conditions change; in terms of communication model, Chinese negotiators prefer indirect speech and constantly use euphemism; a general framework on the contract is more important than specific details for them. American negotiators give priority to the realization of business goals; negotiators represent the company to make decisions and are responsible for the negotiation results; Americans often point out issues face to face and specify concrete solutions to problems; compared with Chinese negotiators, they prefer to reach a consensus on detailed matters and stress less on general tenets. This study illustrates features of Sino-U.S. negotiation in an attempt to provide guidance for future related studies. The author also tries to summarize some pragmatic strategies for Chinese negotiators so as to facilitate the negotiation

DualTable: A Hybrid Storage Model for Update Optimization in Hive

Hive is the most mature and prevalent data warehouse tool providing SQL-like interface in the Hadoop ecosystem. It is successfully used in many Internet companies and shows its value for big data processing in traditional industries. However, enterprise big data processing systems as in Smart Grid applications usually require complicated business logics and involve many data manipulation operations like updates and deletes. Hive cannot offer sufficient support for these while preserving high query performance. Hive using the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) for storage cannot implement data manipulation efficiently and Hive on HBase suffers from poor query performance even though it can support faster data manipulation.There is a project based on Hive issue Hive-5317 to support update operations, but it has not been finished in Hive's latest version. Since this ACID compliant extension adopts same data storage format on HDFS, the update performance problem is not solved. In this paper, we propose a hybrid storage model called DualTable, which combines the efficient streaming reads of HDFS and the random write capability of HBase. Hive on DualTable provides better data manipulation support and preserves query performance at the same time. Experiments on a TPC-H data set and on a real smart grid data set show that Hive on DualTable is up to 10 times faster than Hive when executing update and delete operations.Comment: accepted by industry session of ICDE201

Ionic effect on combing of single DNA molecules and observation of their force-induced melting by fluorescence microscopy

Molecular combing is a powerful and simple method for aligning DNA molecules onto a surface. Using this technique combined with fluorescence microscopy, we observed that the length of lambda-DNA molecules was extended to about 1.6 times their contour length (unextended length, 16.2 micrometers) by the combing method on hydrophobic polymethylmetacrylate (PMMA) coated surfaces. The effects of sodium and magnesium ions and pH of the DNA solution were investigated. Interestingly, we observed force-induced melting of single DNA molecules.Comment: 12 page

Research Progress on Development and Utilization of Functional Microorganisms from Kombucha

Kombucha is a kind of health drink fermented by a symbiotic flora composed of yeasts, acetic acid bacteria and lactic acid bacteria, with sugar and tea as the main substrates. It is popular with the researchers and consumers in the world due to its wide healthy functions including antioxidant, hypoglycemic, and antibacterial activities. Existing studies have proved that the sensory quality and functional components of Kombucha are closely related to the microbial community during its fermentation. This review summarizes the microbial community and fermentation mechanism of Kombucha, core microorganisms that promote the generation of flavors and bioactive substances, and bacterial cellulose production in Kombucha, and current limitations of relative studies. The review would provide in-depth knowledge for exploring the effects of special microorganisms on the flavor and healthy functions, and key theoretical basis for the industrial production of Kombucha

NMR evidence of spinon localization in kagome antiferromagnet YCu3_3(OH)6_6Br2_2[Br1−x_{1-x}(OH)x_x]

We performed nuclear magnetic resonance studies on a kagome antiferromagnet YCu$_3$(OH)$_6$Br$_2$[Br$_{1-x}$(OH)$_{x}$]. No significant NMR spectral broadening is found in the Br center peak from 1 K down to 0.05 K, indicating absence of static antiferromagnetic ordering. In contrast to signatures of dominant 2D kagome antiferromagnetic fluctuations at temperature above 30 K, both the Knight shift $K_{\rm{n}}$ and the spin-lattice relaxation rate $1/T_{1}$ increase when the sample is cooled from 30 K to 8 K, which can be attributed to the scattering of spin excitations by strong non-magnetic impurities. Unusually, a hump is observed in $K_{\rm{n}}$ and $1/T_{2}$ close to 2 K (far below the exchange energy), which indicates the existence of excitations with a large density of states close to zero energy. These phenomena are reproduced by a mean-field simulation of Heisenberg model with bond-dependent exchange interactions, where the sign fluctuations in the spinon kinetic terms caused by impurities result in localization of spinons and an almost flat band close to the Fermi energy.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures. The supplementary materials can be obtained upon reques

Panorama phylogenetic diversity and distribution of type A influenza viruses based on their six internal gene sequences

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Type A influenza viruses are important pathogens of humans, birds, pigs, horses and some marine mammals. The viruses have evolved into multiple complicated subtypes, lineages and sublineages. Recently, the phylogenetic diversity of type A influenza viruses from a whole view has been described based on the viral external HA and NA gene sequences, but remains unclear in terms of their six internal genes (PB2, PB1, PA, NP, MP and NS).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this report, 2798 representative sequences of the six viral internal genes were selected from GenBank using the web servers in NCBI Influenza Virus Resource. Then, the phylogenetic relationships among the representative sequences were calculated using the software tools MEGA 4.1 and RAxML 7.0.4. Lineages and sublineages were classified mainly according to topology of the phylogenetic trees and distribution of the viruses in hosts, regions and time.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The panorama phylogenetic trees of the six internal genes of type A influenza viruses were constructed. Lineages and sublineages within the type based on the six internal genes were classified and designated by a tentative universal numerical nomenclature system. The diversity of influenza viruses circulating in different regions, periods, and hosts based on the panorama trees was analyzed.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This study presents the first whole views to the phylogenetic diversity and distribution of type A influenza viruses based on their six internal genes. It also proposes a tentative universal nomenclature system for the viral lineages and sublineages. These can be a candidate framework to generalize the history and explore the future of the viruses, and will facilitate future scientific communications on the phylogenetic diversity and evolution of the viruses. In addition, it provides a novel phylogenetic view (i.e. the whole view) to recognize the viruses including the origin of the pandemic A(H1N1) influenza viruses.</p

Rapid Identification of Asteraceae

Plants from Asteraceae family are widely used as herbal medicines and food ingredients, especially in Asian area. Therefore, authentication and quality control of these different Asteraceae plants are important for ensuring consumers’ safety and efficacy. In recent decades, electronic nose (E-nose) has been studied as an alternative approach. In this paper, we aim to develop a novel discriminative model by improving radial basis function artificial neural network (RBF-ANN) classification model. Feature selection algorithms, including principal component analysis (PCA) and BestFirst + CfsSubsetEval (BC), were applied in the improvement of RBF-ANN models. Results illustrate that in the improved RBF-ANN models with lower dimension data classification accuracies (100%) remained the same as in the original model with higher-dimension data. It is the first time to introduce feature selection methods to get valuable information on how to attribute more relevant MOS sensors; namely, in this case, S1, S3, S4, S6, and S7 show better capability to distinguish these Asteraceae plants. This paper also gives insights to further research in this area, for instance, sensor array optimization and performance improvement of classification model

Study on the Molecular Mechanisms of dlk1 Stimulated Lung Cancer Cell Proliferation

Background and objective The imprinted gene dlk1 has been recognized as a cancer related gene since it aberrantly expressed in a series of cancer tissues, but its role in lung cancer is still unknown. The aim of this study is to examine dlk1’s expression in non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLCs) and investigate the molecular mechanism by which dlk1 could accelerate the proliferation of the cells in lung cancer cell lines (H520). Methods The relative expression of dlk1 among 30 NSCLC specimens and their adjacent normal lung tissues were analyzed by RT-PCR. A cell model that stably expressed exogenous dlk1 was established following that the dlk1 gene was cloned into a eukaryotic expression vector and then transfected into the lung cancer cells H520. CCK8 analysis and colony forming assay were employed to investigate the effect of dlk1 on cell proliferation. The expression of CyclinB1 was detected by Western blot. Results dlk1 aberrantly expressed in 36.7% (11/30) of the tumor tissues of NSCLC compared with their adjacent cancer lung tissues. CCK8 analysis showed that overexpression of dlk1 could promote the proliferation of H520 cells (P &lt; 0.05) and the results was further confirmed by colony forming assay. Western blot analysis found that over expression of dlk1 could up-regulate the expression of CyclinB1 (P &lt; 0.05). Conclusion dlk1 aberrantly expressed in NSCLCs. The Overexpression of dlk1 could accelerate the proliferation of lung cancer cells H520 in vitro, probably through up-regulating the expression of cell cycle protein CyclinB1