Business Value of Information Technology in A Network Environment

Business value of information technology (IT) continues to be an important issue for both practitioners and academic scholars. Most IT business value literature focuses on the scope of an individual firm and overlooks the impact of the network environment it resides in. On the other hand, interorganizational system (IOS) studies tend to rely on a single information system and fall short on providing a complete picture of IT business value in a network environment. This study extends current IT business value models with explicit inclusion of the network environment factors and examines effects of IT resources on network capabilities and firm performance. Considering theories of dynamic capabilities, flexible specialization, and social network, we propose that IT resources are directly related to both network characteristics and network capabilities. In turn, these network characteristics and capabilities affect firm performance. By referring to different theoretical bases and proposing a nomological model, we advance current IT business value research and provide guides for IT practitioners. This study is planned with both archival and survey data in large, multidivisional and multinational companies in high-tech industries

The Effect of Individual Differences, Tasks, and Decision Models on User Acceptance of Decision Support Systems

Past studies suggested that decision support systems (DSS) must be an “enabling” system aiming to enhance users’ capabilities and to leverage their skills and intelligence. This suggests that users be the center of DSS and users’ characteristics be an important factor of explaining their DSS acceptance behavior. Since DSS are aimed to work in semi-structured and unstructured task environment, perceived task complexity can be used to explain users’ willingness to accept DSS. Further, several studies also used decision models for investigating users’ DSS acceptance behavior. We argue that nature of DSS (based on their underlying decision models) and its interaction with individual differences also play important roles on users’ DSS acceptance behavior. With the conjecture that users’ DSS acceptance behavior directly affects the DSS usage and DSS success, our research question focuses on how do individual differences influence users’ DSS acceptance behavior with consideration of task characteristics and nature of the DSS. The contribution of this paper is multifold. First, we extend the existing understanding of effects of individual differences on users’ DSS acceptance behavior. Second, we extend two major measurements of cognitive styles (GEFT - Group Embedded Figures Test and MBTI - Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) for individual differences in the context of DSS. Third, we investigate multiple task complexities and multiple DSS models. Hypotheses are developed and will be tested with an experiment of 300 plus subjects

Modeling and Application of Passenger Transport Network Capacity in New Town Based on Control Indicators

AbstractIn order to reflect the uncertainty of traffic demand and the orienting of planning schemes in new town, a bi-level programming model of passenger transport network capacity is proposed here based on travel choice behavior model. In the model, the objective function is to maximize the road network capacity. The saturation of road sections, the community development intensity and the public transit trip contribution rate are defined as control indicators, among which the interactive control relationships are revealed. Furthermore, a corresponding solution algorithm is also presented. At last, a numeric example is studied to verify the effectiveness of the model and the algorithm. The results show that the model and the algorithm are of highly effective and available in practice

Global Spherically Symmetric Solutions of the Multidimensional Full Compressible Navier–Stokes Equations with Large Data

We establish the global-in-time existence of solutions of the Cauchy problem for the full Navier–Stokes equations for compressible heat-conducting flow in multidimensions with initial data that are large, discontinuous, spherically symmetric, and away from the vacuum. The solutions obtained here are of global finite total relative-energy including the origin, while cavitation may occur as balls centred at the origin of symmetry for which the interfaces between the fluid and the vacuum must be upper semi-continuous in space-time in the Eulerian coordinates. On any region strictly away from the possible vacuum, the velocity and specific internal energy are Hölder continuous, and the density has a uniform upper bound. To achieve this, our main strategy is to regard the Cauchy problem as the limit of a series of carefully designed initial-boundary value problems that are formulated in finite annular regions. For such approximation problems, we can derive uniform a priori estimates that are independent of both the inner and outer radii of the annuli considered in the spherically symmetric Lagrangian coordinates. The entropy inequality is recovered after taking the limit of the outer radius to infinity by using Mazur’s lemma and the convexity of the entropy function, which is required for the limit of the inner radius tending to zero. Then the global weak solutions of the original problem are attained via careful compactness arguments applied to the approximate solutions in the Eulerian coordinates

Baicalin Downregulates RLRs Signaling Pathway to Control Influenza A Virus Infection and Improve the Prognosis

The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of baicalin on controlling the pulmonary infection and improving the prognosis in influenza A virus (IAV) infection. PCR and western blot were used to measure the changes of some key factors in RLRs signaling pathway. MSD electrochemiluminescence was used to measure the expression of pulmonary inflammatory cytokines including IFN-γ, TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-2, IL-4, IL-5, IL-6, IL-10, IL-12p70, and KC/GRO. Flow cytometry was used to detect the proportion of Th1, Th2, Th17, and Treg. The results showed that IAV infection led to low body weight and high viral load and high expression of RIG-I, IRF3, IRF7, and NF-κB mRNA, as well as RIG-I and NF-κB p65 protein. However, baicalin reduced the rate of body weight loss, inhibited virus replication, and downregulated the key factors of the RLRs signaling pathway. Besides, baicalin reduced the high expression inflammatory cytokines in lung and decreased the ratios of Th1/Th2 and Th17/Treg to arouse a brief but not overviolent inflammatory response. Therefore, baicalin activated a balanced host inflammatory response to limit immunopathologic injury, which was helpful to the improvement of clinical and survival outcomes

MV-ROPE: Multi-view Constraints for Robust Category-level Object Pose and Size Estimation

We propose a novel framework for RGB-based category-level 6D object pose and size estimation. Our approach relies on the prediction of normalized object coordinate space (NOCS), which serves as an efficient and effective object canonical representation that can be extracted from RGB images. Unlike previous approaches that heavily relied on additional depth readings as input, our novelty lies in leveraging multi-view information, which is commonly available in practical scenarios where a moving camera continuously observes the environment. By introducing multi-view constraints, we can obtain accurate camera pose and depth estimation from a monocular dense SLAM framework. Additionally, by incorporating constraints on the camera relative pose, we can apply trimming strategies and robust pose averaging on the multi-view object poses, resulting in more accurate and robust estimations of category-level object poses even in the absence of direct depth readings. Furthermore, we introduce a novel NOCS prediction network that significantly improves performance. Our experimental results demonstrate the strong performance of our proposed method, even comparable to state-of-the-art RGB-D methods across public dataset sequences. Additionally, we showcase the generalization ability of our method by evaluating it on self-collected datasets

Numerical Study of the Effects of Topography and Urbanization on the Local Atmospheric Circulations over the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, China

The effects of the topography and urbanization on the local atmospheric circulations over the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region were studied by the weather research and forecasting (WRF) model, as well as the interactions among these local atmospheric circulations. It was found that, in the summer day time, the multiscale thermally induced local atmospheric circulations may exist and interact in the same time over the BTH region; the topography played a role in the strengthening of the sea breeze circulations; after sunset, the inland progress of sea breeze was slowed down by the opposite mountain breeze; when the land breeze circulation dominated the Bohai bay, the mountain breeze circulation can couple with the land breeze circulation to form a large circulation ranging from the coastline to the mountains. And the presence of cities cannot change the general state of the sea-land breeze (SLB) circulation and mountain-valley breeze (MVB) circulation but acted to modify these local circulations slightly. Meanwhile, the development of the urban heat island (UHI) circulation was also strongly influenced by the nearby SLB circulation and MVB circulation