Co-creation, Failure Learning, and Relaunch Success: Evidence from Online Crowdfunding Market

With intense competition and relatively inexperienced founders, the crowdfunding market has reported high failure rates. However, the IT components of the crowdfunding market provide entrepreneurs with more opportunities for experimentation and trial, leading to a new phenomenon of post-failure relaunches. Research into campaign relaunch success is urgently needed but under-researched. By combining failure learning theory with a collective perspective, the present study examines how investors\u27 co-creation, in terms of advocacy and feedback, can benefit crowdfunding relaunch success directly or indirectly (by motivating founders\u27 failure learning). The study tested the proposed mediation model with 1,902 failure-relaunched Kickstarter campaigns, with most hypotheses supported. Furthermore, the study explores the role of the time interval between crowdfunding relaunch and prior release. The findings indicate that an increased time interval enhances the positive effects of founders\u27 learning efforts on relaunch success while attenuating the potential positive effects of investors\u27 advocacy, implying a tradeoff in timing decisions

Understanding Status Update in Microblog: A Perspective on Media Needs

Microblog has grown popularly as a seminal social medium for timely information seeking and sharing. However, the reason why individuals update real-time information in microblog has not been well understood, and empirical research to address this specific information behavior is hardly available. As a felt urge can be conceptualized as a precursor of real-time updating in the microblog, we attempt to capture the underlying mechanism in causing this less reflective behavior urge. We apply the media needs theory to investigate how the individuals’ media needs spark their urge to update personal status in the microblog. In particular, we conceptualize the cognitive needs as related to information uniqueness, personal integrative needs as related to connectivity, social integrative needs as a unidirectional relationship, affective needs as positive emotions and tension release needs as negative emotions. An online survey was employed to validate the proposed model within 523 microblog users in China. The results suggest that the users’ behavior urge is significantly influenced by information uniqueness, connectivity, unidirectional relationship and positive emotions. Furthermore, among the five media needs, the affective and social integrative related factors strongly determine the personal real-time status update in microblog. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed in this paper

Kinematics of the Broad-line Region of 3C 273 from a Ten-year Reverberation Mapping Campaign

Despite many decades of study, the kinematics of the broad-line region of 3C~273 are still poorly understood. We report a new, high signal-to-noise, reverberation mapping campaign carried out from November 2008 to March 2018 that allows the determination of time lags between emission lines and the variable continuum with high precision. The time lag of variations in H$\beta$ relative to those of the 5100 Angstrom continuum is $146.8_{-12.1}^{+8.3}$ days in the rest frame, which agrees very well with the Paschen-$\alpha$ region measured by the GRAVITY at The Very Large Telescope Interferometer. The time lag of the H$\gamma$ emission line is found to be nearly the same as for H$\beta$. The lag of the Fe II emission is $322.0_{-57.9}^{+55.5}$ days, longer by a factor of $\sim$2 than that of the Balmer lines. The velocity-resolved lag measurements of the H$\beta$ line show a complex structure which can be possibly explained by a rotation-dominated disk with some inflowing radial velocity in the H$\beta$-emitting region. Taking the virial factor of $f_{\rm BLR} = 1.3$, we derive a BH mass of $M_{\bullet} = 4.1_{-0.4}^{+0.3} \times 10^8 M_{\odot}$ and an accretion rate of $9.3\,L_{\rm Edd}\,c^{-2}$ from the H$\beta$ line. The decomposition of its $HST$ images yields a host stellar mass of $M_* = 10^{11.3 \pm 0.7} M_\odot$, and a ratio of $M_{\bullet}/M_*\approx 2.0\times 10^{-3}$ in agreement with the Magorrian relation. In the near future, it is expected to compare the geometrically-thick BLR discovered by the GRAVITY in 3C 273 with its spatially-resolved torus in order to understand the potential connection between the BLR and the torus.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Demonstration of Adiabatic Variational Quantum Computing with a Superconducting Quantum Coprocessor

Adiabatic quantum computing enables the preparation of many-body ground states. This is key for applications in chemistry, materials science, and beyond. Realisation poses major experimental challenges: Direct analog implementation requires complex Hamiltonian engineering, while the digitised version needs deep quantum gate circuits. To bypass these obstacles, we suggest an adiabatic variational hybrid algorithm, which employs short quantum circuits and provides a systematic quantum adiabatic optimisation of the circuit parameters. The quantum adiabatic theorem promises not only the ground state but also that the excited eigenstates can be found. We report the first experimental demonstration that many-body eigenstates can be efficiently prepared by an adiabatic variational algorithm assisted with a multi-qubit superconducting coprocessor. We track the real-time evolution of the ground and exited states of transverse-field Ising spins with a fidelity up that can reach about 99%.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Electronic Structure, Surface Doping, and Optical Response in Epitaxial WSe2 Thin Films

High quality WSe2 films have been grown on bilayer graphene (BLG) with layer-by-layer control of thickness using molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). The combination of angle-resolved photoemission (ARPES), scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/STS), and optical absorption measurements reveal the atomic and electronic structures evolution and optical response of WSe2/BLG. We observe that a bilayer of WSe2 is a direct bandgap semiconductor, when integrated in a BLG-based heterostructure, thus shifting the direct-indirect band gap crossover to trilayer WSe2. In the monolayer limit, WSe2 shows a spin-splitting of 475 meV in the valence band at the K point, the largest value observed among all the MX2 (M = Mo, W; X = S, Se) materials. The exciton binding energy of monolayer-WSe2/BLG is found to be 0.21 eV, a value that is orders of magnitude larger than that of conventional 3D semiconductors, yet small as compared to other 2D transition metal dichalcogennides (TMDCs) semiconductors. Finally, our finding regarding the overall modification of the electronic structure by an alkali metal surface electron doping opens a route to further control the electronic properties of TMDCs

Assembly strategies for polyethylene-degrading microbial consortia based on the combination of omics tools and the “Plastisphere”

Numerous microorganisms and other invertebrates that are able to degrade polyethylene (PE) have been reported. However, studies on PE biodegradation are still limited due to its extreme stability and the lack of explicit insights into the mechanisms and efficient enzymes involved in its metabolism by microorganisms. In this review, current studies of PE biodegradation, including the fundamental stages, important microorganisms and enzymes, and functional microbial consortia, were examined. Considering the bottlenecks in the construction of PE-degrading consortia, a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches is proposed to identify the mechanisms and metabolites of PE degradation, related enzymes, and efficient synthetic microbial consortia. In addition, the exploration of the plastisphere based on omics tools is proposed as a future principal research direction for the construction of synthetic microbial consortia for PE degradation. Combining chemical and biological upcycling processes for PE waste could be widely applied in various fields to promote a sustainable environment