INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH IN CHINESE UNIVERSITIES: AN EXAMINATION OF THE INPUT SIDE

Along with the rapid growth of the Chinese economy over the past decades, information systems (IS) research in China has undergone a profound transformation. This exploratory study reports on a survey involving 107 university researchers, focusing on the input aspects of IS research and how institutional factors affect the input. In this paper, input mainly refers to research activities, effort, methods and reference disciplines. Data show researchers are withdrawing from IS development projects, while increasing their effort in academic research. Compared to the past, IS research topics are now more aligned to the international mainstream. A major hurdle for empirical research is the lack of familiarities with empirical research methodology, as indicated by nearly half of the respondents. Effort in academic research tends to correlate with the researchers\u27 income scheme, i.e., sources and proportion of base salary and benefits in their overall income. However, surprisingly, emphasis on quality of publication has not significantly influenced researchers\u27 effort yet, nor has the increased degree of internationalization affected the selection of research methods and the shift to empirical research. The underlying reasons are explored, and implications are also discussed

Investigation of the clinical features and therapeutic methods for the management of inflammatory lacrimal punctum diseases

Purpose: To establish if there are different classes of inflammatory lacrimal punctum diseases (ILPDs) and to examine the various strategies by which they can be managed therapeutically.Methods: Two hundred and fifty nine (259) patients with inflammatory punctum lacrimal disease were identified and used as subjects for this study. Each patient was carefully examined for evidence of morphology of lacrimal punctum which was confirmed mainly by lacrimal duct flushing and probing. Appropriate therapeutic managements were adopted for patients with other inflammatory conditions besides ILPD. The clinical effects of the various therapeutic strategies were documented. .Results: Eighty-seven (87) patients out of the 259 (32.53 %) suffered from acute or chronic conjunctivitis while 66 patients (5.61 %) suffered from inflammatory lacrimal passage diseases. Patients with both conjunctivitis and lacrimal passage inflammation, patients with dry-eye symptoms, patients with just one of the conditions, and patients with mere evidence of superior punctalacrimalis represented 13.15, 14.19, 14.53, and 33.91 %, respectively. Mere evidence of inferior punctalacrimalis, and presence of acute inflammation were seen in 48.76 and 13.49 % of the 259 patients, respectively, while those with chronic inflammation lasting for 2.97 ± 0.13 years, comprised 86.51 %. Antibiotic eye drops were used for acute inflammation, while chronic inflammation was treated with antibiotic eye drops, lacrimal punctum expansion, pus elimination, and punctum-sparing canaliculotomy. Both therapeutic methods produced satisfactory curative effects.Conclusion: The results show that satisfactory therapy of lacrimal punctum inflammation can be achieved if the right therapeutic agents and procedures are adopted based on clinical characteristics of the ILPD manifesting in the patient.Keywords: Lacrimal punctum, Inflammatory disease, Conjunctivitis, Dry-eye symptom

Unsupervised Deraining: Where Asymmetric Contrastive Learning Meets Self-similarity

Most of the existing learning-based deraining methods are supervisedly trained on synthetic rainy-clean pairs. The domain gap between the synthetic and real rain makes them less generalized to complex real rainy scenes. Moreover, the existing methods mainly utilize the property of the image or rain layers independently, while few of them have considered their mutually exclusive relationship. To solve above dilemma, we explore the intrinsic intra-similarity within each layer and inter-exclusiveness between two layers and propose an unsupervised non-local contrastive learning (NLCL) deraining method. The non-local self-similarity image patches as the positives are tightly pulled together, rain patches as the negatives are remarkably pushed away, and vice versa. On one hand, the intrinsic self-similarity knowledge within positive/negative samples of each layer benefits us to discover more compact representation; on the other hand, the mutually exclusive property between the two layers enriches the discriminative decomposition. Thus, the internal self-similarity within each layer (similarity) and the external exclusive relationship of the two layers (dissimilarity) serving as a generic image prior jointly facilitate us to unsupervisedly differentiate the rain from clean image. We further discover that the intrinsic dimension of the non-local image patches is generally higher than that of the rain patches. This motivates us to design an asymmetric contrastive loss to precisely model the compactness discrepancy of the two layers for better discriminative decomposition. In addition, considering that the existing real rain datasets are of low quality, either small scale or downloaded from the internet, we collect a real large-scale dataset under various rainy kinds of weather that contains high-resolution rainy images.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2203.1150

Study on Characteristic of Overburden Movement in Unsymmetrical Isolated Longwall Mining Using Microseismic Technique

AbstractBased on the key stratum theory, overlying strata structures above a typical unsymmetrical isolated working face (LW10302) was analyzed, and a microseismic monitoring was also applied to characterize the fracturing propagations associated with overburden movement in mining progress. The results show that the overlying strata above LW10302 can be divided into key strata of different grades, and the formed “O-X” fracturing structure have the main and inferior “O-X” ones. The spatial evolution of seismic events demonstrated that seismic activities fits very well with the overburden fracturing patterns and stress manifestation around the longwall face. In the mining process, most of the events located within the surrounding strata of LW10301 and 10302 while low energy events distributed mainly in multiple roof and floor strata, and the strong tremors occurred almost within the super-thick primary key strata and appeared to be related to shear fracturing of large-scale overburden movement. Additionally, seismic signals corresponding to different failure mechanisms show different characteristics in waveform features. The study in this paper indicates that microseismic monitoring can provide invaluable information to characterize the mining-induced seismicity and reveal the failure patterns within strata associated with mining, which will greatly benefit the alleviation and prevention of rock burst hazards in mine

Ring-Like Solitons in Plasmonic Fiber Waveguide Composed of Metal-Dielectric Multilayers

We design a plasmonic fiber waveguide (PFW) composed of coaxial cylindrical metal-dielectric multilayers in nanoscale, and constitute the corresponding dynamical equations describing the modes of propagation in the PFW with the Kerr nonlinearity in the dielectric layers. The physics is connected to the discrete matrix nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equations, from which the highly confined ring-like solitons in scale of subwavelength are found both for the visible light and the near-infrared light in the self-defocusing condition. Moreover, the confinement could be further improved when increasing the intensity of the input light due to the cylindrical symmetry of the PFW, which means both the width and the radius of the ring are reduced.Comment: 4 figures, submitte

Investigating high energy proton proton collisions with a multi-phase transport model approach based on PYTHIA8 initial conditions

The striking resemblance of high multiplicity proton-proton (pp) collisions at the LHC to heavy ion collisions challenges our conventional wisdom on the formation of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). A consistent explanation of the collectivity phenomena in pp will help us to understand the mechanism that leads to the QGP-like signals in small systems. In this study, we introduce a transport model approach connecting the initial conditions provided by PYTHIA8 with subsequent AMPT rescatterings to study the collective behavior in high energy pp collisions. The multiplicity dependence of light hadron productions from this model is in reasonable agreement with the pp $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV experimental data. It is found in the comparisons that both the partonic and hadronic final state interactions are important for the generation of the radial flow feature of the pp transverse momentum spectra. The study also shows that the long range two particle azimuthal correlation in high multiplicity pp events is sensitive to the proton sub-nucleon spatial fluctuations

4-[(3-Meth­oxy­anilino)methyl­idene]-2-phenyl-1,3-oxazol-5(4H)-one

In the title compound, C17H14N2O3, the oxazolone ring is essentially planar [maximum deviation = 0.004 (1) Å] and is oriented with respect to the phenyl and benzene rings at 10.06 (9) and 5.63 (8)°, respectively; the dihedral angle between the phenyl ring and the benzene ring is 15.69 (8)°. In the crystal, N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds link the mol­ecules into chains running along the a axis. Neighbouring chains are inter­connected by π–π stacking, the centroid–centroid distance being 3.6201 (9) Å