Determinants of Outsourcing: Transaction Cost Economics and Core Competencies Theory

A significant feature of firm behaviors in the 1990s has been the practice of outsourcing. From the view of outsourcing clients, the outsourcing decisions are always influenced by several factors, such as cost reduction, focus on core competency, strategic requirement and so on. This paper based on the theory of transaction cost and core competencies, through the introduction of decision model to illustrate three critical determinants for outsourcing decision. This paper applies qualitative analysis to explain three dimensions of the model: Assets specificity, Sunk costs and Core competencies. The case study of China Development Bank shows how firm makes the outsourcing decision according to three aspects in the model and its outcomes of outsourcing. Finally, summarize our results and try to give suggestions to government, outsourcing suppliers and clients

Partial oxidation of Step-Bound Water Leads to Anomalous pH Effects on Metal Electrode Step-Edges

The design of better heterogeneous catalysts for applications such as fuel cells and electrolyzers requires a mechanistic understanding of electrocatalytic reactions and the dependence of their activity on operating conditions such as pH. A satisfactory explanation for the unexpected pH dependence of electrochemical properties of platinum surfaces has so far remained elusive, with previous explanations resorting to complex co-adsorption of multiple species and resulting in limited predictive power. This knowledge gap suggests that the fundamental properties of these catalysts are not yet understood, limiting systematic improvement. Here, we analyze the change in charge and free energies upon adsorption using density-functional theory (DFT) to establish that water adsorbs on platinum step edges across a wide voltage range, including the double-layer region, with a loss of approximately 0.2 electrons upon adsorption. We show how this as-yet unreported change in net surface charge due to this water explains the anomalous pH variations of the hydrogen underpotential deposition (Hupd) and the potentials of zero total charge (PZTC) observed in published experimental data. This partial oxidation of water is not limited to platinum metal step edges, and we report the charge of the water on metal step edges of commonly used catalytic metals, including copper, silver, iridium, and palladium, illustrating that this partial oxidation of water broadly influences the reactivity of metal electrodes.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures and 3 table

Translation of Idiolect in Sandalwood Death Under the Guidance of Perspective Dimension in Construal Theory

The novel Sandalwood Death is glutted with many dialects of Shandong Gaomi. Idiolect is one of the most obvious features in this novel, which can present geographical, social, and cultural features of different characters in the story. It is of great significance for the idiolect translation for the wonderful reading experience of western readers. The paper attempts to study the translation of idiolects in Sandalwood Death in light of perspective dimension in Construal theory for the purpose of the exploration of the applicability of perspective dimension in idiolect translation as well as the translation methods while rendering the idiolects. The study shows that transliteration, the combination of literal translation and liberal translation, the perspective conversion, as well as addition translation can be adopted in translation of idiolect

The Application of Gestalt Simplicity Principle in Translation of Charlotte’s Web

Children’s literature translation plays an important role in children’s growth and development. Therefore, it deserves more and more attention from researchers and translators. Many theories have been applied in children’s literature translation. In view of the characteristics of children’s language, this paper analyzes the simplicity principle in Gestalt Theory in children’s literature translation—Ren Rongrong’s version of Charlotte’s Web and the result shows that simplicity principle can improve the translation quality and make his translation better accepted and easily understood by children

Communication Aware UAV Swarm Surveillance Based on Hierarchical Architecture

Multi-agent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) teaming becomes an essential part in science mission, modern warfare surveillance, and disaster rescuing. This paper proposes a decentralized UAV swarm persistent monitoring strategy in realizing continuous sensing coverage and network service. A two-layer (high altitude and low altitude) UAV teaming hierarchical structure is adopted in realizing the accurate object tracking in the area of interest (AOI). By introducing the UAV communication channel model in its path planning, both centralized and decentralized control schemes would be evaluated in the waypoint tracking simulation. The UAV swarm network service and object tracking are measured by metrics of communication link quality and waypoints tracking accuracy. UAV swarm network connectivity are evaluated over different aspects, such as stability and volatility. The comparison of proposed algorithms is presented with simulations. The result shows that the decentralized scheme outperforms the centralized scheme in the mission of persistent surveillance, especially on maintaining the stability of inner UAV swarm network while tracking moving objects

Federated Variational Learning for Anomaly Detection in Multivariate Time Series

Anomaly detection has been a challenging task given high-dimensional multivariate time series data generated by networked sensors and actuators in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Besides the highly nonlinear, complex, and dynamic nature of such time series, the lack of labeled data impedes data exploitation in a supervised manner and thus prevents an accurate detection of abnormal phenomenons. On the other hand, the collected data at the edge of the network is often privacy sensitive and large in quantity, which may hinder the centralized training at the main server. To tackle these issues, we propose an unsupervised time series anomaly detection framework in a federated fashion to continuously monitor the behaviors of interconnected devices within a network and alert for abnormal incidents so that countermeasures can be taken before undesired consequences occur. To be specific, we leave the training data distributed at the edge to learn a shared Variational Autoencoder (VAE) based on Convolutional Gated Recurrent Unit (ConvGRU) model, which jointly captures feature and temporal dependencies in the multivariate time series data for representation learning and downstream anomaly detection tasks. Experiments on three real-world networked sensor datasets illustrate the advantage of our approach over other state-of-the-art models. We also conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our detection framework under non-federated and federated settings in terms of overall performance and detection latency

Glucocorticosteroid-sensitive inflammatory eosinophilic pseudotumor of the bladder in an adolescent: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Inflammatory eosinophilic pseudotumor of the bladder is a rare inflammatory bladder disease. The etiology and pathophysiology of this condition are still unclear. Few case reports have described inflammatory eosinophilic pseudotumor of the bladder in adults or children. Although benign, this disease is occasionally clinically aggressive and locally invasive, thus open surgical removal or complete transurethral resection is recommended.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>We present the case of a biopsy-proven inflammatory eosinophilic pseudotumor of the bladder in a previously healthy 16-year-old male adolescent with 2-month history of frequent micturition and dysuria with no significant apparent causative factors. The tumor regressed after a 6-week course of glucocorticosteroids.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>To the best of our knowledge, our case is a rare case of inflammatory eosinophilic pseudotumor of the bladder treated with complete conservative management. Due to its glucocorticosteroid-sensitive nature, we postulate that this disease belongs to a subgroup of eosinophilic disorders.</p

Elucidating the mechanism by which synthetic helper peptides sensitize Pseudomonas aeruginosa to multiple antibiotics

The emergence and rapid spread of multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacteria pose a serious threat to global healthcare. There is an urgent need for new antibacterial substances or new treatment strategies to deal with the infections by MDR bacterial pathogens, especially the Gram-negative pathogens. In this study, we show that a number of synthetic cationic peptides display strong synergistic antimicrobial effects with multiple antibiotics against the Gram-negative pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We found that an all-D amino acid containing peptide called D-11 increases membrane permeability by attaching to LPS and membrane phospholipids, thereby facilitating the uptake of antibiotics. Subsequently, the peptide can dissipate the proton motive force (PMF) (reduce ATP production and inhibit the activity of efflux pumps), impairs the respiration chain, promote the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in bacterial cells and induce intracellular antibiotics accumulation, ultimately resulting in cell death. By using a P. aeruginosa abscess infection model, we demonstrate enhanced therapeutic efficacies of the combination of D-11 with various antibiotics. In addition, we found that the combination of D-11 and azithromycin enhanced the inhibition of biofilm formation and elimination of established biofilms. Our study provides a realistic treatment option for combining close-to-nature synthetic peptide adjuvants with existing antibiotics to combat infections caused by P. aeruginosa