How to transition Chinese firms into world-class corporations : organizational and cultural innovations are key

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 255-262).Entering the 21st Century, after almost 30 years development of the Chinese economy, several famous Chinese firms have grown to a significant scale and achieved the rudiments of world-class corporations. Following Japanese and Korean corporations, several firms began their globalization and expansion: Lenovo, Haier, Huawei, and TCL. During the short period of Chinese corporations' globalization, however, they have faced various kinds of difficulties and challenges. Starting from case analyses of eight major electronics corporations (including Philips, Motorola, Toshiba, LG, Acer, Lenovo, Huawei, and TCL, corporations in Europe, USA, Japan, Korea, Taiwan of China and mainland China), the thesis expounds the course of their growth from a historical perspective. It uses the approach of comparison, conclusion and deduction to seek common elements of their success and the common issues faced in their development. The case studies are the principal factual basis of the discussion in the thesis. The main text starts from consideration of organizational and cultural innovation and discusses the forms, evolution, and innovation in organizational development.(cont.) At the same time, I analyze the differences in typical methodology, system, and culture resulting from the differences in national culture in America, Japan, and China. Based on the characteristics of Chinese "Small Groupism" culture, I propose that a solution for Chinese organizational management and cultural innovation is to establish the "Rigid Frame and Flexible Organism," in other words to establish management and cultural bureaucratic organization. In Chapter III, from the perspective of practical application, I explain the methods of diagnosing organizational culture and how effectively to advance innovation in organizational culture. Hereafter, based on the trend and scale analysis of the eight corporations, I draw conclusions as to the common elements in their development as well as guidance for the development and globalization of Chinese electronic corporations. Based on the framework to establish the "Rigid Frame and Flexible Organism", I address in detail recommendations for Chinese firms.by Zhongyao (Charls) Zhao.S.M

Handheld tumor scanner for breast cancer detection

Poster presented at Biomedical Technology Showcase 2006, Philadelphia, PA. Retrieved 18 Aug 2006 from http://www.biomed.drexel.edu/new04/Content/Biomed_Tech_Showcase/Poster_Presentations/Chance.pdf.The amplitude cancellation of in-phase and out of phase of dual source single detector showed remarkable sensitivity to localize small object such as breast tumor with positional accuracy of millimeters. The system design of low frequency, battery operated, mini handheld scanner based the principle of amplitude cancellation is introduced, and performance is evaluated on the phantom simulated the optical properties of tissue and tumor. Some clinical test results are shown

Association between ideal cardiovascular health metrics and suboptimal health status in Chinese population

Suboptimal health status (SHS) is a physical state between health and illness, and previous studies suggested that SHS is associated with majority components of cardiovascular health metrics defined by American Heart Association (AHA). We investigated the association between SHS and cardiovascular health metrics in a cross-sectional analysis of China suboptimal health cohort study (COACS) consisting of 4313 participants (60.30% women) aged from 18 to 65 years old. The respective prevalence of SHS is 7.10%, 9.18%, 10.04% and 10.62% in the first, second, third and fourth quartiles of ideal cardiovascular health (CVH) metrics (P for trend = 0.012). Participants in the largest quartile of ideal CVH metrics show a lower likelihood of having optimal SHS score compared to those in the smallest quartile (odds ratio (OR), 0.43; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.32–0.59), after adjusting for age, gender, marital status, alcohol consumption, income level and education. Four metrics (smoking, physical inactivity, poor dietary intake and ideal control of blood pressure are significantly correlated with the risk of SHS. The present study suggests that ideal CVH metrics are associated with a lower prevalence of SHS, and the combined evaluation of SHS and CVH metrics allows the risk classification of cardiovascular disease, and thus consequently contributes to the prevention of cardiovascular diseases

Association between ideal cardiovascular health metrics and suboptimal health status in Chinese population

Suboptimal health status (SHS) is a physical state between health and illness, and previous studies suggested that SHS is associated with majority components of cardiovascular health metrics defined by American Heart Association (AHA). We investigated the association between SHS and cardiovascular health metrics in a cross-sectional analysis of China suboptimal health cohort study (COACS) consisting of 4313 participants (60.30 % women) aged from 18 to 65 years old. The respective prevalence of SHS is 7.10 %, 9.18 %, 10.04 % and 10.62 % in the first, second, third and fourth quartiles of ideal cardiovascular health (CVH) metrics (P for trend = 0.012). Participants in the largest quartile of ideal CVH metrics show a lower likelihood of having optimal SHS score compared to those in the smallest quartile (odds ratio (OR), 0.43; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.32 – 0.59), after adjusting for age, gender, marital status, alcohol consumption, income level and education. Four metrics (smoking, physical inactivity, poor dietary intake and ideal control of blood pressure are significantly correlated with the risk of SHS. The present study suggests that ideal CVH metrics are associated with a lower prevalence of SHS, and the combined evaluation of SHS and CVH metrics allows the risk classification of cardiovascular disease, and thus consequently contributes to the prevention of cardiovascular diseases

Subset selection modeling for crowded point clouds

Progress in 3D sensing devices makes the capturing of 3D data possible and there is also a growing number of 3D shape repositories available online. These data are usually represented in the form of point clouds. However, processing a point cloud can be challenging, since the data are huge, which affect the computational cost, power consumption and communication load significantly. The situation becomes more serious when raw point clouds data contain outliers or noise through acquisition from 3D sensors. Therefore, a point cloud sampling method which can generate a simplified point cloud that is optimized for subsequent tasks is craving. This dissertation deeply understands and analyzes the latest point clouds processing approaches and proposes an adaptive sampling method which adaptively adjusts the points sampled by Learning to Sample beyond the entire point cloud and guarantees a minimal degradation in performance of downstream classification tasks. We compare the performance of several data point subset selection methods, including random sampling, FPS, S-NET, SampleNet as well as the proposed Adaptive Sampling based on Learning to Sample, over the point clouds classification task with various sample sizes. We adopt ModelNet40 as the dataset and PointNet++ as the task network. To further verify the robustness, we replace a certain number of points with random noise to evaluate the performance of Adaptive Sampling in presence of outliers. Experimental results indicate that Adaptive Sampling based on Learning to Sample is a potential method for subset selection of point clouds while optimizing the objective function of a downstream task.Master of Science (Computer Control and Automation

Experimental Study on PVA-MgO Composite Improvement of Sandy Soil

Materials with violent hydration reaction such as cement are used to solidify sandy soil slopes, which will cause destructive damage to the ecology of the slopes. In this paper, polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and activated magnesium oxide (MgO) are used to improve sandy soil, and the effects of the dosage and curing age of modifiers on the mechanical properties of solidified sandy soil are studied. The dry–wet durability of the composite improved sandy soil is analyzed using a dry–wet cycle test, and the improvement mechanism of PVA and activated magnesium oxide is revealed using an electron microscope. The results show that the curing effect of polyvinyl alcohol and activated magnesium oxide on sand particles is better than that of polyvinyl alcohol alone. The compressive strength of improved soil samples increases with the increase of curing time, and magnesium oxide as an improved material needs appropriate reaction conditions to give full play to its role. The compressive strength of composite improved samples increases first and then decreases during the dry–wet cycle. Through the observation of microstructure, it can be seen that the cementing material wraps and connects the sand particles, and the cementing material of the sample after the dry–wet cycle develops more completely; if the magnesium oxide content is high, cracks may appear inside the sample

Automated Extraction of Forest Burn Severity Based on Light and Small UAV Visible Remote Sensing Images

Identification of forest burn severity is essential for fire assessments and a necessary procedure in modern forest management. Due to the low efficiency and labor intensity of the current post-fire field survey in China’s Forestry Standards, the limitation of temporal resolution of satellite imagery, and poor objectivity of manual interpretations, a new method for automatic extraction of forest burn severity based on small visible unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images is proposed. Taking the forest fires which occurred in Anning city of Yunnan Province in 2019 as the study objects, post-fire imagery was obtained by a small, multi-rotor near-ground UAV. Some image recognition indices reflecting the variations in chlorophyll loss effects in different damaged forests were developed with spectral characteristics customized in A and C, and the texture features such as the mean, standard deviation, homogeneity, and shape index of the length–width ratio. An object-oriented method is used to determine the optimal segmentation scale for forest burn severity and a multilevel rule classification and extraction model is established to achieve the automatic identification and mapping. The results show that the method mentioned above can recognize different types of forest burn severity: unburned, damaged, dead, and burnt. The overall accuracy is 87.76%, and the Kappa coefficient is 0.8402, which implies that the small visible UAV can be used as a substitution for the current forest burn severity survey standards. This research is of great practical significance for improving the efficiency and precision of forest fire investigation, expanding applications of small UAVs in forestry, and developing an alternative for forest fire loss assessments in the forestry industry

Automated Extraction of Forest Burn Severity Based on Light and Small UAV Visible Remote Sensing Images

Identification of forest burn severity is essential for fire assessments and a necessary procedure in modern forest management. Due to the low efficiency and labor intensity of the current post-fire field survey in China’s Forestry Standards, the limitation of temporal resolution of satellite imagery, and poor objectivity of manual interpretations, a new method for automatic extraction of forest burn severity based on small visible unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images is proposed. Taking the forest fires which occurred in Anning city of Yunnan Province in 2019 as the study objects, post-fire imagery was obtained by a small, multi-rotor near-ground UAV. Some image recognition indices reflecting the variations in chlorophyll loss effects in different damaged forests were developed with spectral characteristics customized in A and C, and the texture features such as the mean, standard deviation, homogeneity, and shape index of the length–width ratio. An object-oriented method is used to determine the optimal segmentation scale for forest burn severity and a multilevel rule classification and extraction model is established to achieve the automatic identification and mapping. The results show that the method mentioned above can recognize different types of forest burn severity: unburned, damaged, dead, and burnt. The overall accuracy is 87.76%, and the Kappa coefficient is 0.8402, which implies that the small visible UAV can be used as a substitution for the current forest burn severity survey standards. This research is of great practical significance for improving the efficiency and precision of forest fire investigation, expanding applications of small UAVs in forestry, and developing an alternative for forest fire loss assessments in the forestry industry

Strength of Coarse-Grained Soil Stabilized by Poly (Vinyl Alcohol) Solution and Silica Fume under Wet–Dry Cycles

To investigate an environmentally benign stabilizer for coarse-grained soil in southeast Tibet, poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA) and silica fume were used to improve the geotechnical properties of coarse-grained soil. Unconfined compressive strength (UCS) and wet–dry cycle tests were conducted on prepared samples to evaluate the effect of the additive content and curing age on the strength and durability of coarse-grained soil. The results reveal that the UCS of the samples increased with the additive content of PVA solution and the curing age. The optimal value for the additive content of PVA solution and the curing age is 12% and 7 days, respectively. With the optimal PVA solution content, the PVA solution combined with silica fume stabilizer exhibited better reinforcement compared with pristine PVA. The UCS of the samples stabilized by PVA solution and silica fume increased depending on the curing age, and plateaued after 14 days. Samples with 12% PVA solution and 6% silica fume achieved a satisfactory UCS of 1543.17 kPa after curing for 28 days. As the number of wet–dry cycles increased, the UCS of the samples stabilized by the PVA solution and silica fume exhibited an upward trend during the first three wet–dry cycles, owing to the filling of pores by the gel produced by the silica fume, but began to decline as the number of wet–dry cycles increased. All samples retained a high UCS value after 10 wet-dry cycles compared with the samples that were not subjected to wet–dry cycles

Effects of Carrier Bed Heterogeneity on Hydrocarbon Migration

Reservoir/carrier bed heterogeneity is a common geological phenomenon. This study applied a hydrocarbon migration model based on the invasion percolation theory to simulate the formation of hydrocarbon migration pathways in heterogeneous carrier beds. The results indicate that the pathways and hydrocarbon accumulations in reservoirs may differ from conventional models when continuous low-permeability layers occur as networks within reservoirs. Such low-permeability layers may have formed through depositional or diagenetic processes within reservoir rocks at variable scales. Oil-bearing reservoir in Donghe Sandstone in Hadexun Oilfield in northern Tarim Basin, China, was analyzed to demonstrate the forming mechanisms of substantial tilting of oil-water contact. Donghe Sandstone is a quartz sandstone deposited in an open marine shoreface-shelf environment during a major transgression in Early Carboniferous. Major diagenetic products are abundant tabular concretions along bedding planes and cross laminae. The low-permeability concretions serve as fluid flow barriers which compartmentalize the Donghe Sandstone reservoir. As a result, the oil-water contacts and the saturation of oil in the reservoir appear irregular and tilted in Hadexun Oilfield and neighboring regions