Personal characteristics of an entrepreneur and its influence on performance

This article explores the personal characteristics of an entrepreneur and its influence in performance. In our paper we mainly discussed, how personal characteristics of an entrepreneur influence on performance in the entrepreneurs/tip

The Readiness for and Current Status of E-Government in China

E-government is important for China’s economic and social development. A measurement is developed and applied to assess the readiness of local Chinese governments for e-government. E-government development status of local Chinese governments is assessed through evaluation of their websites. Relationships between e-government readiness and the actual progress on e-government are discussed

Dislocation Avalanche Polycrystalline Nickel

Self-organized criticality (SOC) is widely observed in systems ranging from creep deformation of single crystal ice to the movement of glacier. -The behavior of these SOC systems follows a power law distribution, which is time- and space-scale invariant. Previous phase field simulation of single crystal nickel has shown that plastic flow is characterized by intermittent dislocation avalanches, which can be characterized by a power law distribution. Does this scale invariance also exist in polycrystalline material, in which dislocation avalanches may be hindered by grain boundaries? In this study, we characterize the dislocation loops using homogenous region division algorithm and investigate the statistics of dislocation loops in polycrystalline nickel with various average grain sizes. We find that plastic flow in polycrystalline nickel consists of dislocation avalanches with sizes over three orders of magnitude. Sudden dislocation bursts are separated by a large amount of small avalanches. This intermittency may bring into question the traditional treatment of plasticity as homogenous process

TORE: Token Reduction for Efficient Human Mesh Recovery with Transformer

In this paper, we introduce a set of effective TOken REduction (TORE) strategies for Transformer-based Human Mesh Recovery from monocular images. Current SOTA performance is achieved by Transformer-based structures. However, they suffer from high model complexity and computation cost caused by redundant tokens. We propose token reduction strategies based on two important aspects, i.e., the 3D geometry structure and 2D image feature, where we hierarchically recover the mesh geometry with priors from body structure and conduct token clustering to pass fewer but more discriminative image feature tokens to the Transformer. As a result, our method vastly reduces the number of tokens involved in high-complexity interactions in the Transformer, achieving competitive accuracy of shape recovery at a significantly reduced computational cost. We conduct extensive experiments across a wide range of benchmarks to validate the proposed method and further demonstrate the generalizability of our method on hand mesh recovery. Our code will be publicly available once the paper is published

Pantothenamides Are Potent, On-Target Inhibitors of Plasmodium falciparum Growth When Serum Pantetheinase Is Inactivated

Growth of the virulent human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is dependent on an extracellular supply of pantothenate (vitamin B(5)) and is susceptible to inhibition by pantothenate analogues that hinder pantothenate utilization. In this study, on the hunt for pantothenate analogues with increased potency relative to those reported previously, we screened a series of pantothenamides (amide analogues of pantothenate) against P. falciparum and show for the first time that analogues of this type possess antiplasmodial activity. Although the active pantothenamides in this series exhibit only modest potency under standard in vitro culture conditions, we show that the potency of pantothenamides is selectively enhanced when the parasite culture medium is pre-incubated at 37°C for a prolonged period. We present evidence that this finding is linked to the presence in Albumax II (a serum-substitute routinely used for in vitro cultivation of P. falciparum) of pantetheinase activity: the activity of an enzyme that hydrolyzes the pantothenate metabolite pantetheine, for which pantothenamides also serve as substrates. Pantetheinase activity, and thereby pantothenamide degradation, is reduced following incubation of Albumax II-containing culture medium for a prolonged period at 37°C, revealing the true, sub-micromolar potency of pantothenamides. Importantly we show that the potent antiplasmodial effect of pantothenamides is attenuated with pantothenate, consistent with the compounds inhibiting parasite proliferation specifically by inhibiting pantothenate and/or CoA utilization. Additionally, we show that the pantothenamides interact with P. falciparum pantothenate kinase, the first enzyme involved in converting pantothenate to coenzyme A. This is the first demonstration of on-target antiplasmodial pantothenate analogues with sub-micromolar potency, and highlights the potential of pantetheinase-resistant pantothenamides as antimalarial agents.Aspects of this work were supported by grants from the South African Malaria Initiative (SAMI) to ES and KJS and the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC), St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, to REL. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Effects of the second-order hydrodynamics on the dynamic behavior of the platform among the wind-wave hybrid systems

This paper presents three different wind-wave hybrid systems (HSs) with multiple point-absorption wave energy converters (WECs) integrated onto a floating semi-submersible wind turbine (WT). The focus of the present study is to explore the effects of the second-order wave forces on the dynamic behavior of the platform in the HS, including the platform motion and the mooring line tension, under both operational and extreme sea states. ANSYS/AQWA based on 3D diffraction/radiation potential theory is used to conduct numerical investigation on the second-order hydrodynamics of the HS. To ensure the reliability of the investigation, the validations of the semi-submersible platform and point-absorption WEC are done based on the available experimental data. Additionally, two models, “1st-order” and "1st&2nd-order", are set up for comparative analysis, to highlight the significance of the second-order forces. The simulation results show that the second-order hydrodynamics have a significant influence on the surge and pitch responses of the platform, but almost no effects on the heave response. In addition to this, ignoring the second-order hydrodynamics will significantly underestimate the mooring line tension response. Overall, this study suggests that the second-order hydrodynamics should be considered in the design of wind-wave HSs, in order to ensure their performance and safety, especially under the severe sea states

Graph pangenome captures missing heritability and empowers tomato breeding

Missing heritability in genome-wide association studies defines a major problem in genetic analyses of complex biological traits(1,2). The solution to this problem is to identify all causal genetic variants and to measure their individual contributions(3,4). Here we report a graph pangenome of tomato constructed by precisely cataloguing more than 19 million variants from 838 genomes, including 32 new reference-level genome assemblies. This graph pangenome was used forgenome-wide association study analyses and heritability estimation of 20,323 gene-expression and metabolite traits. The average estimated trait heritability is 0.41 compared with 0.33 when using the single linear reference genome. This 24% increase in estimated heritability is largely due to resolving incomplete linkage disequilibrium through the inclusion of additional causal structural variants identified using the graph pangenome. Moreover, by resolving allelic and locus heterogeneity, structural variants improve the power to identify genetic factors underlying agronomically important traits leading to, for example, the identification of two new genes potentially contributing to soluble solid content. The newly identified structural variants will facilitate genetic improvement of tomato through both marker-assisted selection and genomic selection. Our study advances the understanding of the heritability of complex traits and demonstrates the power of the graph pangenome in crop breeding