HOW THE INCUBATOR MANAGERS ACT AS THE NICHE MANAGER? EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM CHINA

Although the importance of the incubator mangers for successful incubation has been widely discussed, there is little evidence on how the incubator mangers leverage various resources contributing to incubation success. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by employing the niche manger theory to investigate the extent to which the incubator managers act as the niche manager in the incubator context. More specifically, an evaluation is made to explore the influences of expectations, networks, and learning constructed by the incubator managers on the incubation performance. Using data on the 189 national technology business incubators (NTBIs) from 2008 to 2012 in China, we find that the role of networks constructed by the incubator mangers in stimulating the survival of new ventures is not as significant as the roles of expectations and learning construction. More specifically, the venture capital obtained from private organizations performs better than the incubation fund which is mainly obtained from governments. While the internal network building has a great positive impact on incubation performance, the external network tends to act as “bad networks”. Finally, the incubator managers are always not sufficient to offer technology broke support in Chinese NTBIs

Adaptive Temporal Encoding Network for Video Instance-level Human Parsing

Beyond the existing single-person and multiple-person human parsing tasks in static images, this paper makes the first attempt to investigate a more realistic video instance-level human parsing that simultaneously segments out each person instance and parses each instance into more fine-grained parts (e.g., head, leg, dress). We introduce a novel Adaptive Temporal Encoding Network (ATEN) that alternatively performs temporal encoding among key frames and flow-guided feature propagation from other consecutive frames between two key frames. Specifically, ATEN first incorporates a Parsing-RCNN to produce the instance-level parsing result for each key frame, which integrates both the global human parsing and instance-level human segmentation into a unified model. To balance between accuracy and efficiency, the flow-guided feature propagation is used to directly parse consecutive frames according to their identified temporal consistency with key frames. On the other hand, ATEN leverages the convolution gated recurrent units (convGRU) to exploit temporal changes over a series of key frames, which are further used to facilitate the frame-level instance-level parsing. By alternatively performing direct feature propagation between consistent frames and temporal encoding network among key frames, our ATEN achieves a good balance between frame-level accuracy and time efficiency, which is a common crucial problem in video object segmentation research. To demonstrate the superiority of our ATEN, extensive experiments are conducted on the most popular video segmentation benchmark (DAVIS) and a newly collected Video Instance-level Parsing (VIP) dataset, which is the first video instance-level human parsing dataset comprised of 404 sequences and over 20k frames with instance-level and pixel-wise annotations.Comment: To appear in ACM MM 2018. Code link: https://github.com/HCPLab-SYSU/ATEN. Dataset link: http://sysu-hcp.net/li

Knockout of Pannexin-1 Induces Hearing Loss

Mutations of gap junction connexin genes induce a high incidence of nonsyndromic hearing loss. Pannexin genes also encode gap junctional proteins in vertebrates. Recent studies demonstrated that Pannexin-1 (Panx1) deficiency in mice and mutation in humans are also associated with hearing loss. So far, several Panx1 knockout (KO) mouse lines were established. In general, these Panx1 KO mouse lines demonstrate consistent phenotypes in most aspects, including hearing loss. However, a recent study reported that a Panx1 KO mouse line, which was created by Genentech Inc., had no hearing loss as measured by the auditory brainstem response (ABR) threshold at low-frequency range (\u3c 24 kHz). Here, we used multiple auditory function tests and re-examined hearing function in the Genentech Panx1 (Gen-Panx1) KO mouse. We found that ABR thresholds in the Gen-Panx1 KO mouse were significantly increased, in particular, in the high-frequency region. Moreover, consistent with the increase in ABR threshold, distortion product otoacoustic emission (DPOAE) and cochlear microphonics (CM), which reflect active cochlear amplification and auditory receptor current, respectively, were significantly reduced. These data demonstrated that the Gen-Panx1 KO mouse has hearing loss and further confirmed that Panx1 deficiency can cause deafness

Studying newborn neutron stars by the transient emission after stellar collapses and compact binary mergers

The formation of neutron stars (NSs), both from collapses of massive stars and mergers of compact objects, can be usually indicated by bright transients emitted from explosively-ejected material. In particular, if the newborn NSs can rotate at a millisecond period and have a sufficiently high magnetic field, then the spin-down of the NSs would provide a remarkable amount of energy to the emitting material. As a result, super-luminous supernovae could be produced in the massive stellar collapse cases, while some unusual fast evolving and luminous optical transients could arise from the cases of NS mergers and accretion-induced collapses of white dwarfs. In all cases, if the dipolar magnetic fields of the newborn NSs can be amplified to be as high as $10^{15}$ G, a relativistic jet could be launched and then a gamma-ray burst can be produced as the jet successfully breaks out from the surrounding nearly-isotropic ejected material.Comment: 10 pages, 9 pictures, to appear in the AIP Proceedings of the Xiamen-CUSTIPEN Workshop on the EOS of Dense Neutron-Rich Matter in the Era of Gravitational Wave Astronomy, Jan. 3-7, Xiamen, Chin