Value co-creation characteristics and creativity-oriented customer citizenship behavior

For the competitive advantage of service organization, it is important to improve the creative performance of human resources in the organization. For example, when employees perform creatively, in other words, if they generate novel and useful ideas, it will contribute to organizational competiveness. Therefore, there has been an increased focus in identifying its antecedents and consequences. Unfortunately, little is known about the creative performance of customers. According to service-centered dominant logic, customer is the value co-creator, it emphasizes co-opting customer involvement in the value creation process as an additional human resource. In addition, customers can be a valuable resource for service improvement efforts for firms. For instance, companies might benefit greatly from customer feedback and complaints regarding their offerings and can enhance their productivity in terms of quality and quantity. In this paper, the type of novel, creative-oriented customer behaviors highlighted in the preceding paragraph are referred to as creativity-oriented customer citizenship behaviors (CCBs). In the customer value co-creation context, creative-oriented CCBs refer to extra-role efforts by customers with regards the development of ideas about products, practices, services, and procedures that are novel and potentially useful to a firm. According to the intrinsic motivation perspective, the context in which customers create values, influences their intrinsic motivation, which in turn affects creativity-oriented CCBs. The intrinsic motivation perspective suggests that high intrinsic motivation is affected by information from both task characteristics (i.e., autonomy) and social characteristics (e.g., supplier support). Specifically, complex and challenging task characteristics such as high levels of variety, identity, significance, autonomy, and feedback are expected to increase customer intrinsic motivation. Under these conditions, customers should increase the likelihood of creativity-oriented CCBs. Therefore, customers are expected to be most creative when they experience a high level of intrinsic motivation. In contrast, complex and challenging task and social characteristics can have the opposite effect to customers. For example, in a high level of variety task, increased autonomy can lead to increased workload because they must take on related extra responsibilities and accountability. Increased workload, in turn, is expected to lead to decreased likelihood of creativity-oriented CCBs. Therefore, this study attempts to explore the impact of task characteristics and social characteristics on creativity-oriented CCBs. Furthermore, a substantial body of research has examined the possibility that creativity is affected by personal characteristics. As such, in addition to the relevant task and social characteristics, the moderating influence of several trait variables is also considered. This article makes several contributions. First, this study investigates the trade-off effect of the customer value co-creation related task and social characteristics by examining the underlying opposing mechanism of motivation and work overload. Second, this research provides a deeper understanding of contingency factors that systematically strengthen the relationships under consideration. Third, this study may indicate that companies seek to promote the creativity of their industrial customers and should design the tasks and social characteristics of their industrial customers in a way that maximizes their creativity. But, companies should be aware of the negative impact of specific tasks and social characteristics that may minimize the creativity of industrial customers

Non-Einstein Viscosity Phenomenon of Acrylonitrile–Butadiene–Styrene Composites Containing Lignin–Polycaprolactone Particulates Highly Dispersed by High-Shear Stress

Lignin powder was modified via ring-opening polymerization of caprolactone to form a lignin–polycaprolactone (LPCL) particulate. The LPCL particulates were mixed with an acrylonitrile–butadiene–styrene (ABS) matrix at an extremely high rotational speed of up to 3000 rpm, which was achieved by a closed-loop screw mixer and in-line melt extruder. Using this high-shear extruding mixer, the LPCL particulate size was controlled in the range of 3395 nm (conventional twin-screw extrusion) down to 638 nm (high-shear mixer of 3000 rpm) by altering the mixing speed and time. The resulting LPCL/ABS composites clearly showed non-Einstein viscosity phenomena, exhibiting reduced viscosity (2130 Pa·s) compared to the general extruded composite one (4270 Pa·s) at 1 s–1 and 210 °C. This is due to the conformational rearrangement and the increased free volume of ABS molecular chains in the vicinity of LPCL particulates. This was supported by the decreased glass transition temperature (Tg, 83.7 °C) of the LPCL/ABS composite specimens, for example, giving a 21.8% decrement compared to that (107 °C) of the neat ABS by the incorporation of 10 wt % LPCL particulates in ABS. The LPCL particulate morphology, damping characteristics, and light transmittance of the developed composites were thoroughly investigated at various levels of applied shear rates and mixing conditions. The non-Einstein rheological phenomena stemming from the incorporation of LPCL particulates suggest an interesting plasticization methodology: to improve the processability of high-loading filler/polymer composites and ultra-high molecular weight polymers that are difficult to process because of their high viscosity

Down-regulation of ROBO2 Expression in Prostate Cancers

Several lines of evidence exist that axon guidance genes are involved in cancer pathogenesis. Axon guidance genes ROBO1 and ROBO2 are candidate tumor suppressor genes (TSG). The aim of our study was to address whether ROBO1 and ROBO2 expressions are altered in prostate cancers (PCA). In this study, we analyzed ROBO1 and ROBO2 expressions in 107 PCAs. In the immunohistochemistry, loss of ROBO2 expression was identified in 66 % of PCAs and was significantly higher than that in normal cells (p < 0.001). By contrast, there was no significant difference of ROBO1 expression between normal and PCAs. Our results indicate that axon guidance protein ROBO2 is frequently lost in PCA and that ROBO2 might be involved in PCA pathogenesis as a candidate TSG

La temporalité dans les récits sur images d’enfants bilingues franco-coréens dans leurs deux langues

Nous nous intéressons à l’acquisition bilingue successive enfantine chez des enfants coréens habitant en France. La présente étude porte sur 20 récits à partir d’images enregistrés auprès de 5 enfants bilingues dans leurs deux langues (enfants de 7 à 9 ans, résidant en France depuis plus de 3 ans, et scolarisés depuis 14 mois à 4 ans 1/2). A travers l’analyse de ces productions, nous étudions quelques aspects centraux de la construction du récit : 1) la macro-structure des récits, notamment la répartition des propositions entre la trame et l’arrière-plan, et la façon dont l’enfant sélectionne et met en relation les différents procès constituant un macro-événement ; 2) la micro-structure pour ce qui est de la temporalité : sélection des procès, temporalité inhérente de ceux-ci ; relations temporelles, marquage morphologique de la temporalité, de l’aspectualité, et connecteurs. On observe : a) que la distribution de la morphologie verbale dans les deux langues est assez similaire et qu’elle est liée à la structuration globale du récit, c’est-à-dire à l’opposition trame / arrière-plan ; b) que les récits en coréen sont fortement appuyés sur des relations de cause à effet, alors qu’en français ce sont les relations purement temporelles entre événements qui priment. Nous en concluons que ces enfants bilingues franco-coréens s’appuient sur la distinction sémantique entre types de procès et sur l’organisation macro-structurelle trame/arrière-plan pour formuler le temps et l’aspect dans leurs deux langues : ils réservent de préférence la trame à des événements transitionnels et l’arrière-plan à des situations statiques, et ils utilisent surtout des formes verbales à valeur perfective dans la trame, et imperfective dans l’arrière-plan.This study focuses on the successive bilingual language acquisition of Korean children who live in France. This study analyses 20 picture-based narratives elicited from 5 bilingual children in both languages (7 - 8 years old, living in France for more than 3 years). The study is based on central aspects of linguistic construction of narrative discourse : 1) macro-structure of narrative discourse : distribution of clauses into foreground and background, selection of the events that constitute the macro-event and relations between them ; 2) micro-structure as regards temporality : choice of events, temporal characteristics of the events ; temporal relations, morphological tense and aspect, and connectors. We observe that : a) the distribution of verb morphology in the two languages is very similar, and this tendency is linked to the global structure of the text, i.e. the foreground/background distinction ; b) the Korean narratives are organized around a cause/effect relationship, whereas in French, they stick to chronological order.We conclude that these bilingual children rely on the semantic distinction between types of events and on the organization of the global structure foreground / background to express tense and aspect in the two languages : foreground propositions mainly contain 2-state events and background propositions 0-state events (properties) or 1-state events (states), and they tend to use perfective verbal forms in the foreground, and imperfective in the background

Ultraviolet photodepletion spectroscopy of dibenzo-18-crown-6-ether complexes with alkali metal cations

Ultraviolet photodepletion spectra of dibenzo-18-crown-6-ether complexes with alkali metal cations (M+-DB18C6, M = Cs, Rb, K, Na, and Li) were obtained in the gas phase using electrospray ionization quadrupole ion-trap reflectron time-of-flight mass spectrometry. The spectra exhibited a few distinct absorption bands in the wavenumber region of 35450−37800 cm^(−1). The lowest-energy band was tentatively assigned to be the origin of the S_0-S_1 transition, and the second band to a vibronic transition arising from the “benzene breathing” mode in conjunction with symmetric or asymmetric stretching vibration of the bonds between the metal cation and the oxygen atoms in DB18C6. The red shifts of the origin bands were observed in the spectra as the size of the metal cation in M^+-DB18C6 increased from Li^+ to Cs^+. We suggested that these red shifts arose mainly from the decrease in the binding energies of larger-sized metal cations to DB18C6 at the electronic ground state. These size effects of the metal cations on the geometric and electronic structures, and the binding properties of the complexes at the S_0 and S_1 states were further elucidated by theoretical calculations using density functional and time-dependent density functional theories

SNAC: Speaker-normalized affine coupling layer in flow-based architecture for zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech

Zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech (ZSM-TTS) models aim to generate a speech sample with the voice characteristic of an unseen speaker. The main challenge of ZSM-TTS is to increase the overall speaker similarity for unseen speakers. One of the most successful speaker conditioning methods for flow-based multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) models is to utilize the functions which predict the scale and bias parameters of the affine coupling layers according to the given speaker embedding vector. In this letter, we improve on the previous speaker conditioning method by introducing a speaker-normalized affine coupling (SNAC) layer which allows for unseen speaker speech synthesis in a zero-shot manner leveraging a normalization-based conditioning technique. The newly designed coupling layer explicitly normalizes the input by the parameters predicted from a speaker embedding vector while training, enabling an inverse process of denormalizing for a new speaker embedding at inference. The proposed conditioning scheme yields the state-of-the-art performance in terms of the speech quality and speaker similarity in a ZSM-TTS setting.Comment: Accepted to IEEE Signal Processing Letter

Hull-form optimization of a 66,000 dwt bulk carrier in irregular wave condition

This paper deploys optimization techniques to obtain the optimum hull form of a 66,000 DWT bulk carrier in calm water and in irregular head waves at sea state 6. Parametric modification functions for the bow hull-form variation are SAC shape, section shape (U-V type, DLWL type). Multi-objective functions are applied to minimize the values of wave-making resistance in calm water and mean added resistance in waves. WAVIS version 1.3 is used to obtain wave-making resistance in calm water condition. The modified Fujii and Takahashi's formula is applied to obtain the added resistance in short waves. The added resistance in long wave is obtained from the potential-flow solver based on the 3-D panel method. And the mean added resistance in irregular head waves is obtained by linear superposition of the wave spectrum and the response function. The PSO (Particle swarm optimization) algorithm is employed for the optimization technique. The resistance and motion characteristics in calm water, in regular head waves and in irregular head waves of the two hull forms are compared. It has been shown that the optimal brings 6.8% reduction in the mean added resistance at sea state 6

High-Performance PVC Gel for Adaptive Micro-Lenses with Variable Focal Length.

This paper presents a bio-inspired adaptive micro-lens with electrically tunable focus made of non-ionic high-molecular-weight polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gel. The optical device mimics the design of the crystalline lens and ciliary muscle of the human eye. It consists of a plano-convex PVC gel micro-lens on Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) glass, confined with an annular electrode operating as an artificial ciliary muscle. Upon electrical activation, the electroactive adhesive force of the PVC gel is exerted on the annular anode electrode, which reduces the sagittal height of the plano-convex PVC gel lens, resulting in focal length variation of the micro-lens. The focal length increases from 3.8 mm to 22.3 mm as the applied field is varied from 200 V/mm to 800 V/mm, comparable to that of the human lens. The device combines excellent optical characteristics with structural simplicity, fast response speed, silent operation, and low power consumption. The results show the PVC gel micro-lens is expected to open up new perspectives on practical tunable optics

The Singer's Formant and Speaker's Ring Resonance: A Long-Term Average Spectrum Analysis

ObjectivesWe previously showed that a trained tenor's voice has the conventional singer's formant at the region of 3 kHz and another energy peak at 8-9 kHz. Singers in other operatic voice ranges are assumed to have the same peak in their singing and speaking voice. However, to date, no specific measurement of this has been made.MethodsTenors, baritones, sopranos and mezzo sopranos were chosen to participate in this study of the singer's formant and the speaker's ring resonance. Untrained males (n=15) and females (n=15) were included in the control group. Each subject was asked to produce successive /a/ vowel sounds in their singing and speaking voice. For singing, the low pitch was produced in the chest register and the high notes in the head register. We collected the data on the long-term average spectra of the speaking and singing voices of the trained singers and the control groups.ResultsFor the sounds produced from the head register, a significant energy concentration was seen in both 2.2-3.4 kHz and 7.5-8.4 kHz regions (except for the voices of the mezzo sopranos) in the trained singer group when compared to the control groups. Also, the chest register had a significant energy concentration in the 4 trained singer groups at the 2.2-3.1 kHz and 7.8-8.4 kHz. For speaking sound, all trained singers had a significant energy concentration at 2.2-5.3 kHz and sopranos had another energy concentration at 9-10 kHz.ConclusionThe results of this study suggest that opera singers have more energy concentration in the singer's formant/speaker's ring region, in both singing and speaking voices. Furthermore, another region of energy concentration was identified in opera singer's singing sound and in sopranos' speaking sound at 8-9 kHz. The authors believe that these energy concentrations may contribute to the rich voice of trained singers