Can ASEAN Benefit from the European Union’s Experience in the Field of Facilitating Corporate Collaboration?

Regional integration in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) received a boost in 2007 when they explicitly announced their objective to build an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), i.e. a single market and production base in the region. Pursuing the ASEAN single market means that ASEAN shares with the European Union (EU) the common interests of developing regional economic integration, taking action to combat the cost of market fragmentation. The aim of this thesis is to put forward suggestions directed at the realisation of the ASEAN single market in the field of economic integration and cooperation in the business sector based upon the experience of the EU in developing its internal market. To achieve this objective, the thesis investigates current conditions for business cooperation and collaboration and analyses existing barriers to effective cooperation in ASEAN. In the framework of a comparative analysis of the two regional developments where it is relevant, the analysis is mainly based on library-based research complemented by the socio-legal research method of interviewing ASEAN experts and also, businesses within ASEAN. The major barriers identified in cross-border business activities are based on ASEAN Member Countries’ protectionist techniques to control foreign inward investments. The ‘ASEAN Way’ of consensus-based decision-making and a lack of compliance and enforcement mechanisms and of working judicial institutions obstruct the development of efficient mechanisms for the purpose and also, the efficacy of the AEC initiatives and the ASEAN industrial economic cooperation schemes. Considering the limits of the related ASEAN instruments in facilitating corporate collaboration and promoting intra-ASEAN trade and investments, four different areas of mechanisms drawn from the EU’s experience are considered. After conducting an evaluation of the viability and the potential benefits of those mechanisms in ASEAN, the thesis proposes that the most useful area, promising practical benefits, would be the introduction of uniform and universally recognised business entities to facilitate collaboration and cooperation within ASEAN. Recognition of such entities as national entities within every Member Country will help to obviate these protectionist tendencies and improve the development of intra-ASEAN trade

Fractional Ownership, Democratization and Bubble Formation - The Impact of Blockchain Enabled Asset Tokenization

Motivated by the growing importance of research on blockchain applications, this paper conceptualizes the potential impact of blockchain enabled asset tokenization. Asset tokenization is the process of converting real-world assets to digital tokens and trading them fractionally based on a blockchain platform and its smart contract function. This research hypothesizes that tokenizing the asset increases its price by improving the democracy of the market and its liquidity, and eventually results in a price bubble, although it is not clear how long it will last. Furthermore, this impact is hypothesized to be greater on the previously lesser-known assets, because of the dominant investor sentiment and valuation subjectivity. Specifically, the art market is designated as a research context because blockchain applications has been expected to innovate the market by resolving its problems of centralization, inefficiency, and information asymmetry

The Impact of Gender and Cultural Values on Savoring and Happiness Among Korean College Students

Historically, Korea has been strongly influenced by Chinese Confucianism, which emphasizes gender-role differentiation and patriarchal norms. Through globalization, however, Western values, which accentuate achievement and independence, have influenced Korean society and its emphasis on traditional values and sex roles. In particular, Korean females, relative to males, may gain more empowerment by rejecting traditional cultural values. Literature has shown that Asian cultures traditionally emphasize dampening rather than amplifying of positive emotions—a style of positive emotional regulation (i.e., savoring) that predicts lower reported levels of happiness. The present study examined gender differences in cultural values, savoring responses to positive experience, and happiness by testing a hypothesized structural path model, in which, Korean females, relative to males, more strongly rejected traditional Asian values, which predicted lower levels of dampening positive affects, which in turn predicted greater happiness

Phosphorylation of nephrin induces phase separated domains that move through actomyosin contraction

© The Author(s), 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Kim, S., Kalappurakkal, J. M., Mayor, S., & Rosen, M. K. Phosphorylation of nephrin induces phase separated domains that move through actomyosin contraction. Molecular Biology of the Cell, 30(24), (2019): 2996–3012, doi:10.1091/mbc.E18-12-0823.The plasma membrane of eukaryotic cells is organized into lipid and protein microdomains, whose assembly mechanisms and functions are incompletely understood. We demonstrate that proteins in the nephrin/Nck/N-WASP actin-regulatory pathway cluster into micron-scale domains at the basal plasma membrane upon triggered phosphorylation of transmembrane protein nephrin. The domains are persistent but readily exchange components with their surroundings, and their formation is dependent on the number of Nck SH3 domains, suggesting they are phase separated polymers assembled through multivalent interactions among the three proteins. The domains form independent of the actin cytoskeleton, but acto-myosin contractility induces their rapid lateral movement. Nephrin phosphorylation induces larger clusters at the cell periphery, which are associated with extensive actin assembly and dense filopodia. Our studies illustrate how multivalent interactions between proteins at the plasma membrane can produce micron-scale organization of signaling molecules, and how the resulting clusters can both respond to and control the actin cytoskeleton.We thank Hongtao Yu (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center [UTSW]) for providing the HeLa cell line used in this work; Dan Billadeau and Timothy Gomez (Mayo Clinic) for providing antibodies; Nico Stuurman (University of California, San Francisco) for assistance with STORM imaging; Kate Luby-Phelps and Abhijit Bugde (UTSW Live Cell Imaging Core Facility) for their assistance in epifluorescence and spinning disk confocal experiments; Sudeep Banjade for advice on designing the S3, S2, S1 constructs; Khuloud Jaqaman (UTSW) for advice on cluster motility analysis; Salman Banani and Jonathan Ditlev (UTSW) for critical reading of the manuscript; and members of the Rosen lab and participants in the MBL/HHMI Summer Institutes for advice and helpful discussions. This work was supported by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Collaborative Innovation Award; the Welch Foundation (I-1544 to M.K.R.); a J.C. Bose Fellowship from the Department of Science and Technology, government of India (to S.M.); a Margadarshi Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust—Department of Biotechnology, India Alliance (IA/M/15/1/502018 to S.M.). Research in the Rosen lab is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Impact of Mobility on Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus among Injection Drug Users

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.In this study, we develop and present a deterministic model for the transmission dynamics of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) among injection drug users. The model consists of non-injection drug users as well as low-and high-risk injection drug users (IDUs). The model further incorporates the movement of these individuals between large metro, suburban and rural areas. The model parameters were estimated by fitting the model to the 2008–2013 disease prevalence data for non-IDUs obtained from the Agency for Healthcare and Research and Quality (AHRQ), as well as the 2009–2013 Census Bureau data for the number of individuals migrating between three different counties in Kansas. Sensitivity analysis was implemented to determine the parameters with the most significant impact on the total number of infected individuals; the transmission probability, recovery rates, and positive behavioral change parameter for the subgroup have the most significant effect on the number of infected individuals. Furthermore, the sensitivity of the parameters in the different areas was the same when the areas are disconnected. When the areas are connected, the parameters in large-metro areas were the most sensitive, and the rural areas were least sensitive. The result shows that to effectively control the disease across the large metro, suburban and rural areas, it is best to focus on controlling both behavior and disease in the large metro area as this has a trickle-down effect to the other places. However, controlling behavior and disease at the same time in all the areas will lead to the elimination of the disease

Visual function and color vision in adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

AbstractPurposeColor vision and self-reported visual function in everyday life in young adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) were investigated.MethodParticipants were 30 young adults with ADHD and 30 controls matched for age and gender. They were tested individually and completed the Visual Activities Questionnaire (VAQ), Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue Test (FMT) and A Quick Test of Cognitive Speed (AQT).ResultsThe ADHD group reported significantly more problems in 4 of 8 areas on the VAQ: depth perception, peripheral vision, visual search and visual processing speed. Further analyses of VAQ items revealed that the ADHD group endorsed more visual problems associated with driving than controls. Color perception difficulties on the FMT were restricted to the blue spectrum in the ADHD group. FMT and AQT results revealed slower processing of visual stimuli in the ADHD group.ConclusionA comprehensive investigation of mechanisms underlying visual function and color vision in adults with ADHD is warranted, along with the potential impact of these visual problems on driving performance

The influence of gender and cultural values on savoring in Korean undergraduates

The present study investigated antecedents of savoring beliefs and responses in a sample of South Korean college students. Historically, Korea has been strongly influenced by Chinese Confucianism, which emphasizes not only gender-role differentiation and patriarchal norms, but also the dampening of emotions as a culturally appropriate style of positive emotional regulation. We hypothesized that Korean females, relative to males, would reject traditional Asian cultural values in order to gain more empowerment, and would, as a result, report a greater capacity to savor positive experience. Confirming the hypotheses, Korean women, compared to men, reported stronger disagreement with traditional Asian values, greater overall savoring ability, greater capacity for cognitive elaboration, and less use of dampening and greater use of amplifying as savoring responses to positive events. Path analyses supported our hypothesized mediational model in which Korean women, relative to men, more strongly rejected traditional Asian values, which predicted less dampening (but only marginally greater amplifying). We conclude that among young Korean adults: (a) savoring is a relevant concept; (b) traditional Asian values tend to promote dampening of positive emotions; and (c) women more strongly reject traditional cultural values, tend to engage in less dampening and greater amplifying, and perceive greater savoring capacity, relative to men

Reclaiming a Space in American History with the Collective Voices of the Japanese Picture Brides in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic

Julie Otsuka’s 2011 novel The Buddha in the Attic documents the history of ‘picture brides’ who were some of the earliest Japanese female immigrants to the USA and whose narratives remain unwritten, forgotten, and erased. The collective voice of the picture brides in Buddha narrativises the women’s collective loss and effectively delivers a transgressive gesture of resistance toward a national history that refuses to provide a space for those narratives. This paper focuses on Buddha’s literary strategies of using the first-person plural narrative and the repetition of ‘we’, instead of the ‘I’ voice that show how the picture brides failed to be recognised as individual national subjects in the USA and at the same time shows that these voices refuse to be constrained in a singular narrative. This article argues that Otsuka uses a collective voice as a tool with which to inscribe the shared experience of loss, carving out narratives of the picture brides as a subversive alternative to mainstream versions of American history and further claim that collectivity can be a significantly powerful means of occupying a narrative space in the novel

Studies on Functional Polycyclosiloxanes with Dynamic Covalent Bonds

要約のみTohoku University三ツ石方也課

Hope and Positive Emotions in Bereavement Among Older Adults in the United States

This three-paper dissertation aims to enhance our understanding of the role of positive psychology constructs, hope, and positive emotions during bereavement among older adults. The study will be mainly guided by the Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotion, the Hope Theory, and the Revised Stress and Coping Theory. This dissertation is based on secondary data analysis using two different data - the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) for Paper 1 and the Complicated Grief Treatment in Older Adults Study (CGTOA) for Paper 2 and Paper 3. Paper 1 examines the level of positive and negative emotions before and after bereavement, and the impact of positive emotions on bereavement adjustment outcomes such as depression and purpose in life among a nationally representative sample of widowed older adults. Paper 1 finds that recently widowed older adults experience a significant decrease in positive emotions and an increase in negative emotions (compared to the married comparison group) after the loss of their spouse, but they still experience a considerable level of positive emotions during bereavement. The level of post-loss positive emotions was significantly associated with better adjustment outcomes, lower odds of having depression, and a higher level of purpose in life. A significantly greater impact of positive emotions on purpose in life was found among the widowed group compared to the married counterparts. However, the beneficial impact of positive emotions on depression did not differ between the widowed and married groups. Paper 2 and Paper 3 explore hope among the bereaved older adults with complicated grief using data from the CGTOA Study, a randomized clinical trial, which compared the treatment efficacy of complicated grief treatment (CGT) with interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT). Paper 2 focuses on evaluation of the psychometric properties of the Trait Hope Scale (THS) among older adults with complicated grief before proceeding to address the role of hope in CGT in Paper 3. Paper 2 suggests that overall the THS is a valid and reliable tool to measure hope among older adults with complicated grief. The THS demonstrated its sensitivity to change with treatment, showing a significantly greater increase in hope score among treatment responders (in both CGT and IPT) compared to non-responders. However, unlike the theoretically supported two-factor structure of the THS (Pathways and Agency), a different two-factor structure was identified in the study, which suggests that further validation of the factor structure of the THS in older adults with complicated grief is necessary in future studies. Paper 3 investigates the role of hope in CGT, particularly examining hope as a potential moderator and/or mediator of treatment effects. Paper 3 found that both CGT and IPT groups increased their hope scores significantly during the treatment. However, there was no significant difference in increases in hope between CGT and IPT groups. Mediation analysis showed that hope is not a mediator of treatment effects of CGT over IPT. However, significant treatment effects of CGT (over IPT) were found for reduction in the level of grief-related avoidance among those with lower baseline hope, but not for those with higher baseline hope, which confirmed hope is a moderator of treatment effects for only the grief-related avoidance outcome. The findings of this dissertation suggest that 1) positive emotions during bereavement may play a beneficial role in adaption to bereavement, 2) the Trait Hope Scale is a valid and reliable tool to measure hope among older adults with complicated grief, and 3) hope can be improved in complicated grief interventions (both CGT and IPT), and regaining hope may be an important factor associated with the resolution of complicated grief symptoms