Entrepreneurial Imagination in Detroit: Ethnography of Nascent Entrepreneurship in the Post-industrial Economy.

This dissertation research presents an in-depth, qualitative investigation of the early-stage process of organizing a new business. This process marks the inception of organizing, where the private insights of an entrepreneur transform into a social reality manifest in the form of a substantial plan for a new business. I study this process based on the two-years of ethnographic engagement in two Detroit business incubators. I first introduce this dissertation’s methodology and specific methods for data collection and analysis, with a special focus on the original analytic method that captures the temporal evolution of the idea for a new business. The next chapter introduces the two incubator contexts, comparing in detail their organizational setting, history, composition, program structure, and principles underlying incubation approach. This is followed by the analysis of how one of the incubators (GREEN, a sustainable business incubator) organically developed its original incubation practice, in reaction to an increasingly dominant practice in the field (embodied by the other incubator – ACCEL, a business accelerator) and the unique local context of Detroit. The following chapter shifts focus to individual startup companies, and analyzes the idea development process of four nascent firms embedded in two incubators. This analysis suggests that the early-stage entrepreneurial process can be understood as a process of substantiating the entrepreneurial imagination, which is defined as an understanding of the present reality in relation to the desired future reality. I further describe how this entrepreneurial imagination is socially constructed through repeated interactions between entrepreneurs and incubator mentors, and further show how the temporal orientation of the incubator significantly affects the trajectory of substantiating the entrepreneurial imagination. Based on these findings, this dissertation research enriches the theoretical understanding of the early-stage entrepreneurial process, generates knowledge on how new practices emerge in the face of institutional pressure, and offers practical implications on how the local economies in the post-industrial cities can be revitalized through the means of entrepreneurship.PhDBusiness AdministrationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113525/1/suntaek_1.pd

To B or Not To B? Understanding the Emergence of Social Entrepreneurship in the Financialized Economy

This study aims at understanding the recent proliferation of social enterprises, a class of organizations explicitly committed to advancing non-financial stakeholders’ interests, against the historical backdrop of economic financialization, which institutionalized shareholder value maximization as the sole legitimate purpose of firms. These increasing claims of an organizational identity that is deviant from the dominant institutional logic pose an intriguing puzzle to organization theories. This study addresses this puzzle by examining why (mechanism) and when (facilitating context) organizations adopt an institutionally-deviant identity. Informed by an inductive qualitative analysis, this study first identifies two routes to a deviant identity: first, consistent with the current organizational identity literature, organizations strategically adopt a deviant identity to appeal to the stakeholders who are ‘disembedded’ from the dominant logic; and second, reminiscent of identity movements, organizations also politically claim a deviant identity to disassociate themselves from and transform the existing institutional framework. These arguments were then tested in the context of the Certified B Corporations, a growing form of social enterprises. The quantitative analysis supports both predictions by finding that claims of the B Corporation identity was facilitated both by the stakeholder discontent with the shareholder-centered approach and by the salient negative consequences of the economic financialization.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107406/1/1239_SKim.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107406/4/1239_SKim_July14.pdfDescription of 1239_SKim_July14.pdf : July 2014 revisio

Metric and Tool Support for Instant Feedback of Source Code Readability

In the software maintenance phase, comprehending the legacy source code is inevitable, which consumes most of the time of the phase. The better the code is readable, the easier it is for code readers to comprehend the system based on the source code. This paper proposes an enhanced source code readability metric to quantitatively measure the extent of code readability. In addition, we developed a tool support named Instant R. Gauge to update the code on the fly based on the readability feedback of the current code. The tool also provides the history of the readability change so that developers recognize the more readable code and gradually change their coding habit without any annoying advice. The suggested readability metric achieves 75.74% of explanatory power, and our experiment showed that readability of most of the methods authored in our tool is higher than that of the methods without our approach

Embodied Metaphors and Creative “Acts”

Creativity is a highly sought after skill. To inspire people’s creativity, prescriptive advice in the form of metaphors abound: We are encouraged to think outside the box, to consider the problem on one hand, then on the other hand, and to put two and two together to achieve creative breakthroughs. These metaphors suggest a connection between concrete bodily experiences and creative cognition. Inspired by recent advances on body-mind linkages under the emerging vernacular of embodied cognition, we explored for the first time whether enacting metaphors for creativity enhances creative problem-solving. In five studies, findings revealed that both physically and psychologically embodying creative metaphors promote fluency, flexibility, and/or originality in problem-solving. Going beyond prior research that focused primarily on the kind of embodiment that primes preexisting knowledge, we provide the first evidence that embodiment can also activate cognitive processes conducive for generating previously unknown ideas and connections

Anti-metastatic effect of GV1001 on prostate cancer cells; roles of GnRHR-mediated Gαs-cAMP pathway and AR-YAP1 axis

Background Gonadotropin-releasing hormone receptor (GnRHR) transmits its signal via two major Gα-proteins, primarily Gαq and Gαi. However, the precise mechanism underlying the functions of Gαs signal in prostate cancer cells is still unclear. We have previously identified that GV1001, a fragment of the human telomerase reverse transcriptase, functions as a biased GnRHR ligand to selectively stimulate the Gαs/cAMP pathway. Here, we tried to reveal the potential mechanisms of which GV1001-stimulated Gαs-cAMP signaling pathway reduces the migration and metastasis of prostate cancer (PCa) cells. Methods The expression of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT)-related genes was measured by western-blotting and spheroid formation on ultra-low attachment plate was detected after GV1001 treatment. In vivo Spleen-liver metastasis mouse model was used to explore the inhibitory effect of GV1001 on metastatic ability of PCa and the transwell migration assay was performed to identify whether GV1001 had a suppressive effect on cell migration in vitro. In order to demonstrate the interaction between androgen receptor (AR) and YAP1, co-immunoprecipitation (co-IP), immunofluorescence (IF) staining, chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) were performed in LNCaP cells with and without GV1001 treatment. Results GV1001 inhibited expression of EMT-related genes and spheroid formation. GV1001 also suppressed in vivo spleen-liver metastasis of LNCaP cells as well as cell migration in vitro. GV1001 enhanced the phosphorylation of AR and transcription activity of androgen response element reporter gene through cAMP/protein kinase A pathway. Moreover, GV1001 increased Ser-127 phosphorylation of YAP1 and its ubiquitination, and subsequently decreased the levels of AR-YAP1 binding in the promoter region of the CTGF gene. In contrast, both protein and mRNA levels of NKX3.1 known for tumor suppressor gene and AR-coregulator were upregulated by GV1001 in LNCaP cells. YAP1 knockout using CRISPR/Cas9 significantly suppressed the migration ability of LNCaP cells, and GV1001 did not affect the cell migration of YAP1-deficient LNCaP cells. On the contrary, cell migration was more potentiated in LNCaP cells overexpressing YAP5SA, a constitutively active form of YAP1, which was not changed by GV1001 treatment. Conclusions Overall, this study reveals an essential role of AR-YAP1 in the regulation of PCa cell migration, and provides evidence that GV1001 could be a novel GnRHR ligand to inhibit metastasis of PCa via the Gαs/cAMP pathway.This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (Kim HS, 2018M3A9C8021792, Kang KW, 2021R1A2C2093196)

Learning to Spot and Refactor Inconsistent Method Names

To ensure code readability and facilitate software maintenance, program methods must be named properly. In particular, method names must be consistent with the corresponding method implementations. Debugging method names remains an important topic in the literature, where various approaches analyze commonalities among method names in a large dataset to detect inconsistent method names and suggest better ones. We note that the state-of-the-art does not analyze the implemented code itself to assess consistency. We thus propose a novel automated approach to debugging method names based on the analysis of consistency between method names and method code. The approach leverages deep feature representation techniques adapted to the nature of each artifact. Experimental results on over 2.1 million Java methods show that we can achieve up to 15 percentage points improvement over the state-of-the-art, establishing a record performance of 67.9% F1-measure in identifying inconsistent method names. We further demonstrate that our approach yields up to 25% accuracy in suggesting full names, while the state-of-the-art lags far behind at 1.1% accuracy. Finally, we report on our success in fixing 66 inconsistent method names in a live study on projects in the wild

Responses and adverse effects of carboplatin-based chemotherapy for pediatric intracranial germ cell tumors

PurposeCisplatin-based chemotherapy has been commonly used for the treatment of intracranial germ cell tumors (IC-GCTs). However, this treatment exhibits some adverse effects such as renal problems and hearing difficulty. Carboplatin-based chemotherapy was administered to pediatric patients with IC-GCTs from August 2004 at the Samsung Medical Center. In this study, we assessed the responses and adverse effects of carboplatin-based chemotherapy in pediatric IC-GCTs patients according to the risk group, and compared the results with those of the previous cisplatin-based chemotherapy.MethodsWe examined 35 patients (27 men and 8 women) diagnosed with IC-GCTs between August 2004 and April 2008 and received risk-adapted carboplatin-based chemotherapy at the Samsung Medical Center. Patients were divided into either low-risk (LR) or high-risk (HR) groups and a retrospective analysis was performed using information from the medical records.ResultsAlthough hematological complications were common, hearing difficulties or grade 3 or 4 creatinine level elevation were not observed in patients who underwent carboplatin-based chemotherapy. The frequency of febrile neutropenia did not differ between the risk groups. The overall survival was 100% and event-free survival (EFS) was 95.7%. The EFS rate was 100% in the LR group and 90% in the HR group, respectively.ConclusionDespite their common occurrence in high-risk patients, no lethal hematological complications were associated with carboplatin-based treatment. The current carboplatin-based chemotherapy protocol is safe and effective for the treatment of pediatric patients with IC-GCTs

2009 H1N1 influenza virus infection and necrotizing pneumonia treated with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation

A 3-year-old girl with acute respiratory distress syndrome due to a H1N1 2009 influenza virus infection was complicated by necrotizing pneumonia was successfully treated with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). This is the first reported case in which a pediatric patient was rescued with ECMO during the H1N1 influenza epidemic in Korea in 2009