Trade liberalization and environmental tax in differentiated oligopoly with consumption externalities

This paper investigates the environment tax and trade liberalization with different market structures (pure oligopoly or mixed oligopoly) juxtaposing the substitutability of the goods (homogenous goods and differentiated goods), wherein environmental damage is associated with consumption. It shows that the environmental tax in mixed oligopoly is higher than in pure oligopoly irrespective of the properties of goods. In addition, it demonstrates that when the domestic market increases its openings, the tariff reduction does not always bring positive effects on the environment in mixed oligopoly but, in pure oligopoly with homogeneous goods, the tariff reduction is bad for the environment.

Paxillin facilitates timely neurite initiation on soft-substrate environments by interacting with the endocytic machinery.

Neurite initiation is the first step in neuronal development and occurs spontaneously in soft tissue environments. Although the mechanisms regulating the morphology of migratory cells on rigid substrates in cell culture are widely known, how soft environments modulate neurite initiation remains elusive. Using hydrogel cultures, pharmacologic inhibition, and genetic approaches, we reveal that paxillin-linked endocytosis and adhesion are components of a bistable switch controlling neurite initiation in a substrate modulus-dependent manner. On soft substrates, most paxillin binds to endocytic factors and facilitates vesicle invagination, elevating neuritogenic Rac1 activity and expression of genes encoding the endocytic machinery. By contrast, on rigid substrates, cells develop extensive adhesions, increase RhoA activity and sequester paxillin from the endocytic machinery, thereby delaying neurite initiation. Our results highlight paxillin as a core molecule in substrate modulus-controlled morphogenesis and define a mechanism whereby neuronal cells respond to environments exhibiting varying mechanical properties

Teacher-Student Collaboration on Designing Instructional Multimedia Materials

The goal of this study was to engage students as multimedia designers and technology assistants to create instructional multimedia materials at a non-technology based College of Languages in Taiwan. A case study research design was used in order to examine how a particular discipline-based faculty and its students worked together to create the co-mentoring partnerships. Through the teacher-student collaboration, the faculty’s development of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) was also explored. The results of the study showed the teacher-student collaboration model provided this faculty with benefits including technology assistance, and the understanding of students’ creativities, interests, and varied needs for learning. The faculty’s participants also pointed out how a successful teacher-student collaboration model requires a good relationship between teacher and students, alongside students’ active participation. The students found the interdisciplinary learning experience beneficial to their learning achievements

Maximizing Friend-Making Likelihood for Social Activity Organization

The social presence theory in social psychology suggests that computer-mediated online interactions are inferior to face-to-face, in-person interactions. In this paper, we consider the scenarios of organizing in person friend-making social activities via online social networks (OSNs) and formulate a new research problem, namely, Hop-bounded Maximum Group Friending (HMGF), by modeling both existing friendships and the likelihood of new friend making. To find a set of attendees for socialization activities, HMGF is unique and challenging due to the interplay of the group size, the constraint on existing friendships and the objective function on the likelihood of friend making. We prove that HMGF is NP-Hard, and no approximation algorithm exists unless P = NP. We then propose an error-bounded approximation algorithm to efficiently obtain the solutions very close to the optimal solutions. We conduct a user study to validate our problem formulation and per- form extensive experiments on real datasets to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed algorithm

Communication: Linear-expansion shooting techniques for accelerating self-consistent field convergence

Based on the corrected Hohenberg-Kohn-Sham total energy density functional [Y. A. Zhang and Y. A. Wang, J. Chem. Phys. 130, 144116 (2009)]10.1063/1. 3104662, we have developed two linear-expansion shooting techniques (LIST)- direct LIST (LISTd) and indirect LIST (LISTi), to accelerate the convergence of self-consistent field (SCF) calculations. Case studies show that overall LISTi is the most robust and efficient algorithm for accelerating SCF convergence, whereas LISTd is advantageous in the early stage of an SCF process. More importantly, LISTi outperforms Pulays direct inversion in the iterative subspace (DIIS) [P. Pulay, J. Comput. Chem. 3, 556 (1982)]10.1002/jcc.540030413 and its two recent improvements, energy-DIIS [K. N. Kudin, G. E. Scuseria, and E. Cancs, J. Chem. Phys. © 2011 American Institute of Physics.published_or_final_versio