A Social Psychological Perspective on the Forming of Path Dependence in Old Industrial Regions —The Case of Shanxi Province in China

Among so many research literatures in industrial cluster, there lacks still exploration to the possible risks of industrial cluster. Path dependency, which is absolutely not only a phenomenon in technological development, existing not only in an organization but also in the process of cluster development, has been neglected at certain degree in developing regional cluster. The aim of the paper is to address the question of how the micro foundation of path dependence can be explained through a social psychological perspective. By referring to the two concepts from social psychology, selective attention and identity, this paper illustrates the psychological factors leading to the forming of path dependence in industrial cluster. Key words: industrial cluster, path dependency, regional identity, selective attention, social psychology Résumé: Parmi de nombreux documents de recherches sur le bloc industriel, il manque encore des explorations sur les risques possibles du bloc industriel. La voie de dépendance, qui n’est pas seulement un phénomène dans le développement technologique, existant non seulement dans une organisation mais aussi dans le processus du développement du bloc, a été négligée dans certaines mesures dans le développement du bloc industriel regional. L’objectif de cet article est d’ exposer comment la micro-fondation de la voie de dépendance peut être expliquée dans une perspective sociale et psychologique. Se référant à deux concepts de la psychologie sociale-attention sélective et identité, cet article illustre les facteurs psychologiques qui conduisent à la formation de la voie de dépendance dans la bloc industriel. Mots-Clés: bloc industriel, voie de dépendance, identité régionale, attention sélective, psychologie social

Assessment of phagocytosis and cytokine secretions by monocytes in the presence of plasmodium falciparum

Malaria remains one of the most common human infections worldwide. In endemic areas, malaria is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality and it causes significant socioeconomic burdens to the affected people. Monocytes are part of the immune system to control parasite burden and to protect host against malaria infection. Monocytes play their protective roles against malaria via phagocytosis, cytokine production and antigen presentation. Though monocytes are crucial for clearance of malaria infection, they also have been shown to cause adverse clinical outcomes. The objective of this study was to determine the morphology of P. falciparum, to assess phagocytic capability of infected red blood cells by human monocytes and further measure the cytokine secretions of monocytes following phagocytosis by using ELISA. In this study, monocytes were isolated from whole blood collected from healthy individuals while Plasmodium falciparum (3D7) was cultured under optimal conditions. Phagocytotic activity and cytokine production by the monocytes following malaria infection were assessed in vitro by co-culturing the monocytes and P. falciparum-infected red blood cells for 1 and 2 hours. The present study demonstrated that the monocytes phagocytosed the P. falciparum-infected red blood cells and the phagocytosis index increased with longer incubation time, from 8.2% at 1 hour incubation time to 10.4% (p<0.05) at 2 hours incubation time. Following phagocytosis, the monocytes produced TNF-α, initiating innate immune response to help in the clearance of parasite. The data have shown that monocytes cultured alone expressed the highest level of TNF-α during 0 and 1 hour of incubation, while co-culture of monocytes with P. falciparum-infected red blood cells produced the highest level of TNF-α after 2 hours of incubation. Comparing the trend among monocyte control, parasite control and co-culture, all showed an increase in the level of TNF-α produced in the first hour, but the concentration decreased significantly in the second hour. As a conclusion, these findings suggest that monocytes play an important role in malaria infection by phagocytosing the parasites and producing TNF-α for the removal of parasites, thereby initiating an immune response for malaria eradication

Experimental demonstration of RGB LED-based optical camera communications

Red, green, and blue (RGB) light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are widely used in everyday illumination, particularly where color-changing lighting is required. On the other hand, digital cameras with color filter arrays over image sensors have been also extensively integrated in smart devices. Therefore, optical camera communications (OCC) using RGB LEDs and color cameras is a promising candidate for cost-effective parallel visible light communications (VLC). In this paper, a single RGB LED-based OCC system utilizing a combination of undersampled phase-shift on off keying (UPSOOK), wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques is designed, which offers higher space efficiency (3 bits/Hz/LED), long-distance, and nonflickering VLC data transmission. A proof-of-concept test bed is developed to assess the bit-error-rate performance of the proposed OCC system. The experimental results show that the proposed system using a single commercially available RGB LED and a standard 50-frame/s camera is able to achieve a data rate of 150 bits/s over a range of up to 60 m

Neural Multi-Task Learning for Citation Function and Provenance

Citation function and provenance are two cornerstone tasks in citation analysis. Given a citation, the former task determines its rhetorical role, while the latter locates the text in the cited paper that contains the relevant cited information. We hypothesize that these two tasks are synergistically related, and build a model that validates this claim. For both tasks, we show that a single-layer convolutional neural network (CNN) outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines. More importantly, we show that the two tasks are indeed synergistic: by jointly training both of the tasks in a multi-task learning setup, we demonstrate additional performance gains. Altogether, our models improve the current state-of-the-arts up to 2\%, with statistical significance for both citation function and provenance prediction tasks

Oscillation-specific nodal alterations in early to middle stages Parkinsons disease.

Background: Different oscillations of brain networks could carry different dimensions of brain integration. We aimed to investigate oscillation-specific nodal alterations in patients with Parkinsons disease (PD) across early stage to middle stage by using graph theory-based analysis. Methods: Eighty-eight PD patients including 39 PD patients in the early stage (EPD) and 49 patients in the middle stage (MPD) and 36 controls were recruited in the present study. Graph theory-based network analyses from three oscillation frequencies (slow-5: 0.01-0.027 Hz; slow-4: 0.027-0.073 Hz; slow-3: 0.073-0.198 Hz) were analyzed. Nodal metrics (e.g. nodal degree centrality, betweenness centrality and nodal efficiency) were calculated. Results: Our results showed that (1) a divergent effect of oscillation frequencies on nodal metrics, especially on nodal degree centrality and nodal efficiency, that the anteroventral neocortex and subcortex had high nodal metrics within low oscillation frequencies while the posterolateral neocortex had high values within the relative high oscillation frequency was observed, which visually showed that network was perturbed in PD; (2) PD patients in early stage relatively preserved nodal properties while MPD patients showed widespread abnormalities, which was consistently detected within all three oscillation frequencies; (3) the involvement of basal ganglia could be specifically observed within slow-5 oscillation frequency in MPD patients; (4) logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic curve analyses demonstrated that some of those oscillation-specific nodal alterations had the ability to well discriminate PD patients from controls or MPD from EPD patients at the individual level; (5) occipital disruption within high frequency (slow-3) made a significant influence on motor impairment which was dominated by akinesia and rigidity. Conclusions: Coupling various oscillations could provide potentially useful information for large-scale network and progressive oscillation-specific nodal alterations were observed in PD patients across early to middle stages

Energy-efficient active tag searching in large scale RFID systems

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has attracted much research attention in recent years. RFID can support automatic information tracing and management during the management process in many fields. A typical field that uses RFID is modern warehouse management, where products are attached with tags and the inventory of products is managed by retrieving tag IDs. Many practical applications require searching a group of tags to determine whether they are in the system or not. The existing studies on tag searching mainly focused on improving the time efficiency but paid little attention to energy efficiency which is extremely important for active tags powered by built-in batteries. To fill in this gap, this paper investigates the tag searching problem from the energy efficiency perspective. We first propose an Energy-efficient tag Searching protocol in Multiple reader RFID systems, namely ESiM, which pushes per tag energy consumption to the limit as each tag needs to exchange only one bit data with the reader. We then develop a time efficiency enhanced version of ESiM, namely TESiM, which can dramatically reduce the execution time while only slightly increasing the transmission overhead. Extensive simulation experiments reveal that, compared to state-of-the-art solution in the current literature, TESiM reduces per tag energy consumption by more than one order of magnitude subject to comparable execution time. In most considered scenarios, TESiM even reduces the execution time by more than 50%.This work is partially supported by the National Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61103203, 61332004, 61402056 and 61420106009), NSFC/RGC Joint Research Scheme (Grant No. N_PolyU519/12), and the EU FP7 CLIMBER project (Grant Agreement No. PIRSES-GA-2012-318939)