Collaborative HRM, climate for cooperation, and employee intra-organizational social ties in high-technology firms in China: A cross-level analysis

Individual social ties have been an important source of competitive advantages for hightech firms in the knowledge economy. However, the existing cross-level studies have mainly investigated the impact of HRM systems on traditional individual attitudinal or behavioral outcomes, and few studies have examined the effect of SHRM on individual social ties. Based on the data collected from 363 knowledge employees working in 64 high-tech firms in China, we examine the cross-level relationships among collaborative HRM practices, climate for cooperation and employee intra-organizational social ties. The hierarchical linear model results show that organizational-level collaborative HRM practices have significant positive effects on the number and strength of individual-level intra-organizational social ties, and the climate for cooperation mediates the positive cross-level relationship between collaborative HRM and individual intra-organizational social ties. This study makes three contributions to the literature. First, with a cross-level model, this study helps us better understand how collaborative HRM acts as an approach to manage individuals’ social capital formation. Second, this study makes contribution to the social network literature by showing how organizational contextual factors (HRM practices and organizational climate) affect employee individual social ties. Third, based on the AMO model, this paper developed a more clear construct and a three-dimension measurement of the collaborative HRM

FREPA: An Automated and Formal Approach to Requirement Modeling and Analysis in Aircraft Control Domain

Formal methods are promising for modeling and analyzing system requirements. However, applying formal methods to large-scale industrial projects is a remaining challenge. The industrial engineers are suffering from the lack of automated engineering methodologies to effectively conduct precise requirement models, and rigorously validate and verify (V&V) the generated models. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we present a systematic engineering approach, named Formal Requirement Engineering Platform in Aircraft (FREPA), for formal requirement modeling and V\&V in the aerospace and aviation control domains. FREPA is an outcome of the seamless collaboration between the academy and industry over the last eight years. The main contributions of this paper include 1) an automated and systematic engineering approach FREPA to construct requirement models, validate and verify systems in the aerospace and aviation control domain, 2) a domain-specific modeling language AASRDL to describe the formal specification, and 3) a practical FREPA-based tool AeroReq which has been used by our industry partners. We have successfully adopted FREPA to seven real aerospace gesture control and two aviation engine control systems. The experimental results show that FREPA and the corresponding tool AeroReq significantly facilitate formal modeling and V&V in the industry. Moreover, we also discuss the experiences and lessons gained from using FREPA in aerospace and aviation projects.Comment: 12 pages, Published by FSE 202

Tourism experiences reduce the risk of cognitive impairment in the Chinese older adult: A prospective cohort study

Background: Given the etiological complexity of cognitive impairment, no effective cure currently exists for precise treatment of dementia. Although scholars have noted tourism’s potential role in managing cognitive impairment and mild dementia, more robust empirical investigation is needed in this area. This study aimed to examine the associations between tourism and cognitive impairment and dementia in older Chinese adults. Method: From a nationwide community-based cohort, 6,717 individuals aged ≥ 60 were recruited from 2011 to 2014, of whom 669 (9.96%) had had at least one tourism experience in the 2 years prior to enrollment. All the participants were then prospectively followed up until 2018. The association between tourism and cognitive impairment was examined by the Cox proportional hazards regression model. The adjusted hazard ratio (aHR) and its 95% confidence interval (CI) were calculated to evaluate the effect of tourism experience on cognitive impairment and dementia. Results: A total of 1,416 individuals were newly diagnosed with cognitive impairment and 139 individuals with dementia onset during follow-up. The incidence of cognitive impairment was significantly lower among participants with tourism experiences (316.94 per 10,000 person-years) than those without such experiences (552.38 per 10,000 person-years). Cox regression showed that tourism decreased the risk of cognitive impairment (aHR = 0.69, 95% CI: 0.41–0.62) when adjusted for behavioral covariates and characteristics. Compared with participants without tourism experiences, those with 1, 2, and ≥ 3 tourism experiences had a lower risk of cognitive impairment with the aHRs of 0.72 (95% CI: 0.52–0.99), 0.65 (0.42–1.01), and 0.68 (0.44–0.98), respectively. Tourism experiences also reduced participants’ risk of dementia (aHR = 0.41, 95% CI: 0.19–0.89). Conclusion: Our findings demonstrated associations between tourism and reduced risks of cognitive impairment and dementia in older Chinese adults. Thus, tourism could serve as a novel approach to dementia prevention

An evaluation of EQ-5D-3L health utility scores using five country-specific tariffs in a rural population aged 45-69 years in Hua county, Henan province, China.

BACKGROUND: This study aims to compare the performance of the recently developed Chinese (city) tariff of the EQ-5D-3L against the UK, US, Japanese and Korean tariffs in a general rural population in China. METHODS: From November 2015 to September 2016, 12,085 permanent residents aged 45-69 from 257 villages randomly selected from Hua County, Henan Province, China, were interviewed using EQ-5D-3L, and a one-on-one questionnaire investigation was used to collect data on factors associated with HRQOL. The health utility scores were calculated using the UK, US, Japanese, Korean and Chinese (city) tariffs. The agreement, known-groups validity and sensitivity of these five tariffs were evaluated. Transition scores for pairs of observed EQ-5D-3L health states were calculated and compared. RESULTS: The Korean tariff yielded the highest mean health utility score (0.963), followed by the Chinese (city) (0.948), US (0.943), UK (0.930) and Japanese (0.921) tariffs, but the differences in the scores of any two tariffs did not exceed the MCID. The Chinese (city) tariff showed higher ICC values (ICCs> 0.89, 95% CI:0.755-0.964) and narrower limits of agreement (0.099-0.167) than the Korean tariff [(ICCs> 0.71, 95% CI:0.451-0.955); (0.146-0.253)]. The Chinese (city) tariff had a higher relative efficiency and effect size statistics in 10 out of 11 variables as compared to the UK, US and Japanese tariffs. The Chinese (city) tariff (0.215) was associated with moderate mean absolute transition scores compared with the UK (0.342), US (0.230), Japanese (0.149) and Korean (0.189) tariffs for 1485 observed pairs of the EQ-5D-3L health states. CONCLUSIONS: Health utility scores derived from the five tariffs differed. The Chinese (city) tariff was the most suitable of these tariffs and was without obvious weakness. We recommend adopting the Chinese (city) tariff when applying EQ-5D-3L to assess quality of life among the elderly in China's agricultural region with socio-economic status similar to Hua County. Results of this study had provided a crucial basis for health surveys, health promotion projects, health intervention trials, and health economic evaluation taking HRQOL as a target in rural areas of China

GAN-based multi-style photo cartoonization

Cartoon is a common form of art in our daily life and automatic generation of cartoon images from photos is highly desirable. However, state-of-the-art single-style methods can only generate one style of cartoon images from photos and existing multi-style image style transfer methods still struggle to produce high-quality cartoon images due to their highly simplified and abstract nature. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-style generative adversarial network (GAN) architecture, called MS-CartoonGAN, which can transform photos into multiple cartoon styles. We develop a multi-domain architecture, where the generator consists of a shared encoder and multiple decoders for different cartoon styles, along with multiple discriminators for individual styles. By observing that cartoon images drawn by different artists have their unique styles while sharing some common characteristics, our shared network architecture exploits the common characteristics of cartoon styles, achieving better cartoonization and being more efficient than single-style cartoonization. We show that our multi-domain architecture can theoretically guarantee to output desired multiple cartoon styles. Through extensive experiments including a user study, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, outperforming state-of-the-art single-style and multi-style image style transfer methods

Estimating cancer incidence based on claims data from medical insurance systems in two areas lacking cancer registries in China.

BACKGROUND: We aimed to establish a Medical-Insurance-System-based Cancer Surveillance System (MIS-CASS) in China and evaluate the completeness and timeliness of this system through reporting cancer incidence rates using claims data in two regions in northern and southern China. METHODS: We extracted claims data from medical insurance systems in Hua County of Henan Province, and Shantou City in Guangdong Province in China from Jan 1, 2012 to Jun 30, 2019. These two regions have been considered to be high risk regions for oesophageal cancer. We developed a rigorous procedure to establish the MIS-CASS, which includes data extraction, cleaning, processing, case ascertainment, privacy protection, etc. Text-based diagnosis in conjunction with ICD-10 codes were used to determine cancer diagnosis. FINDINGS: In 2018, the overall age-standardised (Segi population) incidence rates (ASR World) of cancer in Hua County and Shantou City were 167·39/100,000 and 159·78/100,000 respectively. In both of these areas, lung cancer and breast cancer were the most common cancers in males and females respectively. Hua County is a high-risk region for oesophageal cancer (ASR World: 25·95/100,000), whereas Shantou City is not a high-risk region for oesophageal cancer (ASR World: 11·43/100,000). However, Nanao island had the highest incidence of oesophageal cancer among all districts and counties in Shantou (ASR World: 36·39/100,000). The age-standardised male-to-female ratio for oesophageal cancer was lower in Hua County than in Shantou (1·69 vs. 4·02). A six-month lag time was needed to report these cancer incidences for the MIS-CASS. INTERPRETATION: MIS-CASS efficiently reflects cancer burden in real-time, and has the potential to provide insight for improvement of cancer surveillance in China. FUNDING: The National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFC0901404), the Digestive Medical Coordinated Development Center of Beijing Municipal Administration of Hospitals (XXZ0204), the Sanming Project of Shenzhen (SZSM201612061), and the Shantou Science and Technology Bureau (190829105556145, 180918114960704)

Diploid mycelia of Ustilago esculenta fails to maintain sustainable proliferation in host plant

Smut fungi display a uniform life cycle including two phases: a saprophytic phase in vitro and a parasitic phase in host plants. Several apathogenic smut fungi are found, lacking suitable hosts in their habitat. Interestingly, MT-type Ustilago esculenta was found to maintain a parasitic life, lacking the saprophytic phase. Its long period of asexual proliferation in plant tissue results in severe defects in certain functions. In this study, the growth dynamics of U. esculenta in plant tissues were carefully observed. The mycelia of T- and MT-type U. esculenta exhibit rapid growth after karyogamy and aggregate between cells. While T-type U. esculenta successfully forms teliospores after aggregation, the aggregated mycelia of MT-type U. esculenta gradually disappeared after a short period of massive proliferation. It may be resulted by the lack of nutrition such as glucose and sucrose. After overwintering, infected Zizania latifolia plants no longer contained diploid mycelia resulting from karyogamy. This indicated that diploid mycelia failed to survive in plant tissues. It seems that diploid mycelium only serves to generate teliospores. Notably, MT-type U. esculenta keeps the normal function of karyogamy, though it is not necessary for its asexual life in plant tissue. Further investigations are required to uncover the underlying mechanism, which would improve our understanding of the life cycle of smut fungi and help the breeding of Z. latifolia