Interactive Effects of Order Assignment Strategy and Information Disclosure on Courier’s Continuance Participation Intention Arising in the On-Demand Logistics

The application of crowdsourcing in logistics is a revolutionary change of urban distribution. The on-demand logistics is one of the typical crowdsourcing logistics modes which is popular in China since 2008, the demand volume of Chinese on-demand logistics was about 18.5 billion in 2019 with annual rate of growth about 37.6%, and the average annual growth rate in recent five years was 73.7%, the market scale reached 131.3 billion yuan with annual rate of growth about 33.8%, and due to the impact of Covid-19, the demand of on-demand logistics is increasing significantly, and the requirement for convenience and personalized services is changing sharply, the accelerating iteration of on-demand logistics patterns causes a downward trend of delivery income that it’s difficult for the platform to balance the operation cost and labor motivation from the perspective of revenue. The prior research in crowdsourcing logistics focuses on the influence of continuance participation intention from the perspectives of external and internal incentive. However, incentive researches are unsuitable for current background of the downwards trend of delivery income comlpetely. And the characteristics of instability, unsafety and unfairness of couriers occupation which were reported by social news not only the reasons of high turnover rate and mismatching of supply-demand, but also point to the problem of management mechanisms such as incentive mechanism, order mechanism and information mechanism. As our knowledge, platform mechanism influence couriers’ daily tasks immediately but the related researches are absent in crowdsourcing logistics, especially considering the order receiving and completing which is the first concern of courier, order mechanism and information mechanism will influence the order receiving and completing directly. Order mechanism means platform assigns orders to courier, it’s the guarantee of matching supply and demand (couriers and orders), as well as the full coverage of the orders. There are different order assignment strategies, from the perspective of the human resources, evaluating performance and seting grades is common strategy, grades is the principles for orders assignment priority to encourage employees with good service quality to stay. In order to guarantee the timeless, some platforms will assign orders from perspective of space. This research summarized the two kinds of order assignment strategies as performance-priority strategy and distance-priority strategy. In performance-priority order assignment strategy, the courier will get an evaluation grade and differentiated orders assignment priority according to their total number of completed orders, total milage, punctuality rate, praise rate and other indicators. The distance-priority order assignment strategy sends orders to the neighboring courier according to the distance from the orders and the stores, and give priority to the closer courier. Information mechanism provides platform labor with assistance, which focuses on the information content of user interface that disclosure by platform. The quantity and accuracy of the information have significant influence on users’ intention and behavior, and the richness of information content as an important dimension of information characteristics affects the information receivers’ behavior immediately. Therefore, according to the operation information in Chinese on-demand logistics platform, this research summarized the information content and conclude two levels of information disclosure in on-demand logistics: one is overall layout information, the number of orders and courier, location layout and real-time traffic information; the other one is individual specific information, order details (distribution revenue goods category, merchant location and time requirements of each order) and transportation capacity details (the level and ranking of each courier on the platform). Each information disclosure includes three aspects: order, capacity and transportation. Detailed information disclosure includes two levels of information: overall layout and individual specific information. Brief information disclosure only includes overall layout information. To abstract differences in orders and information mechanisms specifically, and control other mechanisms (such as incentive mechanism) keep cnsistent better to highlights the effects of the research object, this research designed experiments based on justice theory for Chinese couriers, considered different orders assignment strategy (Performance-priority vs. distance-priority) and information disclosure (detailed information vs. brief information), introduced information justice and distribution justice perception as mediation to investigate the interaction between order assignment strategy and information disclosure, analyzed the moderating path of work experience and proactive personality. With a sample of 340 part-time and full-time couriers, experiment 1 results showed that the interaction between order assignment strategy and information disclosure in on-demand logistics significantly affects the continuance participation intention of couriers, especially under performance-priority order assignment strategy disclosure detailed information(vs. brief information), but under distance-priority order assignment strategy there were no difference in continuance participation intention between detailed and brief information disclosure which showed the ceiling effect of information disclosure, brief information already contains the basis information of distance-priority order assignment strategy, more detailed information would not improve continuous participation intention significantly. Information justice and distributive justice played a significant mediating role, and work experience and proactive personality moderate the above interaction relationships. However, the results of experiment 2 with a sample of 180 part-time couriers indicated that the mediating effect of distributive justice and the moderating effect of proactive personality were both insignificant, which showed the purposefulness and proactiveness characteristcs of part-time couriers, . The research reveals the mechanism of justice perception on continuous participation intention and the process of information understanding and utilization in crowdsourcing logistics platform, provided specific management suggestions for the platform to attract delivery capacity by setting order assignment strategy and information disclosure when the distribution income is gradually stabilized. Furture, more mechanism can be introduced with appropriate justice perception, and more group characteristics of crowdsourcing logistics participants can be considered

Sequential Condition Evolved Interaction Knowledge Graph for Traditional Chinese Medicine Recommendation

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has a rich history of utilizing natural herbs to treat a diversity of illnesses. In practice, TCM diagnosis and treatment are highly personalized and organically holistic, requiring comprehensive consideration of the patient's state and symptoms over time. However, existing TCM recommendation approaches overlook the changes in patient status and only explore potential patterns between symptoms and prescriptions. In this paper, we propose a novel Sequential Condition Evolved Interaction Knowledge Graph (SCEIKG), a framework that treats the model as a sequential prescription-making problem by considering the dynamics of the patient's condition across multiple visits. In addition, we incorporate an interaction knowledge graph to enhance the accuracy of recommendations by considering the interactions between different herbs and the patient's condition. Experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing TCM recommendation methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance

Blue phase liquid crystals stabilized by linear photo-polymerization

Stabilizing a photopolymer-embedded blue phase liquid crystal precursor with linearly polarized UV light is investigated experimentally. When the UV polarization axis is perpendicular to the stripe electrodes of an in-plane-switching cell, anisotropic polymer networks are formed through the linear photo-polymerization process and the electrostriction effect is suppressed. As a result, the measured hysteresis is dramatically reduced from 6.95% to 0.36% and the response time shortened by similar to 2x compared to unpolarized UV exposure. To induce larger anisotropy in polymer networks for mitigating the electrostriction effect, high-intensity linearly polarized UV exposure is preferred

Electro-optic response of polymer-stabilized blue phase liquid crystals

The dynamic response of a polymer-stabilized blue phase liquid crystal (BPLC) is comprised of two distinct processes: Kerr effect-induced local reorientation and electrostriction-induced lattice distortion. A double exponential rise/decay model is proposed to analyze the underlying physical mechanisms. If the electric field is below a critical field (E-c), Kerr effect dominates and the response time is fast. However, when E \u3e E-c electrostriction effect manifests, leading to an increased response time and a noticeable hysteresis. A higher polymer concentration helps suppress electrostriction, but the tradeoff is increased operation voltage. These results provide useful guidelines for future BPLC material and device optimizations

Bioactivity-based HPLC tandem Q/TOF for alpha-glucosidase inhibitors : Screening, identification, and quantification from actinomycetes

This study was performed to screen α-glucosidase inhibitors from the actinomycete metabolites library by high throughput screening. Twelve strains of actinomycete were considered to be α-glucosidase inhibitors producing strains; then effective inhibitory strain PW409 was fermented and separated by bioactivity based HPLC, two fractions showing remarkable inhibitory activities; the two compounds were identified as 1-deoxynojirimycin (DNJ) and miglitol by mass spectrometry, comparing with authentic standards, and relevant literature. The quantification analysis of DNJ and miglitol by HPLC-MS/MS showed that the average concentrations of DNJ and miglitol in broth of strain PW409 were 11.2 and 95.8 mg/L, respectively. This is the first report about Streptomyces sp. products α-glucosidase inhibitor miglitol. The strain PW409 has potential application in biosynthesis and biotransformation of antidiabetes drug miglitol. The method can be utilized for new α-glucosidase inhibitors discovering and development from other inhibitory activity strains.Colegio de Farmacéuticos de la Provincia de Buenos Aire

Fingolimod exerts in vitro anticancer activity against hepatocellular carcinoma cell lines via YAP/TAZ suppression

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remains a notably global health challenge with high mortality rates and poor prognosis. The deregulation of the Hippo signalling pathway, especially the overexpression and activation of downstream effector Yes-associated protein (YAP), has been demonstrated to result in the rapid malignant evolution of HCC. In this context, multiple efforts have been dedicated to targeting YAP for HCC therapy, but effective YAP inhibitors are still lacking. In this study, through a YAP-TEAD (8×GTIIC) luciferase reporter assay, we identified fingolimod, an immunomodulatory drug approved for the treatment of multiple sclerosis, as a novel YAP inhibitor. Fingolimod suppressed the proliferation of HCC cell lines by downregulating the protein levels as well as the transactivating function of YAP. Overall, our current study not only identifies fingolimod as a novel YAP-targeting inhibitor, but also indicates that this clinically-approved drug could be utilized as a potential and feasible therapeutic drug for HCC

Dynamic ASR Pathways: An Adaptive Masking Approach Towards Efficient Pruning of A Multilingual ASR Model

Neural network pruning offers an effective method for compressing a multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) model with minimal performance loss. However, it entails several rounds of pruning and re-training needed to be run for each language. In this work, we propose the use of an adaptive masking approach in two scenarios for pruning a multilingual ASR model efficiently, each resulting in sparse monolingual models or a sparse multilingual model (named as Dynamic ASR Pathways). Our approach dynamically adapts the sub-network, avoiding premature decisions about a fixed sub-network structure. We show that our approach outperforms existing pruning methods when targeting sparse monolingual models. Further, we illustrate that Dynamic ASR Pathways jointly discovers and trains better sub-networks (pathways) of a single multilingual model by adapting from different sub-network initializations, thereby reducing the need for language-specific pruning