The Chinese Diaspora and Philanthropy

This paper explores philanthropic links between the Chinese diaspora and the People's Republic of China. It draws on a wide range of sources and aims to sketch the range and nature of those links

Electromagnetic form factors of the baryon decuplet with flavor SU(3) symmetry breaking

We investigate the electromagnetic form factors of the baryon decuplet within the framework of the $\mathrm{SU(3)}$ self-consistent chiral quark-soliton model, taking into account the $1/N_c$ rotational corrections and the effects of flavor $\mathrm{SU(3)}$ symmetry breaking. We first examine the valence- and sea-quark contributions to each electromagnetic form factor of the baryon decuplet and then the effects of the flavor SU(3) symmetry breaking. The present results are in good agreement with the recent lattice data. We also compute the charge radii, the magnetic radii, the magnetic dipole moments and the electric quadrupole moments, comparing their results with those from other theoretical works. We also make a chiral extrapolation to compare the present results with the lattice data in a more quantitative manner. The results show in general similar tendency to the lattice results. In particular, the results of the $M1$ and $E2$ form factors are in good agreement with those of lattice QCD.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figures. Comparison with the lattice data was elaborate

Teaching Engineering Ethics in the Classroom through a Town Hall Meeting Activity

Engineers often contribute to projects that impact many people and have ethical implications. Some may even move to a career of political advocacy and policy-making. However, most engineering curricula have a strongly technical focus and do not require students to think critically about ethical issues related to engineering. To bridge this gap, we developed a classroom-based town hall meeting activity that demonstrates the ethical issues that may arise when engineers are advocating for or helping craft public policies. Our town hall meeting scenario, which was set in a fictional tourist town called Rainbow Town, divided a class of twenty engineering students into groups of engineers, politicians, and voters. There were two opposing political groups and two engineering groups with competing interests. The voters had individual characters with varying careers and objectives. The town hall meeting was a debate on whether Rainbow Town should undertake a construction project that would bring jobs to the city, but could potentially adversely impact fish population at the town’s natural heritage site, the main source of income for the town. The objective of the activity varied based on what role each student was playing. The politicians’ job was to further the objectives of their own party while simultaneously keeping their voter base happy. The engineers’ job was to help voters make an informed decision about which policy (or party) to vote for, while helping politicians craft the right policy. The voters’ job was to protect their own livelihoods. Despite the simplicity of the town hall meeting scenario, the students wholeheartedly donned the mantle of their assigned role, taking the objectives of their role seriously. At the post-activity debrief, students commented that the activity was harder on the engineers since they had to prove everything with facts, but the politician groups did not.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Organizational Learning from Extreme Performance Experience: The Impact of Success and Recovery Experience

This paper argues that two different types of a firm’s own extreme performance experiences—success and recovery—and their interactions can generate survival-enhancing learning. Although these types of experience often represent valuable sources of useful learning, several important learning challenges arise when a firm has extremely limited prior experience of the same type. Thus, we theorize that a certain threshold of a given type of experience is required before each type of experience becomes valuable, with low levels of experience harming the organization. Furthermore, we propose that success and recovery experience will interact to enhance each other’s value. These conditions can help overcome learning challenges such as superstitious learning or learning from small samples. We investigate our ideas using a sample of the U.S. commercial banks founded between 1984 and 1998. Our results indicate that both success and recovery experience of a firm generate survival-enhancing learning, but only after a certain level of experience is reached. Furthermore, success and recovery experience enhance each other’s learning value, consistent with the theories that emphasize the importance of richer and contrasting experience in providing useful knowledge. Our framework advances organizational learning theory by presenting a contingent model of the impact of success and recovery experience and their interaction

The Role of Noxa/MCL-1 in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma (HNSCC) Treatment

Head and neck cancer is the sixth leading type of cancer with 90 percent of head and neck cancer arising from squamous cell lining on the epithelium of the oral and nasal cavity, pharynx, and salivary gland. Even with tremendous achievements on chemotherapeutic drugs and therapies, the long-term prognosis of patients with advanced head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) has shown little improvement over the last three decades. Cisplatin is one of widely used chemotherapeutic drugs for multiple cancers, including head and neck cancer, but the prolonged use of this drug is limited by its toxicity and by the development of resistance. To overcome these major roadblocks to improved prognosis requires mechanism-based therapeutic strategies to maximize the antitumor effect of drugs while limiting their toxicities. Cisplatin exerts anticancer effects via multiple mechanisms, yet its most prominent mode of action involves the generation of DNA lesions followed by the activation of the DNA damage response and the induction of BCL-2 family-dependent mitochondrial apoptosis. DNA damage activates a tumor suppressor p53 to induce apoptosis. One of its functions is to induce the expression of several pro-apoptotic proteins such as Noxa, which binds to an anti-apoptotic BCL-2 family protein, MCL-1 (myeloid leukemia cell-1) to inactivate its pro-survival function and induce apoptosis. We examined Noxa expression and apoptosis induced by cisplatin in p53-wild-type HN30 and HN31, p53-truncated and inactive HN4 and HN12, and p53-deleted HN22 and HN8 HNSCC cell lines. We found that Noxa was induced in HN30 and HN31 cells and down-regulation of Noxa by shRNA (short-hairpin RNA) decreased apoptosis, indicating Noxa contribution to cisplatin-induced apoptosis. Interestingly, cisplatin treatment induced Noxa and apoptosis even in p53-deleted HN22 and HN8 cells, suggesting the existence of the p53-independent pathways for the induction of Noxa. Based on these observations, we hypothesized that modulation of Noxa/MCL-1 axis could mimic cisplatin-induced cell death. We found that Noxa overexpression induced cell death in all cell lines tested regardless of p53 status. This finding could be applicable as a potential therapeutic strategy to treat head and neck cancer