Diversification, Relatedness, And Firm Performance: Empirical Evidence From China

The relationship between diversification, relatedness and performance has long been a controversial issue in mainstream strategic management research. Research in this area, however, has focused primarily on developed countries. This study argues that the conclusions drawn from developed countries may not apply to developing countries. In an investigation of 227 publicly-listed companies in China, this study found that: 1) firm scale significantly contributes to the improvement of economic performance; 2) relatedness correlates negatively with firm performance, and 3) the relationship between diversification and performance fits the intermediate model. This study also provided evidence to support the argument that differences do exist in the rationales between firms in developed and developing countries

A Circuit-Based Quantum Algorithm Driven by Transverse Fields for Grover's Problem

We designed a quantum search algorithm, giving the same quadratic speedup achieved by Grover's original algorithm; we replace Grover's diffusion operator (hard to implement) with a product diffusion operator generated by transverse fields (easy to implement). In our algorithm, the problem Hamiltonian (oracle) and the transverse fields are applied to the system alternatively. We construct such a sequence that the corresponding unitary generates a closed transition between the initial state (even superposition of all states) and a modified target state, which has a high degree of overlap with the original target state

Effects of Walking in Bamboo Forest and City Environments on Brainwave Activity in Young Adults

Background. In Japan, “Shinrin-yoku” or forest bathing (spending time in forests) is a major practice used for relaxation. However, its effects on promoting human mental health are still under consideration. The objective of this study was to investigate the physiological and psychological relaxation effects of forest walking on adults. Sixty participants (50% males; 50% females) were trained to walk 15-minute predetermined courses in a bamboo forest and a city area (control). The length of the courses was the same to allow comparison of the effects of both environments. Blood pressure and EEG results were measured to assess the physiological responses and the semantic differential method (SDM) and STAI were used to study the psychological responses. Blood pressure was significantly decreased and variation in brain activity was observed in both environments. The results of the two questionnaires indicated that walking in the bamboo forest improves mood and reduces anxiety. Moreover, the mean meditation and attention scores were significantly increased after walking in a bamboo forest. The results of the physiological and psychological measurements indicate the relaxing effects of walking in a bamboo forest on adults

Hepatoprotective effect of Alhagi sparsifolia against Alcoholic Liver injury in mice

Overconsumption of alcohol leads to alcoholic liver disease (ALD). Natural compounds have been investigated previously for their hepatoprotective activities against liver injury. This study investigated the protective effect of Alhagi sparsifolia on ALD. Alcohol was administered to mice for three consecutive days; either alone or in combination with Alhagi sparsifolia extract (150, 300, 600 mg/kg). Serum aspartate aminotransferase and alanine transaminase as biomarkers of liver injury, the content of malonaldehyde, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and glutathione which indicated the redox status of liver and the antioxidant enzyme activity of super oxide dismutase were detected, respectively. Moreover, the expression of protein cytochrome P450 2E1 (CYP2E1) the key enzyme of alcohol metabolism, and also tested by western blot experiment. Subsequently, the mRNA levels of inflammatory factors including TNF- α and TLR4 was determined real-time PCR. Results showed that Alhagi sparsifolia significantly alleviated alcohol-induced liver injury by reducing serum ALT and AST, inhibiting MDA and H2O2 content, increasing SOD, and GSH level in the liver (P< 0.05). In addition, the Alhagi sparsifolia treatment inhibited the expression of CYP2E1 (P< 0.05). The results suggest that Alhagi sparsifolia could be a promising natural substance for ameliorating acute alcohol-induced oxidative stress and hepatic injury

A Validation Approach to Over-parameterized Matrix and Image Recovery

In this paper, we study the problem of recovering a low-rank matrix from a number of noisy random linear measurements. We consider the setting where the rank of the ground-truth matrix is unknown a prior and use an overspecified factored representation of the matrix variable, where the global optimal solutions overfit and do not correspond to the underlying ground-truth. We then solve the associated nonconvex problem using gradient descent with small random initialization. We show that as long as the measurement operators satisfy the restricted isometry property (RIP) with its rank parameter scaling with the rank of ground-truth matrix rather than scaling with the overspecified matrix variable, gradient descent iterations are on a particular trajectory towards the ground-truth matrix and achieve nearly information-theoretically optimal recovery when stop appropriately. We then propose an efficient early stopping strategy based on the common hold-out method and show that it detects nearly optimal estimator provably. Moreover, experiments show that the proposed validation approach can also be efficiently used for image restoration with deep image prior which over-parameterizes an image with a deep network.Comment: 29 pages and 9 figure

Protective effect of Alhagi sparsifolia against acetaminophen-induced liver injury in mice

Purpose: To investigate the hepatoprotective effects of Alhagi sparsifolia extract against acetaminophen (APAP)-induced liver injury in mice.Methods: Three doses of Alhagi sparsifolia (600, 300 and 150 mg/kg) were were administered to separate groups of mice orally once a day for three days. One-hour after the last dose, APAP (300 mg/kg) was intraperitoneally injected. Liver tissue was taken and tested for levels of serum aspartate aminotransferase (AST) and alanine transaminase (ALT) as biomarkers of liver injury; malonaldehyde (MDA); hydrogen peroxide (H2O2); glutathione (GSH) as an indicator of liver redox; and antioxidant enzyme activity using super oxide dismutase (SOD) assay. Additionally, western blotting was used to measure the expression of protein cytochrome P450 2E1 (CYP2E1) as the key enzyme of APAP metabolism.Results: Blood serum of ALT and AST and levels of CYP2E1 were markedly reduced, while the levels of MDA, H2O2, and SOD were elevated in a dose-dependent manner in mice treated with Alhagi sparsifolia compared to control group treated with APAP alone.Conclusion: The results demonstrate that Alhagi sparsifolia protects mice liver tissue against APAPinduced hepatic injury partly via decreased oxidative stress and inhibition of CYP2E1 expression.Keywords: Alhagi sparsifolia, Polysaccharide, Acetaminophen, CYP2E1, Antioxidan