The recent COVID-19 pandemic has clearly shown how agricultural foods and e-commerce initiatives are critical for many organizations, regions, and countries worldwide. Despite this vital importance, ...prior IS research on the business value of IT has not paid enough attention to the potential specificities of the agribusinesses. This study examines the impact of e-commerce capability on business agility in agribusinesses. Using a sample of Chinese agriculture firms, we find that: 1) The e-commerce capability of agribusinesses enables two types of business agility: market capitalizing agility and operational adjustment agility, and 2) while environmental complexity positively moderates the effects of e-commerce capability on the market capitalizing agility and operational adjustment agility, environmental dynamism does not. This study contributes to the IS research on the business value of IT by providing an eloquent theoretical explanation and empirical evidence on how e-commerce capability help agricultural firms to thrive through complexity by enabling market capitalizing agility (strategic focus) and operational adjustment agility (operational focus).
•Agricultural foods and e-commerce initiatives are critical worldwide.•Specificities of the agribusiness context worldwide and in China.•E-commerce capability enables agribusinesses to thrive through complexity.•Rationale: E-commerce capability facilitates business agility to agribusinesses.•This paper contributes to IS research on business value of e-commerce initiatives.
Display omitted
•Circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) is one of the key features of chiral luminescent molecules, having unique mechanisms and many intriguing yet un-solving problems.•CPL-MOMs ...(metal–organic materials) linked by coordination bonds have become a hot topic, arousing wide applications in stereo-optical LED, biochemistry and biomedicine, recognition and sensing, photoswitches, security, anti-counterfeiting, and so on.•This review surveys the recent progress in CPL-MOMs, focusing on basic concepts, methods, up-to-date mechanisms, strategies and typical examples, with an intent to show the understanding of scientific problems and reach potential applications and prospects.
Chirality is ubiquitous in nature, and circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) is one of the key features of some chiral non-racemic luminescent systems. Among the developed CPL-active systems, chiral metal–organic materials (MOMs) have become tremendously meaningful due to the combination of coordination-bonded metal centers and organic ligands. This brings specific opportunities in the design of novel structures including coordination polymers, discrete supramolecular assemblies, and other types of coordination complexes with molecular or supramolecular-leveled chirality, which can be originated from ligand or metal-based chirogens and luminogens. In these chiral MOMs, CPL properties might be aroused or amplified under suitable arrangement of chirogens and luminogens, for which, effective strategies like controlled self-assembly for helicity amplification, aggregation of luminogens, charge transfer, energy transfer, etc, have been put forward. As a result, exciting potential applications have been found in such fields as CPL-OLED, stereo-biochemistry and biomedicine, chiral recognition and sensing, chiroptical photoswitches, security devices and so on. In this review, we will mainly discuss the recent progress made in CPL MOMs, including the basic concepts, major parameters and characterization methods, mechanism and designing origins, different structural categories, effective strategies to enhance CPL performance, as well as their practical applications and prospects.
Double‐atom catalysts (DACs) have emerged as a novel frontier in heterogeneous catalysis because the synergistic effect between adjacent active sites can promote their catalytic activity while ...maintaining high atomic utilization efficiency, good selectivity, and high stability originating from the atomically dispersed nature. In this review, the recent progress in both experimental and theoretical research on DACs for various catalytic reactions is focused. Specifically, the central tasks in the design of DACs—manipulating the synergistic effect and engineering atomic and electronic structures of catalysts—are systematically reviewed, along with the prevailing experimental, characterization, and computational modeling approaches. Furthermore, the practical applications of DACs in water splitting, oxygen reduction reaction, nitrogen reduction reaction, and carbon dioxide reduction reaction are addressed. Finally, the future challenges for DACs are summarized and an outlook on the further investigations of DACs toward heterogeneous catalysis in high‐performance energy and environmental applications is provided.
Double‐atom catalysts (DACs) have emerged as a new frontier of heterogeneous catalysis with promoted catalytic activity from the synergistic effect between adjacent active sites. Manipulating the synergistic effect and engineering atomic and electronic structures of catalysts are central tasks in the design of DACs. In this review, experimental and theoretical approaches and practical applications are introduced.
(
) is a well-studied probiotic bacterium that can colonize a large number of mammals. In humans,
is found in different body sites, including the gastrointestinal tract, urinary tract, skin, and ...breast milk. The abundance of
varies among different individuals. Several beneficial effects of
have been noted. First,
can produce antimicrobial molecules, such as organic acids, ethanol, and reuterin. Due to its antimicrobial activity,
is able to inhibit the colonization of pathogenic microbes and remodel the commensal microbiota composition in the host. Second,
can benefit the host immune system. For instance, some
strains can reduce the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines while promoting regulatory T cell development and function. Third, bearing the ability to strengthen the intestinal barrier, the colonization of
may decrease the microbial translocation from the gut lumen to the tissues. Microbial translocation across the intestinal epithelium has been hypothesized as an initiator of inflammation. Therefore, inflammatory diseases, including those located in the gut as well as in remote tissues, may be ameliorated by increasing the colonization of
. Notably, the decrease in the abundance of
in humans in the past decades is correlated with an increase in the incidences of inflammatory diseases over the same period of time. Direct supplementation or prebiotic modulation of
may be an attractive preventive and/or therapeutic avenue against inflammatory diseases.
With the rising prevalence of autoimmune diseases, the role of the environment, specifically the gut microbiota, in disease development has grown to be a major area of study. Recent advances show a ...relationship and possible cause and effect between the gut microbiota and the initiation or exacerbation of autoimmune diseases. Furthermore, microbial dysbiosis and leaky gut are frequent phenomena in both human autoimmune diseases and the murine autoimmunity models. This review will focus on literature in recent years concerning the gut microbiota and leaky gut in relation to the autoimmune diseases, including systemic lupus erythematosus, type 1 diabetes, and multiple sclerosis.
A leaky gut has been observed in a number of autoimmune diseases including type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, and systemic lupus erythematosus. Previous studies from our ...laboratory have shown that lupus mice also bear a leaky gut and that the intestinal barrier function can be enhanced by gut colonization of probiotics such as
spp
Retinoic acid (RA) can increase the relative abundance of
spp. in the gut. Interestingly, RA has also been shown to strengthen the barrier function of epithelial cells in vitro and in the absence of probiotic bacteria. These reports bring up an interesting question of whether RA exerts protective effects on the intestinal barrier directly or through regulating the microbiota colonization. In this review, we will discuss the roles of RA in immunomodulation, recent literature on the involvement of a leaky gut in different autoimmune diseases, and how RA shapes the outcomes of these diseases.
Online impulsive buying has become increasingly prevalent in e-commerce and social commerce research, yet there is a paucity of systematically examining this particular phenomenon in the paradigm of ...information systems. To advance this line of research, this study aims to gain insight into online impulsive buying through a meta-analysis of relevant research. Derived from 54 articles, this meta-analysis categorized the critical factors that influence online impulsive buying into the website, marketing, and affective stimuli. This study further explores the moderating effect of economic development level. The empirical results reveal that the chosen 13 main factors are significantly and positively related to online impulsive buying except for website security, price, novelty, and negative emotion. Moreover, economic development level moderates the relationship between several factors (i.e., website visual appeal, ease of use, price, promotion, pleasure, and positive emotion) and online impulsive buying. This study contributes to both theory and practice. It not only extends the impulsive buying literature to the online context by emphasizing the IT-supported website stimuli, but also provides implications for future research on online impulsive buying behavior across different economic development levels. Moreover, it provides guidelines for practitioners on how to leverage information technology to induce online impulsive buying.
•Switching behavior involves push, pull, and mooring factors.•Privacy concerns push users to switch.•Monetary rewards of alternatives pull users to switch.•Inertia moors users to stay with incumbent ...mobile payment apps.
Switching behaviors of mobile payment application received scarce attention. This study investigates the key factors influencing the switching behaviors of mobile payment application through the perspective of the push–pull–mooring framework. Privacy concerns, alternative rewards, and inertia are identified as push, pull, and mooring factors, respectively. The model was tested with 3785 valid responses among Alipay users. Inertia was found to attenuate the relationship between alternative rewards and switching behavior. This study sheds new light on the switching behavior of mobile payment application users. Our findings inform service providers to retain existing users as well as attract potential users.
The intestinal epithelial lining, together with factors secreted from it, forms a barrier that separates the host from the environment. In pathologic conditions, the permeability of the epithelial ...lining may be compromised allowing the passage of toxins, antigens, and bacteria in the lumen to enter the blood stream creating a "leaky gut." In individuals with a genetic predisposition, a leaky gut may allow environmental factors to enter the body and trigger the initiation and development of autoimmune disease. Growing evidence shows that the gut microbiota is important in supporting the epithelial barrier and therefore plays a key role in the regulation of environmental factors that enter the body. Several recent reports have shown that probiotics can reverse the leaky gut by enhancing the production of tight junction proteins; however, additional and longer term studies are still required. Conversely, pathogenic bacteria that can facilitate a leaky gut and induce autoimmune symptoms can be ameliorated with the use of antibiotic treatment. Therefore, it is hypothesized that modulating the gut microbiota can serve as a potential method for regulating intestinal permeability and may help to alter the course of autoimmune diseases in susceptible individuals.
In this article, we present a metaheuristic-based control framework, called beetle antennae olfactory recurrent neural network, for simultaneous tracking control and obstacle avoidance of a redundant ...manipulator. The ability to avoid obstacles while tracking a predefined reference path is critical for any industrial manipulator. The formulated control framework unifies the tracking control and obstacle avoidance into a single constrained optimization problem by introducing a penalty term into the objective function, which actively rewards the optimizer for avoiding the obstacles. One of the significant features of the proposed framework is the way that the penalty term is formulated following a straightforward principle: maximize the minimum distance between a manipulator and an obstacle. The distance calculations are based on Gilbert-Johnson-Keerthi algorithm, which calculates the distance between a manipulator and an obstacle by directly using their three-dimensional geometries, which also implies that our algorithm works for a manipulator and an arbitrarily shaped obstacle. Theoretical treatment proves the stability and convergence, and simulations results using an LBR IIWA seven-DOF manipulator are presented to analyze the performance of the proposed framework.
PDF
