Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and alliances are potential alternative choices for managers. We propose that three dimensions of industry conditions are likely to be influential in such choices: (1) ...industry demands on firms to make significant commitment, (2) the environmental pressures for flexibility, and (3) the limitations on firm choices stemming from industry concentration and institutional conditions. We develop propositions about how differences across these three dimensions influence the choices that firms make between M&As and alliances.
•Low-frequency magnetic field influenced on myofibrillar protein gel properties.•0.5 mT was the optimum intensity for water-holding capacity of gel.•Low-frequency magnetic field affected secondary ...structures of myofibrillar protein.
This study aimed to investigate the effect of a low-frequency magnetic field (LF-MF; 0, 0.25, 0.5, and 1.4 mT) on the gel properties of pork myofibrillar protein (MP) and to explore potential mechanisms. The water-holding capacity (WHC) and rheological properties of MP gels treated at 0.5 mT were better than those from other treatments. The water mobility did not change significantly as intensity increased, while the ratios of immobilized water (PT21) and free water (PT22) significantly decreased and increased, respectively. This suggested that the effect of LF-MF on MP hydration might be related to the formation of water clusters. Raman spectra suggested that α-helices unfolded and β-sheets, β-turns, and random coils were formed in MP gels (from 0.25 to 1.4 mT). Furthermore, the intensities of characteristic peaks in the tryptophan and aliphatic residues band were highest at 0.5 mT, indicating that 0.5 mT was the optimum intensity for hydrophobic interactions.
In this paper, a novel turbo-coded 16-ary orbital angular momentum - shift keying-free space optical (OAM-SK-FSO) communication system combining a convolutional neural network (CNN) based adaptive ...demodulator under strong atmospheric turbulence is proposed for the first time. The feasibility of the scheme is verified by transmitting a 256-grayscale two-dimensional digital image. The bit error ratio (BER) performance of the system is investigated and the effect of different factors such as turbulence strength, propagation distance, code rate, length of random interleaver and length of bit interleaver is also taken into account. An advanced encoder/decoder structure and mapping scheme are applied to diminish the influence of CNN misclassification and reduce the BER effectively. With the optimal encoder/decoder structure and CNN model settings, the BER varies from 0 to 4.89×10
when the propagation distance increases from 200m to 1000m for a given turbulence strength Cn2 equals 5×10
m
. For a determined propagation distance equals 400m, the BER ranges from 0 to 4.01×10
when Cn2increases from 1×10
m
to 4×10
m
. Our numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed system can provide better BER performance under strong atmospheric turbulence and conditions when the classification ability of CNN is limited.
A novel multifrequency printed monopole antenna applied to both WLAN and WiMAX systems is proposed in this letter. The antenna structure is simple, and the size is 34×18 mm 2 . The proposed ...microstrip-fed antenna mainly comprises a fork-shaped strip that is etched on a modified rectangular ring and a rectangular-defected ground plane. To experimentally analyze the characteristics of this antenna, the design, fabrication, and measurement have been completed. Good antenna performances have been obtained.
As the hub and carrier to transfer the passengers, the railway station is an important factor that affects the rail passenger transportation because the normal operation of the station without load ...redundancy is determined by the moderate passenger flow. It means reasonable and accurate prediction of passengers entering and leaving the station can provide the basis and guarantee for the station security, the resources allocation and the personnel deployment. Since the neural network model is good at processing the common regular data changes through training the network and adjusting the weight value based on a large number of training samples, the neural network model is used in processing the short-term irregular data to predict the passenger flow at the railway station which is susceptible to the constantly changing external factors. In this paper, the neural network is used to predict the passenger flow. First, the key factors affecting the change of the passenger flow are selected and analyzed as the input of the neural network. Second, the learning and the rate updating of variable step size are adopted to estimate the number people entering the station during a certain time interval, which is then weighted with the historical data to derive the prediction of the passenger flow during the next time interval. The simulation results show that the experiment results show that the method proposed in this paper can better track and predict the sudden changes in the passenger flow caused by emergencies. Meanwhile, it can be found that in the process of forecasting abnormal passenger flow, the most critical link is to summarize and summarize the characteristics of railway station passenger flow, clarify the type and time distribution of passenger flow at each station, and analyze the factors that cause abnormal changes in passenger flow.
In the present paper, a vinyl ester (VE) resin, potentially used as a resin matrix for fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite sucker rods in oil drilling, FRP bridge cables, or FRP marine ...structures, was investigated on its resistance to water and alkaline solution immersion in terms of water uptake, hydrothermal expansion, and mechanical properties. A two-stage diffusion model was applied to simulate the water uptake processes. Alkaline solution immersion led to a slightly higher mass loss (approx. 0.4%) compared to water immersion (approx. 0.23%) due to the hydrolysis and leaching of uncured small molecules (e.g., styrene). Water immersion caused the expansion of VE plates monitored with Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG). With the same water uptake, the expansion increased with immersion temperatures, which is attributed to the increased relaxation extent of the resin molecular networks. Although an obvious decrease of the glass transition temperatures (
) of VE due to water immersion (5.4 to 6.1 °C/1% water uptake),
can be recovered almost completely after drying. Tensile test results indicate that a short-term immersion (less than 6 months) enhances both the strength and elongation at break, while the extension of the immersion time degrades both the strength and elongation. The modulus of VE shows insensitive to the immersion even at elevated temperatures.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a malignant tumor with invasive and metastatic characteristics and poor prognosis. Intracellular protein homeostasis is associated with invasion and ...metastasis of pancreatic cancer, but the specific molecular mechanism remains unclear. Our previous studies have revealed that DNAJB11, a key protein in protein homeostasis, is secreted by exosomes in the supernatant of dissociated pancreatic cancer cells with high metastasis. The results from transcriptome sequencing and co-immunoprecipitation (Co-IP)-based liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) showed that depletion of DNAJB11 levels could increase HSPA5 expression and induce endoplasmic reticulum stress through the PRKR-like endoplasmic reticulum kinase signaling pathway in pancreatic cancer cells. Furthermore, exosomal DNAJB11 promoted cell development of PC cells in vitro and in vivo. In addition, exosomal DNAJB11 could regulate the expression of EGFR and activate the downstream MAPK signaling pathway. Clinical blood samples were collected to evaluate the potential of exosome DNAJB11 as a diagnostic biomarker and therapeutic target for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. This study could provide a new theoretical basis and potential molecular targets for the treatment of pancreatic cancer.
One-dimensional TiO
2
nanotube array (1D-TNTs) was prepared on the surface of the pure titanium mesh by a simple anodization method, and 2H phase MoS
2
(2H-MoS
2
) was deposited on the surface of the ...1D-TNTs with a magnetron sputtering method. XRD, SEM, TEM, XPS, PL, UV–Vis DRS and photoelectric properties were used to characterize the 2H-MoS
2
/1D-TNTs composite material. The results show that 2H-MoS
2
is uniformly composited on the surface of 1D-TNTs. By constructing Z-scheme transfer mechanism of electron–hole pairs, the carrier separation efficiency is significantly increased and the recombination rate is reduced, so that the degradation of rhodamine B by 2H-MoS
2
/1D-TNTs under simulated visible light is greatly improved. The stability of 2H-MoS
2
/1D-TNTs was tested by cyclic photocatalysis experiment. The mechanism was studied by masking experiment, and it was concluded that OH and·O
2
−
are the main active species in the catalytic process.
Accurate monitoring of grassland biomass at high spatial and temporal resolutions is important for the effective utilization of grasslands in ecological and agricultural applications. However, ...current remote sensing data cannot simultaneously provide accurate monitoring of vegetation changes with fine temporal and spatial resolutions. We used a data-fusion approach, namely the spatial and temporal adaptive reflectance fusion model (STARFM), to generate synthetic normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data from Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Landsat data sets. This provided observations at fine temporal (8-d) and medium spatial (30 m) resolutions. Based on field-sampled aboveground biomass (AGB), synthetic NDVI and support vector machine (SVM) techniques were integrated to develop an AGB estimation model (SVM-AGB) for Xilinhot in Inner Mongolia, China. Compared with model generated from MODIS-NDVI (R2 = 0.73, root-mean-square error (RMSE) = 30.61 g/m2), the SVM-AGB model we developed can not only ensure the accuracy of estimation (R2 = 0.77, RMSE = 17.22 g/m2), but also produce higher spatial (30 m) and temporal resolution (8-d) biomass maps. We then generated the time-series biomass to detect biomass anomalies for grassland regions. We found that the synthetic NDVI-derived estimations contained more details on the distribution and severity of vegetation anomalies compared with MODIS NDVI-derived AGB estimations. This is the first time that we have generated time series of grassland biomass with 30-m and 8-d intervals data through combined use of a data-fusion method and the SVM-AGB model. Our study will be useful for near real-time and accurate (improved resolutions) monitoring of grassland conditions, and the data have implications for arid and semi-arid grasslands management.
Four novel metal-free organic sensitizers bearing double donor–acceptor (D–A) branches with indole and phenoxazine units as donors (SDD1–4) and cyanoacrylic acid as electron acceptor were synthesized ...and characterized for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). Dyes SDD1–3 were designed with indole as a donor and 1,4-phenylenebis(methylene), 1,4-butylene and 1,6-hexylene as a linker, respectively, while the dye SDD4 was designed with phenoxazine as a core donor. Their photophysical, electrochemical, and DSSCs characteristics were investigated. The results show that the architecture structure of the linkage affects the performance of the cells slightly. The DSSCs based on SDD4 shows much higher η than the DSSCs based on SDD1–3, which indicated that phenoxazine is a better donor than indole. Under standard global AM 1.5 solar condition (100 mW cm−2), the SDD4 dye-sensitized cell gave the highest η of 4.33% with chenodeoxycholic acid as a coadsorbent, reaching 82% of N719-based DSSCs.
Display omitted Comparing to the dye RD with a single D–A unit, the dye SDD4 with phenoxazine as donor shows better photovoltaic performance due to its two D–A light-harvesting units and two anchoring groups.
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