Yu Zhang

Technology licensing as a vital part of business behavior in many industries has drawn a fair amount of attention in industrial organization literature. Most existing literature on licensing decisions assumes that all firms engage in Cournot or Bertrand competition, while the type of mixed competition may affect the choice of the licensor. In this context, what decision will the licensor make faced with different mixed competitions? This paper studies the optimal technology licensing contract of a licensor firm engaging in different mixed competitions with a potential licensee in a differentiated duopoly market considering one upstream firm that provides key inputs. We find that if either the royalty or fixed-fee licensing is applied, the licensor favors royalty licensing under Bertrand-Cournot competition when the degree of substitution is small and prefers the fixed-fee licensing no matter under what kind of mixed competition as the degree of substitution increases. In the case of fixed-fee licensing, the result shows that the profits of licensors are the same under different types of mixed competition. Besides, fixed-fee licensing is not always the optimal choice for consumers, and they would prefer royalty licensing when the degree of substitution is very small.

The psychological impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on college students is an important topic. With the entry of the post-epidemic era, how universities can better improve students’ psychological resilience in teaching is the research topic of this article. In the form of a questionnaire survey, some entrepreneurial college students investigated the loneliness and psychological resilience of college students after the outbreak of the epidemic and explored the role of self-efficacy in it. The data is collected online through cooperation with an entrepreneurial event, and the participating students are asked for background information such as colleges, grade, and majors. After collecting this information, they answered a series of simplified scale questions about loneliness, self-efficacy, and psychological resilience. In the end, a total of 200 questionnaires from different universities were collected, and the structural equation model was used to explore the role of self-efficacy. The results show that: loneliness has a significant negative effect on Self-efficacy, β = -0.292, p < 0.001; Self-efficacy has a significant positive effect on psychological resilience, β = 0.556, p < 0.0 01; loneliness has a significant negative effect on psychological resilience, β = -0.244, p < 0.01. Self-Efficacy has a significant intermediate effect in loneliness and psychological resilience, with an effective value of -0.111 and p < 0.01. The results show that this exploratory survey finds it important to provide targeted personal self-efficacy improvement activities for college students with a strong sense of loneliness and to combine school and family education organically to help college students form a healthy and upward mentality to better cope with the unknown and troubles caused by the epidemic, which will help improve the psychological resilience of college students in the epidemic.

At present, people mainly focus on health education for adolescents. The health education of adolescents is related to future of adolescents. In youth, their emotions are easily influenced. Therefore, this manuscript constructs an interactive health education model for adolescents through affective computing. Researchers in various countries have done a lot of research on human–computer interaction, and affective computing is one of the research hotspots. This manuscript aims to study the use of affective computing to construct an interactive health education model for adolescents. It proposed an interactive emotional algorithm based on emotional computing and focuses on the ICABoost algorithm. The experimental results of this paper show that the surveyed junior high school students are divided into three grades: the first, second, and third grades. Among them, 11, 11, and 13 were mentally healthy, with a total percentage of only 18.5%; 16, 14, and 16 were moderately severe in health education, accounting for 24.3%. The percentage of severe cases was 29.6%. It can be seen that, through the investigation of this manuscript, it can be seen that today’s youth health education should be paid attention to. Only by constructing a corresponding interactive health education model for young people can we promote the comprehensive and healthy development of young people.

Congenital nystagmus in infants and young children can lead to early blindness. Previous neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that EB is accompanied by alterations in brain structure and function. However, the effects of visual impairment and critical developmental periods on brain functional connectivity at rest have been unclear. Here, we used the voxel-wise degree centrality method to explore the underlying functional network brain activity in adolescents with EB. Twenty-one patients with EBs and 21 sighted controls underwent magnetic resonance imaging. Differences between the two groups were assessed using the DC method. Moreover, the support vector machine method was used to differentiate patients with EB patients from the SCs according to DC values. Compared with the SCs, the patients with EB had increased DC values in the bilateral cerebellum_6, cerebellum vermis_4_5, bilateral supplementary motor areas, and left fusiform gyrus; the patients with EB had decreased DC values in the bilateral rectal gyrus and left medial orbital frontal gyrus. The SVM classification of the DC values achieved an overall accuracy of 70.45% and an area under the curve of 0.86 in distinguishing between the patients with EB and the SCs. Our study may reveal the neuromechanism of neuroplasticity in EB; the findings provide an imaging basis for future development of restorative visual therapies and sensory substitution devices, and future assessments of visual rehabilitation efficacy.

In service marketing, AI assistants and self-service technology have become popular. As a result, it is critical to enrich the understanding of whether consumers react differently in the artificial intelligence service context in comparison with the human service context. This study examines the effect of assistant type on consumers’ decision-making. Through three experiments, this research finds that variety seeking will be higher when consumers are making decision in AI service environment. Furthermore, we tested uncertainty as the underlying mechanism. Moreover, we demonstrated that this pattern is moderated by situational involvement. Specifically, in consumption contexts of high involvement, the consumers are less likely to seek variety, and in consumption contexts of low involvement, they prefer more variety. This research offers service providers new insights by revealing how, why, and when the interaction of AI technology influences consumers’ decision-making in service marketing.

Currently, advancements in information and communication technology and an increased interest in using the Internet for educational purposes have led educators to work in new virtual settings. However, using technology in teaching requires the understanding and information of English educators. Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge is an educator's knowledge concept regarding integrating technology into education. Also, how educators integrate technology effectively into their classes is a significant issue, as learning environments are influenced by rapid advances in instructional technology. Consistent with this issue, it is critical for teacher development to integrate ICT into educational tasks in the design, application, and assessment of practices in a virtual setting. To this end, the objective of the present review is to consider the role of practice in the virtual platform in developing EFL teachers' TPACK. Ultimately, some implications are presented for the EFL educational stakeholders.

The automated valuation of benchmark land price plays an essential role in regulating land demand in Chinese real-estate market as the big data are currently accumulated rapidly. However, this problem becomes highly challenging due to the multidimension, large volume, and nonlinearity of the land price-influencing factors. In this paper, an effective data-driven automated valuation framework is proposed for valuing real estate assets by combining a GIS and neural network technologies. This framework can automatically obtain the values of spatial factors affecting land price from GIS and generate training set data for training the neural network to identify the complex relationship between all kinds of factors and benchmark land prices. The effectiveness and universality of the framework is verified via the data of benchmark land prices in Wuhan. The framework can be applied for automated benchmark land price valuation in other cities.

A scientific paper’s citation represents its influence, which is the most intuitive indicator to access the quality of papers. This paper mainly adopts the social network analysis method, using the authors and the keywords of sports industry papers in China to constitute the networks of collaboration and knowledge, to explore effects of the degree centrality of authors and keywords and the structural hole of authors and keywords on the citation of papers in the collaboration and knowledge networks and draw the following conclusions: as for collaboration networks, the degree centrality at the paper level is positively correlated with citations; in the collaboration network, the positive correlation between the structural hole at the paper level and citations does not exist; within knowledge networks, an inverted- U shape was found between degree centrality and paper’s citation; and within knowledge networks, a positive correlation is in existence between the structural hole of papers and their citation. This study synthesizes the already widely used collaboration network with the knowledge network constructed through keywords, distinguishes from the previous network features focusing at the author level, and explores research projects of Chinese Sports Industry from the paper level, providing a new perspective for the research of sports industry in China, complementing the methods and ideas of sports industry research, as well as providing a reference for the research in other disciplinary fields.

This study chooses Chinese athletes as the research object and constructs the overall network of its social support network and discussion network. From the micro-, meso-, and macrolevels of the social network structure, the structure and characteristics of the athlete’s overall social network are analyzed. Through research, we found that there is embeddedness, that is, the relevance, between society support networks, between society discussion networks, and between society support networks and society discussion networks. At the same time, in the athletes’ social support network and social discussion network, some athletes have no contact with other players; they have no “power” in the group as well, so it is difficult to obtain network resources. We also found that there are small-world characteristics in the social network of Chinese professional athletes. The above findings will provide a deeper understanding of the peculiarities of athlete groups and have certain practical significance for improving athletes’ daily training and life management conditions.

Interpersonal physiological synchrony has been consistently found during collaborative tasks. However, few studies have applied synchrony to predict collaborative learning quality in real classroom. To explore the relationship between interpersonal physiological synchrony and collaborative learning activities, this study collected electrodermal activity and heart rate during naturalistic class sessions and compared the physiological synchrony between independent task and group discussion task. The students were recruited from a renowned university in China. Since each student learn differently and not everyone prefers collaborative learning, participants were sorted into collaboration and independent dyads based on their collaborative behaviors before data analysis. The result showed that, during group discussions, high collaboration pairs produced significantly higher synchrony than low collaboration dyads. Given the equivalent engagement level during independent and collaborative tasks, the difference of physiological synchrony between high and low collaboration dyads was triggered by collaboration quality. Building upon this result, the classification analysis was conducted, indicating that EDA synchrony can identify different levels of collaboration quality.

The BP neural network model is a hot issue in recent academic research, and it has been successfully applied to many other fields, but few researchers apply the BP neural network model to the field of automobile insurance. The main method that has been used in the prediction of the total claim amount in automobile insurance is the generalized linear model, where the BP neural network model could provide a different approach to estimate the total claim loss. This paper uses a genetic algorithm to optimize the structure of the BP neural network at first, and the calculation speed is significantly improved. At the same time, by considering the overfitting problem, an early stop method is introduced to avoid the overfitting problem. In the model, a three-layer BP neural network model, which includes the input layer, hidden layer, and output layer, is trained. With consideration of various factors, a total claim amount prediction model is established, and the trained BP neural network model is used to predict the total claim amount of automobile insurance based on the data of the training set. The results show that the accuracy of the prediction by using the BP neural network model to both the data of Shandong Province and to the data of six cities is over 95%. Then, the predicted total claim amount is used to calculate premiums for five cities in Shandong Province according to credibility theory. The results show that the average premium of the five cities is slightly higher than the actual claim amount of the city. The combination of BP neural network and credibility theory can perform accurate claim amount estimation and pricing for automobile insurance, which can effectively improve the current situation of the automobile insurance business and promote the development of insurance industry.

© 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd.Few-layer thick MoSe2 and WSe2 possess non-trivial spin textures with sizable spin splitting due to the inversion symmetry breaking embedded in the crystal structure and strong spin-orbit coupling. We report a spin-resolved photoemission study of MoSe2 and WSe2 thin film samples epitaxially grown on a bilayer graphene substrate. We only found spin polarization in the single-and trilayer samples-not in the bilayer sample-mostly along the out-of-plane direction of the sample surface. The measured spin polarization is found to be strongly dependent on the light polarization as well as the measurement geometry, which reveals intricate coupling between the spin and orbital degrees of freedom in this class of material.

Resistance to anoikis, or apoptosis triggered by detachment from the extracellular matrix, lengthens the survival of malignant cells, facilitating reattachment and colonization of secondary sites. To examine the molecular mechanisms underlying resistance to anoikis in human oral squamous cell carcinoma cells, we cultured human squamous carcinoma cells in suspension on plates coated with poly-2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate, which blocks access to the ECM. Cells in suspension that formed multicellular aggregates had significantly lower levels of apoptosis than single cells. Aggregates, but not single cells, had high levels of fibronectin. Preincubation with a cyclic arginine-glycine-aspartic acid peptide or fibronectin-blocking antibody significantly increased anoikis. Single cells had markedly lower expression of the integrin αv receptor than aggregates. Blocking αv function with a blocking antibody or by transfection with an antisense oligonucleotide increased apoptosis and inhibited aggregation. In single cells but not aggregates, phosphorylation of the integrin-associated focal adhesion kinase at tyrosine 397 was reduced, and p53 levels were increased. Apoptosis was increased by blocking FAK with an antisense oligonucleotide and reduced by blocking p53. These findings show that SCC cells escape suspension-induced anoikis by forming multicellular aggregates that avail themselves of fibronectin survival signals mediated by integrin αv. Single cells in suspension that do not form aggregates undergo anoikis because of decreased FAK phosphorylation and increased p53 levels. Thus, SCC cells appear to use neighboring cells and the ECM molecule FN to promote the metastatic phenotype.

Ultra-high isotropic resolution imaging of retinal structures was made possible with an adaptive optics system using dual deformable mirrors and a Fourier-domain optical coherence tomography system with correction for longitudinal chromatic aberration. This system was used to image microscopic retinal structures of healthy as well as diseased retinas in vivo. The improved resolution and contrast enhanced visualization of morphological structures in the retina can be clearly seen. The benefits of this instrument are apparent from comparison of new images with those acquired using a previous generation AO-OCT instrument. Big change in the appearance of speckle field can be observed as well. Additionally, further improvements in volumetric data acquisition and image representation will be discussed. This includes creation of large Field of View AO-OCT volume from multiple sub-volumes and its visualization. Also techniques and results of reducing speckle contrast by averaging multiple B-scans will be presented.

Frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimers disease are sometimes difficult to differentiate clinically because of overlapping symptoms. Using diffusion tensor imaging measurements of fractional anisotropy can be useful in distinguishing the different patterns of white matter degradation between the two dementias. In this study, we performed MRI scans in a 4 Tesla MRI machine including T1-weighted structural images and diffusion tensor images in 18 patients with FTD, 18 patients with Alzheimers disease and 19 cognitively normal controls. FA was measured selectively in specific fibre tracts as well as globally in a voxel-by-voxel analysis. Patients with FTD were associated with reductions of FA in frontal and temporal regions including the anterior corpus callosum, bilateral anterior, descending cingulum tracts, and uncinate tracts, compared to controls. Patients with Alzheimers disease were associated with reductions of FA in parietal, temporal and frontal regions including the left anterior and posterior cingulum tracts, bilateral descending cingulum tracts and left uncinate tracts compared to controls. When compared with Alzheimers disease, FTD was associated with greater reductions of FA in frontal brain regions, whereas no region in Alzheimers disease showed greater reductions of FA when compared to FTD. In conclusion, the regional patterns of anisotropy reduction in FTD and Alzheimers disease compared to controls suggest a characteristic distribution of white matter degradation in each disease. Moreover, the white matter degradation seems to be more prominent in FTD than in Alzheimers disease. Taken together, the results suggest that white matter degradation measured with DTI may improve the diagnostic differentiation between FTD and Alzheimers disease.

Background: Endothelins are paracrine peptides with growth-promoting and vasoactive functions for a variety of cell types. Elevated activation of the endothelin signaling pathway induces cell proliferation and/or survival and is implicated in a variety of malignancies. Increased endothelin 1 was described in solar lentigines in previous reports, raising the possibility that the endothelin pathway may be of significance in keratinocyte proliferation-related disorders. However, detailed investigation on endothelins in skin malignancies is lacking. Objectives: This study aims to survey the expression of endothelins and their receptors in keratinocyte-derived benign and malignant tumors of the skin and to test the effects of endothelin inhibitors on the growth and survival of cultured keratinocytes. Methods: Quantitative polymerase chain reaction was used to measure the level of gene transcription of three endothelins and two endothelin receptors. The genes with significant messenger ribonucleic acid expression abnormalities were confirmed with immunohistochemical analysis to examine expression differences at the protein levels. To analyze the effect of endothelin inhibitors on the keratinocyte growth and survival, keratinocytes were cultured in the presence of various concentrations of endothelin inhibitors and subjected to tetrazolium bromide assay to quantify the cell numbers over time. Results: ET-1 mRNA was found to be significantly up-regulated in seborrheic keratosis and basal cell carcinoma. However, no significant expression increase was found in actinic keratosis, Bowen's disease, or squamous cell carcinoma. Immunohistochemical analysis of ET-1 peptide confirmed increased expression. In cultured keratinocytes, peptide inhibitors of the endothelin pathway resulted in a marked reduction in cell survival. Conclusion: The endothelin signaling pathway, especially ET-1, is activated in basoloid keratinocyte neoplasms of the skin, such as basal cell carcinoma and seborrheic keratosis. Blockade of this pathway can reduce cell survival in vitro. Therefore, endothelin inhibitors potentially offer a novel method for the treatment of some keratinocyte-derived skin tumors.

A Brief History of Qi takes the reader through the mysterious terrain of Chinese Medicine, Chinese language, Chinese martial arts and Qi Gong - a truly evocative guide to virtually all the traditional Chinese arts and sciences. This book is devoted to a topic represented by a single Chinese character, Qi. When presented with the concept of Qi, students of Chinese culture, Chinese medicine, Chinese martial arts and a wide range of Chinese traditional arts and sciences face one of the most perplexing challenges of their tenure. The book begins with an examination of Qi's linguistic and literary roots, stretching back through the shadowy mists of Chinese pre-civilisation. The authors then trace the development of the concept of Qi through a number of related traditional Chinese disciplines including painting, poetry, medicine and martial arts. The book concludes with an examination of the depth and breadth of Qi as manifested in life's cycles.

As a result of simultaneous developments, including the proliferation of opportunities for online feedback, the application of discourse ethics to journalism, and a greater emphasis on journalistic accountability, the time is ripe for revisiting opportunities that online mechanisms provide for holding journalists accountable to audiences. This paper proposes recommendations to guide hosting online comments in light of the Habermasian framework of discourse ethics developed by Glasser and Ettema (2008). It also explores the limits of such approaches in nations with different press models, such as the development model as practiced in China