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The impact of entrepreneurial overconfidence on incubator effectiveness
Get PDFThe low utilization of incubator resources has been subject to much academic attention within entrepreneurship research. This study explores how entrepreneurs’ overconfidence impacts the utilization of incubator resources and influences incubation performance. Based on interviews with 8 incubators and questionnaires from 184 entrepreneurs, the findings show a negative relationship between entrepreneurs’ overconfidence and the incubation performance of start-ups. This finding emerges in the context of incubation management through the fully mediating role of entrepreneurial learning. As a moderator, the contract control of the incubator weakens the negative relationship between entrepreneurs’ overconfidence and entrepreneurial learning. The microcosm of the incubator context allows the researchers to examine the internal agent interaction. This paper explores the related literature, presents the research study, discusses the findings and provides avenues for future scholarly research on this topic
Modelling the interdependence of spatial scales in urban systems
Get PDFThe multitude of interwoven spatial scales and their relevance for urban systems has been of interest to the complexity science of cities since its conception. Today, we are well aware that urban environments are being simultaneously shaped and organised through actions at all levels. However, the fundamental question of how to reveal and quantify the interdependence of processes in between various spatial and temporal scales is less often addressed. Deepening our theoretical understanding of the multiscale spatiotemporal complexity of urban systems demands a transdisciplinary framework and the deployment of novel and advanced mathematical models. This article performs a multiscale analysis of urban structures using a large dataset of rent price values in the Ruhr area, Germany. We argue that, due to their many interacting degrees of freedom, urban systems exhibit similar features as other strongly correlated systems, for example, turbulent flows, notably the occurrence of extreme small-scale fluctuations. This analogy between urban and turbulent systems, which we support by empirical evidence, allows for the modelling of spatial structures on the basis of concepts and methods from turbulence theory. We demonstrate how by identifying the main turbulence-borrowed characteristics of an arbitrary two-dimensional urban field, it can be fully reproduced with a small number of prescribed points. Our findings have theoretical implications in the way we quantify and analyse scales in urban systems, model small-scale urban structures as well as potential policy relevance on understanding the evolution and spatial organisation of cities
Autistic Parents’ Personal Experiences of Parenting and Support: Messages from an Online Focus Group
Get PDFSocial work with autistic adults should be operated within principles of personalisation and strength-based approach. While many parents are diagnosed on the autistic spectrum as adults, their needs, different parenting styles and capabilities have been often misunderstood, or seldom respected by professionals. To address this gap, this study explored autistic parents’ experiences of parenting and support. In order to examine ‘real-life’ through the parent’s own points of view, an online focus group was used to explore seven autistic parents’ own perspectives and experiences. Data were analysed via thematic techniques. This study found that the parents claimed that autism may not impact always on their parenting capacity, and, when it does, they can succeed in raising their children, especially their autistic children, if they are provided with appropriate support services. But their parenting style and capabilities were misunderstood by professionals who used traditional pathologising assumptions on parental capacity. This study concluded that dismantling stereotypical norms of autism and lack of knowledge of autism within professionals is needed to change to properly assess autistic parent’s needs and their capacity using strength-based approach
ConvNet-based performers attention and supervised contrastive learning for activity recognition
Get PDFHuman activity recognition based on generated sensor data plays a major role in a large number of applications such as healthcare monitoring and surveillance system. Yet, accurately recognizing human activities is still challenging and active research due to people’s tendency to perform daily activities in a different and multitasking way. Existing approaches based on the recurrent setting for human activity recognition have some issues, such as the inability to process data parallelly, the requirement for more memory and high computational cost albeit they achieved reasonable results. Convolutional Neural Network processes data parallelly, but, it breaks the ordering of input data, which is significant to build an effective model for human activity recognition. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes causal convolution based on performers-attention and supervised contrastive learning to entirely forego recurrent architectures, efficiently maintain the ordering of human daily activities and focus more on important timesteps of the sensors’ data. Supervised contrastive learning is integrated to learn a discriminative representation of human activities and enhance predictive performance. The proposed network is extensively evaluated for human activities using multiple datasets including wearable sensor data and smart home environments data. The experiments on three wearable sensor datasets and five smart home public datasets of human activities reveal that our proposed network achieves better results and reduces the training time compared with the existing state-of-the-art methods and basic temporal models
Interval Coordination of Multiagent Networks With Antagonistic Interactions
Get PDFThis paper studies interval coordination problems for multiagent systems with antagonistic interactions. For strongly connected signed networks, it is shown that when the intersection of intervals imposed by agents is nonempty: (1) the multiagent system achieves bipartite consensus with structurally balanced network; (2) all agents’ states must converge to 0, if the signed network is structurally unbalanced. We establish the consensus conditions for bipartite consensus and zero-value consensus by employing the Gauge Transformation and robust analysis of signed networks. When the signed networks are strongly connected and the intersection of intervals is empty, the system reaches an asymptotically stable and unique equilibrium. Moreover, the equilibrium states are only decided by the network structure and interval constraints, and are not related to initial agents’ states. Associating the equilibrium of dynamics with the solution of a system of nonlinear equations, we obtain the uniqueness, stability and continuity of equilibria. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the theoretical results
Release of tephra-hosted iron during early diagenesis fingerprinted by iron isotopes
Get PDFThe micronutrient iron (Fe) plays a fundamental role controlling primary productivity in the upper ocean, with volcanic eruptions and deposition of airborne volcanic material (termed tephra) a potential source of Fe. Here, we investigate the geochemical and Fe isotopic (δ56Fe) composition of tephra layers, sediments, and mixed tephra-sediment samples from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Hole 1396C, located offshore the volcanically active island of Montserrat in the Lesser Antilles, Caribbean Sea. We find that buried tephras, which have experienced diagenesis, exhibit lighter δ56Fe (relative to standard IRMM-524a) compositions (down to −0.26 ± 0.04‰, 2SD) than fresh tephra deposited in Montserrat (δ56Fe = 0.02 ± 0.02‰, 2SD). Such negative values suggest that isotopically heavier Fe has been lost from the originally deposited material. Using multivariate statistical modelling and mass balance constraints, we identify the outward Fe flux (with calculated δ56Fe of 0.21 ± 0.31‰, 2SD, n = 12) during non-reductive dissolution of tephra as the likely cause of the retention of these light δ56Fe compositions. Due to the widespread nature of tephra deposition, tephra diagenesis may provide an important source of isotopically heavy dissolved Fe (dFe) to the oceans. This process contrasts with more commonly considered reductive dissolution processes, which provide a source of dFe enriched in light isotopes to the oceans
Transport of Plastics Within the World’s Oceans
Get PDFThe following sections are included:
Introduction
Beaching and Coastal Retention of Plastics
Surface Transport and Accumulations of Plastics
Surface Transport to Remote Regions
Vertical Transport of Plastics
Plastic Accumulation in the Deep Sea
Conclusio
Review of Hannah-Rose Murray, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
No full textGreen project management practices, green knowledge acquisition and sustainable competitive advantage: empirical evidence
Get PDFPurpose: This study aims to envisage the impact of green project management (GPM) practices on sustainable competitive advantage (SCA). Moreover, this study also accessed the mediating role of green knowledge acquisition (GKA) as a mechanism between GPM and SCA. Design/methodology/approach: Using a quantitative field survey, the data were collected from the multi-sector manufacturing enterprises (n = 265) in Pakistan. The measurement and structural model were tested through Analysis of Moment Structure by conducting a covariance structure analysis. Findings: The findings suggest that GPM practices are positively related to SCA. In addition to this direct effect, GKA play a significant role in explaining the associations between GPM practices and SCA. The findings bring essential insights for the enterprises, policymakers, practitioners and project managers to promote GPM practices for low-carbon projects to achieve SCA. Research limitations/implications: The data used in this study is cross-sectional in nature. The geographic location is limited to firms in Pakistan, while well-validated subjective measures are used to make the survey more convenient for participants. Practical implications: The practitioners in general, while project managers in particular, are recommended to implement GPM practices and GKA to achieve high performance of SCA. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to examine GPM practices and its effect on SCA directly and via GKA in a single model
Genome-wide association study identifies novel candidate malaria resistance genes in Cameroon
Get PDFRecent data suggest that only a small fraction of severe malaria heritability is explained by the totality of genetic markers discovered so far. The extensive genetic diversity within African populations means that significant associations are likely to be found in Africa. In their series of multi-site genome-wide association studies (GWAS) across sub-Saharan Africa, the Malaria Genomic Epidemiology Network (MalariaGEN) observed specific limitations and encouraged country-specific analyses. Here, we present findings of a GWAS of Cameroonian participants that contributed to MalariaGEN projects (n = 1103). We identified protective associations at polymorphisms within the enhancer region of CHST15 (FDR < 0.02) that are specific to populations of African ancestry, and that tag strong eQTLs of CHST15 in hepatic cells. In-silico functional analysis revealed a signature of epigenetic regulation of CHST15 that is preserved in populations in historically malaria endemic regions, with haplotype analysis revealing a haplotype that is specific to these populations. Association analysis by ethnolinguistic group identified protective associations within SOD2 (FDR < 0.04), a gene previously shown to be significantly induced in pre-asymptomatic malaria patients from Cameroon. Haplotype analysis revealed substantial heterogeneity within the beta-like globin (HBB) gene cluster among the major ethnic groups in Cameroon confirming differential malaria pressure and underscoring age-old fine-scale genetic structure within the country. Our findings revealed novel insights in the evolutionary genetics of populations living in Cameroon under malaria pressure with new significant protective loci (CHST15 and SOD2) and emphasized the significant attenuation of genetic association signals by fine-scale genetic structure