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PurposeThe purpose of this paper was to assess and determine the impact of the five core technologies of Industry 4.0 (3D Printing, Big Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things (IoT) and Robotics) on the organizational performance of the retail industry in the context of Pakistan.Design/methodology/approachPakistan's retail industry was chosen as the target sector, and the target population was composed of senior-level employees, including managers from first-level positions to top-level positions, as well as subordinate employees working under the supervision of first-level managers, possessing the technological know-how of Industry 4.0. The data were collected through a matrix-based survey questionnaire that was based on a five-point Likert scale, ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” The process of data analysis was conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics.FindingsThe findings obtained by this research work showed a significant relationship among the five core pillars of Industry 4.0 and the organizational performance of Pakistan's retail industry. Besides, the obtained findings provided preliminary evidence that Industry 4.0's disruptive technologies, particularly, 3D printing, big data analytics, cloud computing, IoT and robotics, could help Pakistan's retail industry solve various problems and challenges, such as meager revenues, increased expenses and unorganized systems.Originality/valueThe present study extended the theoretical body of knowledge through studying and examining Industry 4.0's five crucial factors that significantly contribute to the service sector, particularly, the retail industry, of the big emerging markets (BEM) economies, including Pakistan.

Historical materialism is one of Marx’s greatest discoveries, which is of great significance in the history of human social thought. In Engels’ later years, there was a new trend in the development of capitalist society, where letters became an important carrier for Engels to carry out theoretical research, propaganda and struggle. Engels’ letters in his later years paid full attention to the reaction to the superstructure of the economic foundation and the relative independence of ideology. In addition, it emphasizes that the theory should keep pace with the times, also puts forward and expounds the thought of “historical resultant force theory.” Furthermore, we firmly opposed dogmatism, contrarily adhered and developed scientific Marxism. Engels’ letters in his later years not only enriched and developed Marxist historical materialism, but also provided a strong theoretical basis for the great practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era.

Visceral leishmaniasis is responsible for up to 30,000 deaths every year. Current treatments have shortcomings that include toxicity and variable efficacy across endemic regions. Previously, we reported the discovery of GNF6702, a selective inhibitor of the kinetoplastid proteasome, which cleared parasites in murine models of leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, and human African trypanosomiasis. Here, we describe the discovery and characterization of LXE408, a structurally related kinetoplastid-selective proteasome inhibitor currently in Phase 1 human clinical trials. Furthermore, we present high-resolution cryo-EM structures of the Leishmania tarentolae proteasome in complex with LXE408, which provides a compelling explanation for the noncompetitive mode of binding of this novel class of inhibitors of the kinetoplastid proteasome.

The transformation from traditional manufacturing to intelligent manufacturing intrigues the profound and lasting effect on the future manufacturing worldwide. Industry 4.0 was proposed for advancing manufacturing to realize short product life cycles and extreme mass customization in a cost‐efficient way. As the heart of Industry 4.0, smart factory integrates physical technologies and cyber technologies and makes the involved technologies more complex and precise in order to improve performance, quality, controllability, management, and transparency of manufacturing processes. So far, leading manufacturers have begun the journey toward implementing smart factory. However, most firms still lack insight into the challenges and resources for implementing smart factory. As such, this paper identifies the requirements and key challenges, investigates available new technologies, reviews existing studies that have been done for smart factory, and further provides guidance for manufacturers to implementing smart factory in the context of Industry 4.0.

In both 2D and 3D object detection algorithms, the reference boxes obtained by the anchor mechanism lay the foundation for the next detection tasks of the network. Most of the existing anchor mechanisms are designed by hand to generate a dense array of anchors. The size of the anchors obtained in this way is single and the anchors are densely distributed in the image space. It has poor robustness and a large number of redundant anchors. In views of these defects, we propose the 3D anchor generating network. It predicts the 3D anchors by learning the semantic features of the picture, in which the anchors are sparsely distributed around the objects in the image with different sizes in different positions of the image. We applied it to TLNet’s baseline monocular network for 3D object detection on KITTI dataset, the result showed a significant improvement on the performance of 3D object detection algorithms.

Background: Salmonella is a common pathogen for gastroenteritis, but it rarely causes intracranial infection in China. To improve the understanding of pediatric Salmonella meningitis, we report three cases of Salmonella meningitis in Chinese children.Case presentation: The patients were aged from 1 day to 14 months. Fever was the first symptom in two patients, while loose stool with a little mucus occurred in one patient during the course of disease. Peripheral white blood cell count, neutrophils count, and C-reactive protein were 20.08 - 25.2 *109/L, 15.4 - 19.7 *109/L, and 1.6 - >160 mg/L, respectively. CSF analysis showed that white blood cell count, glucose, and protein were 70 - 1473 *106/L, 0.18 - 3.19 mmol/L, and 598.1 - 6639.0 mg/L, respectively. Three isolates of Salmonella were detected in cerebrospinal fluid cultures, including Salmonella newport, Salmonella paratyphi, and Salmonella typhimurium (one case per each). All strains were sensitive to ceftriaxone, ceftazidime, cefoperazone / sulbactam, meropenem, and imipenem, while one strain was resistant to ampicillin. The blood cultures were all negative. All patients were treated with carbapenems after failed therapies of cefotaxime or ceftriaxone, for a total duration of 3 - 5 weeks. One patient died, and subdural effusion occurred in one of the two survivors. Conclusions: Salmonella meningitis was rare, but the clinical conditions were serious. Carbapenems might be the first choice for treating Salmonella meningitis.

The size effect on the seismic performance of conventional reinforced concrete columns has been observed in terms of flexural failure and shear failure. Under earthquake loading, slender columns experience flexural failure, and short columns experience flexure-shear failure and shear failure. However, the effect of section size on the seismic performance of high-strength reinforced concrete columns under the conditions of different shear span-to-depth ratios requires further confirmation. For this purpose, six high-strength reinforced concrete columns with shear span-to-depth ratios of 2 and 4 were subjected to cyclic loading in this study. The experimental results indicated that relative nominal flexural strength, energy dissipation coefficient, factor of safety, and local factor of safety all exhibited a strong size effect by decreasing with increasing column size. Furthermore, the size effect became stronger as the shear span-to-depth ratio was increased, except for average energy dissipation coefficient. The observed changes in the factor of safety were in good agreement with the Type 2 size effect model proposed by Bažant. Thus, based on the local factor of safety and Bažant’s Type 2 model, the code equation for moment capacity of different shear span-to-depth ratios was modified to provide a consistent factor of safety regardless of column size.

Existing literatures have explored the positive effect of leadership style on innovation atmosphere from a team perspective. However, much attention has been paid to transformational leadership style, whereas studies on transactional leadership style are not available. To this end, this paper explores the relationship between the two leadership styles and innovation atmosphere in enterprises. The intermediary role that trust and individual identification play in the relationship between leadership style and innovation atmosphere is examined as well. We conduct a survey on 294 respondents and run hierarchical regression and adjustment regression. The results show that (1) transformational leadership style can facilitate to build trust and individual identification; (2) transformational leadership style is more helpful for building innovation atmosphere; (3) it is easier for leaders with transformational leadership style to build trust and that trust positively affects innovation atmosphere; (4) trust and individual identity are helpful for creating innovation atmosphere; (5) trust and individual identification play an intermediary role between transformational leadership style and innovation atmosphere; (6) trust does not play an intermediary role between transactional leadership style and innovation atmosphere, whereas individual identity does. Implications from the findings are discussed.

BACKGROUND: Meningitis and encephalitis are life-threatening syndromes with high morbidity and mortality in children. Due to limitations of traditional laboratory approaches in etiological diagnosis, the rate of misdiagnoses is unacceptably high. METHODS: We retrospectively compared the potential clinical impact of the FilmArray meningitis/encephalitis (ME) panel vs. conventional cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) culture in children with central nervous system (CNS) infections. Sixty-eight pediatric patients (

We present SE block-based Single Shot Multibox Detector (SE-SSD), a framework that improves the accuracy of the Single Shot Detector (SSD [9]). As a currently popular method, increasing the number of feature maps or the fusion of different feature layers can improve the performance of the deep network. Other approach such as DSOD [16] can learn a good object detectors from scratch. In this paper, we introduce the “Squeeze-and-Excitation” (SE) block, and analyze how to use SE block effectively to refine the performance of the SSD. The improved performance is enhanced by adaptively recalibrating channel-wise feature responses, than increasing the depth of convolutional layers. The proposed network explicitly model the nonlinear interactions between channels, and selectively emphasize or suppress the informative features of different channels. When Our network tested on Pasal VOC, it can achieve 82.0% mAP. In addition, the result on Pascal VOC 2012 test and COCO can also achieve 76.4% mAP and 27.9% mAP separately. The result of proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art methods R-FCN and SSD on each dataset. And the speed of SE-SSD is still faster than Faster-RCNN and RFCN.

The steel pipe concrete column has been applied in construction projects. The prefabricated assembly era has also been quiet, but there is little research on steel pipe concrete columns and pre-concrete beam nodes. This paper summarizes the articles on concrete-filled steel tubular column and beam joint, and puts forward a kind of concrete-filled steel tubular column and precast beam joint strengthened by U-shaped plate and stud. The joint has clear force transmission, convenient site construction and saves materials, which provides reference for the joint form of reinforced concrete beam and concrete-filled steel tubular column.

Robotic manipulation for rigid objects is a relatively easy task, while grasping highly deformable objects, such as garments, is still a big challenge for robots. This research detects the grasping points of hanging garment using deep learning to facilitate robot manipulation. A neural network is proposed to predict the cartesian coordinates and visibility of predefined grasping points. In order to reduce the impact of different clothing colors, depth images are used for the input of the model. It is inaccurate and unrealistic to label data manually because of complex dynamics of clothes; therefore, synthetic dataset is leveraged to train the neural network. This paper makes use of generative adversarial network (GAN) to translate synthetic data to real data. A real dataset is acquired taken by Azure Kinect sensor as the test dataset. The experimental results indicate that our method can provide accurate prediction of the grasping points and can be applied to real scenarios.

In order to analyze the effect of rebar size on the compressive strength of concrete cover, the axial behavior of a prism with a central rebar was experimentally and theoretically investigated. The test results indicated that the concrete compressive strength with rebar was relatively smaller than the axial compressive strength of prism that was similar with the concrete strength of cylinder. Further, the degree of reduction in the concrete compressive strength increased as the diameter-thickness ratio increased. Moreover, based on the test results and walled cylinder theory, the influence of rebar on the concrete compressive strength can be better understood. Lastly, in the structural design, the small rebar size and big concrete cover thickness should be chosen so that the effect of splitting action on concrete cover was weaken.

This paper principally studies the prediction of slope deformation based on Support Vector Machine (SVM). In the prediction process，explore how to reconstruct the phase space. The geological body’s displacement data obtained from chaotic time series are used as SVM’s training samples. Slope displacement caused by multivariable coupling is predicted by means of single variable. Results show that this model is of high fitting accuracy and generalization, and provides reference for deformation prediction in slope engineering.

The indolo[2,3-a]carbazole alkaloids constitute an important class of natural products with interesting and diverse biological activities. A series of novel ring-fused indolocarbazoles were synthesized and evaluated for inhibition of topoisomerase I-mediated relaxation of supercoiled DNA and in vitro antitumor activity. The derivatives bearing a methylenedioxy or an ethylenedioxy ring fused onto the nonglycosylated indole (1a, 1b) demonstrated more potent anti-topoisomerase I activity. The isopropylenedioxy analogue 1c was approximately half as active as 1a, while the O-dimethoxy analogue 1d and the regioisomers 2a and 2b were essentially devoid of measurable activity, implying that the stacking with the intact DNA strand has been impeded by these compounds due to steric hindrance. The newly synthesized indolocarbazoles were screened against the NCI's 60 tumor cell lines. The order of activity, based on the mean GI50 values, is as follows: 1a > 2a ~ 1d > 1b > MCR-47 > 2b. Though in general the analogues that showed potent activity against topoisomerase I (1a, 1b) also showed potent in vitro inhibition of tumor cell growth, the antitumor activity of the anti-topoisomerase I inactive 1d and 2a were intriguing. COMPARE analyses confirmed that the topoisomerase I is the primary target for 1a and 1b; however, other target(s) or pathway(s) may also be involved, with PLD1 and MERTK suggested. Further investigation of these molecular targets against these indolocarbazoles is warranted Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper proposes AHP-FCE model with dynamic weight for the operational phase of school public building, to determine the energy saving coefficient of unit Office, and then evaluate energy efficiency of the whole building during running period. Paper introduces the concept of degree of weight effect, to quantify the impact of factors on the overall evaluation result, explains the idea of energy saving coefficient, to measure the building energy efficiency. Based on degree of weight effect, we get weight adjustment vectors to calculate energy saving coefficient. Through the energy monitoring system based on Green IT, paper shows that the proposed model can reflect the energy efficiency accurately and in time, rather than simply reflect how much energy is consumed.

The study reported in this paper tested the hypothesis that the developmental and reproductive health of mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis) exposed to pulp and paper effluent in the Dengcun River would differ from that of mosquitofish living in a reference site. We also studied whether morphological characteristics such as the anal fin and hemal spines of mosquitofish could serve as indicators for evaluating the androgenic effect and mosquitofish population security in the Dengcun River. Male and female mosquitofish were captured at three sites contaminated by pulp and paper effluent in the Dengcun River in Sihui, South China, and at a nearby uncontaminated reference site. Samples were collected from the sampling sites on the same day in August 2009. We compared the populations by total length, wet body and liver mass, gonad mass, and population composition. We also compared the populations according to number of anal fin segments, oocyte and embryo count, anal fin and hemal spine morphology among females, and by sperm count and viability among males, and observed the gonadal and liver histology of both males and females. Female mosquitofish exposed to pulp and paper effluent in the Dengcun River were generally smaller in length and mass, had a greater number of anal fin segments and more embryos, but had significantly fewer oocytes in comparison with those living at the reference site. The higher number of anal fin ray 3 segments and the increased ray 4:6 length ratio observed among fish taken from the Dengcun River sites indicated that they might be subject to the androgenic effect. Furthermore, the significantly different hemal spine morphology of the effluent-affected females also indicated the pulp and paper mills effluents in Dengcun River might contain androgenic substance(s). Male mosquitofish at the sites exposed to effluent had a higher number of anal fin segments and greater testis mass in comparison with those living at the reference site. No evidence of intersex was found in either males or females, although histopathological tests on females revealed histologic abnormalities in the liver and gonads. It can be concluded that pulp and paper effluent contamination in the Dengcun River has affected a number of developmental parameters and reproductive characteristics in mosquitofish, with possible adverse effects on reproduction in this population.

The current study investigated the development and reproductive health of western mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis) in the Hanxi River, which has been heavily contaminated by municipal wastewaters from towns in Dongguan of southern China. Western mosquitofish collected from four study sites, Songmu (SM), Yangwu (YW), Hengli (HL), and Zhangcun (ZC) of the Hanxi River, as well as a reference site (LX) of the Liuxi River, were dissected and analyzed for development parameters (total length, wet body mass, liver mass, gonad index, and population composition), reproductive parameters (oocyte count and weight of females, and sperm count and viability of males), and morphology (anal fin in males and females, and hemal spines in males). With the exception of the origin site (SM), mosquitofish from the Hanxi River exhibited significantly decreasing development and reproduction levels. Significant correlations were found for the collected mosquitofish between the morphological and reproductive indexes (ratio of perpendicular distance to tip to vertical distance from the tip on the 16th hemal spine) versus the sperm count of males; ratio 16P:16D versus sperm viability of males; segments of anal fin ray 3 versus oocyte count of females; and segments of anal fin ray 3 versus average oocyte mass of females. The results demonstrated that both male and female mosquitofish in the Hanxi River were affected by the discharged wastewaters, as reflected in their morphological changes in comparison with those of mosquitofish from the reference site.

The discovery, synthesis, and optimization of compound 1 from a high-throughput screening hit to highly potent and selective peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor delta (PPARdelta) agonists are reported. The synthesis and structure-activity relationship in this series are described in detail. On the basis of a general schematic PPAR pharmacophore model, scaffold 1 was divided into headgroup, linker, and tailgroup and successively optimized for PPAR activation using in vitro PPAR transactivation assays. A (2-methylphenoxy)acetic acid headgroup, a flexible linker, and a five-membered heteroaromatic center ring with two hydrophobic aryl substituents were required for efficient and selective PPARdelta activation. The fine-tuning of these aryl substituents led to an array of highly potent and selective compounds such as compound 38c, displaying an excellent pharmacokinetic profile in mouse. In an in vivo acute dosing model, selected members of this array were shown to induce the expression of pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase-4 (PDK4) and uncoupling protein-3 (UCP3), genes that are known to be involved in energy homeostasis and regulated by PPARdelta in skeletal muscle.

The optimized geometries and electron affinities of the alkoxy radicals have been examined using four hybrid Hartree–Fock/density functional methods. The basis set used in this work is of double-ζ plus polarization quality with additional diffuse s- and p-type functions, denoted DZP++. The geometries are fully optimized with each DFT method independently. Three different types of the neutral-anion energy separations reported in this work are the adiabatic electron affinity (EA ad ), the vertical electron affinity (EA vert ), and the vertical detachment energy (VDE). The most reliable adiabatic electron affinities (with ZPVE correction), obtained at the DZP++ BP86 level of theory, are 1.80 eV (for C 2 H 5 O), 1.80 eV ( a ) and 1.92 eV ( b ) for the two isomers of C 3 H 7 O, 1.83 eV ( a ) and 1.97 eV ( b ) for the two isomers of C 4 H 9 O, and 1.83 eV ( a ), 1.97 eV ( b ), 2.02 eV ( c ), and 1.96 eV ( d ) for the four isomers of C 5 H 11 O, respectively. Compared with the experimental values, the average absolute error of the BP86 method is 0.05 eV. The BPW91 and BLYP functionals also give reasonable predictions, with average absolute errors of 0.13 and 0.13 eV, respectively.

A series of PPARdelta-selective agonists was investigated and optimized for a favorable in vivo pharmacokinetic profile. Isoxazole LCI765 (17d) was found to be a potent and selective PPARdelta agonist with good in vivo PK properties in mouse (C(max)=5.1 microM, t(1/2)=3.1 h). LCI765 regulated expression of genes involved in energy homeostasis in relevant tissues when dosed orally in C57BL6 mice. A co-crystal structure of compound LCI765 and the LBD of PPARdelta is discussed.

This paper reports the synthesis of the raw material. Crystal growth and spectral properties of Tm 3+ /Yb 3+ : GdVO 4 . For polycrystalline raw material of rare earth (Tm 3+ , Yb 3+ ) -doped GdVO 4 were synthesized using liquid-phase reaction method in pH=7.0–7.5. The Tm 3+ /Yb 3+ : GdVO 4 crystal with the dimension Φ 30×35 mm 2 was obtained by the Czochralski method. The absorption spectrum was measured at room temperature. According to the Judd–Ofelt theory the parameters of oscillator strengths Ω λ were calculated: Ω 2 = 3.86 × 1 0 - 20 cm 2 , Ω 4 = 0.65 × 1 0 - 20 cm 2 , Ω 6 = 0.73 × 1 0 - 20 cm 2 .

Er 3+ : GdVO 4 single crystal with large size and good optical quality has been grown by Czochralski method. Its absorption and emission spectra were measured at room temperature. The absorption cross-sections are calculated on the basis of its spectra. According to Judd–Ofelt theory, the phenomenological intensity parameters Ω λ of Er 3+ ions have been fitted adopting least-squares method. Moreover, the spectral parameters of Er 3+ ions including oscillator strengths, radiative transition probabilities, radiative lifetimes and integrated emission cross-sections have been calculated. From the parameters mentioned above, the laser emission probability of Er 3+ : GdVO 4 crystal was discussed.

The study reported in this paper used mosquitofish to investigate the estrogenic and androgenic effects of municipal wastewater contamination on the stream system in Guangzhou, China. Western mosquitofish collected from a reference site and five study sites in streams forming part of the Pearl River network were dissected and analyzed for their morphological characteristics (anal fin and hemal spine characteristics) and target mRNA expression of genes (VTGα and ERα mRNA expression). Increased VTGα mRNA expression in males and decreased VTGα mRNA expression in females were observed in samples taken from four of the five study sites, with no such observations being made at the reference site. Correlation analysis indicated a significant correlation between the hemal spine morphology index and the gene transcription relative to the reference site. The multiple index also indicated that both male and female mosquitofish in contaminated streams were altered by discharged wastewater, as reflected in their morphological changes and relative induction of mRNA expression of genes in comparison to fish collected from the reference site.

With the rapid development of Software-Intensive System (SIS), equipment software system plays more important role in new-generation weapon. The current development of equipment software is summarized. In order to improve the safeguard capacity of equipment software and form complete and comprehensive safeguard architecture, the key input and output factors of estimation model for equipment software is established. According to the standard of ISO/IEC 12207, the whole life cycle of equipment software is divided into three different processes and corresponding activities in three processes are defined in detail. Aiming to the blindness of equipment software's transplant and retirement, the activities in transplant and retirement processes are emphasized. Possible changes and the corresponding works in equipment software's whole life cycle are also defined. Finally, the means to enhance the level of equipment software support for such conceptual change, regulation and system and talents training are discussed.

With the recent rapid growth of science and technology, various kinds of electronic devices are frequently used in people's daily life. Traditionally, graphical user interfaces are always applied in most of the electronic devices. However, it is inconvenient to use them while functions contained in devices become more complicated for some people, especially those without professional knowledge or aged. Therefore, it is natural that people want to operate or control these devices in a more convenient way. A new operation method called FIESTO is presented in this paper, which allowed users controlling devices using their own natural language commands. FIESTO extracts contained functions and related parameters from commands after a series of processing, and then guides available devices execute tasks. Ontology is used as a key technique in the project. A prototype system in the printer field is also developed by using the method. It is still in its infancy, but its effectiveness is confirmed by an evaluation to it. The experiment shows the method's potential application in other filed.

Different manufactures have various user interfaces (UIs) for the similar devices, which bring great inconvenience to the user. A method is presented in this paper to make interfaces that can be customized by users. It employs the approach of separating widgets of UIs from functions and binding functions to device drivers dynamically. The customized interfaces can be applied to all similar devices from various manufactures. A generic user interface customization model and an implementation scheme are proposed based on the method above, as well as a prototype system in the printer field.