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PurposeThis paper aims to explore the extent to which unionized employees are dissatisfied in Chinese Enterprise Trade Unions (CETUs) when they perceive high levels of the triple-role conflicts, as well as whether rights expectations will moderate these relationships. The authors define CETUs' triple-role conflicts as the extent to which CETUs and their cadres prioritize fulfilling the roles of preserving social stability (“peace”) and/or maintaining the production order (“production”) over protecting worker's rights and interests (“workers” rights).Design/methodology/approachPilot study developed the scales via both qualitative and quantitative studies, which include item generation using the transcript of individual interviews with 36 informants, and exploratory factor analyses with 106 respondents. The study used a sample of 327 employees from more than 20 firms in North and Southwest China.FindingsResults indicate high reliability and validity of the scales and provide largely consistent supports for our hypotheses: three dimensions of triple-role conflicts are negatively related to employees' satisfaction in CETUs, and rights expectations moderate these relationships.Originality/valueThis study developed three scales to respectively measure CETUs' triple-role conflicts, rights expectation and satisfaction in CETUs. More importantly, the findings shed light on the moderating mechanism of rights expectation in the relationships between triple-role conflicts and satisfaction in CETUs.

Aim To describe distribution patterns and species richness of cetaceans along a wide geographical range using occurrence data coupled with survey effort, from poorly studied oceanic areas. Specific objectives were to compare species richness and relative abundances among sub‐regions and to describe the distribution of each species. Location Eastern North Atlantic. Time period 2012–2017. Major taxa studied Cetacea. Methods Cetacean monitoring was performed by dedicated observers from cargo ships, used as platforms of opportunity, along routes between Iberian Peninsula, Macaronesia and north‐western Africa. We mapped relative abundance (encounter rates), survey effort and species richness. We examined the dependence of the number of sightings and species richness on survey effort. The area was divided into sub‐regions (according to the Exclusive Economic Zones and international waters), and relative abundances of the eight most frequently sighted species, as well as species richness, were compared among them. In addition, we describe the distribution of each species in relation to sea depth, distance to coast, latitude and longitude. Results A total of 1,989 sightings were logged, and 26 cetacean species were identified. Species richness and relative abundances of the eight most common species differed substantially between sub‐regions. Common and bottlenose dolphins distributed in shallow coastal waters contrasting with the oceanic distribution of Stenella dolphins. Cuvier's beaked whale and minke whale had similar distributions. Pilot and sperm whales were distributed in southern waters. Main conclusions A considerable amount of survey effort was needed to attain reliable estimates of species richness. In less surveyed areas, species richness and abundance are likely to be underestimated. The offshore waters presented high species richness and several hotspots of cetacean abundance. This work provides new knowledge on cetacean distribution at a large scale in the eastern North Atlantic, relevant to future conservation management.

Parallelization schemes are essential in order to exploit the full benefits of multi-core architectures, which have become widespread in recent years, especially for scientific applications. In shared memory architectures, the most common parallelization API is OpenMP. However, the introduction of correct and optimal OpenMP parallelization to applications is not always a simple task, due to common parallel shared memory management pitfalls and architecture heterogeneity. To ease this process, many automatic parallelization compilers were created. In this paper we focus on three source-to-source compilers—AutoPar, Par4All and Cetus—which were found to be most suitable for the task, point out their strengths and weaknesses, analyze their performances, inspect their capabilities and suggest new paths for enhancement. We analyze and compare the compilers’ performances over several different exemplary test cases, with each test case pointing out different pitfalls, and suggest several new ways to overcome these pitfalls, while yielding excellent results in practice. Moreover, we note that all of those source-to-source parallelization compilers function in the limits of OpenMP 2.5—an outdated version of the API which is no longer in optimal accordance with nowadays complicated heterogeneous architectures. Therefore we suggest a path to exploit the new features of OpenMP 4.5, as it provides new directives to fully utilize heterogeneous architectures, specifically ones that have a strong collaboration between CPUs and GPGPUs, thus it outperforms previous results by an order of magnitude.

Echocardiographic strain imaging is used to quantify cardiac deformation noninvasively through various techniques including non-rigid image registration. However, non-rigid image registration should be strong enough to deal with the poor spatiotemporal resolution of echocardiographic images. Extracting relevant features and calculating a suitable geometric transformation for the relevant features are the main parts of a registration problem. This paper aims to introduce a suitable geometric transformation for quantifying cardiac deformation based on a modified fuzzy inference system (FIS). The proposed method extracts relevant features of two echocardiographic images to generate proper rules for registration of two echocardiographic images. The modified FIS comprises two FISs in a series structure. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method for echocardiographic motion estimation with both in silico and in vivo databases. Applying the proposed method to the well-known STRAUS database resulted in 0.68 mm tracking error and 0.5 ± 3.78 relative circumferential strain error, which indicate the competitiveness of the proposed method with the state-of-the-art algorithms. In addition, the obtained results from in vivo database, CETUS, expressed the potential of the suggested algorithm for clinical application.

To report the safety and efficacy of a novel surgical technique using two lasers in cataract surgery. In this contralateral eye report, a 57-year-old female underwent cataract extraction. Two laser devices and a standard phacoemulsification, platform were used to conduct the procedures. First, a femtosecond laser was used to perform the corneal incision, capsulorhexis, and initial lens fragmentation in each eye. Following this, a nanosecond laser was used to enter the 2.8 mm incision, uni-axially, and complete the viscoelastic-divided nucleus fragment emulsification and removal in one eye. Standard phacoemulsification was used in the completion of the other eye. Posterior chamber foldable acrylic intraocular lenses were implanted in both cases. We evaluated perioperative acuity, refraction, keratometry, Scheimpflug tomography, intraocular pressure, endothelial cell counts, and total energy used with each laser in each case. Corrected distance visual acuity improved from preoperative 20/60 and 20/70 to postoperative 20/20 in both eyes, with 6-month follow-up. In the right eye, the total intraocular energy used was 2 J by the femtosecond laser and 6 J by the phacoemulsification device. In the left eye, the nanosecond laser utilized the same energy of 2 J and the nanosecond laser 2.4 J (80 pulses of 30 mJ each). There were no other differences noted in intraocular pressure or endothelial cell counts. In this report, we introduce a bladeless all-laser cataract surgery extraction alternative technique, with several potential novel advantages: enhanced incision and capsulorhexis reproducibility, reduction in intraocular energy used, and elimination of the potential of thermal corneal injury.

Isaac Newton's Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, published in 1728, one year after the great man's death, unleashed a storm of controversy. And for good reason. The book presents a drastically revised timeline for ancient civilizations, contracting Greek history by five hundred years and Egypt's by a millennium. Newton and the Origin of Civilization tells the story of how one of the most celebrated figures in the history of mathematics, optics, and mechanics came to apply his unique ways of thinking to problems of history, theology, and mythology, and of how his radical ideas produced an uproar that reverberated in Europe's learned circles throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold reveal the manner in which Newton strove for nearly half a century to rectify universal history by reading ancient texts through the lens of astronomy, and to create a tight theoretical system for interpreting the evolution of civilization on the basis of population dynamics. It was during Newton's earliest years at Cambridge that he developed the core of his singular method for generating and working with trustworthy knowledge, which he applied to his study of the past with the same rigor he brought to his work in physics and mathematics. Drawing extensively on Newton's unpublished papers and a host of other primary sources, Buchwald and Feingold reconcile Isaac Newton the rational scientist with Newton the natural philosopher, alchemist, theologian, and chronologist of ancient history.

We introduce an extensible knowledge based tool for idiom (pattern) recognition in DSP (digital signal processing) programs. Our tool utilizes functionality provided by the Cetus compiler infrastructure for detecting certain computation patterns that frequently occur in DSP code. We focus on recognizing patterns for for-loops and statements in their bodies as these often are the performance critical constructs in DSP applications for which replacement by highly optimized, target-specific parallel algorithms will be most profitable. For better structuring and efficiency of pattern recognition, we classify patterns by different levels of complexity such that patterns in higher levels are defined in terms of lower level patterns. The tool works statically on the intermediate representation. For better extensibility and abstraction, most of the structural part of recognition rules is specified in XML form to separate the tool implementation from the pattern specifications. Information about detected patterns will later be used for optimized code generation by local algorithm replacement e.g. for the low-power high-throughput multicore DSP architecture ePUMA.

With the evolution of high-performance computing, parallel applications have developed an increasing necessity for fault tolerance, most commonly provided by checkpoint and restart techniques. Checkpointing tools are typically implemented at one of two different abstraction levels: at the system level or at the application level. The latter has become an interesting alternative due to its flexibility and the possibility of operating in different environments. However, application-level checkpointing tools often require the user to manually insert checkpoints in order to ensure that certain requirements are met (e.g. forcing checkpoints to be taken at the user code and not inside kernel routines). This paper examines the transformations required to enable automatic checkpointing of parallel applications in the CPPC application-level checkpointing framework. These transformations have been implemented on two very different compiler infrastructures: Cetus and LLVM. Cetus is a Java-based compiler infrastructure aiming to provide an easy to use and clean IR and API for program transformation. LLVM is a low-level, SSA-based toolchain. The fundamental differences of both approaches are analyzed from the structural, behavioral and performance perspectives.

Fully automated dissolution test systems have become common throughout the pharmaceutical industry, and they are frequently utilized in laboratories that have a high sample throughput such as stability testing and quality control laboratories. Although these systems were introduced approximately 20 to 30 years ago, very few “new” automated dissolution systems have been introduced in the last 10 years. Thus, there is a unique demand for a novel approach in designing a dissolution system which incorporates many of the technological advances that have been made in the last decade. This case study describes the entire process of creating a novel fully automated dissolution system. The introduction of the Cetus 840® automated micro-sampling dissolution system, developed by Hatch Science® in collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb, integrates several new technologies, such as micro-sampling, cameras to record the dissolution test, a robust vessel washing routine, on-line high-performance liquid chromatography, vibration sensor, and a more hydrodynamic sampling system.

We compare the properties of dwarf galaxies in the Local Group with the simulated galaxies formed before reionization in a cosmological simulation of unprecedented spatial and mass resolution including radiative feedback effects. We find that a subset of the Local Group dwarfs, the dwarf Spheroidals, are remarkably similar to the simulated dwarf galaxies in all their properties already before reionization. Simulated and observed dwarf Spheroidal galaxies not only have similar properties but also follow the same scaling relations. Based on this similarity and on the observed ages of their dominant stellar populations we propose the hypothesis that Local Group dwarfs form in two different ways: (i) most dwarf Spheroidals are pristine fossils of the pre-reionization era and (ii) dwarf irregulars are more massive galaxies that formed most of their stars later, after reionization. There is also a group of “polluted fossils” with properties that are intermediate between these two main groups. We predict the existence of many more dwarf Spheroidals, fainter and with lower surface brightness than the observed population.