China’s industrial state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are commonly perceived as performing poorly. This leads authors to conclude that SOE reform so far has been a failure, and to recommend all-out privatization. Industrial SOE profitability indeed declined drastically in the course of the reform period, and industrial SOEs are always less profitable than industrial non-SOEs. However, the gap betwe...

An achromatic element eliminating only longitudinal chromatic aberration (LCA) while maintaining transverse chromatic aberration (TCA) is established for the eye model, which involves the angle formed by the visual and optical axis. To investigate the impacts of higher-order aberrations on vision, the actual data of higher-order aberrations of human eyes with three typical levels are introduced...

When the senses deliver conflicting information, vision dominates spatial processing, and audition dominates temporal processing. We asked whether this sensory specialization results in cross-modal encoding of unisensory input into the task-appropriate modality. Specifically, we investigated whether visually portrayed temporal structure receives automatic, obligatory encoding in the auditory do...

Ubiquitous computing is associated with a vision of everything being connected to everything. However, for successful applications to emerge, it will not be the quantity but the quality and usefulness of connections that will matter. Our concern is how qualitative relations and more selective connections can be established between smart artefacts, and how users can retain control over artefact ...

When conflicts occur during integration of visual and auditory information, one modality often dominates the other, but the underlying neural circuit mechanism remains unclear. Using auditory-visual discrimination tasks for head-fixed mice, we found that audition dominates vision in a process mediated by interaction between inputs from the primary visual (VC) and auditory (AC) cortices in the p...

The concept of “agency” in games and other playable media (also referred to as “intention”) has been discussed as a player experience and a structural property of works. We shift focus, considering agency, instead, as a phenomenon involving both player and game, one that occurs when the actions players desire are among those they can take (and vice versa) as supported by an underlying computati...

In this paper, we examine the role of political connections by analyzing the short-and long-term performance of Chinese state owned enterprise (SOE) acquirers relative to private owned enterprise (POE) from 1994 to 2008. The empirical result shows that 1) SOE acquirers outperform the POE acquirer both in terms of long-run stock and operating performance; 2) announcement effect of POE acquirer t...

The probability distribution P from which the history of our universe is sampled represents a theory of everything or TOE. We assume P is formally describable. Since most (uncountably many) distributions are not, this imposes a strong inductive bias. We show that P (x) is small for any universe x lacking a short description, and study the spectrum of TOEs spanned by two P s, one reflecting the ...

Silicon electronics dominates information processing, and offers a remarkable technology for making very complex systems for very little cost. Many of the waveguide passive optical components that we use today in telecommunications, such as wavelength splitters, use the same technology base – the silicon, silicon dioxide and silicon nitride that are the semiconductors and insulators of electron...