Closest Competitor Research Articles

Adversarial Threshold Neural Computer for Small Organic Molecular Structures

Introduction:A special place in the development of new drugs is computer modeling of potential drug candidates. At this stage, the molecular structure of a drug is created and virtually validated. Molecular structures are created mostly by bioinformatics specialists and medical chemists. Therefore, the process of creating and virtual testing of molecules is long and expensive.Purpose:Developing a model of a deep generative adversarial neural network and its reinforcement environment for generating targeted small organic molecular structures with predetermined properties, as well as reward functions for molecular diversity.Results: The developed deep neural network model called ATNC is based on the concepts of adversarial learning and reinforcement learning. The model uses a recurrent neural network with external memory as a generator of molecular structures, and a special neural network block for selecting the generated molecules before their real estimation by the environment. A new objective reward function of internal clustering by diversity is proposed, which allows the model to generate more diverse chemistry. Comparative experiments have shown that the proposed ATNC model is better than its closest competitor in terms of generating unique and more complex valid molecular structures. It has also been demonstrated that the the molecules generated by ATNC match to the a priori distributions of the key molecular descriptors of the training molecules. Experiments were conducted on a large dataset of 15 000 drug-like molecular compounds collected manually from the ChemDiv collection.Practical relevance:The proposed model can be used as an intelligent assistant in developing new drugs by medical chemists.

Time partitioning between jaguar Panthera onca, puma Puma concolor and ocelot Leopardus pardalis (Carnivora: Felidae) in Costa Rica’s dry and rainforests

Segregation of the daily activity patterns is considered and important mechanism facilitating the coexistance of competing species. Here, we evaluated if temporal separation existed among jaguar (Panthera onca), puma (Puma concolor) and ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) and if their activity patterns were related to that of a particular prey. We used camera trap records to estimate the activity schedules of these predators and their prey. We used the coefficient of overlapping (Δ; ranging from 0 to 1) to quantify the temporal interactions between predators and prey, and calculated confidence intervals from bootstrap samples. Strong temporal overlap occurred among the three felids (Δ = 0.63 - 0.82) in both dry and rainforests. However, a greater temporal separation was observed between the closest competitors (jaguar and puma, puma and ocelot). Jaguar and puma had a strong temporal overlap with medium and large-sized prey, while ocelots’ activity matched that of small-sized prey. High overlapping coefficients among the felids suggest that temporal segregation is not the main mechanism facilitating their coexistence in these areas. However, fine-scale or spatiotemporal differences in their activity patterns might contribute to their coexistence in tropical environments.

The Impact of M&A Announcements on Rivals: The Role of Competitive Dynamics

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As) research has predominantly focused on the antecedents of M&As and post-acquisition outcomes. To have better understanding of the impact of the M&A activities, it is crucial to extend the focus on the industry rivals. This paper investigates when and how an M&A announcement by the acquiring firm affects the market valuations of rival firms. Building on the Resource Based View (RBV) and competitive dynamics literatures, this paper shows, both theoretically and empirically, how the market penalizes rivals when a focal firm in the industry makes an M&A announcement. Also, if the rivals and the focal firm are strategically similar and close competitors, then rivals tend to suffer more negative consequences. The findings of this study extend the understanding of the influence of M&A on competitive dynamics.

Scalable preparation and stabilization of atomic-thick CoNi layered double hydroxide nanosheets for bifunctional oxygen electrocatalysis and rechargeable zinc-air batteries

Development of non-precious metal based oxygen electrocatalysts, particularly bifunctional ones for both oxygen reduction and oxygen evolution is at the heart of electrochemical energy research. Layered double hydroxides have great promise, and to fulfill their full potentials requires effective strategies to engineer and stabilize their structures at the nanoscale. In this study, we report the scalable preparation and delamination of atomic-thick CoNi layered double hydroxide nanosheets, and the subsequent flocculation from their colloidal dispersion upon the introduction of negatively charged graphene oxide nanosheets. Thanks to the large surface areas of CoNi layered double hydroxide monolayers and the high electrical conductivity of reduced graphene oxide support, the thus-formed composite exhibits bifunctional activity and stability far more superior to its close competitors for oxygen reduction and oxygen evolution in both 1 M and 6 M KOH. It could also be used as the oxygen electrocatalyst of rechargeable Zn-air batteries to enable remarkable discharge peak power density and stable cycling stability.

Possibilities and Ways of Using Benchmarking in Hotel Companies

Purpose. The aim of the work is an attempt to answer the questions of whether and how benchmarking is used in hotels with concomitant benchmarking comparisons and what are the benefits of benchmarking in hotel companies. Method. Survey forms filled in by hotel directors were the research tool. The study involved 12 selected hotels located in Poznań and thus, 18% of all the hotels operating in the city. An analysis of the responses was conducted in hotel groups based on selected factors such as network affiliation or category. The Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was calculated for individual responses to obtain answers to the questions of whether and how selected factors differentiate the hoteliers’ approach to benchmarking. Findings. It was found that a comparative analysis should refer to similar hotels in terms of category, ownership and regional conditions. Benchmarking is primarily used to improve current efforts of the company. An endeavour to improve competitiveness and reduce costs is also an important reason for using this method. The lack of courage and openness on the part of managers to look for patterns outside their own industry and the group of their closest competitors are surprising. Research conclusions and limitations. The research only took into account hotels located in the city – a case study of Poznań. Although the number of surveyed hotels was sufficient for an attempt to generalize results in the city, the sample size should be significantly increased in order to make broader generalizations. It is also worth identifying other factors (beyond category and network affiliation) which differentiate the hoteliers’ approach to benchmarking. Practical implications. The study and application process which resulted in the analysis of the responses were purely practical. Amongst others, the responses concerned the course of benchmarking, experience in its implementation, or the manner of information flow on the use of best practices within the company. The questions asked included the type of benchmarking used and the effects of its application in the hotels. Originality. In Polish literature, this kind of empirical research is not often conducted, all the more that it requires the collection of data through personal interviews with the hotel managers. Type of paper. Review article.

Improving performance of iterative solvers with the AXC format using the Intel Xeon Phi

This work is focused on the application of the new AXC format in iterative algorithms on the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor to solve linear systems by accelerating the sparse matrix-vector (SpMV) product. These algorithms are the Conjugate Gradient (CG) and the Biconjugate Gradient Stabilised (BiCGS) methods used to solve symmetric and non-symmetric linear systems. Two highly efficient formats were selected to compare the AXC format: the Compressed Sparse Row (CSR) format and the Sliced ELLPACK-C- $$\alpha $$ (SELL-C- $$\alpha $$ ) format. The evaluation process consists of two phases. The first phase is focused on the performance comparison of the SpMV kernels alone. The second phase compares the performance of the solvers with the different kernels integrated within them. As this work is oriented to explore the full capabilities of the Intel Xeon Phi architecture, the Intel’s intrinsic instructions set were used to code the kernels for the AXC and SELL-C- $$\alpha $$ formats and compared with the Intel’s MKL optimal implementation of the CSR format. Numerical results demonstrate that the AXC format achieves the higher average performance 15.9 GFLOPS against the 5.5 GFLOPS for the SELL-C- $$\alpha $$ format and 8.4 GFLOPs for the MKL CSR format, and it also have the lowest variability when performing the SpMV product alone. Results also show that the AXC format achieves up to 6.5 $$\times $$ , 1.5 $$\times $$ and 1.9 $$\times $$ greater performance over the MKL CSR format, its closest competitor, for the SpMV product, the CG and the BiCGS algorithms, respectively.

Local Competition Amplifies the Corrosive Effects of Inequality

Inequality is widely believed to incite conflict, but the evidence is inconsistent. We argue that the spatial scale of competition—the extent to which individuals compete locally, with their interaction partners, or globally, with the entire population—can help settle the question. We built a mathematical model of the evolution of conflict under inequality and tested its predictions in an experimental game with 1,205 participants. We found that inequality increases conflict, destroys wealth, and engenders risk taking. Crucially, these effects are amplified by local competition. Thus, inequality is at its most damaging when it arises between close competitors. Indeed, at the extremes, the combined effects of inequality and the scale of competition are very large. More broadly, our findings suggest that disagreements in the literature may be the result of a mismatch between the scale at which inequality is measured and the scale at which conflict occurs.

Close Competitors? On the Causes and Consequences of Bilateral Competition Between Banks

We interview 379 European bank CEOs to identify their banks’ main competitors. We then provide evidence on the drivers of bilateral bank competition; construct a novel competition measure at the locality level; and assess how well it explains variation in firms’ credit constraints. We find that banks identify another bank as a main competitor in small-business lending when their branch networks overlap; when both are foreign owned or relationship oriented; and when the potential competitor has fewer hierarchical layers. Intense bilateral bank competition increases local credit constraints, especially for small firms, as competition may impede the formation of lending relationships.

Status and prospects of cashew cultivation in India-an over view

Cashew, a perennial tree well known as ‘poor man's crop ’is a source of highly priced cashew nuts. India being the leading producer, consumer and second largest exporter of cashew in the world, has a prime position in cashew trade in the world market. But the productivity level of Indian cashew is far less than that of its close competitors viz., Vietnam, Nigeria, Cote de'Ivoire, Philippines etc. The cashew processing sector in India is one of the largest in the world and has given huge employment to rural people especially the women folk. Some of the cashews processing industries in India are still under unorganized sector. Increasing demand for the nuts has necessitated the increased production. The present review is an attempt made towards understanding the Indian cashew industry in relation to its position in the global market, problems being faced by the cashew industry and the scope in future.

Clear and Close Competitors? On the Causes and Consequences of Bilateral Competition between Banks

We interview 361 European bank CEOs to identify their banks’ main competitors. We then provide evidence on the drivers of bilateral bank competition, construct a novel competition measure at the locality level, and assess how well it explains variation in firms’ credit constraints. We find that banks identify another bank as a main competitor in small-business lending when their branch networks overlap, when both are foreign owned or relationship oriented, or when the potential competitor has fewer hierarchical layers. Intense bilateral bank competition increases local credit constraints, especially for small firms, as competition may impede the formation of lending relationships.

Pictures and Progress

ABSTRACT This attractive gift book is “a steal” at its very affordable price, but it also presents the results of outstanding investigative scholarship and analytic bibliography. The editors assert that Frederick Douglass “became the most photographed American of the nineteenth century” and that he “wrote more extensively on photography than any other American” during the four years of the Civil War. They have identified 160 separate photographs of him that are not copies from the same negative, and his closest competitors seem to be General George Armstrong Custer, Red Cloud, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant. The volume celebrates and illustrates the amazing career of Frederick Douglass through several visual media and brings together his essays on photography, which were often vehicles for his ideas on a wide range of subjects, ranging from literature, to popular science, to “philosophy of Progress,” to American politics.

Competition between hydrogen bonds and halogen bonds: a structural study

O–H hydrogen-bond donors and R–CC–I halogen-bond donors are close competitors for suitable acceptor sites in solid-state assembly.

Salmonella enterica Serovar Typhimurium Strategies for Host Adaptation.

Bacterial pathogens must sense and respond to newly encountered host environments to regulate the expression of critical virulence factors that allow for niche adaptation and successful colonization. Among bacterial pathogens, non-typhoidal serovars of Salmonella enterica, such as serovar Typhimurium (S. Tm), are a primary cause of foodborne illnesses that lead to hospitalizations and deaths worldwide. S. Tm causes acute inflammatory diarrhea that can progress to invasive systemic disease in susceptible patients. The gastrointestinal tract and intramacrophage environments are two critically important niches during S. Tm infection, and each presents unique challenges to limit S. Tm growth. The intestinal tract is home to billions of commensal microbes, termed the microbiota, which limits the amount of available nutrients for invading pathogens such as S. Tm. Therefore, S. Tm encodes strategies to manipulate the commensal population and side-step this nutritional competition. During subsequent stages of disease, S. Tm resists host immune cell mechanisms of killing. Host cells use antimicrobial peptides, acidification of vacuoles, and nutrient limitation to kill phagocytosed microbes, and yet S. Tm is able to subvert these defense systems. In this review, we discuss recently described molecular mechanisms that S. Tm uses to outcompete the resident microbiota within the gastrointestinal tract. S. Tm directly eliminates close competitors via bacterial cell-to-cell contact as well as by stimulating a host immune response to eliminate specific members of the microbiota. Additionally, S. Tm tightly regulates the expression of key virulence factors that enable S. Tm to withstand host immune defenses within macrophages. Additionally, we highlight the chemical and physical signals that S. Tm senses as cues to adapt to each of these environments. These strategies ultimately allow S. Tm to successfully adapt to these two disparate host environments. It is critical to better understand bacterial adaptation strategies because disruption of these pathways and mechanisms, especially those shared by multiple pathogens, may provide novel therapeutic intervention strategies.

How to avoid small results with big data

Big data and analytics are buzzwords that elicit both excitement and fear in managers in most firms, small or large. Firms are competing with each other to implement their data and analytics strategies, in the process spending billions of dollars, either to cement their leadership position or play catch‐up with their closest competitors. According to a recent report by the International Data Corporation, the big data and business analytics (BDA) market is expected to generate a revenue of $150 billion in 2017.Moreover, this industry is predicted to grow at over 12% annually, crossing the $200 billion mark by 2020.

Fighting over food unites the birds of North America in a continental dominance hierarchy

The study of aggressive interactions between species has, to date, usually been restricted to interactions among small numbers of ecologically close competitors. Nothing is known about interspecific dominance hierarchies that include numerous, ecologically varied species. Such hierarchies are of interest because they could be used to address a variety of research questions, e.g. do similarly ranked species tend to avoid each other in time or space, and what will happen when such species come into contact as climates change? Here, we propose a method for creating a continental-scale hierarchy, and we make initial analyses based on this hierarchy. We quantified the extent to which a dominance hierarchy of feeder birds was linear, as intransitivities can promote local species9 coexistence. Using the existing network of citizen scientists participating in Project FeederWatch, we collected the data with which to create a continent-spanning interspecific dominance hierarchy that included species that do not currently have overlapping geographic distributions. Overall, the hierarchy was nearly linear, and largely predicted by body mass, although there were clade-specific deviations from the average mass-dominance relationship. Most of the small number of intransitive relationships in the hierarchy were based on small samples of observations. Few observations were made of interactions between close relatives and ecological competitors like Melanerpes woodpeckers and chickadees, as such species often have only marginally overlapping geographic distributions. Yet, these species9 ranks--emergent properties of the interaction network--were usually in agreement with published literature on dominance relationships between them.

The Effect of Marketing Strategy on Consumer Satisfaction: Distance Education Perspective

The University of Education, Winneba (UEW) was among the first public Universities to establish Distance Education Programmes for Ghanaians who could not make themselves available for conventional education. However, in recent past, there has been an increase in the number of universities that offer similar services thereby increasing the competitive nature of the educational market. Therefore, the main purpose of this study was to unearth the strategies that could be employed by UEW Distance Learning Education Center to strengthen its competitive position to outwit close competitors. The descriptive survey design method was employed for the study and a sample size of 120 distance students of UEW, Kumasi Girls Study Center was selected. A convenient sampling technique was also employed. Questionnaire was the main instrument used for data collection. Results from descriptive statistics and standard multiple regression analysis showed that the significant predictor of students’ satisfaction with the UEW distance education programme is valuable learning experience from the courses. It was also revealed from the students’ perspective that the UEW uses student-instructor interactions (i.e. social bonding) as the main form of marketing strategy in satisfying its customers. Finally, it was found that the UEW could maintain its dominant position in the distance education market through positive word of mouth information from students to the public. It is recommended that UEW must build trust and be committed to the welfare of students.

Lomitapide for the treatment of hypercholesterolemia

ABSTRACTIntroduction: Homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HoFH) is a serious rare inherited condition that leads to extremely elevated levels of low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), and predisposes affected individuals to high risk of atherosclerotic vascular disease. Traditional therapies are largely ineffective in managing the hypercholesterolemia in these patients; diet and regular LDL-apheresis are the mainstays of management. Lomitapide is an inhibitor of microsomal triglyceride transfer protein (MTP) that blocks the assembly of metabolic precursors of LDL particles. Lomitapide has been approved for use in the HoFH population.Areas covered: This article explores the basic properties of lomitapide, including its pharmacodynamic, pharmacokinetic and metabolic profiles. It also reports the current market status of lomitapide and its close competitors. Trials of lomitapide are also briefly reviewed as well as the safety and tolerability of the drug.Expert opinion: Lomitapide has been recently approved for use in HoFH, a population that has been traditionally very difficult to effectively manage. While lomitapide has some safety concerns, including gastrointestinal symptoms and potential hepatotoxicity, and has yet to prove long term efficacy on hard cardiovascular endpoints, it does represent an attractive treatment option for a small group of patients who, until now, had very limited available effective therapies.

Local Competition Amplifies the Corrosive Effects of Inequality

Inequality is widely believed to incite conflict, but causal evidence is scarce. In a mathematical model and an experiment with 1205 human players, we study the effects of inequality and the spatial scale of competition on the evolution of conflict. We show that inequality of outcomes increases belligerent behaviour, destroys wealth, and engenders risk-taking. Crucially, these effects are amplified by local competition—the extent to which individuals compete exclusively with their social partners for fitness (or proxies thereof). Thus, inequality is at its most damaging when it arises between close competitors. More broadly, our work demonstrates that the scale of competition regulates the effects of inequality on conflict, which helps to explain the distribution of violence across different levels of social organisation.

Every Byte Counts

Quick responses to user actions are instrumental to the success of mobile applications. To ensure such responsiveness, applications often prefetch data objects before the user requests them. This way, applications can avoid the need to retrieve data through slow network connections during user interactions. However, prefetches may also harm. They increase launch delays and might cause substantial amounts of data to be downloaded through energy-hungry, cellular connections. In this paper, we propose EBC, a novel algorithm to schedule application prefetches and overcome their drawbacks. EBC computes application usage probabilities and traffic volume estimates to determine when and for which applications prefetches should be triggered. Thereby, it applies different strategies depending on whether a cellular or Wi-Fi connection is available. We evaluate the performance of EBC on two publicly available, large-scale data sets: LiveLab and Device Analyzer. Our results show that EBC can lower launch delays and ensure freshness of application content. At the same time, it reduces the amount of data downloaded through cellular connections. On the Device Analyzer data set, for instance, EBC achieves a 10% reduction in cellular traffic and a 36% better average freshness with respect to its closest competitor.

How to change contracts into beneficial relationships – the results of empirical research

How to change contracts into beneficial relationships – the results of empirical research