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This study explores whether religion plays an important role in corporate poverty alleviation. Religious atmosphere affects managers' attitude towards corporate social responsibility (CSR) and then influences corporate poverty alleviation. This study first examines the impact of religious atmosphere on corporate poverty alleviation and then investigates whether formal institutions, such as law enforcement environments and ownership, influence the relationship between religious atmosphere and corporate poverty alleviation behavior.

In 2016, the Chinese government initiated a nationwide campaign aiming to eliminate poverty in China by 2020. The authors conduct empirical tests with data on Chinese listed firms from 2016 to 2020. The religious atmosphere is measured by the number of Buddhist monasteries and Taoist temples within a certain radius around Chinese listed firms' registered addresses. The authors adopt the ordinary least squares (OLS) method for regression and take the two-stage least squares (2SLS) method to address the endogeneity issue.

The results show a positive relationship between religious atmosphere and corporate poverty alleviation donations. Law enforcement attenuates the positive association between the religious atmosphere and corporate poverty alleviation donations. Religion and corporate poverty alleviation donations have a more positive association for non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) than for state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

The authors' findings have important implications. First, this study inspires incorporating the ethical value of traditional culture, such as religion, into CSR. Second, the findings imply that informal institutions have a greater impact on corporate decision-making when formal institutions are weak, suggesting that informal institutions should be emphasized when promoting CSR in countries where formal institutions are relatively weak. The study investigates only religious influence on corporate poverty alleviation based on Buddhism and Taoism, but the authors do not examine the impacts of other religions. Future research may examine the relationships between other religions and corporate poverty alleviation in China.

This study illustrates the positive role played by religion in promoting CSR by relating religious atmosphere to corporate poverty alleviation. It fills the research gap between religion and CSR and also contributes to the literature on determinants of corporate poverty alleviation.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of groove shape on the hydrodynamic characteristics of a journal bearing.

The computational fluid dynamics model also takes into account the cavitation phenomena and thermal effect, which can illustrate the lubrication performance of a journal bearing.

The hydrodynamic simulations of the journal bearing with the different groove shapes are conducted under different operation conditions.

Based on the numerical analysis, the suggestions are presented for groove shape selection and can be used to the design of a journal bearing under the extreme operation condition.

The Monascus pigment has been widely applied in the food processing industry as a functional additive. Lovastatin and polysaccharides are two important bio-active materials found in Monascus. Citrinin is considered as mycotoxin. Thus, it is important to produce high yields of intracellular Monascus pigments with high yields of lovastatin and polysaccharides, while maintaining low citrinin yields under liquid fermentation.

The intracellular yields of pigments, lovastatin, polysaccharides and citrinin; biomass; and reducing the sugar content of Monascus purpureus HBSD 08 were determined every day during a 10-day culturing period using lactose, maltose, sucrose, glucose, glycerine and xylose as the sole carbon sources. Additionally, the pigment composition was analysed by a thin layer chromatography (TLC) and the in vitro antitumor activities of the pigments were determined.

The maximal yield of pigments (55.44 U/mL after six days of culture) and lovastatin content (1,475.30 µg/L after five days of culture) were obtained in the presence of glucose and maltose as the sole carbon sources, respectively. The suitable carbon sources for high intracellular polysaccharides yields were sucrose, maltose and xylose. Glucose should not be chosen as the sole carbon source because of its high food safety risk. In vitro antitumor activities of pigments in the presence of different carbon sources were in the order of xylose > glucose = maltose > glycerine > sucrose = lactose. The pigment compositions in the presence of different carbon sources were the same from the TLC analysis. Thus, maltose displayed high intracellular yields of pigments, lovastatin and polysaccharides; high food safety against citrinin, and high in vitro antitumor activity during the ten days culturing period.

This study shows us the benefits of using maltose as a substrate in the production of intracellular Monascus pigments while ensuring economic and food safety.

Because of their large field of view, omnistereo vision systems have been widely used as primary vision sensors in autonomous mobile robot tasks. The purpose of this article is to achieve real-time and accurate tracking by the omnidirectional vision robot system.

The authors provide in this study the key techniques required to obtain an accurate omnistereo target tracking and location robot system, including stereo rectification and target tracking in complex environment. A simple rectification model is proposed, and a local image processing method is used to reduce the computation time in the localization process. A target tracking method is improved to make it suitable for omnidirectional vision system. Using the proposed methods and some existing methods, an omnistereo target tracking and location system is established.

The experiments are conducted with all the necessary stages involved in obtaining a high-performance omnistereo vision system. The proposed correction algorithm can process the image in real time. The experimental results of the improved tracking algorithm are better than the original algorithm. The statistical analysis of the experimental results demonstrates the effectiveness of the system.

A simple rectification model is proposed, and a local image processing method is used to reduce the computation time in the localization process. A target tracking method is improved to make it suitable for omnidirectional vision system. Using the proposed methods and some existing methods, an omnistereo target tracking and location system is established.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of fused deposition modelling (FDM) models and finite element analysis (FEA) related to dysplastic hip orthopaedic surgery.

The study involved the use of Mimics and Abaqus softwares. Mimics was used to process the CT scan patient data to STL format before producing FDM models which were for before and after surgery. FEA was done to study the two different type of implant biomaterials used in dysplastic hip surgery.

The use of FDM pre models for preplanning of dysplastic hip surgery by orthopaedic surgeons and viewing of the surgery outcome via FDM post models. Different implant biomaterials used gave different results in reduction of stresses that were achieved.

This is original work involving patients in hospital, which got ethical approval and was funded by a university grant. The paper describes a new kind of research in the university.

Robot localization in dynamic, cluttered environments is a challenging problem because it is impractical to have enough knowledge to be able to accurately model the robot’s environment in such a manner. This study aims to develop a novel probabilistic method equipped with function approximation techniques which is able to appropriately model the data distribution in Markov localization by using the maximum statistical power, thereby making a sensibly accurate estimation of robot’s pose in extremely dynamic, cluttered indoors environments.

The parameter vector of the statistical model is in the form of positions of easily detectable artificial landmarks in omnidirectional images. First, using probabilistic principal component analysis, the most likely set of parameters of the environmental model are extracted from the sensor data set consisting of missing values. Next, we use these parameters to approximate a probability density function, using support vector regression that is able to calculate the robot’s pose vector in each state of the Markov localization. At the end, using this density function, a good approximation of conditional density associated with the observation model is made which leads to a sensibly accurate estimation of robot’s pose in extremely dynamic, cluttered indoors environment.

The authors validate their method in an indoor office environment with 34 unique artificial landmarks. Further, they show that the accuracy remains high, even when they significantly increase the dynamics of the environment. They also show that compared to those appearance-based localization methods that rely on image pixels, the proposed localization strategy is superior in terms of accuracy and speed of convergence to a global minima.

By using easily detectable, and rotation, scale invariant artificial landmarks and the maximum statistical power which is provided through the concept of missing data, the authors have succeeded in determining precise pose updates without requiring too many computational resources to analyze the omnidirectional images. In addition, the proposed approach significantly reduces the risk of getting stuck in a local minimum by eliminating the possibility of having similar states.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a solution for Reynolds equation with both throttling term and reverse throttling term and provides a reference for changing damping of hydrostatic bearing.

The reverse throttling term is introduced into the Reynolds equation, and the adaptive damping factor is used in the Newton iteration method to improve convergence of numerical calculations. The static and dynamic performances of this bearing are numerically investigated by the finite-element method.

The results indicate that the reflux orifices lead to a decrease in load capacity at a high eccentricity ratio. Additionally, the mass inflow rate is increased; however, the additional inflow increase can be controlled by enhanced backpressure of the reflux orifice. Nevertheless, the bearing with the reflux orifice shows superiority in resisting high-frequency disturbances and enhances direct damping by 20% under a high backpressure.

This work presents an adaptive Newton damping iterative method for solving Reynolds equation with both throttling term and reverse throttling term. This work also provides a new idea for bearing structure design in improving damping.