Determinants of Corporate R&D Investment: An Empirical Study Comparing Korea's IT Industry with Its Non‐IT Industry

In our study, we extracted the market, finance, and government factors determining R&D investment of individual firms in the IT industry in Korea. We collected the financial data of 515 individual firms belonging to IT and non‐IT industries between 1980 and 1999 from the Korea Investors Service's database and investigated the empirical relationship between the factors using an ordinary regression model, a fixed effects model, and a random effects model. The main findings of our study are as follows: i) The Herfindahl Index variable representing the degree of market concentration is statistically insignificant in explaining R&D expenditures in the IT manufacturing industry. ii) Assets, which is used as a proxy variable for firm size, have a positive and statistically significant coefficient. These two results suggest that the Schumpeterian Hypothesis may be only partially applied to the IT manufacturing industry in Korea. iii) The dividend variable has a negative value and is statistically significant, indicating that a tendency of high dividends can restrict the internal cash flow for R&D investment. iv) The sales variable representing growth potential shows a positive coefficient. v) The subsidy as a proxy variable for governmental R&D promotion policies is positively correlated with R&D expenditure. This suggests that government policy has played a significant role in promoting R&D activities of IT firms in Korea since 1980. vi) Using a dummy variable, we verified that firms reduced their R&D investments to secure sufficient liquidity under the restructuring pressure during Korea's 1998 and 1999 economic crisis.     

Nickel- and copper-coated carbon fibre reinforced tin-lead alloy composites

Nickel and copper were deposited over brominated, surface treated, and pristine P-100 carbon fibres using cementation and electroplating techniques. The fibres were brominated by bromine vapour for 48 h and then desorbed at 200 °C in air for 12 h. The anodic oxidation treatment of the fibres involved electrochemical etching in a dilute sodium hydroxide electrolyte for 3 min. Electroplated coated fibres showed better tensile properties than cementation coated fibres. In addition, nickel coating exhibited better bonding with the carbon fibres compared to copper coating. The effect of bromination and surface treatment was improved adhesion between coating and fibres. Nickel- and copper-coated fibres, which were brominated, anodically oxidized, and pristine, reinforced tin-lead alloy composites were fabricated by squeeze casting. The composites containing coated treated carbon fibres had higher tensile and shear strength than the ones containing coated pristine carbon fibres. Moreover, the composite with coated brominated carbon fibres had better tensile strength and shear strength than the surface treatment. The results also showed the composites containing nickel-coated fibres had higher tensile and shear strength than the ones containing copper-coated fibres.     

Delayed delivery of surviving triplet after fetal reduction and spontaneous abortion

In multiple pregnancies, survival of remaining fetuses after premature death and delivery of one fetus is uncommon. We report a case of a triplet pregnancy that was reduced to twins at the 14th gestational week and then had preterm premature rupture of membranes and intrauterine fetal death of one twin at the 17th gestational week. To save the surviving fetus, delivery of the dead fetus and ligation of the umbilical cord at the cervical level were performed. We also performed McDonald cervical cerclage to keep the placenta of the dead fetus as well as that of the surviving one in the uterine cavity. After a series of aggressive procedures, including immediate administration of tocolytic agents, and antibiotic prophylaxis to prevent infection and preterm labor, the surviving fetus was delivered vaginally 73 days later due to intractable uterine contractions. After a 10-week hospital stay, the infant boy, weighing 2,500 g, was discharged without any sequelae. To our knowledge, this was the longest interval between deliveries in a triplet pregnancy reported in Taiwan. With adequate intensive management, a satisfactory outcome of the fetus and mother in such cases is possible.     

Ultra-shallow p-junction formation in silicon by excimer laser doping: a heat and mass transfer perspective

Heat and mass transfer at the nanosecond time scale and the nanometer length scale in pulsed laser fabrication of ultra-shallow p⁺-junctions is studied in this work. A new technique is developed to fabricate the ultra-shallow p⁺-junctions with pulsed laser doping of crystalline silicon with a solid spin-on-glass (SOG) dopant, through the nanosecond pulsed laser heating, melting, and boron mass diffusion in the 100 nm thin silicon layer close to the surface. High boron concentration of 10²⁰ atoms cc⁻¹ and the ‘box-like’ junction profile are achieved. The key mechanism determining the ‘box-like’ junction shape is found to be the melt-solid interface limited diffusion. The ultra-shallow p⁺-junctions with the depth from 30 to 400 nm are successfully made by the excimer laser. The optimal laser fluence condition for SOG doping is found about 0.6–0.8 J cm⁻² by studying the ultra-shallow p⁺-junction boron profiles measured by the secondary ion mass spectroscopy (SIMS) vs the laser fluence and the pulse number. The one-dimensional numerical analysis agrees reasonably with the experiment, within the available physical picture. Possible mechanisms such as boron diffusivity dependence on the dopant concentration in the molten silicon are proposed.     

Exceptional convergent evolution in a virus

Replicate lineages of the bacteriophage phiX 174 adapted to growth at high temperature on either of two hosts exhibited high rates of identical, independent substitutions. Typically, a dozen or more substitutions accumulated in the 5.4-kilobase genome during propagation. Across the entire data set of nine lineages, 119 independent substitutions occurred at 68 nucleotide sites. Over half of these substitutions, accounting for one third of the sites, were identical with substitutions in other lineages. Some convergent substitutions were specific to the host used for phage propagation, but others occurred across both hosts. Continued adaptation of an evolved phage at high temperature, but on the other host, led to additional changes that included reversions of previous substitutions. Phylogenetic reconstruction using the complete genome sequence not only failed to recover the correct evolutionary history because of these convergent changes, but the true history was rejected as being a significantly inferior fit to the data. Replicate lineages subjected to similar environmental challenges showed similar rates of substitution and similar rates of fitness improvement across corresponding times of adaptation. Substitution rates and fitness improvements were higher during the initial period of adaptation than during a later period, except when the host was changed.     

A comprehensive approach to the solution of direct-coupledmultislice model of skewed rotor induction motors using time-steppingeddy-current finite element method

Normally a complicated three-dimensional (3-D) approach is needed to study the field pattern of induction machines with skewed rotor bars. In this paper, a time-stepping two-dimensional (2-D) eddy-current finite element method, based on multislice technique, is described to study the steady-state operation and the starting process of skewed rotor induction machines. The fields of the multislices are being solved en bloc simultaneously, and thus, the effects of the eddy current and saturation can be taken into account directly. New forms of the governing equations for the multislice model are derived, which allow the meshes of multislices to be taken as one 2-D mesh so that the algorithm is very similar to that of general 2-D problems. Special techniques required for the mesh generation in the multislice model and the salient structures of the software are also described. The results obtained by using the program being developed have very good correlation with test data