LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Corporate Ownership Structure and the Informativeness of Earnings

Management typically has discretion over the recognition of accruals and this discretion can be used by management to signal their private information or to opportunistically manipulate earnings. To the extent that management uses their discretion to manipulate accruals, earnings will become less informative. Also, managers in their choice of accepted accounting procedures could choose to reflect the economics underlying the transactions or select accounting techniques to reflect accounting numbers for personal benefit. This will in turn, influence the informativeness of earnings. Prior studies in the United States have examined the relationship between management ownership structure and earnings management. For example, Warfield, Wild and Wild (1995) has shown that managerial ownership is positively associated with earnings explanatory power for returns and inversely related to the magnitude of discretionary accounting accruals. When Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, 29(7) & (8), Sept./Oct. 2002, 0306-686X
Relationships of role stressors with organizational citizenship behavior: a meta-analysis.

Several quantitative reviews have documented the negative relationships that role stressors have with task performance. Surprisingly, much less attention has been directed at the impact of role stressors on other aspects of job performance, such as organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). The goal of this study was to therefore estimate the overall relationships of role stressors (i.e., role ambiguity, conflict, and overload) with OCB. A meta-analysis of 42 existing studies indicated that role ambiguity and role conflict were negatively related to OCB and that these relationships were moderated by the target of OCB, type of organization, OCB rating source, and publication status. As expected, role conflict had a stronger negative relationship with OCB than it did with task performance. Finally, we found support for a path model in which job satisfaction mediated relationships of role stressors with OCB and for a positive direct relationship between role overload and OCB.
Do patients perceive a link between a fragility fracture and osteoporosis?

BACKGROUND
To evaluate factors associated with whether patients associate their fracture with future fracture risk.


METHODS
Fragility fracture patients participated in a telephone interview. Unadjusted odds ratios (OR, [95% CI]) were calculated to identify factors associated with whether patients associate their fracture with increased fracture risk or osteoporosis. Predictors identified in univariate analysis were entered into multivariable logistic regression models.


RESULTS
127 fragility fracture patients (82% female) participated in the study, mean (SD) age 67.5 (12.7) years. An osteoporosis diagnosis was reported in 56 (44%) participants, but only 17% thought their fracture was related to osteoporosis. Less than 50% perceived themselves at increased risk of fracture. The odds of an individual perceiving themselves at increased risk for fracture were higher for those that reported a diagnosis of osteoporosis (OR 22.91 [95%CI 7.45;70.44], p < 0.001), but the odds decreased with increasing age (0.95 [0.91;0.99], p<0.009). The only variable significantly associated with the perception that the fracture was related to osteoporosis was self-reported osteoporosis diagnosis (39.83 [8.15;194.71], p<0.001).


CONCLUSION
Many fragility fracture patients do not associate their fracture with osteoporosis. It is crucial for physicians to communicate to patients that an osteoporosis diagnosis, increasing age or a fragility fracture increases the risk for future fracture.
Small bites versus large bites for closure of abdominal midline incisions (STITCH): a double-blind, multicentre, randomised controlled trial

BACKGROUND
Incisional hernia is a frequent complication of midline laparotomy and is associated with high morbidity, decreased quality of life, and high costs. We aimed to compare the large bites suture technique with the small bites technique for fascial closure of midline laparotomy incisions.


METHODS
We did this prospective, multicentre, double-blind, randomised controlled trial at surgical and gynaecological departments in ten hospitals in the Netherlands. Patients aged 18 years or older who were scheduled to undergo elective abdominal surgery with midline laparotomy were randomly assigned (1:1), via a computer-generated randomisation sequence, to receive small tissue bites of 5 mm every 5 mm or large bites of 1 cm every 1 cm. Randomisation was stratified by centre and between surgeons and residents with a minimisation procedure to ensure balanced allocation. Patients and study investigators were masked to group allocation. The primary outcome was the occurrence of incisional hernia; we postulated a reduced incidence in the small bites group. We analysed patients by intention to treat. This trial is registered at Clinicaltrials.gov, number NCT01132209 and with the Nederlands Trial Register, number NTR2052.


FINDINGS
Between Oct 20, 2009, and March 12, 2012, we randomly assigned 560 patients to the large bites group (n=284) or the small bites group (n=276). Follow-up ended on Aug 30, 2013; 545 (97%) patients completed follow-up and were included in the primary outcome analysis. Patients in the small bites group had fascial closures sutured with more stitches than those in the large bites group (mean number of stitches 45 [SD 12] vs 25 [10]; p<0·0001), a higher ratio of suture length to wound length (5·0 [1·5] vs 4·3 [1·4]; p<0·0001) and a longer closure time (14 [6] vs 10 [4] min; p<0·0001). At 1 year follow-up, 57 (21%) of 277 patients in the large bites group and 35 (13%) of 268 patients in the small bites group had incisional hernia (p=0·0220, covariate adjusted odds ratio 0·52, 95% CI 0·31-0·87; p=0·0131). Rates of adverse events did not differ significantly between groups.


INTERPRETATION
Our findings show that the small bites suture technique is more effective than the traditional large bites technique for prevention of incisional hernia in midline incisions and is not associated with a higher rate of adverse events. The small bites technique should become the standard closure technique for midline incisions.


FUNDING
Erasmus University Medical Center and Ethicon.
LDA Revisited: Entropy, Prior and Convergence

Inference algorithms of latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), either for small or big data, can be broadly categorized into expectation-maximization (EM), variational Bayes (VB) and collapsed Gibbs sampling (GS). Looking for a unified understanding of these different inference algorithms is currently an important open problem. In this paper, we revisit these three algorithms from the entropy perspective, and show that EM can achieve the best predictive perplexity (a standard performance metric for LDA accuracy) by minimizing directly the cross entropy between the observed word distribution and LDA's predictive distribution. Moreover, EM can change the entropy of LDA's predictive distribution through tuning priors of LDA, such as the Dirichlet hyperparameters and the number of topics, to minimize the cross entropy with the observed word distribution. Finally, we propose the adaptive EM (AEM) algorithm that converges faster and more accurate than the current state-of-the-art SparseLDA [20] and AliasLDA [12] from small to big data and LDA models. The core idea is that the number of active topics, measured by the residuals between E-steps at successive iterations, decreases significantly, leading to the amortized σ(1) time complexity in terms of the number of topics. The open source code of AEM is available at GitHub.
Can we get rid of TREC assessors ? Using Mechanical Turk for relevance assessment

Recently, Amazon Mechanical Turk has gained a lot of attention as a tool for conducting different kinds of relevance evaluations. In this paper we show a series of experiments on TREC data, evaluate the outcome, and discuss the results. Our position, supported by these preliminary experimental results, is that crowdsourcing is a viable alternative for relevance assessment.
Erosive potential of commonly used beverages, medicated syrup, and their effects on dental enamel with and without restoration: An in vitro study

AIM
This study evaluates erosive potential of commonly used beverages, medicated syrup, and their effects on dental enamel with and without restoration in vitro.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
Test medias used in this study included carbonated beverage, noncarbonated beverage, high-energy sports drink medicated cough syrup, distilled water as the control. A total of 110 previously extracted human premolar teeth were selected for the study. Teeth were randomly divided into two groups. Test specimens were randomly distributed to five beverages groups and comprised 12 specimens per group. Surface roughness (profilometer) readings were performed at baseline and again, following immersion for 14 days (24 h/day). Microleakage was evaluated. The results obtained were analyzed for statistical significance using SPSS-PC package using the multiple factor ANOVA at a significance level of P < 0.05. Paired t-test, Friedman test ranks, and Wilcoxon signed ranks test.


RESULTS
For surface roughness high-energy sports drink and noncarbonated beverage showed the highly significant difference with P values of 0.000 and 0.000, respectively compared to other test media. For microleakage high-energy sports drink had significant difference in comparison to noncarbonated beverage (P = 0.002), medicated syrup (P = 0.000), and distilled water (P = 0.000).


CONCLUSION
High-energy sports drink showed highest surface roughness value and microleakage score among all test media and thus greater erosive potential to enamel while medicated syrup showed least surface roughness value and microleakage among all test media.
Social Security in Theory and Practice ( II ) : Efficiency Theories , Narrative Theories , and Implications for Reform

166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forces create and sustain old age Social Security as a public program? Mulligan and Sala-i-Martin (1999b) document several of the internationally and historically common features of social security programs, and explore “political” theories of Social Security. This paper discusses the “efficiency theories,” which view creation of the SS program as a full or partial solution to some market failure. Efficiency explanations of social security include the “SS as welfare for the elderly”, the “retirement increases productivity to optimally manage human capital externalities”, “optimal retirement insurance”, the “prodigal father problem”, the “misguided Keynesian”, the “optimal longevity insurance”, the “government economizing transaction costs”, and the “return on human capital investment”. We also analyze four “narrative” theories of social security: the “chain letter theory”, the “lump of labor theory”, the “monopoly capitalism theory”, and the “Sub-but-Nearly-Optimal policy response to private pensions theory”. The political and efficiency explanations are compared with the international and historical facts and used to derive implications for replacing the typical pay-as-you-go system with a forced savings plan. Most of the explanations suggest that forced savings does not increase welfare, and may decrease it.
An overview on subgroup discovery: foundations and applications

Subgroup discovery is a data mining technique which extracts interesting rules with respect to a target variable. An important characteristic of this task is the combination of predictive and descriptive induction. An overview related to the task of subgroup discovery is presented. This review focuses on the foundations, algorithms, and advanced studies together with the applications of subgroup discovery presented throughout the specialised bibliography.
A Software Implementation of the IEEE 754R Decimal Floating-Point Arithmetic Using the Binary Encoding Format

The IEEE Standard 754-1985 for binary floating-point arithmetic [1] was revised [2], and an important addition is the definition of decimal floating-point arithmetic. This is intended mainly to provide a robust, reliable framework for financial applications that are often subject to legal requirements concerning rounding and precision of the results, because the binary floating-point arithmetic may introduce small but unacceptable errors. Using binary floating-point calculations to emulate decimal calculations in order to correct this issue has led to the existence of numerous proprietary software packages, each with its own characteristics and capabilities. IEEE 754R decimal arithmetic should unify the ways decimal floating-point calculations are carried out on various platforms. New algorithms and properties are presented in this paper which are used in a software implementation of the IEEE 754R decimal floatingpoint arithmetic, with emphasis on using binary operations efficiently. The focus is on rounding techniques for decimal values stored in binary format, but algorithms for the more important or interesting operations of addition, multiplication, division, and conversions between binary and decimal floating-point formats are also outlined. Performance results are included for a wider range of operations, showing promise that our approach is viable for applications that require decimal floating-point calculations.
Reasoning with PCP-nets in a Multi-Agent Context

PCP-nets generalize CP-nets to model conditional preferences with probabilistic uncertainty. In this paper we use PCP-nets in a multiagent context to compactly represent a collection of CP-nets, thus using probabilistic uncertainty to reconcile possibly conflicting qualitative preferences expressed by a group of agents. We then study two key preference reasoning tasks: finding an optimal outcome which best represents the preferences of the agents, and answering dominance queries. Our theoretical and experimental analysis demonstrates that our techniques are efficient and accurate for both reasoning tasks.
Observational multicentric study on chronic sciatic pain: clinical data from 44 Italian centers.

OBJECTIVE
To provide information on the clinical presentation of sciatic neuropathy and its management in a real-world setting, and to analyze the effects of a multimodal approach based on the association of physical and pharmacological therapy.


PATIENTS AND METHODS
A multicentric observational prospective study was conducted in 44 Italian tertiary centers specialized in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Orthopedics, Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Rheumatology. To develop a shared management of LPB with sciatica, a dedicated clinical record was proposed to collect data about diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes. Pain, disability, and quality of life were recorded trough validated questionnaires at baseline and after a two-month follow-up.


RESULTS
394 patients (age, mean ± SD 55.7 ± 14.1 years, 57.1% females) with chronic LBP and sciatica were enrolled in the study. The characteristics of the selected group showed a certain variability in the clinical presentation. At baseline, patients received several different therapeutic options among physical, pharmacological and neurotrophic treatments. A subgroup of 312 patients was treated with a combination of neurotrophic agents containing alpha-lipoic acid (ALA). After a two-month follow-up, a general improvement in both perceived pain and functional disabilities was observed. A significant improvement (p < 0.001) in the Pain Numeric Rating Scale (NRS), Roland e Morris Disability Questionnaire (RMDQ) and Brief Pain Inventory (BPI) Italian short version was observed.


CONCLUSIONS
Sciatic neuropathy is a multifaceted condition managed by means of a wide spectrum of therapeutic options. The results of this study suggest that a multimodal approach based on the association of ALA with physical and pharmacological therapies can be beneficial in the treatment of LBP with sciatica.
Vegetation Detection for Driving in Complex Environments

A key challenge for autonomous navigation in cluttered outdoor environments is the reliable discrimination between obstacles that must be avoided at all costs, and lesser obstacles which the robot can drive over if necessary. Chlorophyll-rich vegetation in particular is often not an obstacle to a capable off-road vehicle, and it has long been recognized in the satellite imaging community that a simple comparison of the red and near-infrared (NIR) reflectance of a material provides a reliable technique for measuring chlorophyll content in natural scenes. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of using this chlorophyll-detection technique to improve autonomous navigation in natural, off-road environments. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that this feature has properties complementary to the color and shape descriptors traditionally used for point cloud analysis, and show significant improvement in classification performance for tasks relevant to outdoor navigation. Results are shown from field testing onboard a robot operating in off-road terrain.
Effect of backpack load carriage on cervical posture in primary schoolchildren.

OBJECTIVE
This study examined the effects of various backpack loads on elementary schoolchildren's posture and postural compensations as demonstrated by a change in forward head position.


SUBJECTS
A convenience sample of 11 schoolchildren, aged 8-11 years participated.


METHODS
Sagittal digital photographs were taken of each subject standing without a backpack, and then with the loaded backpack before and after walking 6 minutes (6MWT) at free walking speed. This was repeated over three consecutive weeks using backpacks containing randomly assigned weights of 10%, 15%, or 20% body weight of each respective subject. The craniovertebral angle (CVA) was measured using digitizing software, recorded and analyzed.


RESULTS
Subjects demonstrated immediate and statistically significant changes in CVA, indicating increased forward head positions upon donning the backpacks containing 15% and 20% body weight. Following the 6MWT, the CVA demonstrated further statistically significant changes for all backpack loads indicating increased forward head postures. For the 15 & 20%BW conditions, more than 50% of the subjects reported discomfort after walking, with the neck as the primary location of reported pain.


CONCLUSIONS
Backpack loads carried by schoolchildren should be limited to 10% body weight due to increased forward head positions and subjective complaints at 15% and 20% body weight loads.
Citizens’ Perceptions of Data Protection and Privacy in Europe

Data protection and privacy gain social importance as technology and data flows play an ever greater role in shaping social structure. Despite this, understanding of public opinion on these issues is conspicuously lacking. This article is a meta-analysis of public opinion surveys on data protection and privacy focussed on EU citizens. The article firstly considers the understanding and awareness of the legal framework for protection as a solid manifestation of the complex concepts of data protection and privacy. This is followed by a consideration of perceptions of privacy and data protection in relation to other social goals, focussing on the most visible of these contexts the debate surrounding privacy, data protection and security. The article then considers how citizens perceive the ‘real world’ environment in which data processing takes place, before finally considering the public’s perception and evaluation of the operation of framework against environment. 1 Corresponding author Hallinan, Dara, Michael Friedewald, and Paul McCarthy, "Citizens' Perceptions of Data Protection and Privacy", Computer Law and Security Review, Vol. 28, No. 3, 2012, pp. 263-272. 1 CITIZENS’ PERCEPTIONS OF DATA PROTECTION AND PRIVACY IN EUROPE
New ESD protection circuits based on PNP triggering SCR for advanced CMOS device applications

New silicon controlled rectifier (SCR) structures for ESD protection circuits, with low parasitic capacitance, are proposed. These new SCR structures are triggered by parasitic PNP (not NPN) transistor, with which the anode-cathode spacing (LSCR), the triggering voltage (VTRIG), the holding voltage (VHOLD), and the on-resistance (RON) were reduced successfully, and excellent ESD performance was achieved
The Beta Reputation System

Reputation systems can be used to foster good behaviour and to encourage adherence to contracts in e-commerce. Several reputation systems have been deployed in practical applications or proposed in the literature. This paper describes a new system called the beta reputation system which is based on using beta probability density functions to combine feedback and derive reputation ratings. The advantage of the beta reputation system is flexibility and simplicity as well as its foundation on the theory of statistics.
Subband decomposition independent component analysis and new performance criteria

We introduce a new extended model for independent component analysis (ICA) and/or blind source separation (BSS), in which the assumption of the standard ICA model that the source signals are mutually independent (or spatio-temporally uncorrelated) is relaxed. The source is presumed to be the sum of some independent and/or dependent subcomponents. We show a practical solution for this class of blind separation problem by using subband decomposition (SD) and the independence test by analyzing global mixing-demixing matrices obtained for various subbands or multi-bands. This is a very simple but efficient technique, and users just apply the proposed method to conventional ICA/BSS algorithms as pre- and post-processing. The proposed method has been tested for blind separation problems with partially dependent sources. The results indicate that the method is promising for the signal separation problem of speech, image, EEG data, etc.
A breakthrough in Speech emotion recognition using Deep Retinal Convolution Neural Networks

2. School of Electronics Engineering and Computer science. Peking University, Beijing 100871,China Abstract—Speech emotion recognition (SER) is to study the formation and change of speaker’s emotional state from the speech signal perspective, so as to make the interaction between human and computer more intelligent. SER is a challenging task that has encountered the problem of less training data and low prediction accuracy. Here we propose a data augmentation algorithm based on the imaging principle of the retina and convex lens, to acquire the different sizes of spectrogram and increase the amount of training data by changing the distance between the spectrogram and the convex lens. Meanwhile, with the help of deep learning to get the high-level features, we propose the Deep Retinal Convolution Neural Networks (DRCNNs) for SER and achieve the average accuracy over 99%. The experimental results indicate that DRCNNs outperforms the previous studies in terms of both the number of emotions and the accuracy of recognition. Predictably, our results will dramatically improve human-computer interaction.
The Property Graph Database Model

Most of the current graph database systems have been designed to support property graphs. Surprisingly, there is no standard specification of the database model behind such systems. This paper presents a formal definition of the property graph database model. Specifically, we define the property graph data structure, basic notions of integrity constraints (e.g. graph schema), and a graph query language.