Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND MANAGEMENT EARNINGS FORECAST QUALITY: EVIDENCE FROM FRENCH IPOS

This study examines whether corporate governance attributes have an effect on the quality of financial disclosure. Specifically, we examine the association between board attributes, ownership retained, auditor quality, and underwriter reputation and management earnings forecast quality measured by management earnings forecast accuracy and bias. Using 117 French IPOs, we find that management earnings forecast quality is significantly associated with some corporate governance attributes. For the board of directors, we find that IPO firms are more likely to issue less accurate and more optimistic earnings forecast when the board size is large. We also find that IPO firms are more likely to issue more accurate and more conservative earnings forecast when the proportion of independent directors on the board is higher. However, CEO duality is not significantly associated with management earnings forecast quality. For ownership retained, we find that IPO firms are more likely to issue more accurate and more conservative earnings forecast when the proportion of shares retained by insiders is higher. With respect to auditor quality, our results show that auditor quality has no significant influence on management earnings forecast quality. Finally, concerning underwriter reputation, our results show that IPO firms are more likely to issue less accurate but more conservative earnings forecast when the IPO firm is underwritten by a more prestigious underwriter. Our results provide evidence that financial disclosure quality is higher in firms with properly structured board of directors. These findings have implications for policy makers and market participants. Potential investors should consider the firm specific as well as corporate governance characteristics as they evaluate management earnings forecast quality.
Generality of Interference by Tonal Stimuli in Recognition Memory for Pitch

An investigation was made into the disruptive effects on pitch recognition produced by tones taken from beyond the octave from which the standard (S) and comparison (C) tones were taken. Pitch recognition was required after a retention interval during which eight other tones were played. Errors were compared for sequences in which the interpolated tones were taken from the same octave as were the S and C tones; in which they were taken from the octave above; in which they were taken from the octave below; and in which half of the intervening tones were taken from the octave above and the other half from the octave below, the order of choice of octave within the sequence being random. Large disruptive effects were produced by interpolated tones drawn from the higher and lower octaves, though these effects were slightly less than those produced by tones drawn from the same octave. The greatest disruptive effect occurred when the intervening tones in any one sequence were drawn from both the higher and the lower octaves. The implications of these findings are discussed.
The bilingual advantage in L3 learning: a developmental study of rhotic sounds

ABSTRACT Facilitative effects of bilingualism on general aspects of third language (L3) proficiency have been demonstrated in numerous studies conducted in bilingual communities and classrooms around the world. When it comes to L3 phonology, however, empirical evidence has been scarce and inconclusive in respect to the question of whether and/or how knowledge of two (or more) phonologies enhances the acquisition of an additional one. Adopting the Focus on Multilingualism [Cenoz, J. (2013). The influence of bilingualism on third language acquisition: Focus on multilingualism. Language Teaching, 46(1), 71–86] approach, the present study investigates the L3 phonological development in 19 German learners of Spanish with prior knowledge of English. Five of the young L3 learners were also speakers of Croatian, Israeli Hebrew, Italian and Polish, Russian, or Spanish as a heritage language. All the learners were tested on their developing ability to produce the Spanish /r/ and /ɾ/ segments in the course of three years of formal target language instruction. The results suggest a positive effect of specific, rather than broad-based, bilingual experience on L3 speech learning, in particular the production of universally difficult phonemes. Evidence for a degree of a ‘connected growth' of L2 and L3 phonology further illuminates the results.
Robust camera self-calibration from monocular images of Manhattan worlds

We focus on the detection of orthogonal vanishing points using line segments extracted from a single view, and using these for camera self-calibration. Recent methods view this problem as a two-stage process. Vanishing points are extracted through line segment clustering and subsequently likely orthogonal candidates are selected for calibration. Unfortunately, such an approach is easily distracted by the presence of clutter. Furthermore, geometric constraints imposed by the camera and scene orthogonality are not enforced during detection, leading to inaccurate results which are often inadmissible for calibration. To overcome these limitations, we present a RANSAC-based approach using a minimal solution for estimating three orthogonal vanishing points and focal length from a set of four lines, aligned with either two or three orthogonal directions. In addition, we propose to refine the estimates using an efficient and robust Maximum Likelihood Estimator. Extensive experiments on standard datasets show that our contributions result in significant improvements over the state-of-the-art.
Dendritic calcium transients evoked by single back‐propagating action potentials in rat neocortical pyramidal neurons.

1. Dendrites of rat neocortical layer V pyramidal neurons were loaded with the Ca2+ indicator dye Calcium Green‐1 (CG‐1) or fluo‐3, and the mechanisms which govern action potential (AP)‐evoked transient changes in dendritic cytosolic Ca2+ concentration ([Ca2+]i) were examined. APs were initiated either by synaptic stimulation or by depolarizing the soma or dendrite by current injection, and changes in fluorescence of the indicator dye were measured in the proximal 170 microns of the apical dendrite. 2. Simultaneous two‐pipette recordings of APs from the soma and apical dendrite, and dendritic fluorescence imaging indicated that a single AP propagating from the soma into the apical dendrite evokes a rapid transient increase in fluorescence indicating a transient increase in [Ca2+]i. At 35‐37 degrees C the decay time constant of the fluorescence transient following an AP was around 80 ms. 3. Voltage‐activated Ca2+ channels (VACCs) of several subtypes mediated the AP‐evoked fluorescence transient in the proximal (100‐170 microns) apical dendrite. The AP‐evoked fluorescence transient resulted from Ca2+ entry through L‐type (nifedipine sensitive; 25%), N‐type (omega‐conotoxin GVIA sensitive; 28%) and P‐type (omega‐agatoxin IVA sensitive; 10%) Ca2+ channels and through Ca2+ channels (R‐type) not sensitive to L‐, N‐ and P‐type Ca2+ channel blockers (cadmium ion sensitive; 37%). 4. The decay time course of the dendritic fluorescence transient was prolonged by the blockers of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) Ca(2+)‐ATPase, cyclopiazonic acid and thapsigargin, suggesting that uptake of Ca2+ into the ER in dendrites governs clearance of dendritic Ca2+. 5. The decay time course of the fluorescence transient was slightly prolonged by benzamil, a blocker of plasma membrane Na(+)‐Ca2+ exchange and by calmidazolium, a blocker of the calmodulin‐dependent plasma membrane Ca(2+)‐ATPase, suggesting that these pathways are less important for dendrite Ca2+ clearance following a single AP. Neither the mitochondrial uncoupler carbonyl cyanide p‐(trifluoromethoxy)phenylhydrazone (FCCP) nor the blocker of Ca2+ uptake into mitochondria, Ruthenium Red, had any measurable effect on the decay time course of the fluorescence transient. 6. Dendritic fluorescence transients measured during trains of dendritic APs began to summate at impulse frequencies of 5 APs s‐1. At higher frequencies APs caused a concerted and maintained elevation of dendritic fluorescence during the train. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Positive , Negative , or Mixed ? Mining Blogs

The rich non-factual information on the blogosphere presents interesting research questions. In this paper, we present a study on analysis of blog posts for their sentiment by using a generic sentiment lexicon. In particular, we applied Support Vector Machine to classify blog posts into three categories of opinions: positive, negative and mixed. We investigated the performance difference between global topic-independent and local topic-dependent opinion classification on a collection of blogs. Our experiment shows that topic-dependent classification performs significantly better than topic-independent classification, and this result indicates high interaction between sentiment words and topic.
Teaching verbs through child-directed speech: Are mothers doing it right?

Compared to learning nouns, infants struggle with verb learning and there is limited evidence to indicate whether caregivers are making this process easier through child- directed speech. An infant’s ability to learn a new verb is largely affected by the time it is verbalised and when the related action is performed; much evidence supports hearing verbs in non-ostensive contexts (when the action is impending or has recently been completed) to be more beneficial for learning than hearing verbs ostensively (while the action is ongoing). American mother-child play of 18 dyads was coded for maternal verb utterances and related action performance, with dyads categorised by three infant age groups: 6, 12 and 19 months-old. The results did not reflect the findings of previous literature (Tomasello & Kruger, 1992); approximately 61% of maternal verb utterances labelled ongoing actions, 25% labelled impending actions and 14% labelled actions that had just been completed more movement-focused verbs in the completed and ongoing conditions than result- focused verbs, with movement-focused verbs more frequently labelling ongoing actions than impending or completed actions. Similar differences between conditions for result-focused verbs did not reach significance. These findings suggest that children are not hearing verbs at the supposed optimum time for learning and maternal. Mothers uttered significantly action labelling differs depending on verb-type
Speech enhancement via low-rank matrix decomposition and image based masking

Speech enhancement is an important task in many applications such as speech recognition. Conventional methods always require some principles by which to distinguish speech and noise and the most successful enhancement requires strong models for both speech and noise. However, if the noise actually encountered differs significantly from the system's assumptions, performance will rapidly declines. In this work, we propose an unsupervised speech enhancement system based on decomposing the frequency-time spectrogram into a sparse foreground speech and a low-rank background noise, which makes few assumptions about the noise other than its limited spectral variation. An image based masking is also designed to handle the poor performance of noise removing when using spectrogram decomposition only. Evaluations via PESQ and SegSNR show that the new approach improves signal-to-distortion ratio and PESQ in most cases when compared to several traditional speech enhancement algorithms.
Evolutionarily stable anti-cancer therapies by autologous cell defection

Game theory suggests an anti-cancer treatment based on the use of modified cancer cells that disrupt cooperation within the tumor. Cancer cells are harvested from the patient, the genes for the production of essential growth factors are knocked out in vitro and the cells are then reinserted in the tumor, where they lead to its collapse.
A Coq formal proof of the Lax-Milgram theorem

The Finite Element Method is a widely-used method to solve numerical problems coming for instance from physics or biology. To obtain the highest confidence on the correction of numerical simulation programs implementing the Finite Element Method, one has to formalize the mathematical notions and results that allow to establish the soundness of the method. The Lax–Milgram theorem may be seen as one of those theoretical cornerstones: under some completeness and coercivity assumptions, it states existence and uniqueness of the solution to the weak formulation of some boundary value problems. This article presents the full formal proof of the Lax–Milgram theorem in Coq. It requires many results from linear algebra, geometry, functional analysis, and Hilbert spaces.
Students' Attitude Towards Natural Science In Debre Markos Town Primary Schools

This study examines attitudes to school science classes amongst primary school students based on the assumption that these will influence their attitudes and choices later in life. 980 primary school students in grades 4-6(Debre Markos Town, Ethiopia)) were given a Likert-type questionnaire and asked to provide verbal explanations for their agreement/disagreement with each item. The items are divided into three "clusters," representing three central influences on student attitudes: "motivational factors", "locus of control" and "relevance of science. " My results support the findings of previous research in elements such as students' enthusiasm for experiments, and reveal some interesting discrepancies in the way boys and girls assess the relevance of science they learn in school. While the questionnaire shows that most of the students saw discussion in science class as a source of interest, students' explanations and their answers to the open-ended questions also indicate that the most common model of a science lesson they see is readings from the textbook, accompanied by the teacher's explanations. Only about one half of the students claim to take an active part in classes, answering questions asked by the teacher in class, taking part in class discussions, and expressing their opinions. The teacher is perceived as a significant part of the learning process. The students' explanations indicate that they see the teacher as a primary source of information and authority.
Human to Robot Demonstrations of Routine Home Tasks:Acknowledgment and Response to the Robot’s Feedback

This paper investigates the possible role of the robot’s feedback in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) from the human perspective, and attempts to highlight some important conceptual and practical issues such as the lack of explicitness and consistency on people’s demonstration strategies. More specifically, any changes that can be expected on the part of a human (teacher), in the teaching of a task, when a robot (student) declares that the given demonstration was not understood. The findings from such studies can help in turn, from a system perspective, towards the design of HRI systems that are able to better anticipate and behave according to human expectations. Partly intended as a replication and verification of a previous study, the everyday domestic task of setting a table, both in Japanese and in non-Japanese (or “western”) style, is taught to a humanoid robot by the participants of the currently conducted user study. The participant’s acknowledgment and responses to the robot’s feedback are discussed in regard to demonstration changes and consistency, based on a HRI gesture classification.
PENGARUH LEVERAGE, UKURAN PERUSAHAAN, DANFINANCIAL DISTRESS TERHADAP KONSERVATISMEAKUNTANSI

Laporan keuangan merupakan salah satu media utama yang digunakan oleh perusahaan untuk mengkomunikasikan informasi keuangan kepada pihak internal dan eksternal perusahaan. Standar Akuntansi Keuangan masih memberikan peluang untuk memilih akuntansi konservatif dalam penyusunan laporan keuangan, maka dalam usaha untuk menyempurnaan laporan keuangan tersebut lahirlah prinsip konservatisme akuntansi. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menguji secara empiris mengenai pengaruh leverage, ukuran perusahaan, dan financial distress terhadap konservatisme akuntansi. Penelitian ini dilakukan di perusahaan manufaktur yang terdaftar di Bursa Efek Indonesia (BEI) pada periode 2013-2015. Metode penentuan sampel menggunakan metode purposive sampling sehingga sampel yang digunakan 327 perusahaan manufaktur. Teknis analisis data yang digunakan adalah statistik deskriptif, uji asumsi klasik, uji normalitas, uji autokorelasi, uji multikolinieritas, uji heteroskedastisitas, model regresi linier berganda, dan uji hipotesis yang dilakukan dengan menggunakan SPSS 20.0 for windows. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa leverage berpengaruh negatif namun tidak signifikan, ukuran perusahaan dan financial distress berpengaruh secara negatif dan signifikan terhadap konservatisme akuntansi
The power of reflective action to build teacher efficacy

Teachers can regain their sense of efficacy if school leaders engage them in a systematic process, the Reflective Action Protocol, of reflecting on their classroom expectations and practices, making adjustments, and taking careful note of improvements in student learning. This process asks instructionally focused questions that push teachers to recognize their own personal biases, give an honest appraisal of their own effect on students, and consider new ways of teaching. By grounding the discussion in close observations of classroom practices and their effects on learning, school leaders can build teacher efficacy and can move teachers to pursue specific priorities that meet the needs of all students. But school leaders must make a serious commitment to a cyclical process of observing teachers, providing immediate, specific feedback, and focusing on the connection among teacher planning, instruction, and their effect on student learning.
An assessment of machine and statistical learning approaches to inferring networks of protein-protein interactions

Abstract Protein-protein interactions (PPI) play a key role in many biological systems. Over the past few years, an explosion in availability of functional biological data obtained from high-throughput technologies to infer PPI has been observed. However, results obtained from such experiments show high rates of false positives and false negatives predictions as well as systematic predictive bias. Recent research has revealed that several machine and statistical learning methods applied to integrate relatively weak, diverse sources of large-scale functional data may provide improved predictive accuracy and coverage of PPI. In this paper we describe the effects of applying different computational, integrative methods to predict PPI in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We investigated the predictive ability of combining different sets of relatively strong and weak predictive datasets. We analysed several genomic datasets ranging from mRNA co-expression to marginal essentiality. Moreover, we expanded an existing multi-source dataset from S. cerevisiae by constructing a new set of putative interactions extracted from Gene Ontology (GO)- driven annotations in the Saccharomyces Genome Database. Different classification techniques: Simple Naive Bayesian (SNB), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) were evaluated. Relatively simple classification methods (i.e. less computing intensive and mathematically complex), such as SNB, have been proven to be proficient at predicting PPI. SNB produced the “highest” predictive quality obtaining an area under Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) value of 0.99. The lowest AUC value of 0.90 was obtained by the KNN classifier. This assessment also demonstrates the strong predictive power of GO-driven models, which offered predictive performance above 0.90 using the different machine learning and statistical techniques. As the predictive power of single-source datasets became weaker MLP and SNB performed better than KNN. Moreover, predictive performance saturation may be reached independently of the classification models applied, which may be explained by predictive bias and incompleteness of existing “Gold Standards”. More comprehensive and accurate PPI maps will be produced for S. cerevisiae and beyond with the emergence of largescale datasets of better predictive quality and the integration of intelligent classification methods.
iConstruct: virtual disabilities in online settings

Abstract The present study focused on cultural constructions of disability in virtual settings, examining specifically how cultural constructions of disability were mediated through the use of online technology. This was accomplished by identifying and analyzing Greek Cypriot online news media articles and online readers’ posts in response to these articles. Findings indicated that disability in these online settings mainly reproduced traditional models of disability, with the charity model being more prevalent. However, there were instances in which dominant discourses of disability were ruptured through the introduction of counter-narratives in users’ posts which echoed the human rights model of disability. Implications for the fields of media, education and disability studies are discussed in relation to the possibility of using digital media to contribute to the challenge of critical media literacy to address issues of diversity and disability.
Effects of carbohydrate meals of varying consistency on gastric myoelectrical activity.

BACKGROUND There is at present no agreement on the type of test meal to be used when performing EGG. To our knowledge the response of the stomach to high carbohydrate isocaloric meals of different consistencies has not been formally assessed. AIM To study 1) the effects of high carbohydrate meals of varying consistency on EGG activity; and 2) the effects of increasing the calorie content of a meal without changing its consistency and composition on the postprandial EGG. SUBJECTS Eighteen healthy volunteers, six males (age: 21-35 year, weight: 45-60 kg) and 12 females in the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle (age: 24-30 years, weight: 45-55 kg). METHODS Following an overnight fast subjects were given three high carbohydrate, low fat, isocaloric meals (165-170 kcal) of different consistencies (solid, semisolid, liquid), on three separate days in a random order. The liquid and semisolid meals were equal in volume (200 ml) while the volume of the solid meal was smaller. One hour EGG recordings were done in the fasting and fed states in each subject. As a second step, ten of the above volunteers (taken randomly) were given the solid test meal on a separate day after increasing the calorie content of the meal to 350 kcal. RESULTS The power of the EGG at the dominant frequency significantly increased after solid (175 kcal meal: fasting 49 +/- 12 dB vs. fed 57 +/- 13 dB; p < 0.05, 375 kcal meal: fasting 48.5 +/- 12.9 dB vs fed 58.1 +/- 11.7 dB) and semisolid (fasting 50 +/- 12 dB vs. fed 55 +/- 13; P < 0.05). The increase in power was not significantly different when fed with solids and semisolids. There was no statistically significant change in EGG power during the first 15 or 60 minutes after the liquid meal. Feeding showed no significant effect on the dominant frequency and the percentage of 2-4 cpm waves of the EGG with any of the three types of test meals. CONCLUSIONS Solid and semisolid meals high in carbohydrate and low in fat are capable of inducing a significant increase in the EGG power in normal subjects. Isocaloric solid and semisolid meals have similar effects on gastric slow wave activity. EGG appears unaffected by the liquid meal. Therefore only an increase in the power of the EGG can be regarded as normal if a high carbohydrate solid or a semisolid meal is given as the test meal when performing an EGG.