Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The IPO Derby: Are There Consistent Losers and Winners on this Track?

Recent studies have documented that various factors such as discretionary accounting accruals, underwriter reputation, venture capital backing, and firm size will affect the long-run performance of IPOs. However, it is not clear whether the return predictability of these attributes are the manifestation of one phenomenon, or independent results. In this study, we use univariate and multivariate analyses on these factors to trace the sources of return predictability. We find that these previously identified effects are not the same phenomenon, though correlated to some extent. The results show that a confluence of these determinants is more important than any individual factor in explaining the IPO long-run performance. We also identify a subset of IPOs that outperform their benchmark and another subset that consistently underperforms.
Corporations in Evolving Diversity: Cognition, Governance, and Institutions

The 2008-9 financial crisis demands we look anew at the role of corporations, and the working of financial markets around the world. In this challenging and insightful book, one of our most eminent economists provides a compelling new analysis of the corporate firm; the role of shareholders, managers and workers; and institutional governance structures. In recent decades the firm has predominantly been seen as an organization run and governed in the interests of shareholders, where management act as the agent of shareholders, and the workers simply as instruments for share-value maximization. This book reverses this viewpoint. It sees corporations as associational cognitive systems where 'cognitive actions' are distributed amongst managers and workers, with shareholders supplying 'cognitive tools' and monitoring their use in the systems. Aoki analyses the different relationships that can exist between shareholders, managers, and workers from this perspective, and identifies a range of different models of organizational architecture and associated governance structures. He also discusses ways in which corporations act as players in social, political, and organizational games, as well as global economic games; how these inter-related social dynamics may change particular, distinctive national structures into the diversity incorporated in the global corporate landscape; and how they now call for new roles for financial markets.
The Effect of Root Canal Irrigation with Combination of Sodium Hypo-chlorite and Chlorhexidine Gluconate on the Sealing Ability of Obturation Materials

Objectives: The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of the precipitate that was formed by combining Sodium Hypochlorite (NaOCl) and Chlorhexidine Gluconate (CHX) on the sealing ability of root canal obturation materials. Materials and Methods: The fluid filtration method was conducted on a total of 100 roots. Samples were randomly divided into two control (n=5) and three experimental groups (n=30). The samples in group 1 were irrigated with 1.5 mL of 2.5% NaOCl, and then the smear layers of the teeth were removed by 17% EDTA, while the specimens of group 2 were irrigated by 1.5 mL of 2.5% NaOCl and 1.5 mL of 2% CHX; after the smear layer removal, a final flush with 1.5 mL of 2.5% NaOCl was performed. The samples of group 3 were irrigated the same as group 1 but after the smear layer removal canals were irrigated again with 1.5 mL of 2.5% NaOCl and then a final flush with 1.5 mL of 2% CHX was performed. Teeth were obturated with gutta-percha and AH26 sealer and after seven days, microleakage was evaluated by the fluid filtration technique. The results were analyzed by the ANOVA and Tukey's test. Results: The samples in group 3 had significantly greater microleakage compared to teeth in group 1, 2 (p<0.05), and the specimens in group 1 showed significantly less amount of microleakage than samples in group 2, 3 (p<0.05). Conclusion: The presence of the precipitate that is formed due to interaction between NaOCl and CHX has negative effect on the sealing ability of gutta-percha and AH26 sealer.
Computing Semantic Compositionality in Distributional Semantics

This article introduces and evaluates an approach to semantic compositionality in computational linguistics based on the combination of Distributional Semantics and supervised Machine Learning. In brief, distributional semantic spaces containing representations for complex constructions such as Adjective-Noun and Verb-Noun pairs, as well as for their constituent parts, are built. These representations are then used as feature vectors in a supervised learning model using multivariate multiple regression. In particular, the distributional semantic representations of the constituents are used to predict those of the complex structures. This approach outperforms the rivals in a series of experiments with Adjective-Noun pairs extracted from the BNC. In a second experimental setting based on Verb-Noun pairs, a comparatively much lower performance was obtained by all the models; however, the proposed approach gives the best results in combination with a Random Indexing semantic space.
Impact of Social Support Resources on Post- Purchase Dissonance: Evidence from Jordan

This article aims to address the paucity of research into the impact of social support resources – family, friends and significant others – on post-purchase emotional and cognitive dissonance amongst young consumers. For the purposes of the study, a quantitative survey was undertaken of 564 randomly selected undergraduate purchasers of smart phones at six Jordanian universities. Data analysis revealed that social support had a statistically significant impact on emotional dissonance for males in the group. It had no bearing on emotional dissonance amongst females in the survey. However, the findings indicate an influence upon levels of cognitive dissonance experienced by both males and females. Consumer cognitive dissonance appears to increase in direct proportion to levels of familial influence surrounding the purchase. This study is one of only a limited number offering empirical evidence of the effects of social support systems on post-purchase dissonance.
Internationalization and Domestic Politics: The Impact of the International Economy on National Policies: An Analytical Overview

A stethoscope in which two diaphragms are used to amplify sound. The diaphragms are axially spaced, and to one diaphragm a piece of stainless steel is attached and a magnetized metal is attached to the other diaphragm, whereby a magnetic field exists between the spaced diaphragms. In order to better transmit sound, the interior of the Y-fitting is coated with carbon.
Citizen empowerment and participation in e-democracy: Indian context

Present paper examines whether citizens' empowered status influences their online democratic participation. The paper put forward two stages of citizen empowerment in the virtual space. In the first stage, citizens are enabled for e-democracy participation and in the second stage citizens are part of the decision making process. On the basis of review of literature, a research model was delineated and tested with quantitative data collected through a survey. Regression results indicate that empowerment elements do influence the participation in e-democracy. The study also reveals that participation in partisan networks influences by cohesive empowerment. Citizen participation through electronic voting machines is influenced by the network actor's empowerment status. And citizens' technical empowerment is found to influence participation through mobile phones.
Blood and Earth: Indivisible Territory and Terrorist Group Longevity

The study of terrorism has been both broad in scope and varied in approach. Little work has been done, however, on the territorial aspects of terrorist groups. Most terrorist groups are revolutionary to one degree or another, seeking the control of a piece of territory; but for the supportive population of a terrorist group, how important is the issue of territory? Are the intangible qualities of territory more salient to a given population than other factors? Are territorially based terrorist groups more durable than their ideologically or religiously motivated cohorts? This paper aims to propose the validity of the territorial argument for the study of political terrorism.
Time-dependent quasi-spherical accretion

ABSTRA C T Differentially rotating, ‘advection-dominated’ accretion flows are considered in which the heat generated by viscous dissipation is retained in the fluid. The equations of time-dependent quasi-spherical accretion are solved in a simplified one-dimensional model that neglects the latitudinal dependence of the flow. A self-similar solution is presented that has finite size, mass, angular momentum and energy. This may be expected to be an attractor for the initialvalue problem in which a cool and narrow ring of fluid orbiting around a central mass heats up, spreads radially and is accreted. The solution provides some insight into the dynamics of quasi-spherical accretion and avoids many of the strictures of the steady self-similar solution of Narayan & Yi. Special attention is given to the astrophysically important case in which the adiabatic exponent g a 5=3; even in this case, the flow is found to be differentially rotating and bound to the central object, and accretion can occur without the need for powerful outflows.
Some asymptotic properties of the local time of the uniform empirical process

We study the almost sure asymptotic properties of the local time of the uniform empirical process. In particular, we obtain two versions of the law of the iterated logarithm for the integral of the square of the local time. It is interesting to note that the corresponding problems for the Wiener process remain open. Properties of LP-norms of the local time are studied. We also characterize the joint asymptotics of the local time at a fixed level and the maximum local time.
Association of C-Reactive Protein With Cardiovascular Disease Mortality According to Diabetes Status

OBJECTIVE C-reactive protein (CRP) is associated with the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD); whether the effects are modified by diabetes status still is unclear. This study investigated these issues and assessed the added value of CRP to predictions. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Participants were drawn from representative samples of adults living in England and Scotland. Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to relate baseline plasma CRP with all-cause and CVD mortality during follow-up in men and women with and without diabetes. The added value of CRP to the predictions was assessed through c-statistic comparison and relative integrated discrimination improvement. RESULTS A total of 25,979 participants (4.9% with diabetes) were followed for a median of 93 months, during which period there were 2,767 deaths (957 from CVD). CRP (per SD loge) was associated with a 53% (95% CI 43–64) and 43% (38–49) higher risk of cardiovascular and all-cause mortality, respectively. These associations were log linear and did not differ according to diabetes status (both P ≥ 0.08 for interaction), sex, and other risk factors. Adding CRP to conventional risk factors improved predictions overall and separately by diabetes status but not for CVD mortality, although such improvements only were marginal based on several discrimination statistics. CONCLUSIONS The association between CRP and CVD was similar across diabetes status, and the effects are broadly similar across levels of other conventional risk factors.
Independence of Herpesvirus-Induced T Cell Lymphoma from Viral Cyclin D Homologue

Cyclin D family members are cellular protooncogenes, and their viral homologues in the Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV, human herpesvirus type 8 [HHV-8]) and the closely related Herpesvirus saimiri have been implicated as putative cofactors of viral transformation and pathogenesis. KSHV is regularly found in Kaposi's sarcoma and in the primary effusion B cell lymphoma and Castleman's disease associated with immunosuppression and AIDS. H. saimiri strain C488 transforms human and marmoset T cells in vitro and causes polyclonal T cell lymphoma in New World monkeys. The viral cyclins stimulate cell cycle progression of quiescent fibroblasts, and they form active cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK)6 complexes of broad substrate specificity that can resist and downregulate cellular CDK inhibitors. This study shows that the viral cyclin of H. saimiri strain C488 is not required for viral replication, T cell transformation, and pathogenicity in New World primates.
Analysis of longitudinal data with drop‐out: objectives, assumptions and a proposal

Summary. The problem of analysing longitudinal data that are complicated by possibly informative drop‐out has received considerable attention in the statistical literature. Most researchers have concentrated on either methodology or application, but we begin this paper by arguing that more attention could be given to study objectives and to the relevant targets for inference. Next we summarize a variety of approaches that have been suggested for dealing with drop‐out. A long‐standing concern in this subject area is that all methods require untestable assumptions. We discuss circumstances in which we are willing to make such assumptions and we propose a new and computationally efficient modelling and analysis procedure for these situations. We assume a dynamic linear model for the expected increments of a constructed variable, under which subject‐specific random effects follow a martingale process in the absence of drop‐out. Informal diagnostic procedures to assess the tenability of the assumption are proposed. The paper is completed by simulations and a comparison of our method and several alternatives in the analysis of data from a trial into the treatment of schizophrenia, in which approximately 50% of recruited subjects dropped out before the final scheduled measurement time.
Association between the Perioperative Antioxidative Ability of Platelets and Early Post-Transplant Function of Kidney Allografts: A Pilot Study

Background Recent studies have demonstrated that the actions of platelets may unfavorably influence post-transplant function of organ allografts. In this study, the association between post-transplant graft function and the perioperative activity of platelet antioxidants was examined among kidney recipients divided into early (EGF), slow (SGF), and delayed graft function (DGF) groups. Methodology/Principal Findings Activities of superoxide dismutase, catalase, glutathione transferase (GST), glutathione peroxidase, and glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6P) were determined and levels of glutathione, oxidized glutathione, and isoprostane were measured in blood samples collected immediately before and during the first and fifth minutes of renal allograft reperfusion. Our results demonstrated a significant increase in isoprostane levels in all groups. Interestingly, in DGF patients, significantly lower levels of perioperative activity of catalase (p<0.02) and GST (p<0.02) were observed. Moreover, in our study, the activity of platelet antioxidants was associated with intensity of perioperative oxidative stress. For discriminating SGF/DGF from EGF, sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values of platelet antioxidants were 81–91%, 50–58%, 32–37%, and 90–90.5%, respectively. Conclusions During renal transplantation, significant changes occur in the activity of platelet antioxidants. These changes seem to be associated with post-transplant graft function and can be potentially used to differentiate between EGF and SGF/DGF. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to reveal the potential protective role of platelets in the human transplantation setting.
Baseline LDL-C and Lp(a) Elevations Portend a High Risk of Coronary Revascularization in Patients after Stent Placement

Background and Aim. Incidence of coronary restenosis after stent placement is high. Our study was going to investigate whether Lp(a) elevation was potential for predicting coronary restenosis and whether the effects of Lp(a) elevation on coronary restenosis were dependent on LDL-C level. Methods and Results. Totally 832 participants eligible for stent placement were enrolled and followed up for monitoring clinical end points. Baseline characteristics were collected. According to the cut point of Lp(a), participants were divided into low Lp(a) group (Lp(a) < 30 mg/dL) and high Lp(a) group (Lp(a) ≥ 30 mg/dL). Furthermore, based on baseline LDL-C level, participants were divided into LDL-C < 1.8 mmol/L and ≥1.8 mmol/L subgroups. Clinical end points including major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE), cardiovascular death, nonfatal myocardial infarction, ischemic stroke, and coronary revascularization (CR) were compared. Patients in high Lp(a) groups more frequently presented with acute coronary syndrome and three vessel stenoses. In subgroup of LDL-C < 1.8 mmol/L, no significant differences of cardiovascular outcomes were found between low and high Lp(a) groups. While in the subgroup of LDL-C ≥ 1.8 mmol/L, incidences of MACE and CR were significantly higher in high Lp(a) group, and odds ratio for CR was 2.05. Conclusion. With baseline LDL-C and Lp(a) elevations, incidence of CR is significantly increased after stent placement.
CLR-Estimate For The Generators Of Positivity Preserving And Positively Dominated Semigroups

Let B be a generator of positivity preserving (shortly, positive) semi-group in L 2 on a space with-nite measure. It is supposed that the semigroup e ? tB ; t > 0; acts continuously from L 2 to L 1. For a measurable function V 0 an estimate for the number of negative eigenvalues of the operator B ? V is obtained, generalizing the similar estimate for the the Schrr odinger operator (the CLR-estimate) and reproducing, for that case, the best-known coeecient. A more general theorem replaces the positivity property of the semigroup by domination by a positive semi-group.
Integrating subscription-based and connection-oriented communications into the embedded CORBA for the CAN bus

The authors present the design of CAN-CORBA, an environment-specific CORBA for CAN-based distributed control systems. The ORB core of the CAN-CORBA has the following properties. (1) It supports subscription based group communication as well as the classical connection oriented point-to-point communication of CORBA; as a result, it better services the data multicasting requirement of typical control systems. (2) It significantly lowers the amount of message traffic required for each CORBA method invocation so that even the slow broadcast bus of the CAN can tolerate the overhead of CORBA method invocations. To seamlessly integrate two communication schemes into our extremely light-weight ORB, we design a transport layer protocol on the CAN that can support up to four different upper level protocols. We have implemented the CAN-CORBA on the mArx real time operating system developed at Seoul National University. Our experiments clearly demonstrate that it is feasible to use CORBA in developing distributed embedded control systems possessing severe resource limitations.
Gestalt Perceptual Organization of Visual Stimuli Captures Attention Automatically: Electrophysiological Evidence

The visual system leverages organizational regularities of perceptual elements to create meaningful representations of the world. One clear example of such function, which has been formalized in the Gestalt psychology principles, is the perceptual grouping of simple visual elements (e.g., lines and arcs) into unitary objects (e.g., forms and shapes). The present study sought to characterize automatic attentional capture and related cognitive processing of Gestalt-like visual stimuli at the psychophysiological level by using event-related potentials (ERPs). We measured ERPs during a simple visual reaction time task with bilateral presentations of physically matched elements with or without a Gestalt organization. Results showed that Gestalt (vs. non-Gestalt) stimuli are characterized by a larger N2pc together with enhanced ERP amplitudes of non-lateralized components (N1, N2, P3) starting around 150 ms post-stimulus onset. Thus, we conclude that Gestalt stimuli capture attention automatically and entail characteristic psychophysiological signatures at both early and late processing stages. Highlights We studied the neural signatures of the automatic processes of visual attention elicited by Gestalt stimuli. We found that a reliable early correlate of attentional capture turned out to be the N2pc component. Perceptual and cognitive processing of Gestalt stimuli is associated with larger N1, N2, and P3
Rate of convergeance of a particle method for the solution of a 1D viscous scalar conservation law in a bounded interval

In this paper, we give a probabilistic interpretation of a viscous scalar conservation law in a bounded interval thanks to a nonlinear martingale problem. The underlying nonlinear stochastic process is reflected at the boundary to take into account the Dirichlet conditions. After proving uniqueness for the martingale problem, we show existence thanks to a propagation of chaos result. Indeed we exhibit a system of N interacting particles, the empirical measure of which converges to the unique solution of the martingale problem as N → +∞. As a consequence, the solution of the viscous conservation law can be approximated thanks to a numerical algorithm based on the simulation of the particle system. When this system is discretized in time thanks to the Euler-Lepingle scheme [D. Lepingle, Math. Comput. Simulation 38 (1995) 119-126], we show that the rate of convergence of the error is in O(Δt + 1/√N), where At denotes the time step. Finally, we give numerical results which confirm this theoretical rate.
Learning from evidence in a complex world.

Policies to promote public health and welfare often fail or worsen the problems they are intended to solve. Evidence-based learning should prevent such policy resistance, but learning in complex systems is often weak and slow. Complexity hinders our ability to discover the delayed and distal impacts of interventions, generating unintended "side effects. " Yet learning often fails even when strong evidence is available: common mental models lead to erroneous but self-confirming inferences, allowing harmful beliefs and behaviors to persist and undermining implementation of beneficial policies. Here I show how systems thinking and simulation modeling can help expand the boundaries of our mental models, enhance our ability to generate and learn from evidence, and catalyze effective change in public health and beyond.
Analysis of micro credit as a veritable tool for poverty reduction among rural farmers in Anambra State, Nigeria.

This study ,described socioeconomic characteristics of farmers described socioeconomic characteristics of farmers, determined effect of socioeconomic characteristics on access to credit and identified constraints to credit access and repayments. Multistage and simple random sampling methods were used to select 120 respondents. Primary data were collected by means of questionnaire and 3point Likert Scale. Non parametric and parametric statistical tools including percentages, frequency distributions, mean ranking and multiple regression were deployed for data analyses. Majority (65%) of the farmers were females; 90% were aware of micro credits facilities’ availability, 73.3% had above 11years experience in farming; 51.67% obtained less than N100,000.00, while 51.62% earned below N 150,000.00 as annual income. Credit access was significantly influenced by marital status, educational level, years of farming experience and interest rate, while repayment was most seriously constrained by expenses on family responsibilities. Poverty reduction among rural farmers for sustainable agriculture and rural development would be ensured by provision of interest free credit facilities and minimizing bureaucratic bottlenecks by the financial institutions.