Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What influences the strategic contribution of boards

About the book: Boards play a crucial role in ensuring that public and nonprofit publicly accountable and perform well. Following various failures and scandals they face increasing scrutiny, pressure and expectations. Serious questions have been raised about the ability of boards to govern effectively. Such concerns have stimulated a renewed interest in organizational governance, and a growing literature on the subject. Much of the current literature, however, has been criticized for underestimating the constraints and conflictions demands that boards face and recommending unrealistic solutions. There have been relatively few detailed empirical studies of what boards do in practice. This book fills that gap by bringing together analyses based upon some of the best recent empirical studies of public and non-profit governance in the UK. Using a new theoretical framework that highlights the paradoxical nature of governance the book throws light on the questions at the heart of recent debates about nonprofit boards: * Are boards publicly accountable or is there a democratic deficit? * Are boards able to exercise real power, or does management run the show? * What do boards do? Are they effective stewards of an organization's resources? Can they play a meaningful role in setting organisational strategy? * What effect are regulatory and other changes designed to improve board effectiveness having? The book will be essential reading for academics and students with an interest in the governance and management of public and nonprofit organizations. It will also be of value to policy-makers and practitioners who wish to gain a deeper understanding of how boards work and what can be done to improve their performance.
Capture and Ideology in the Economic Theory of Politics

The economic theory of regulation long ago put public interest theories of politics to rest. These theories have correctly been viewed as normative wishings, rather than explanations of real world phenomena. They have been replaced by models of political behavior that are consistent with the rest of microeconomics (Anthony Downs, 1957; James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, 1965; George Stigler, 1971; Sam Peltzman, 1976). Recently, however, debate has arisen over whether some version of a public interest theory of regulation will have to be readmitted to our thinking about actions and results in the political arena. What is at issue is the empirical importance of the altruistic, publicly interested goals of rational actors in determining legislative and regulatory outcomes (James Kau and Paul Rubin, 1979; Kalt, 1981; Peltzman, 1982). This study assesses the nature and significance of publicly interested objectives in a particular instance of economic policymaking: U.S. Senate voting on coal strip-mining regulations. The existence of such objectives is, of course, no contradiction of the economic view of human behavior (Kenneth Arrow, 1972; Gary Becker, 1974); and may well be rooted in genetic-biological history (Becker, 1976; Jack Hirshleifer, 1978). Generally, however, individuals' altruistic, publicly interested goals have been given little attention. This reflects the judgment that such goals are so empirically unimportant as to allow the use of Occam's razor in positive models, or well-founded apprehensions that these goals are unusually difficult to identify, measure, and analyze. Notwithstanding the latter problem, we find that approaches which confine themselves to a view of political actors as narrowly egocentric maximizers explain and predict legislative outcomes poorly. The tracking and dissecting of the determinants of voting on coal strip-mining policy suggest that the economic theory of politics has been prematurely closed to a broader conception of political behavior.
Pricing, hedging and trading financial instruments

List of Figures. List of Tables. List of Examples. Foreword. Preface to Volume III. III.1 Bonds and Swaps. III.1. 1 Introduction. III.1. 2 Interest Rates. III.1. 3 Categorization of Bonds. III.1. 4 Characteristics of Bonds and Interest Rates. III.1. 5 Duration and Convexity. III.1. 6 Bonds with Semi-Annual and Floating Coupons. III.1. 7 Forward Rate Agreements and Interest Rate Swaps. III.1. 8 Present Value of Basis Point. III.1. 9 Yield Curve Fitting. III.1. 10 Convertible Bonds. III.1. 10.1 Characteristics of Convertible Bonds. III.1. 10.2 Survey of Pricing Models for Convertible Bonds. III.1. 11 Summary and Conclusions. III.2 Futures and Forwards. III.2. 1 Introduction. III.2. 2 Characteristics of Futures and Forwards. III.2. 3 Theoretical Relationships between Spot, Forward and Futures. III.2. 4 The Basis. III.2. 5 Hedging with Forwards and Futures. III.2. 6 Hedging in Practice. III.2. 7 Using Futures for Short Term Hedging. III.2. 8 Summary and Conclusions. III.3 Options. III.3. 1 Introduction. III.3. 2 Foundations. III.3. 3 Characteristics of Vanilla Options. III.3. 4 Hedging Options. III.3. 5 Trading Options. III.3. 6 The Black-Scholes-Merton Model. III.3. 7 The Black-Scholes-Merton Greeks. III.3. 8 Interest Rate Options. III.3. 9 Pricing Exotic Options. III.3. 10 Summary and Conclusions. III.4 Volatility. III.4. 1 Introduction. III.4. 2 Implied Volatility. III.4. 3 Local Volatility. III.4. 4 Modelling the Dynamics of Implied Volatility. III.4. 5 Stochastic Volatility Models. III.4. 6 Scale Invariance and Hedging. III.4. 7 Trading Volatility. III.4. 8 Summary and Conclusion. III.5 Portfolio Mapping. III.5. 1 Introduction. III.5. 2 Risk Factors and Risk Factor Sensitivities. III.5. 3 Cash Flow Mapping. III.5. 4 Applications of Cash Flow Mapping to Market Risk Management. III.5. 5 Mapping an Options Portfolio to Price Risk Factors. III.5. 6 Mapping Implied Volatility. III.5. 7 Case Study: Volatility Risk in FTSE 100 Options. III.5. 8 Summary and Conclusions. References. Index.
The Influence of Organizational Culture on the Outcome of an IS Implementation

A number of information system (IS) studies have adopted organizational culture (OC) theory to investigate IS implementations. The studies highlight that members will reach consensus or agreement in the use of an IS but also experience inevitable tensions and ambiguities in the use of the IS. However, literature related to IS implementation/OC has rarely examined the influence that the saliency of specific cultural practices may have on the success or failure of IS implementations. Using a case study approach, we adopted the “soft positivism” research philosophy to collect data, underpinned by Martin’s (1992) integration and differentiation perspectives of OC to study organizational implementation of an IS. These perspectives served as interpretive lenses through which to explain how members’ salient behaviors towards an IS evolved during the implementation process. Our study augments the IS implementation/OC literature by demonstrating how salient cultural practices influence the outcome of IS implementation
Efficiently Summarizing Data Streams over Sliding Windows

Estimating the frequency of any piece of information in large-scale distributed data streams became of utmost importance in the last decade (e.g., in the context of network monitoring, big data, etc.). If some elegant solutions have been proposed recently, their approximation is computed from the inception of the stream. In a runtime distributed context, one would prefer to gather information only about the recent past. This may be led by the need to save resources or by the fact that recent information is more relevant. In this paper, we consider the sliding window model and propose two different (on-line) algorithms that approximate the items frequency in the active window. More precisely, we determine a (ε, δ)-additive-approximation meaning that the error is greater than ε only with probability δ. These solutions use a very small amount of memory with respect to the size N of the window and the number n of distinct items of the stream, namely, O(1/ε log 1/δ (log N+log n)) and O(1/τε log 1/δ (log N+log n)) bits of space, where τ is a parameter limiting memory usage. We also provide their distributed variant, i.e., considering the sliding window functional monitoring model. We compared the proposed algorithms to each other and also to the state of the art through extensive experiments on synthetic traces and real data sets that validate the robustness and accuracy of our algorithms.
Collective Classi!cation in Network Data

etworks have become ubiquitous. Communication networks, financial transaction networks, networks describing physical systems, and social networks are all becoming increasingly important in our day-today life. Often, we are interested in models of how nodes in the network influence each other (for example, who infects whom in an epidemiological network), models for predicting an attribute of interest based on observed attributes of objects in the network (for example, predicting political affiliations based on online purchases and interactions), or we might be interested in identifying important nodes in the network (for example, critical nodes in communication networks). In most of these scenarios, an important step in achieving our final goal is classifying, or labeling, the nodes in the network. Given a network and a node v in the network, there are three distinct types of correlations that can be utilized to determine the classification or label of v: (1) The correlations between the label of v and the observed attributes of v. (2) The correlations between the label of v and the observed attributes (including observed labels) of nodes in the neighborhood of v. (3) The correlations between the label of v and the unobserved labels of objects in the neighborhood of v. Collective classification refers to the combined classification of a set of interlinked objects using all three types of information just described. Many applications produce data with correlations between labels of interconnected nodes. The simplest types of correlation can be the result of homophily (nodes with similar labels are more likely to be linked) or the result of social inu-ence (nodes that are linked are more likely to have similar labels), but more complex dependencies among labels often exist. Within the machine-learning community , classication is typically done on each object independently, without taking into account any underlying network that connects the nodes. Collective classi-cation does not t well into this setting. For instance, in the web page classica-tion problem where web pages are interconnected with hyperlinks and the task is to assign each web page with a label that best indicates its topic, it is common to assume that the labels on interconnected web pages are correlated. Such intercon-nections occur naturally in data from a variety of applications such as bibliographic data, email networks, and social networks. Traditional classication techniques would ignore the correlations represented by these interconnections and would be hard pressed to produce the classication accuracies possible …
Testing for Constant Returns to Scale and Perfect Competition in the Israeli Economy, 1980-2006

In this paper we test the hypothesis of constant returns to scale and no market power, implementing Hall's test (1988, 1991) on Israeli annual real business-sector GDP data. The results validate the hypothesis of perfect competition at the aggregate level and are in line with most empirical research in other countries as well. Thus on the one hand they justify the imposition of the CRS restriction when estimating the business-sector GDP production function in Israel and on the other contradict the assumption of CRS with market power and fixed entry costs in the modeling of the Israeli economy.
The Australian public service under the Keating Government: A case of weakened accountability?

Managerial restructuring of the Australian public service during the period of the Keating Government was designed to provide greater responsiveness on the part of public servants to ministers. Increased use of ministerial advisers and the formalisation of contract employment for departmental secretaries pointed to a possible erosion of responsible government norms, but this process was moderated by tension between the private sector practices being introduced and an adherence to the traditions of responsible government. We suggest that a pragmatic approach to public sector reform partly accounted for this unease and we speculate that the more ideological commitment to managerialism displayed by the Howard Government might indicate that responsible government within the Commonwealth Public Service is in further danger of erosion.
Organizational Commitment and Job Satisfaction

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role Job satisfaction on Organizational commitments. In this study, Data collected from 280 Iranian employees. The present study employs a questionnaire survey approach to collect data for testing the research hypotheses. Relevant statistical analytical techniques including regression for analysis was then used. The results indicate that all three factors of Job satisfaction (Promotions‚ Personal relationships‚ and Favorable conditions of work) have positive and significant effects on Organizational commitments. The main contribution of the paper is to provide empirical evidence about the impact of Job satisfaction on Organizational commitments. Also the findings of the study are important for both practitioners and academics.
Growth and Variability in State Tax Revenue: An Anatomy of State Fiscal Crises

Revenues and Expenditures: The Components of Crisis State Government Spending State Government Taxes Budgeting for Stability: Some Principles Measuring Cyclical Variability The Cyclical Variability of State Government Revenues The Variability of State Income and Sales Taxes Is There a Trade-Off between Variability and Growth in State Government Tax Bases? The Role of Rainy Day Funds in Easing State Fiscal Crises Conclusion Bibliography Index
Single-shot person re-identification based on improved Random-Walk pedestrian segmentation

Single-shot person re-identification is to match pedestrian images captured from different cameras at different time under the condition of large illumination variations, different viewpoints, and inadequate information of single-shot case. To deal with these challenges, we propose a four-step single-shot person re-identification algorithm that consists of pedestrian segmentation, human region partitioning, feature extraction and human feature matching. Based on an improved Random Walks algorithm, human foreground is segmented by combining the shape prior information and the color seed constraint into the Random Walk formulation. Then color features of HSV histogram and 1-D RGB signal along with texture features from human body parts are used for the person re-identification. The correct match is then determined by the similarity scores of all features with appropriate weight selection. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance by using the proposed algorithm compared to the previous representative methods.
MacMahon Symmetric Functions, the Partition Lattice, and Young Subgroups

A MacMahon symmetric function is a formal power series in a finite number of alphabets that is invariant under the diagonal action of the symmetric group. In this article, we show that the MacMahon symmetric functions are the generating functions for the orbits of sets of functions indexed by partitions under the diagonal action of a Young subgroup of a symmetric group. We define a MacMahon chromatic symmetric function that generalizes Stanley's chromatic symmetric function. Then, we study some of the properties of this new function through its connection with the noncommutative chromatic symmetric function of Gebhard and Sagan.
The Causes and Consequences of CEO, COB, and Board Turnover

I investigate the relation between CEO, chairman, and board turnover and ask how changes in the boardroom affect performance. I find that voluntary chairman turnover causes voluntary CEO turnover. Furthermore, directors do not leave voluntarily if the firm fires its CEO. I identify a group of directors with superior monitoring abilities: Outsiders with experience in the relevant industry increase the performance-sensitivity of CEO turnover and the probability of performance improvements. I also include relatively unexplored board dimensions such as gender and education and find no correlation with turnover and performance. Several anti-takeover mechanisms protect managers but do not affect performance.
DISCOVERY OF NUCLEAR WATER MASER EMISSION IN CENTAURUS A

We report the detection of a 22 GHz water maser line in the nearest (D ∼ 3.8 Mpc) radio galaxy Centaurus A (Cen A) using the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA). The line is centered at a velocity of ∼960 km s−1, which is redshifted by about 415 km s−1 from the systemic velocity. Such an offset, as well as the width of ∼120 km s−1, could be consistent with either a nuclear maser arising from an accretion disk of the central supermassive black hole (SMBH), or with a jet maser that is emitted from the material that is shocked near the base of the jet in Cen A. The best spatial resolution of our ATCA data constrains the origin of the maser feature within <3 pc of the SMBH. The maser exhibits an isotropic luminosity of ∼1 L☉, which classifies it as a kilomaser, and appears to be variable on timescales of months. A kilomaser can also be emitted by shocked gas in star-forming regions. Given the small projected distance from the core, the large offset from systemic velocity, and the smoothness of the line feature, we conclude that a jet maser line emitted by shocked gas around the base of the active galactic nucleus is the most likely explanation. For this scenario we can infer a minimum density of the radio jet of ≳ 10 cm−3, which indicates substantial mass entrainment of surrounding gas into the propagating jet material.
Performance Measurement Intrusion and Perturbation Analysis

The authors study the instrumentation perturbations of software event tracing on the Alliant FX/80 vector multiprocessor in sequential, vector, concurrent, and vector-concurrent modes. Based on experimental data, they derive a perturbation model that can approximate true performance from instrumented execution. They analyze the effects of instrumentation coverage, (i.e., the ratio of instrumented to executed statements), source level instrumentation, and hardware interactions. The results show that perturbations in execution times for complete trace instrumentations can exceed three orders of magnitude. With appropriate models of performance perturbation, these perturbations in execution time can be reduced to less than 20% while retaining the additional information from detailed traces. In general, it is concluded that it is possible to characterize perturbations through simple models. This permits more detailed, accurate instrumentation than traditionally believed possible. >
The New European Criminology: Crime and Social Order in Europe

'The new European criminology' gathers together leading criminologists from all over Europe to consider crime and responses to crime within and across national borders. For the first time it allows students to experience the most exciting work in European criminology and to compare approaches to crime in different parts of Europe. The five sections of the book look at: * the effects of European harmonisation on crime * criminal justice, law enforcement and penal reform * organised crime, from the Mafia in Italy to drug running in the Balkans * local crime in international contexts * possible future directions for criminology and some suggestions for a new criminology of war.
Super-resolving a Single Intensity/Range Image via Non-local Means and Sparse Representation

We propose an example-based super-resolution (SR) framework, which uses a single input image and, unlike most of the SR methods does not need an external high resolution (HR) dataset. Our SR approach is based in sparse representation framework, which depends on a dictionary, learned from the given test image across different scales. In addition, our sparse coding focuses on the detail information of the image patches. Furthermore, in the above process we have considered non-local combination of similar patches in the input image, which assist us to improve the quality of the SR result. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for intensity images as well as range images. Contemplating the importance of edges in images of both these modalities, we have added an edge preserving constraint that will maintain the continuity of edge related information to the input low resolution image. We investigate the performance of our approach by rigorous experimental analysis and it shows to perform better than some state-of-the-art SR approaches.
Consistency of maternal cognitions and principles across the first five months following preterm and term deliveries

The aims of this study were to examine and compare the development of parenting cognitions and principles in mothers following preterm and term deliveries. Parenting cognitions about child development, including thinking that is restricted to single causes and single outcomes (categorical thinking) and thinking that takes into account multiple perspectives (perspectivist thinking), have been shown to relate to child outcomes. Parenting principles about using routines (structure) or infant cues (attunement) to guide daily caregiving have been shown to relate to caregiving practices. We investigated the continuity and stability of parenting cognitions and principles in the days following birth to 5 months postpartum for mothers of infants born term and preterm. All parenting cognitions were stable across time. Categorical thinking increased at a group level across time in mothers of preterm, but not term, infants. Perspectivist thinking increased at a group level for first-time mothers (regardless of birth status) and tended to be lower in mothers of preterm infants. Structure at birth did not predict later structure (and so was unstable) in mothers of preterm, but not term, infants and neither group changed in mean level across time. Attunement was consistent across time in both groups of mothers. These results indicate that prematurity has multiple, diverse effects on parenting beliefs, which may in turn influence maternal behavior and child outcomes. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). 1. Consistency of maternal cognitions and principles across the first five months following preterm and term deliveries A large literature documents the importance of parenting beliefs about infants and caregiving (Bornstein, 2015; Bornstein et al., 2007; Dichtelmiller et al., 1992; Goodnow, 1988; Miller, 1988; Miller-Loncar, Landry, Smith, & Swank, 2000; Moorman & Pomerantz, 2008; Pomerantz & Dong, 2006). However, few studies have examined the parenting beliefs of parents of preterm infants, despite preterm deliveries occurring in around 12–13% of live births in the United States and around 5–9% in Europe and other developed countries (Goldenberg, Culhane, Iams, & Romero, 2008). This gap in the literature is significant because infants born prematurely may be at risk due to early non-optimal caregiving environments (e.g., Clark, Woodward, ∗ Corresponding author at: Merideth Gattis, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3AT, UK. Tel: +44(0)29 2087 0034. E-mail addresses: avw30@cam.ac. uk (A. Winstanley), gattism@cardiff.ac. uk (M. Gattis). http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.infbeh. 2014.09. 005 0163-6383/© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).