Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What Drives Target Price Forecast Revisions and Their Investment Value ?

Using a variance decomposition approach, we document that earnings forecasts and the discount rate implied in P/E ratio forecasts are both important in driving target price revisions during the sample period (1999 through 2011). Earnings forecasts are more important for companies with smaller market capitalization, higher book-to-market, slower sales growth, and lower past returns. However, a target price-based trading strategy produces a significant risk-adjusted profit when target price revisions are driven not only by revisions in earnings forecasts, but also by revisions in discount rates. This evidence suggests that equity analysts provide informative forecasts about discount rates implied in P/E ratio in addition to earnings. JEL Classification: G10, G14, G24
Flowering and pollinators of three distylous species of... FLOWERING AND POLLINATORS OF THREE DISTYLOUS SPECIES OF Psychotria (Rubiaceae) CO-OCCURRING IN THE BRAZILIAN ATLANTIC FOREST1

This study investigates the flowering and pollinators of the floral morphs of three co-occurring distylous species, Psychotria conjugens Müll, P. hastisepala Müll. Arg. and P. sessilis Vell. , in two consecutive flowering seasons in an Atlantic Forest fragment in southeastern Brazil. The species have diurnal, creamcolored, tubular, nectariferous flowers and their flowering occurs in the rainy season, from September to April, with little or no overlapping between species, characterizing a staggered flowering. The flowering of the longand short-styled floral morphs of each species was synchronous, but the number of open flowers per day per morph tended to vary in each flowering season. These numbers were higher in P. sessilis and P. conjugens and, probably, resulted in higher total numbers of visits on its flowers (up to 1084 visits in P. sessilis and 756 in P. conjugens), compared to that observed in P. hastisepala (up to 71). There was a higher frequency of visits to long-styled flowers of all species. The bee Ariphanarthra palpalis was a common pollinator to all species. This bee is native to Brazil, solitary, considered relatively rare and its host plants were unknown. Other native bees (Melipona spp.) also visited the flowers of the Psychotria species. The availability of flowers with similar floral features over eight months, the staggered flowering and common pollinators appear to be part of a strategy to attract floral visitors, minimizing the competition for pollinators and then favoring the legitimate pollination of these plants.
Comparative genomic analyses reveal genetic characteristics and pathogenic factors of Bacillus pumilus HM-7

Bacillus pumilus plays an important role in industrial application and biocontrol activities, as well as causing humans and plants disease, leading to economic losses and biosafety concerns. However, until now, the pathogenesis and underlying mechanisms of B. pumilus strains remain unclear. In our previous study, one representative isolate of B. pumilus named HM-7 has been recovered and proved to be the causal agent of fruit rot on muskmelon (Cucumis melo). Herein, we present a complete and annotated genome sequence of HM-7 that contains 4,111 coding genes in a single 3,951,520 bp chromosome with 41.04% GC content. A total of 3,481 genes were functionally annotated with the GO, COG, and KEGG databases. Pan-core genome analysis of HM-7 and 20 representative B. pumilus strains, as well as six closely related Bacillus species, discovered 740 core genes and 15,205 genes in the pan-genome of 21 B. pumilus strains, in which 485 specific-genes were identified in HM-7 genome. The average nucleotide identity (ANI), and whole-genome-based phylogenetic analysis revealed that HM-7 was most closely related to the C4, GR8, MTCC-B6033, TUAT1 and SH-B11 strains, but evolutionarily distinct from other strains in B. pumilus. Collinearity analysis of the six similar B. pumilus strains showed high levels of synteny but also several divergent regions for each strains. In the HM-7 genome, we identified 484 genes in the carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAZyme) class, 650 genes encoding virulence factors, and 1,115 genes associated with pathogen-host interactions. Moreover, three HM-7-specific regions were determined, which contained 424 protein-coding genes. Further investigation of these genes showed that 19 pathogenesis-related genes were mainly associated with flagella formation and secretion of toxic products, which might be involved in the virulence of strain HM-7. Our results provided detailed genomic and taxonomic information for the HM-7 strain, and discovered its potential pathogenic mechanism, which lay a foundation for developing effective prevention and control strategies against this pathogen in the future.
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Concerns about the duration of China’s growth and hence the question of a permanent significant contribution of China to world economic growth relate, amongst other things, to the problem of reducing regional disparity in China. While China’s high average growth is driven by a small number of rapidly developing provinces, the majority of provinces have experienced more moderate development. To obtain broad continous growth it is important to identify the determinants of provincial growth. Therefore, we introduce a stylized model of regional development which is characterized by two pillars: (i) International integration indicated by FDI and/or trade lead to imitation of international technologies, technology spill overs and temporary dynamic scale economies, and (ii) domestic factors indicated by human and real capital available through interregional factor mobility. Using panel data analysis and GMM estimates our empirical analysis supports the predictions from our theoretical model of regional development. Positive and significant coefficients for FDI and trade support the importance of international integration and technology imitation. A negative and significant lagged GDP per capita indicates a catching up, non steady state process across China’s provinces.Highly significant human and real capital identifies the importance of these domestic growth restricting factors. However, other potentially important factors like labor or government expenditures are (surprisingly) insignificant or even negative. Further, in contrast to implications from NEG models indicators for urbanization and agglomeration do not contribute significantly.
Quantum-Kit: Simulating Shor's Factorization of 24-Bit Number on Desktop

Quantum-Kit is a graphical desktop application for quantum circuit simulations. Its powerful, memory-efficient computational engine enables large-scale simulations on a desktop. The ability to design hybrid circuits, with both quantum and classical bits and controls, is employed to demonstrate Kitaev's approach to Shor's factorization algorithm. For the first time, Shor's factorization of a 24-bit integer is simulated with Quantum-Kit in a mere 26 minutes on a modest desktop with Intel Core i5 7400T, 2.4GHz and 12GB RAM, while the largest number factorized so far has been a 20-bit integer run on a supercomputer. For the conventional Shor's algorithm, Quantum-Kit is about 35 times faster than previously reported simulation times, whereas, with Kitaev's approach, Quantum-Kit is 6 orders of magnitude faster in Shor's factorization of exactly the same number.
Clinical detection, diagnosis and treatment of morphological abnormalities of sperm flagella: A review of literature

Sperm carries male genetic information, and flagella help move the sperm to reach oocytes. When the ultrastructure of the flagella is abnormal, the sperm is unable to reach the oocyte and achieve insemination. Multiple morphological abnormalities of sperm flagella (MMAF) is a relatively rare idiopathic condition that is mainly characterized by multiple defects in sperm flagella. In the last decade, with the development of high-throughput DNA sequencing approaches, many genes have been revealed to be related to MMAF. However, the differences in sperm phenotypes and reproductive outcomes in many cases are attributed to different pathogenic genes or different pathogenic mutations in the same gene. Here, we will review information about the various phenotypes resulting from different pathogenic genes, including sperm ultrastructure and encoding proteins with their location and functions as well as assisted reproductive technology (ART) outcomes. We will share our clinical detection and diagnosis experience to provide additional clinical views and broaden the understanding of this disease.
Management or technology? Firms’ embeddedness in dual talent flow networks and their innovation performance

This paper examines the complex relationship between different types of talent flow networks and firms’ innovation. Based on the social network theory and human capital theory, we divide the talent flow networks into “management talent flow networks” and “technical talent flow networks”. The paper then investigates the potential interacting effect and matching effect between the two types of networks when they influence the innovation of firms. The empirical results, which draw from LinkedIn (China) resume data show that: (1) in both management talent flow networks and technical talent flow networks, higher degree of centrality and larger structural hole indexes can enhance firms’ innovation performance; (2) there is significant interacting effect between management talent flow networks and technical talent flow networks in their influence on firms’ innovation. That is, the interaction between firms’ centrality in management talent flow networks and technical talent flow networks, and the interaction between firms’ structural hole indexes in the two networks can both enhance their innovation performance; (3) there is also noteworthy matching effect between the two network types. That is, firms with balanced degree centrality (high-high, or low-low) and balanced structural hole indexes (high-high, or low-low) in management talent flow networks and technical talent flow networks exhibit better innovation performance than those with imbalanced degree centrality (high-low, or low-high) and structural hole indexes (high-low, or low-high) in the two networks. This paper contributes to the classification research on talent flow networks, and deepens our understanding of the complex influencing mechanism between talent flow networks and firms’ innovation. Moreover, it provides managerial implications for firms to improve innovation performance via talent flow management.
Nonlinear Rossby Wave–Wave and Wave–Mean Flow Theory for Long-term Solar Cycle Modulations

The Schwabe cycle of solar activity exhibits modulations and frequency fluctuations on slow timescales of centuries and millennia. Plausible physical explanations for the cause of these long-term variations of the solar cycle are still elusive, with possible theories including stochasticity of the alpha effect and fluctuations of the differential rotation. It has been suggested recently in the literature that there exists a possible relation between the spatiotemporal structure of the solar cycle and the nonlinear dynamics of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) Rossby waves at the solar tachocline, including both wave–wave and wave–mean flow interactions. Here we extend the nonlinear theory of MHD Rossby waves presented in a previous article to take into account long-term modulation effects due to a recently discovered mechanism that allows significant energy transfers throughout different wave triads: the precession resonance mechanism. We have found a large number of Rossby–Hauwirtz wave triads whose frequency mismatches are compatible with the solar cycle frequency. Consequently, by analyzing the reduced dynamics of two triads coupled with a single mode (five-wave system), we have demonstrated that in the amplitude regime in which precession resonance occurs, the energy transfer throughout the system yields significant long-term modulations on the main ∼11 yr period associated with intratriad energy exchanges. We further show that such modulations display an inverse relationship between the characteristic wave amplitude and the period of intratriad energy exchanges, which is consistent with the Waldmeier law for the solar cycle. In the presence of a constant forcing and dissipation, the five-wave system in the precession resonance regime exhibits irregular amplitude fluctuations, with some periods resembling the grand minimum states.
Force-free electrodynamics near rotation axis of a Kerr black hole

Despite their potential importance for understanding astrophysical jets, physically realistic exact solutions for magnetospheres around Kerr black holes have not been found, even in the force-free approximation. Instead approximate analytical solutions such as the Blandford–Znajek (split-)monopole, as well as numerical solutions, have been constructed. In this paper we consider a new approach to the analysis and construction of such magnetospheres. We consider force-free electrodynamics close to the rotation axis of a magnetosphere surrounding a Kerr black hole assuming axisymmetry. This is the region where the force-free approximation should work the best, and where the jets are located. We perform a systematic study of the asymptotic region with (split-)monopole, paraboloidal and vertical asymptotic behaviors. Imposing asymptotics similar to a (split-)monopole, we find under certain assumptions that demanding regularity at the rotation axis and the event horizon restricts solutions of the stream equation so much that it is not possible for a solution to be continuously connected to the static (split-)monopole around the Schwarzschild black hole in the limit where the rotation goes to zero. On the one hand, this result provides independent evidence to the issues discovered with the asymptotics of the Blandford–Znajek (split-)monopole in reference (Grignani G, Harmark T and Orselli M 2018 Phys. Rev. D 98 084056). On the other hand, we also point out possible caveats in our arguments that one could conceivably exploit to amend the perturbative construction of the Blandford–Znajek (split-)monopole.
ViSiL: Fine-Grained Spatio-Temporal Video Similarity Learning

In this paper we introduce ViSiL, a Video Similarity Learning architecture that considers fine-grained Spatio-Temporal relations between pairs of videos -- such relations are typically lost in previous video retrieval approaches that embed the whole frame or even the whole video into a vector descriptor before the similarity estimation. By contrast, our Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based approach is trained to calculate video-to-video similarity from refined frame-to-frame similarity matrices, so as to consider both intra- and inter-frame relations. In the proposed method, pairwise frame similarity is estimated by applying Tensor Dot (TD) followed by Chamfer Similarity (CS) on regional CNN frame features - this avoids feature aggregation before the similarity calculation between frames. Subsequently, the similarity matrix between all video frames is fed to a four-layer CNN, and then summarized using Chamfer Similarity (CS) into a video-to-video similarity score -- this avoids feature aggregation before the similarity calculation between videos and captures the temporal similarity patterns between matching frame sequences. We train the proposed network using a triplet loss scheme and evaluate it on five public benchmark datasets on four different video retrieval problems where we demonstrate large improvements in comparison to the state of the art. The implementation of ViSiL is publicly available.
Changing trends of patient characteristics and treatment pathways during the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-sectional analysis of 72,459 inpatient cases from the German Helios database

Background This study compared patient profiles and clinical courses of SARS-CoV-2 infected inpatients over different pandemic periods. Methods In a retrospective cross-sectional analysis, we examined administrative data of German Helios hospitals using ICD-10-codes at discharge. Inpatient cases with SARS-CoV-2 infection admitted between 03/04/2020 and 07/19/2022 were included irrespective of the reason for hospitalization. All endpoints were timely assigned to admission date for trend analysis. The first pandemic wave was defined by change points in time-series of incident daily infections and compared with different later pandemic phases according to virus type predominance. Results We included 72,459 inpatient cases. Patients hospitalized during the first pandemic wave (03/04/2020–05/05/2020; n = 1,803) were older (68.5 ± 17.2 vs. 64.4 ± 22.6 years, p < 0.01) and severe acute respiratory infections were more prevalent (85.2 vs. 53.3%, p < 0.01). No differences were observed with respect to distribution of sex, but comorbidity burden was higher in the first pandemic wave. The risk of receiving intensive care therapy was reduced in all later pandemic phases as was in-hospital mortality when compared to the first pandemic wave. Trend analysis revealed declines of mean age and Elixhauser comorbidity index over time as well as a decline of the utilization of intensive care therapy, mechanical ventilation and in-hospital mortality. Conclusion Characteristics and outcomes of inpatients with SARS-CoV-2 infection changed throughout the observational period. An ongoing evaluation of trends and care pathways will allow for the assessment of future demands.
Characterization of carotenoids in Lycium barbarum fruit by using UPC2-PDA-Q-TOF-MSE couple with deep eutectic solvents extraction and evaluation of their 5α-reductase inhibitory activity

Carotenoids from Lyciu m barbarum fruits have possessed pharmacological efficacy against eye diseases, cardiovascular disorders, cancer, and benign prostatic hyperplasia. However, the efficient extraction, rapid characterization and activities evaluation of Lycium carotenoids remains a challenge. To concentrate and characterize Lycium carotenoids, we have developed ultrasound-assisted extraction methods with different deep eutectic solvents (DESs) and analyzed carotenoids by ultra-performance convergence chromatography coupled with photo diode array detector and quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UPC2-PDA-Q-TOF-MSE). DESs containing choline chloride and malonic acid presented better extraction efficiency and were more environmentally friendly than other extraction methods. Carotenoids were more quickly profiled (in 11 min) by UPC2 compared to by UPLC (in 35 min), with seventeen main peaks were characterized in the MS fragmentation patterns. The in vitro 5α-reductase inhibitory activity of DESs extracts, fractions and components were subsequently assessed, and the predominant component zeaxanthin dipalmitate (ZD) exhibited potent inhibitory activity. Our study provides a chemical and pharmacological basis for the further development of potential new drugs based on Lycium carotenoids.
Impact of WTAP in small HCC and paired adjacent non-neoplastic liver tissue on recurrence: A cohort study with external extension analysis

Background: To evaluate prognostic value of WTAP levels in tumor and paired adjacent non-neoplastic liver tissues (PANLT) for cases of hepatitis B virus (HBV)-positive Asian small hepatocellular carcinoma (sHCC) patients who received curative partial hepatectomy. Method: The investigation with two external cohorts were included. Associations between hazard risk of recurrence and continuous WTAP levels were investigated with restricted cubic spline models. Cox and inverse probability weighting models were established for survival analysis. Based on interaction effects, further stratification analysis was performed. Landmark analysis was employed to analyze cases of late recurrence. Finally, sensitivity analysis was performed to assess unmeasured confounders. Findings: In an investigation cohort of 307 patients, restricted cubic spline models indicated that hazard risk of recurrence increases with elevated WTAP levels for sHCC and PANLT. However, using Cox and inverse probability weighting models, no significant differences were observed in recurrence-free survival (RFS) between groups with different WTAP levels in sHCC. Multivariate analysis showed that patients with high PANLT WTAP levels had significantly worse RFS (HR 1.567, 95% CI 1.065–2.307; p = 0.023). Based on the significant interaction effect between WTAP levels in sHCC and PANLT, stratification analysis revealed that recurrence risk is more pronounced in patients with high WTAP levels in both PANLT and sHCC. Landmark analysis showed that late recurrence was more likely to occur in patients with high PANLT WTAP levels (HR 2.058, 95% CI 1.113–3.805; p = 0.021). Moreover, the detrimental effects of elevated PANLT WTAP levels on RFS were validated with two external cohorts. Sensitivity analysis confirmed the robustness of results. Conclusion: Increased PANLT WTAP expression levels independently predict high recurrence risk in HBV-positive Asian sHCC patients. Both tumor tissues and PANLT need to be considered together in future clinical practice to obtain a more comprehensive and accurate evaluation for recurrence risk.
Why dividends disappear in the UK – liquidity , risk or catering ?

This study examines the role of liquidity, risk and catering in explaining the disappearing dividends phenomenon among UK firms, using an extended sample period from 1989 to 2009. We observe a declining percentage of dividend-payers in the UK after 1990 but an upward trend after 2007, suggesting the signalling role of dividends during the recent recessionary period. Different from US studies, our results indicate that the link between dividend policy and stock market liquidity is weak in the UK, and stock market liquidity fails to replace the role of catering theory in explaining disappearing dividends puzzle. By contrast, risk provides a significant (around 50 percent) explanation to the disappearing dividends; and after adjusting for risk, we find that catering incentives no longer explain the changes in propensity to pay in the UK. JEL classification: D22, G15, G30, G35
A global phylogeny of Stegnogramma ferns (Thelypteridaceae): generic and sectional revision, historical biogeography and evolution of leaf architecture

The thelypteroid fern genus Stegnogramma s.l. contains around 18–35 species and has a global, cross‐continental distribution ranging from tropical to temperate regions. Several genera and infrageneric sections have been recognized previously in Stegnogramma s.l. , but their phylogenetic relationships are still unclear. In this study, we present a global phylogeny of Stegnogramma s.l. with the most comprehensive sampling to date and aim to pinpoint the phylogenetic positions of biogeographically and taxonomically important taxa. Based on the reconstructed historical biogeography and character evolution, we propose a new (infra)generic classification and discuss the diversification of Stegnogramma s.l. in a biogeographical context. New names or combinations are made for 12 (infra)species, including transferring the monotypic species of Craspedosorus to Leptogramma. Finally, we discuss a possible link between leaf architecture and ecological adaptation, and hypothesize that the increase in leaf dissection and free‐vein proportion is an adaptive feature to cool climates in Stegnogramma s.l.