Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Shareholding Structure of Japanese Banks and Their Real Estate Lending in the 1980s

This paper studies the effects of the bank shareholding structure on real estate lending by Japanese banks in the 1980s. It shows that the shareholders did @not passively leave all the monitoring of bank managers to regulatory agents. The real estate lending of the regional banks decreased as the total shares held by the large shareholders increased. However, the opposite was true for the national banks that led a financial keiretsu. Their real estate lending increased in the shares held by the members of the bank's keiretsu. The cross shareholding and other business ties between these banks and their same-keiretsu shareholders protected the bank managers from the discipline of other shareholders.
Stochastic comparison algorithm for discrete optimization with estimation

An iterative discrete optimization algorithm that works with Monte Carlo estimation of the objective function is developed. Two algorithms, the simulated annealing algorithm and the stochastic ruler algorithm, are considered. The authors examine some of the problems of their use and combine the advantages of both algorithms to form an iterative random search algorithm called the stochastic comparison (SC) algorithm. The SC algorithm actually solves an alternative optimization problem, and it is shown under symmetry assumption that the alternative problem is equivalent to the original one. The convergence of the SC algorithm is proved based on time-inhomogeneous Markov chain theory. Results of numerical experiments on a testbed problem with randomly generated objective function are presented. <<ETX>>
What Characterizes Commonality on European NYSE Euronext Markets?

Using a rich dataset of orders and trades for a sample of stocks listed on the four European markets of NYSE Euronext, we apply principal component analysis and provide evidence on the existence and magnitude of commonality in returns, order flow and liquidity. We show that commonality in order flow mainly comes from foreign market members acting for their own account. Proprietary trading is a major driver in trade imbalance and return commonality. Next, we provide evidence on commonality in hidden liquidity. In contrast to commonality in visible depth that is the strongest for large firms, comovements in hidden depth seem to be stronger for small caps. We also show that commonality in returns, order flow and liquidity is not constant throughout the day. The opening of US markets is a key moment where commonality often reaches its maximum level.
Examination of pH in lot fed beef for Japan

Cattle lot fed for the Japanese market produce carcases of high value and thus downgrading based on meat quality represents a significant cost. The Meat Standards Australia guidelines for the rate of pH fall specify that carcases must not reach pH 6.0 before their temperature reaches 35°C, however limited experimental data suggests this is a common occurrence in heavy carcases produced for the Japanese market. Therefore a study was conducted to confirm this occurrence and to determine the impact of season on the incidence of fast pH fall. 811 carcases were examined from cattle fed for ~150 days, 411 in April and 400 in July. Initial pH (pHi) and temperature were measured on all carcases and then a sub-set of samples (200/season) were measured for traits such as colour, drip loss and protein solubility. pHi was measured on core muscle samples taken from the loin muscle between the 5th/6th ribs prior to entering the chiller. The pH at 35°C was predicted for a subset of 41 carcases based on data collected at the MSA site at the lumbarsacral junction using non linear regression. There was a significant relationship (P < 0.05) between pH at 35°C at the MSA site and the temperature at the sampling site at the 5th/6th rib used for determination of pHi. A large proportion of the carcases were outside the MSA pH/temperature window in both autumn (86%) and winter (95%). Season was found to have a significant effect on pH at 35°C (P < 0.001) and ultimate pH (P < 0.001) with higher values in the autumn and winter respectively. A high incidence of carcases exhibiting a fast pH decline at high temperatures was found, irrespective of season and the significance of this finding is discussed.
AUDIT COMMITTEE AND INTERNAL AUDIT: IMPLICATIONS ON AUDIT QUALITY

The purpose of this study is to investigate the association of audit committee expertise and internal audit function characteristics, with audit quality, which is proxied by audit fee. As highlighted by prior studies, audit committee and internal audit are among the corporate governance mechanisms. Hence, among the corporate governance characteristics included in this study are audit committee expertise, frequency of audit committee meetings, structure of internal audit function and size of internal audit function. Using publicly available information, 200 Malaysian listed companies were utilised for both 2009 and 2010. It was shown that a positive relationship exists between external audit fee and two of the audit committee characteristics, i.e. audit committee with postgraduate qualification and frequency of audit committee meeting. Further, a positive relationship was found between external audit fee and a characteristic of the internal audit function, which is size of the internal audit function. Apart from contributing to the literature on corporate governance and audit quality, this study may serve as an input for regulators to encourage strict enforcement for Malaysian listed companies to incorporate corporate governance practices, especially in respect of audit committee composition and internal audit function. Finally, it highlights the call for continuous education for directors, to become more resourceful in order to improve their relationship with auditors.
Clinical efficacy of temocillin.

tazobactam. The addition of tazobactam was of no benefit in strains producing GES, VEB and PER b-lactamases, which all had CXA-101 MICs . 64 mg/L. In the only isolate producing an ESBLM-D b-lactamase (OXA-32), the MIC was reduced from . 64 to 8 mg/L. The OXA-32-producing isolate was also susceptible to piperacillin/tazobactam. Susceptibility to piperacillin/ tazobactam was additionally seen in one isolate (producing PER-1), which was resistant to all b-lactams except imipenem and ceftazidime plus clavulanate. The latter combination was found to have activity against four isolates (producing PER-1, BEL-1, SHV-5 and TEM-4). In conclusion, CXA-101 was found to have good in vitro activity against 4/9 ESBLA-producing P. aeruginosa. The addition of tazobactam extended the activity to the one ESBLM-D-producing isolate tested. Hence, CXA-101 plus tazobactam had good in vitro activity against half of the ESBL-producing P. aeruginosa isolates investigated. In comparison, imipenem had activity against 9/10 isolates, ceftazidime plus clavulanate against 4/10 isolates, piperacillin/ tazobactam against 3/10 isolates, cefepime against 2/10 isolates and ceftazidime or ceftazidime plus tazobactam against 1/10 isolates.
The Relationship between Quality of Earnings and Market-Based Variables in Tehran Stock Exchange (Tse): The Role of Accrual Accounting

This paper investigates the role of accrual accounting on the quality of earnings for the firms accepted in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). First 96 firms were selected between 1998-2003. Then, the method of mesa comparisons was used in the context of cross-sectional analysis used to cross-sectional analysis. The results indicate that accrual accounting (the difference between earnings and cash flows) does not affect the average stock returns. In addition, there is no significant difference between average returns of the firms with high and low accrual accounting. Components of accruals were also examined and similar results were found. They are changes in inventory, accounts receivable, other non-cash current assets, accounts payable, other current liabilities, discretionary and non-discretionary accruals.
Character Word Embedding for NLP tasks in Indian languages

In the recent time Word Embeddings have been used as unsupervised approach to achieve results comparable to that of supervised methods which use handcrafted features.But information about word morphology and shape is normally ignored when learning word representations.Character level embedding can capture the intra-word information specially when dealing with morphologically rich languages. Here we propose to use neural network that learns character level representation of words and associate them with usual word representations to perform morphologically rich text such as POS tagging. Our character-level word embedding essentially takes word’s morphological segmentation into account (affixes,root etc.) and generate the embedding by giving preferences to the various parts of the segmentation. In the result of the word similarity tasks also it produces good result. The method is not language specific, so it can be implemented for other languages our given code.
LIDAR CALIBRATION CENTRE

This paper presents the newly established Lidar Calibration Centre, a distributed infrastructure in Europe, whose goal is to offer services for complete characterization and calibration of lidars and ceilometers. Mobile reference lidars, laboratories for testing and characterization of optics and electronics, facilities for inspection and debugging of instruments, as well as for training in good practices are open to users from the scientific community, operational services and private sector. The Lidar Calibration Centre offers support for trans-national access through the EC HORIZON2020 project ACTRIS-2.
Perioperative gastric tonometric PCO2 and intramucosal pH in patients undergoing liver transplantation

Background: Extensive research has focused on the role of insufficient gastro‐intestinal perfusion and inflammatory activation in the development of organ dysfunction during critical illness. In patients undergoing liver transplantation, portal and caval vein clamping leads to gastro‐intestinal and lower extremity venous congestion during the anhepatic phase, and studies suggest that gastro‐intestinal perfusion may be compromised. This study was performed to investigate gastro‐intestinal perfusion in patients undergoing liver transplantation.
Stakeholder Versus Shareholder Satisfaction in Corporate Risk Management

Inherent in corporate governance is the conflict between satisfying stakeholders in general versus satisfying shareholders in particular. This empirical study of Danish non-financial companies finds that companies which state that their aim is to satisfy stakeholders in general ("stakeholder satisfaction companies") pursue a more extensive hedging strategy of exposures to changes in exchange rates than companies which state that their aim is to satisfy shareholders in particular ("shareholder satisfaction companies"). The extensive hedging strategy of stakeholder satisfaction companies cannot be explained by company characteristics normally identified in the literature as being decisive for hedging behaviour such as firm size, leverage, and export ratio. Rather, the study finds a unique relationship between the managerial focus on stakeholders and a conservative risk management strategy. The results are important to companies in other countries with open economies.
Alternatives When Coronary Sinus Pacing Is Not Possible

VLAY, S.C. : Alternatives When Coronary Sinus Pacing Is Not Possible. Biventricular pacing via a branch vein of the coronary sinus is not always possible due to anatomical reasons including phrenic nerve stimulation, scarred myocardium unable to sense or pace, and distorted anatomy prohibiting entry into the coronary sinus. Three patients are described in which alternative site pacing with an electrode in the right ventricular outflow tract alone or as a part of biventricular pacing system in the right ventricle provided a major improvement in dyspnea, congestive heart failure, New York Heart Association functional class, and ability to ambulate. (PACE 2003; 26[Pt. I]:4–7)
Under-Regulated and Over-Guaranteed? International Bank Mergers and Bank Risk-Taking

Weak bank supervision gives banks the ability to shift risk from themselves to supervisors. One way for banks to take advantage of weak supervisory systems is to engage in risky activities such as cross-border bank mergers. We examine whether the supervisory structure of a country influences the decision to engage in a cross-border merger by looking at the number of such mergers between OECD countries between 1985 and 2001. We also look at the change in risk profile associated with 299 individual mergers. We find that banks expand into countries that provide good business opportunities. However, once a bank decides to expand into a country, the decision to increase or decrease risk appears to be related to its home supervisory structure. Strong supervision - especially fairly priced deposit insurance - appears to mitigate moral hazard.
Tumour necrosis factor polymorphisms and susceptibility to follicular lymphoma

Follicular lymphoma is characterized in 85% of patients by the presence of a t(14;18) chromosomal translocation that results in overproduction of BCL2. In this study the distribution of high and low expressing TNF alleles at the TNF (−308) and LTα (+252) polymorphic sites in 121 patients with follicular lymphoma and 88 control individuals has been analysed. A reduction in high expressing haplotypes in patients compared to normal controls was found (P = 0.055), with no significant difference observed in response rate or overall survival between patients with high or low expressing haplotypes. These results suggest that the TNF locus, or an adjacent locus within the MHC region, is an important genetic risk factor in this disease.
Perturbation spectra in the warm inflationary scenario

We investigate the phenomenology of warm inflation and present generic results about the evolution of the inflaton and radiation fields. The general conditions required for warm inflation to take place are derived and discussed. A comprehensive approach is presented for the generation of thermally induced adiabatic and isocurvature perturbations and the amplitude of their spectra calculated. In addition we derive the ratio of tensor-to-scalar perturbations and find the spectral indices for adiabatic, isocurvature and tensor perturbations formed in the warm inflationary era. These results are presented in a simplified and compact approach that is generally applicable. Our results are illustrated by inflation models with polynomial and exponential potentials. We compare our analytic results against numerical models and find excellent agreement. Finally, presently available data is used to put constraints on warm inflation and we discuss how near--future observations may distinguish the warm inflationary scenario from standard supercooled inflation. The main observable difference is the different scalar-to- tensor ratio, and that the consistency relation between this and the slope of tensor perturbations does not hold for warm inflation.
How Developers Make Design Decisions about Users' Privacy: The Place of Professional Communities and Organizational Climate

New technologies continuously challenge people's information privacy, while privacy protection practices, such as Privacy-by-Design, did not become widespread engineering practices. The difficulty of designing privacy-preserving information systems highlights the need for studying developers' privacy decision-making processes, as the developers' communities are well coordinated and they are the ones who can promote or hinder privacy in the systems they design. We conducted an online survey (n=101), to understand the effectors on developers' professional privacy attitudes and practices. We investigate whether developer's privacy decision-making is shaped by several factors, including organizational (organizational privacy climate, business and legal contexts), professional (privacy knowledge) and personal (personal perceived privacy).
Telecommunication Services in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Analysis of Access and Use in the Southern Volta Region in Ghana

In order to show how rural households use -- and benefit from -- publicly available telecommunication services, determinants and degree of the use of public telephone facilities have been analysed. The results of the empirical assessment in three villages in Southern Ghana show the considerable catchment area of the services and the high penetration of use within the communities that had the services in place or were close-by. Additionally, the research uncovers that people are willing to take high costs in terms of time and money into account in order to be able to utilise the communication services. The multivariate analysis of the determinants of service use on the household and the personal level indicates that there is high hidden demand and that this demand is by no means limited to the economically wealthy and active. However, user rates are particularly low amongst women, illiterates, and people living in significant distance to public service facilities.
Density relaxation in a vibrated granular material.

We report measurements of the density of a vibrated granular material as a function of time. The material studied consists of monodisperse spherical glass particles confined to a long, thin cylindrical tube. Vibrations cause the pile to evolve from a low density initial configuration toward a steady state with a final density that depends on the intensity of the vibrations. We find a complex time evolution that is incompatible with a single exponential relaxation. There appears to be a characteristic value of the acceleration that separates two regimes of packing behavior. The results are compared to current theories of compaction.
The minimal signal-to-noise ratio required to stabilize over a noisy channel

We consider the problem of stabilizing a discrete-time plant over a noisy channel that is subject to a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) constraint. It has previously been shown that a necessary condition for stabilization with linear time-invariant state feedback is that the SNR satisfy a lower bound whose value depends solely upon the unstable plant poles. The same lower bound is also necessary for stabilization using linear time invariant output feedback for a minimum phase plant with relative degree one. Following Nair and Evans, we use the concept of entropy power to show that the same bound is also necessary when nonlinear time-varying control laws are applied. Another previous result is that the aforementioned bound on the SNR is also sufficient for stabilization. We apply the concept of entropy rate to provide an alternate proof of this result that also demonstrates an intimate connection between the discrete Bode sensitivity integral and the problem of disturbance-free estimation
Effect of respirators equipped with particle or particle-and-gas filters during exposure in a pig confinement building.

OBJECTIVES This study compared the protective effect of two respiratory protection devices during exposure in a pig confinement building. METHODS Thirty-six healthy persons were exposed for 3 hours in the building, 12 without any protection, 12 with a particle-filter mask, and 12 with a mask filtering both particles and gases. Symptoms, body temperature, nasal lavage fluid, exhaled nitric oxide, and bronchial responsiveness to methacholine were assessed before and after the exposure. Pre- and postexposure urine and blood samples were collected. RESULTS After the exposure, the participants with respirators reported fewer symptoms than those without. Wearing a mask also reduced the inflammatory response assessed with nasal lavage (cell concentration, interleukins 6 and 8) and peripheral blood (cell number). Lung function was significantly impaired only in the unprotected group; postexposure vital capacity and forced expiratory volume in 1 second showed a decrease of 3-4% from the preexposure levels (P=0.006 and P=0.002, respectively). Bronchial responsiveness (P<0.01) and body temperature (P<0.001) increased similarly in the three groups. Bronchial responsiveness to methacholine increased 2.7, 2.4, and 2.1 doubling concentration steps for those unprotected, those using a particle-filter mask, and those using a mask with particle and gas filters, respectively. The prostaglandin D2 metabolite, 9a, 11b-PGF2 increased significantly (P=0.003) only in those unprotected. CONCLUSIONS Wearing a respirator in a pig confinement building reduces the inflammatory reaction but does not influence the increase in bronchial responsiveness, with no difference between the use of a particle-filter mask or a mask with a particle-gas filter combination.
New Criteria on $p$th Moment Input-to-State Stability of Impulsive Stochastic Delayed Differential Systems

By employing the Razumikhin technique, the uniformly exponentially stable function and the average dwell-time (ADT) approach, some Razumikhin-type theorems on input-to-state stability (ISS) for time-varying impulsive stochastic delay differential systems (ISDDS) are obtained. It is shown that if the time-varying continuous stochastic delayed dynamics is ISS and the impulsive effects are destabilizing, then the ISDDS is input-to-state stable (ISS) with respect to a lower bound of the average dwell-time (ADT). The existing results on ISS of impulsive systems in the literature require the coefficients of the estimated upper bound for the diffusion operator of a Lyapunov function to be constant numbers. While, the results in this note allow us the coefficients of the estimated upper bound of the diffusion operator to be sign-changing time-varying function. An example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of our results. From the example, one can see the existing results fail to be used to determine the ISS for some type of ISDDS.
THE FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION OF EARLIEST GLAUCOMATOUS VISUAL FIELD DEFECTS DOCUMENTED BY AUTOMATIC PERIMETRY

2500–3000 eyes with ocular hypertension, with or without established glaucoma in the fellow eye, were followed with automatic perimetry for several years. Forty‐five eyes showed a documented change from repeated normal fields to reproducible glaucomatous visual field loss. The location of the defective points in the first pathological field of each eye was registered. The resulting frequency distribution is shown and discussed.
Productivity Enhancement at Home via Cross-Border Acquisitions: The Roles of Learning and Contemporaneous Domestic Investments

type="main" xml:id="smj2256-abs-0001"> We examine whether ex post domestic productivity gains accrue to firms making cross-border acquisitions. We argue that cross-border acquisitions can enhance the acquirers' productivity at home, and we posit that these domestic productivity gains will be greater when there are learning opportunities in the target's host country and when contemporaneous domestic productivity-enhancing investments are made by the acquirer in conjunction with the acquisition. These predictions are supported by data drawn from a sample of French acquiring and nonacquiring firms. Our results indicate that cross-border acquisitions and investing in productivity at home are complementary: each makes the other more beneficial to firm productivity . Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.