Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The dynamics of business investment following banking crises and normal recessions

I empirically analyze the dynamics of business investment following normal recessions (declines in business investment that are not associated with banking crises) and banking crises. Using a panel of 16 advanced economies, I find evidence for significant non-linear trend reversion or bounce-back effects on the level of business investment following normal recessions, i.e., the deeper the previous recession was, the higher the growth rate of business investment will be. The trend reversion effect is absent when a decline in business investment is associated with a banking crisis. As a consequence, normal recessions do not have significant permanent effects on the level of business investment, whereas banking crises have large and significant permanent effects. The results are in line with important theories and other empirical results on business cycle dynamics.
Exogenous nitric oxide centrally enhances pulmonary reactivity in the normal and hypertensive rat

1. Chronic hypoxia causes sustained pulmonary hypertension and, although impairment of the pulmonary endothelial nitric oxide (NO) pathway has been implicated, no study has described the central role of NO in modulating pulmonary vascular tone and reactivity. Centrally, NO inhibits sympathetic outflow, so we hypothesised that central NO would modulate pulmonary vascular tone and its reactivity to acute hypoxia, especially in the hypertensive state.
Consumer Attitudinal Insights about Social Media Advertising: A South Asian Perspective

Current study aims to indentify the underlying belief dimensions that influence consumer attitudes toward social media advertising in a collectivistic cultural context of South Asia. It also examines the influence of consumers’ favorable attitudes toward social media advertising on their ad clicking and online buying behaviors. To meet the objectives of the current study data was collected from randomly chosen university students (n=210) using survey at Islamabad capital city of Pakistan. Results reveal four factors of consumer beliefs about social media advertising. However, only two dimensions i.e. information and economy are statistically significant predictors of consumer attitudes toward social media advertising in Pakistan. Furthermore, results reveal that favorable attitudes toward social media advertising significantly influence consumers’ ad clicking behavior, which in turn positively affects their online buying behavior. Findings of the current study are useful for the multinational companies which intend to advertise their products and services through social media channels (e.g. through FaceBook, LinkedIn etc.) in South Asia.
Returns to Acquirers of Listed and Unlisted Targets: An Examination of Australian Bidders

We analyze the market reaction to the announcement of takeover bids initiated by Australian public firms on private and public targets. The results show that acquirers of private targets benefit from a significantly higher share price reevaluation. This so-called listing effect is broad-based and persistent. It does not appear to depend on whether the target is large or small; whether it is related or not to the bidder’s industry; whether it is domestic or cross-border; and whether it is in the resources sector or not. We find only minor evidence that bidder returns might be stronger for larger acquisitions of private targets; for targets in the resources sector; and in subdued market conditions such as in the wake of the global financial crisis. In addition, our selection model suggests that endogenous choice of target is unlikely to have produced biased results. Overall, our findings are supportive of the view that market frictions contribute to make private firms attractive targets.
Do Big Investors’ Trades Have Predictive Power? A Note on Istanbul Stock Market

The net buying (selling) volume of the most net buyer (seller) brokers over a unit period is a widely followed piece of information in Istanbul Stock Market, which most market commentaries inaccurately refer to as “the net money in- or outflow”. It is, in fact, a proxy for big investors’ trading. In this note, we test whether this information has predictive value, whether market participants’ emphasis on this information is justified, or just an illusion. By doing so, we add to the literature on the relationship between big investors’ trading and stock returns, using a unique information set. Results suggest a significant contemporaneous association between the “net inflow” and current returns, but little predictive value
The chief executive officer and the chief information officer: the strategic partnership

AbstractInformation technology (IT) has become a strategic resource for many firms today. Coordination of this resource requires strong leadership and cooperation within the firm. The relationship of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and the Chief Information Officer (CIO) is crucial for the effective, successful utilization of IT for competitive advantage.This paper first explores the CIO position, giving reasons for its development, tracing its evolution, and pinpointing certain responsibilities associated with the position. The paper then highlights the CIO's concerns and identifies the future implications for the CIO. The second portion of the paper takes the CEO's perspective towards IT and the CIO's position. Special attention is directed towards describing the CEO's perspective on the CIO's qualifications, addressing the problem of overblown CEO expectations for the CIO position, and discussing 'old-line' CEOs' attitudes towards IT and the CIO position. Also addressed is the exploration of the common CEO perception of the CIO as an 'empire builder' and an analysis of the CEO's perspective on the future need for a CIO position.Finally the paper focuses on developing this 'strategic partnership' between the CIO and the CEO. Suggestions are provided for the CIO and the CEO to help achieve this ideal partnership. Although these suggestions are not all conclusive, they are critical to the 'partnership'.
Transtemporal power- and frequency-based color-coded duplex sonography of cerebral veins and sinuses.

PURPOSE To determine the ability of transtemporal power- and frequency-based transcranial color-coded duplex sonography to aid in the assessment of cerebral veins and sinuses, as well as to provide reference data for flow direction and velocity. METHODS Using a color duplex device equipped with a 2.0/2.5-MHz sector scan, we insonated 120 healthy volunteers and three patients with cerebral venous thrombosis. RESULTS In subjects 20 to 59 years old, deep middle cerebral veins were identified in 88%, basal veins in 97%, straight sinuses in 60%, and transverse sinuses in 42%. The corresponding values for subjects 60 to 79 years old were 53%, 86%, 23%, and 20%, respectively. Velocities were highest in transverse and straight sinuses, slower in basal veins, and slowest in deep middle cerebral veins. Flow was directed lateromedially in the deep middle cerebral vein, rostrocaudally in the basal vein and straight sinus, and mediolaterally in the transverse sinus. Two patients with straight sinus thromboses showed reversed flow direction in the basal veins, and one patient with superior sagittal sinus thrombosis showed elevated velocities in a deep middle cerebral vein. CONCLUSION Transtemporal power- and frequency-based color-coded duplex sonography enabled imaging and velocity measurements in deep cerebral veins in subjects 20 to 59 years old, but detection of the straight and transverse sinuses was low. In older subjects, only the basal vein was regularly assessed.
The neurogenetics of group behavior in Drosophila melanogaster

ABSTRACT Organisms rarely act in isolation. Their decisions and movements are often heavily influenced by direct and indirect interactions with conspecifics. For example, we each represent a single node within a social network of family and friends, and an even larger network of strangers. This group membership can affect our opinions and actions. Similarly, when in a crowd, we often coordinate our movements with others like fish in a school, or birds in a flock. Contributions of the group to individual behaviors are observed across a wide variety of taxa but their biological mechanisms remain largely unknown. With the advent of powerful computational tools as well as the unparalleled genetic accessibility and surprisingly rich social life of Drosophila melanogaster, researchers now have a unique opportunity to investigate molecular and neuronal determinants of group behavior. Conserved mechanisms and/or selective pressures in D. melanogaster can likely inform a much wider phylogenetic scale. Here, we highlight two examples to illustrate how quantitative and genetic tools can be combined to uncover mechanisms of two group behaviors in D. melanogaster: social network formation and collective behavior. Lastly, we discuss future challenges towards a full understanding how coordinated brain activity across many individuals gives rise to the behavioral patterns of animal societies. Summary: We highlight studies that exploited computational tools and the genetic accessibility and rich social life of Drosophila melanogaster to reveal molecular and neuronal determinants of social networks and collective behavior.
A comparison between the MoCA and the MMSE visuoexecutive sub-tests in detecting abnormalities in TIA/stroke patients

Background Executive dysfunction predicts stroke risk, dementia, and mortality. The Montreal cognitive assessment detects more visuoexecutive dysfunction than the mini-mental state examination but it is unclear which of the individual Montreal cognitive assessment visuoexecutive items contribute to the better performance of the Montreal cognitive assessment. We therefore determined the relative performance of the Montreal cognitive assessment visuoexecutive sub-tests versus the mini-mental state examination pentagon copying in patients with stroke and transient ischemic attack. Methods Mini-mental state examination and Montreal cognitive assessment were administered to a prospective, population-based cohort of stroke, and transient ischemic attack patients from the Oxford Vascular Study at six month or five-year follow-up between November 2007 and June 2009. We compared the proportion of participants with incorrect Montreal cognitive assessment visuoexecutive tasks and sub-tasks but correct mini-mental state examination pentagon copying versus the proportion with incorrect MMSE pentagon copying but correct visuoexecutive Montreal cognitive assessment sub-test and individual sub-test items. Results Among 412 patients assessed with the mini-mental state examination and Montreal cognitive assessment, the Montreal cognitive assessment detected more visuoexecutive dysfunction than the mini-mental state examination (OR 11.4, 95% CI 8.2–15.8, p < 0.001). The likelihood of incorrect mini-mental state examination pentagon copying increased as the numbers of correct MoCA visuoexecutive responses decreased: 2/106 (1.9%) and 9/10 (90.0%) incorrect mini-mental state examination pentagon copying for 5/5 and 0/5 correct Montreal cognitive assessment visuoexecutive tasks, respectively (p for trend 0.005). Each Montreal cognitive assessment visuoexecutive sub-task, including trails (39.6%), cube copying (49.5%), and clock drawing (59.0%), detected more patients with visuoexecutive dysfunction than the mini-mental state examination pentagon copying (20.6%, p < 0.001). Conclusion All three of the Montreal cognitive assessment visuoexecutive sub-tests detected more abnormalities than the mini-mental state examination pentagon copying and thus contributed to the over 10-fold superiority of Montreal cognitive assessment over the mini-mental state examination for detection of visuoexecutive dysfunction.
Securitization by Banks and Finance Companies: Efficient Financial Contracting or Regulatory Arbitrage?

In this paper, we test two competing explanations for the increasing use of securitization by financial institutions. First, by reducing financial distress costs, securitization lowers the cost of debt finance, particularly for risky and highly levered companies. Second, regulatory distortions in the Basle Capital Accord may create incentives for highly levered banks to securitize assets in order to avoid binding or nearly binding capital requirements. We find that unregulated finance companies and investment banks are much more apt to securitize assets than banks, and that risky and highly levered financial institutions are more likely to engage in securitization than safer ones. At the same time, highly levered banks – banks with low capital ratios – are less likely than better capitalized banks to securitize. Thus, the evidence suggests that securitization is best understood as a contracting innovation aimed at lowering financial distress costs rather than an outgrowth of poorly structured regulations.
Evaluation of a New Selective Chromogenic Agar Medium for Detection of Extended-Spectrum β-Lactamase-Producing Enterobacteriaceae

ABSTRACT A novel chromogenic agar medium (ESBL-Bx; bioMérieux, Marcy l'Etoile, France) was compared to MacConkey agar supplemented with 2 mg ceftazidime/liter (MCKC) for the selective isolation and presumptive identification of extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL)-producing Enterobacteriaceae directly from clinical samples. Of a total of 644 clinical specimens (including 551 fecal samples), 496 yielded no growth and 148 yielded growth on one or both media. Overall, 44 ESBL-producing Enterobacteriaceae strains (Escherichia coli [n = 17], Enterobacter aerogenes [n = 17], Klebsiella spp. [n = 5], and Citrobacter freundii [n = 5]) were isolated from 37 specimens by a combination of both methods after 18 to 24 h of incubation. The sensitivities were 97.7 and 84.1% for ESBL-Bx and MCKC, respectively, with 43 ESBL-positive strains isolated as colored colonies from 36 specimens on ESBL-Bx versus 37 ESBL-positive organisms isolated from 32 specimens on MCKC. The specificities by specimens were 89 and 91% for ESBL-Bx and MCKC, respectively. On either one of the two media, natural AmpC-hyperproducing Enterobacter spp. (n = 25) and Citrobacter spp. (n = 14) were the most common false positives as well as non-ESBL-producing Klebsiella oxytoca (n = 18) on ESBL-Bx and Morganella morganii (n = 10) on MCKC. We conclude that ESBL-Bx is a sensitive and specific medium for the isolation of ESBL-producing Enterobacteriaceae from clinical samples. The main advantages of ESBL-Bx over MCKC reside in its chromogenic character and its sensitivity and selectivity, which enabled the recovery and presumptive identification of most ESBL-producing Enterobacteriaceae within 24 h and reduced by 27% the need for unnecessary identification and confirmation of ESBL testing when disregarding all colorless colonies growing on this medium.
Potential applications of concurrent transcranial magnetic stimulation and functional magnetic resonance imaging in acquired brain injury and disorders of consciousness

Abstract Background: Diagnostic assessment, prognosis and treatment monitoring in patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC) rest largely on behaviorally-based procedures. This approach can lead to misdiagnosis, inaccurate outcome prediction and inappropriate judgements regarding the effectiveness of treatment interventions. Concurrent transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) may provide a biological measure of conscious awareness, aid clinicians in clinical decision-making and provide a treatment alternative for DoC. Study: This paper reviews the use of TMS and fMRI in the assessment of patients with DoC and suggests potential applications for concurrent use of these procedures.
The Determinants of Bank Liquidity

This study investigates the determinants of banks liquidity. There are two category of bank liquidity in this study that is precautionary and involuntary. The definition of precautionary liquidity is the ratio of total cash, demand deposit at central bank, and demand deposit at other banks, to total asset. Whilst the definition of involuntary liquidity is the ratio of total traded securities of central bank, government, and others, to total asset. The study indicates that credit, saving and deposit affect precautionary liquidity. This reflects that operational bank activities influence precautionary liquidity. In contrast, financial system and macroeconomic conditions have an effect on involuntary liquidity. The lag or historical liquidity of both liquidities, precautionary and involuntary, are strongly determined each of them. In addition, financial system and macroeconomic condition significantly influence small banks liquidity in precautionary and involuntary. Monetary policy, by means of reserve requirement affects only small bank’s precautionary liquidity. Furthermore, indirect monetary policy through interest rate policy does not significantly have influence on banks liquidity.
STYX: a trusted and accelerated hierarchical SSL key management and distribution system for cloud based CDN application

Protecting the customer's SSL private key is the paramount issue to persuade the website owners to migrate their contents onto the cloud infrastructure, besides the advantages of cloud infrastructure in terms of flexibility, efficiency, scalability and elasticity. The emerging Keyless SSL solution retains on-premise custody of customers' SSL private keys on their own servers. However, it suffers from significant performance degradation and limited scalability, caused by the long distance connection to Key Server for each new coming end-user request. The performance improvements using persistent session and key caching onto cloud will degrade the key invulnerability and discourage the website owners because of the cloud's security bugs. In this paper, the challenges of secured key protection and distribution are addressed in philosophy of "Storing the trusted DATA on untrusted platform and transmitting through untrusted channel". To this end, a three-phase hierarchical key management scheme, called STYX1 is proposed to provide the secured key protection together with hardware assisted service acceleration for cloud-based content delivery network (CCDN) applications. The STYX is implemented based on Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT) and SIGMA (SIGn-and-MAc) protocol. STYX can provide the tight key security guarantee by SGX based key distribution with a light overhead, and it can further significantly enhance the system performance with QAT based acceleration. The comprehensive evaluations show that the STYX not only guarantees the absolute security but also outperforms the direct HTTPS server deployed CDN without QAT by up to 5x throughput with significant latency reduction at the same time.
Differences between electrode-assigned frequencies and cochlear implant recipient pitch perception

Conclusion. This study demonstrated an evident mismatch between frequencies assigned to electrodes and frequencies evoked by stimulation of those same electrodes in implanted patients. We propose that the mapping procedures should include, whenever possible, a comparison with homolateral residual hearing in order to obtain an appropriate frequency range assignation for each electrode. Objectives. The study aimed to investigate the correspondence between the frequencies assigned to each electrode and those actually perceived by the cochlear implant patient. Patients and methods. We studied five post-lingually deaf adults with detectable residual hearing in the implanted and in the contralateral ear, who had each received a Cochlear®implant. An ACE standard setting was used for mapping. The patients were asked to match the electric pitch with the acoustic one following presentation of pure tones to both the implanted and the contralateral ear. Results. In almost all patients the two most apical electrodes evoked higher frequencies than those assigned by the mapping software (E22 = 188–313, E21 = 313–438 Hz). Therefore, electric stimulation seems not to determine pitch sensations for frequencies <500 Hz. For most electrodes there is no correspondence between the acoustic pitch and the assigned frequency ranges. Moreover, these results were almost always different when stimulating the implanted and the contralateral ear.
Helicobacter Pylori Infection in a Group of Egyptian Children With Upper Gastro-Intestinal Bleeding

Background Upper gastrointestinal bleeding is a life threatening condition in children. Common sources of upper gastrointestinal bleeding in children include mucosal lesions and variceal hemorrhage. Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is a Gram negative spiral-shaped bacterium that is found in the gastric mucous layer or adherent to the epithelial lining of the stomach. It causes more than 90% of duodenal ulcers and up to 70-80% of gastric ulcers. The relationship between H. pylori infection and upper GIT bleeding in children is still un-clear. This study aimed to estimate the incidence of H. pylori infection in children presented with upper GIT bleeding and correlation between H. pylori infection and endoscopic findings of the cause of bleeding. Methods The study included 70 children presented with upper GIT bleeding indicated for upper gastrointestinal endoscopy admitted in pediatric department, Minia University Hospital, Egypt during the period from February 2010 to December 2012. Thirty healthy children were included as a control group with age and sex matched. After medical history taking and physical examination all children were exposed for laboratory investigations (CBC, prothrombin time and concentration, liver function tests, hepatitis viral markers, blood urea and serum creatinine and Helicobacter pylori stool antigen test). Upper endoscopy was done for patients only. Patients were classified into variceal and non variceal groups according to upper endoscopy. Results Helico-pylori infection was significantly higher in children with non-variceal bleeding than controls (P = 0.02) and children with variceal bleeding (P = 0.03) with no significant difference between children with variceal bleeding and controls (P = 0.9). Both weights and BMIs centile were significantly lower in variceal and non-variceal groups than controls (P = 0.01 & 0.001 and 0.01 & 0.001 respectively). AST, ALT and direct bilirubin levels were significantly higher in variceal group than controls (P = 0.001, 0.004 & 0.001 respectively). Prothrombin concentration and albumin levels were significantly lower in variceal group than controls (P = 0.001 & 0.01 respectively). Hemoglobin levels were significantly lower in variceal and non-variceal groups than controls (P = 0.01 & 0.001 respectively). No significant differences were present as regards age, sex, height or platelets count between cases (variceal and non-variceal) and controls. Conclusions H. pylori infection is significantly higher in children with non-variceal bleeding than controls. No significant difference between children with variceal bleeding and controls. Triad of increased ALT, decreased albumin levels and negative H. pylori infection could be a significant triad in predicting variceal bleeding as a cause of upper GIT bleeding in children.
Inverse correlation between serum PGE2 and T classification in head and neck cancer

Prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) serum levels have been shown previously to be increased in tumor bearing mice as well as in patients with solid tumors; however, the impact on the course or stage of disease has not been shown. We hypothesized that PGE2 is strictly required for aggressive and especially early‐stage tumors of the head and neck to provoke invasion and angiogenesis.