Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effect of Peanut and Walnut Shells powders on Tensile and Microstructure of the PMMA for prosthetic Denture

Peanut shells, walnut shells, Tensile, Heat Cure, Weight Fraction & Particle Size. In the current research, the heat-cured matrix material powder of PMMA was reinforced with Peanut and Walnut Shells (natural powders) which are chemically treated with 5% (w/v) (NaOH) to improve the matrix bonding (PMMA) before being used as a reinforcing powder and adding to exactly similar averages particle sizes ≤ (53μm), with different weight fractions of (4, 8, and 12 wt.%). The results indicated that the Elastic modulus values reached their maximum value at (8 wt.%.) when reinforced with Peanut Shells powders (1.053Gpa), while, the values of tensile strength, elongation percentage at the break, decrease as the weight fraction of Peanut and Walnut Shells powders increase and the lowest values are obtained by reinforcing with Peanut Shells powders to reach their minimum values at (12 wt.%) where the lowest values of them are (29 MPa, 2.758%) respectively. The fracture surface morphology of pure PMMA seemed to be homogenous morphology in (SEM) test, whereas the fracture surface morphology of PMMA composite reinforced by (Peanut and Walnut Shells) powders and shows a smoothness fracture surface morphology this refers to brittle to semi ductile or ductile transformation. How to cite this article Z. M. Abdul Monem, J. K. Oleiwi Q. A. Hamad, “The Effect of peanut and walnut shells powders on tensile and microstructure of the PMMA for prosthetic Denture,” Engineering and Technology Journal, Vol. 39, Part A, No. 02, pp. 196-205, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.30684/etj.v39i2A. 1730
Board Diversity, Corporate Risk-Taking and Corporate Diversification Activities: Empirical Evidence From Malaysia

The study examines the impact of board diversity on corporate risk-taking and corporate diversification activities of firms in Malaysia. The data used in the study is consists of 712 firms listed on the Main Market of Bursa Malaysia for a five-years (5) period from 2010 to 2014. The results show that the diverse board, with the presence of female directors as board members in firm, has reduced firms’ corporate risk-taking, especially on earnings volatility and debt obligation risks. The similar influence was also recorded for liquidity risk, however, the relationship was insignificant. These results are consistent with many of previous studies that have supported the argument that the female directors have risk-averse behaviour and this reduces their risk-taking in the context of corporate firms. The risk-intolerance behaviour of female directors was also represented through the negative relationship between board diversity and geographical diversification activities and the positive relationship between board diversity and industrial diversification activities. Female directors in the diverse board prefer business venture activities that are less-risky like industrial diversification activities that are usually conducted domestically. Conversely, geographical diversification activities were not preferred as firms need to expose to the high-risk foreign market environment when they venture their businesses across these locations. Theories such as agency and asymmetric information theory, resources dependence theory and human capital theory are in relation to the evidence found in the study, of which it connects the link between gender of board members and tolerance of risk-taking and preference of types of business activities. This study contributes towards an understanding of types of corporate risk-taking preferred by the female directors in the diverse board of Malaysian firms. Practically, it has also highlighted the diversification activities conducted by the board members, with the presence of female directors.
Hydrolysis behavior of AlN in aluminum dross

The influences of reaction temperature and time and other factors on the hydrolysis of AlN in aluminum dross were investigated by measuring the pH value of suspension and the AlN content in the reaction products.The results show that ammonia will release from the solution of aluminum dross immersed in deionized water.At the same hydrolysis temperature,pH value increases up to equilibrium with time prolonging.With increasing the hydrolysis temperature,AlN in aluminum dross will react more thoroughly.At 298 K,the alteration of liquid-solid ratio will result in the change of pH value,and stirring can accelerate the process to some extent,while the particle size has less effect on the hydrolysis.Compared with AlN powder and AlN bulk ceramic,there are great differences in hydrolysis reaction activity and products.
Does Firms’ Equity Financing Benefit Debtholders? Evidence from Private Placements of Equity

We examine how private placements of equity (PPEs) affect debtholder wealth. We find that banks charge higher loan spreads, require more collateral, and impose stricter covenants for firms conducting PPEs. The results are more pronounced for firms without a value-enhancing PPE feature, particularly those with poorer governance and higher information asymmetry. These firms also invest less efficiently and underperform in the post-placement period and realize more negative bond and stock returns around PPE (post-placement M&amp;A) announcement dates. Thus, issuers’ managerial entrenchment problems are the main source of debtholders’ loss in PPEs, and lenders use such information in adjusting lending terms.
Children’s patience and school-track choices several years later: Linking experimental and field data

We present direct evidence on the link between children’s patience and educational-track choices years later. Combining an incentivized patience measure of 493 primary-school children with their high-school track choices taken at least three years later at the end of middle school, we find that patience significantly predicts choosing an academic track. This relationship remains robust after controlling for a rich set of covariates, such as family background, school-class fixed effects, risk preferences, and cognitive abilities, and is not driven by sample attrition. Accounting for middle-school GPA as a potential mediating factor suggests a direct link between patience and educational-track choice.
Identifying Taste-Based Discrimination: Effect of Black Electoral Victories on Racial Prejudice and Economic Gaps

I test for the causal impact of Black electoral victories in local elections on White Americans’ attitude toward Black Americans. Using Race Implicit Attitude Test scores as a measure of racial prejudice and close-election regression-discontinuity design for causal inference, I find Black electoral victories cause measures of racial bias to rise, by 4% of the average Black-White difference in IAT scores. Simultaneously, they widen racial gaps in unemployment and mortgage denials. Interpreting these close electoral victories as instrumental variables, I find a large causal effect of prejudice-based racial discrimination on Black-White economic gaps.
Procedural Fairness of Objective and Subjective Performance Evaluations: Exploring the Combined Effects of Uncertainty and Trust

Les recherches empiriques sur les couts et avantages des evaluations de performance subjectives comparees a objectives ont produit des resultats qui restent mitiges. Pour eclairer ce debat, nous examinons les effets de ces deux types d’evaluation sur la perception de justice procedurale des managers dans differents contextes combinant incertitude et confiance. L’objectif est, d’une part, d’identifier si un type d’evaluation de performance est percue comme plus juste que l’autre dans certains contextes et, d’autre part, d’explorer comment ces perceptions de justice se forment.Pour traiter ces deux questions, nous analysons les donnees quantitatives et qualitatives recueillis aupres de 418 managers a l’aide d’un questionnaire base sur des scenarios. Nos resultats montrent que les evaluations subjectives sont percues comme plus justes que les evaluations objectives par les managers confrontes a des situations de forte incertitude et qui ont confiance dans leur superieur. A l’inverse, les evaluations objectives sont percues comme plus justes dans les situations ou incertitude et confiance sont tous les deux faibles. Nos resultats montrent egalement que les managers forment leur jugement de justice en considerant deux dimensions : ils percoivent que les evaluations subjectives leur offrent la possibilite d’exprimer leur point de vue, alors que les evaluations purement objectives sont vues comme plus precises et moins biaisees.Globalement, ces resultats suggerent que les organisations peuvent ameliorer leurs systemes d’evaluation des performances, soit en utilisant les mesures appropriees au contexte, soit en agissant sur l’incertitude et/ou la confiance.
Financial Structure and Bank Relationships of Italian Multinational Firms

This paper examines the financial structure and the bank relationships of Italian multinational firms. We show that multinationals are on average more leveraged than non-internationalized firms. Moreover, they have a larger share of financial and bank debt out of total debt, maintain more bank relationships, are less dependent on the main bank for the firm, and benefit from lower interest rates. Lastly, multinationals take greater advantage of intra-group financing than non-internationalized firms. These results are robust to estimation methods that tackle the potential endogeneity of the choice to go international, such as matching and instrumental variables estimation.
Shareholder Meetings Uncertainty: Evidence from the Options Market

Extant literature finds insignificant abnormal returns around shareholder meetings. We verify those findings but show that option implied volatility gradually declines by about 1.04 percent between record and meeting dates and then by about 0.30 percent right after annual meetings. These declines occur even if meetings do not have shareholder proposals or close votes. The post-meeting decline is more pronounced for meetings with close-call shareholder proposals. Our evidence indicates that investors anticipate meeting outcomes to affect stock prices and that shareholder proposals are consequential but have heterogeneous value implications.
Can Internet Banking Affect Households' Participation in Financial Markets and Financial Awareness?

We are in a digital era and more and more banks have begun to offer Internet banking. The availability of this new channel can reduce households' cost of acquiring information and the time spent on financial transactions; therefore, it could also impact on households' decisions to start investing in financial markets. Using an instrumental variable approach, we find that the adoption of Internet banking induces households to participate in financial markets and, in particular, to hold short‐term assets with a low risk/return profile. Over time, the adoption of Internet banking also drives a better understanding of basic financial concepts.
Foreign Investors and Target Firms’ Financial Structure: Cavalry or Locusts?

We study how FDI affects the financial structure of targeted firms, by looking at a sample of foreign acquisitions that occurred in Italy between 1998 and 2016. We show that the entry of foreign investors promotes the diversification of financing sources. Moreover, foreign acquisitions lower investment sensitivity to the availability of bank credit and the cash flow sensitivity of cash, allowing targeted firms to rely more on non-bank external financing channels. Importantly, these effects are stronger for investment in intangible assets. These findings suggest that the positive productivity effects of FDI emphasized in the literature are, at least in part, traceable to enhanced investment in capital that is harder to finance through the banking sector.
LGBT Employment Nondiscrimination and Capital Structure

Workplace equality is an important and integral component of firms’ corporate social responsibility. We argue that firms need to expend substantial resources to mitigate potential LGBT litigation risk or accommodate actual litigation costs, and absorb labor adjustment costs associated with voluntarily adopted or legally imposed LGBT nondiscrimination, leading to a downward adjustment in financial leverage in equilibrium. Consistently, we find a negative association between firms’ Corporate Equality Index scores and financial leverage. To sharpen causality, we use a difference-in-differences design that relies on staggered passages of state LGBT employment nondiscrimination laws. After ensuring exogeneity of these state laws, we show that firms respond to their passages with a reduction in financial leverage. This effect is more pronounced in firms that are labor intensive, prone to mass layoffs, having experienced past LGBT lawsuits, and financially distressed. Affected firms also experience elevated operating leverage and loan spread. We conclude that firms adjust capital structure to accommodate the cost associated with LGBT employment nondiscrimination.
A Colorful Mind

Color is ubiquitous. Our study appears to be the first to investigate the impact of color on decision making in a laboratory setting using a randomized control design. We find differences in the influence of red, yellow, green, and blue along with white primarily in social decision making rather than individual decision making. In the Andreoni-Miller dictator game, red and yellow subjects give less than green subjects when giving reduces the social pie. Red responders are more demanding than blue responders in the ultimatum game and red trustees reciprocate less than blue trustees in the trust game. Red and yellow subjects also cooperate less than green subjects in both the public goods game and the sequential prisoner’s dilemma game. This study points to additional avenues to explore the use of colors in real-world environmental and business settings such as charitable donations, political campaigns, and business management.
No eureka! Incentives Hurt Creative Breakthrough Irrespective of the Incentives' Frame

We investigate the effect of financial incentives, framed as gains and losses, on creative breakthrough. Rather than originating merely from diligent work, creative breakthrough entails a eureka-moment – the sudden insight and the radical reorganization of ideas for the solution of a problem. We argue that financial incentives can be detrimental for creative breakthrough. Moreover, framing financial incentives as losses may lead to particularly strong detrimental effects, compared to incentives framed as gains. We test our hypotheses in a laboratory experiment using a classical paradigm to investigate creative breakthrough: the candle problem (Duncker 1945). We find causal evidence that, relative to a condition without performance-contingent incentives, financial incentives are counterproductive for creative breakthrough. This holds true for financial incentives framed as gains as well as for those framed as losses. We do not find any significant differences arising from the framing of incentives. Financial incentives and the loss framing of incentives are classical managerial tools for enhancing employee performance. They have proven effective for routine tasks. Our results, however, suggest that their success cannot be generalized to work environments that build on people's ability to achieve breakthroughs via eureka-moments.
Staggered wages, unanticipated shocks and firms’ adjustments

<br>This paper studies the employment and wage effects of contract staggering, i.e., the staggered nature in which wages adjust to changes in the economic environment. Our analysis is based on a large matched employers employees dataset merged to collective agreements in the Netherlands, a country in which collective bargaining is dominant and contract staggering is relatively pervasive. By exploiting exogenous variation in the start dates of collective agreements around the Great Recession, we estimate the causal effect of increases in base wages mandated by collective agreements signed right before the shock on labour cost adjustments of firms. Our main result is that contract staggering has, on average, no real effect on employment. We find significant employment losses only in sectors covered by contracts with duration larger than thirty months, a rigidity much higher than that assumed in macroeconomic models including staggered wages. Instead, we show that firms were able adjust labour costs by curbing other pay components such as bonuses and benefits and incidental pay. <br><br>
Do retail investors bite off more than they can chew? A close look at their return objectives

Surveys worldwide indicate that return expectations of individual investors are often high. This paper investigates the determinants of individual target returns and the capacity of investors to reach their expectations. Using trading records and matched survey data for 4,140 retail investors, we show that investor target returns are mainly driven by subjective financial literacy and subjective risk tolerance, as well as some socio-demographics (age and education). Investors with higher target returns and investors with the highest subjective risk tolerance are less able to reach their targets. Although high financial literacy and high risk tolerance are strong drivers of investor ambition, they do not guarantee better success.
Outpatient Portal Use in Prenatal Care: Differential Use by Race, Risk, and Area Social Determinants of Health Factors

Objective: To report the relationship of Outpatient Patient Portal (OPP) use with clinical risk, area social determinants of health (SDoH), and race/ethnicity among pregnant women. Methods: Regression models predicting overall and individual portal feature use (main effects and interactions) based on key variables were specified using logfiles and clinical data. Results: Overall OPP use among non-Hispanic Black women or patients who lived in lower SDoH neighborhoods were significantly less. High-risk pregnancy patients were likely to use the OPP more than those with normal-risk pregnancy. We found similar associations with individual OPP features, like the Visit (scheduling) and My Record (test results). We also found significant interactive associations between race, clinical risk, and SDoH. Non-Hispanic Black women living in lower SDoH areas used OPP less than non-Hispanic White women from similar or affluent areas. Conclusion: More research must be conducted to learn of OPP implications for pregnant women with specific clinical diagnoses.
SimNet: Learning Reactive Self-driving Simulations from Real-world Observations

In this work we present a simple end-to-end trainable machine learning system capable of realistically simulating driving experiences. This can be used for verification of self-driving system performance without relying on expensive and time-consuming road testing. In particular, we frame the simulation problem as a Markov Process, leveraging deep neural networks to model both state distribution and transition function. These are trainable directly from the existing raw observations without the need of any handcrafting in the form of plant or kinematic models. All that is needed is a dataset of historical traffic episodes. Our formulation allows the system to construct never seen scenes that unfold realistically reacting to the self-driving car’s behaviour. We train our system directly from 1,000 hours of driving logs and measure both realism, reactivity of the simulation as the two key properties of the simulation. At the same time we apply the method to evaluate performance of a recently proposed state-of-the-art ML planning system [1] trained from human driving logs. We discover this planning system is prone to previously unreported causal confusion issues that are difficult to test by non-reactive simulation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that directly merges highly realistic data-driven simulations with a closed loop evaluation for self-driving vehicles. We make the data, code, and pre-trained models publicly available to further stimulate simulation development.
Multitask Learning for Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion of Anglicisms in German Speech Recognition

Anglicisms are a challenge in German speech recognition. Due to their irregular pronunciation compared to native German words, automatically generated pronunciation dictionaries often contain incorrect phoneme sequences for Anglicisms. In this work, we propose a multitask sequence-to-sequence approach for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion to improve the phonetization of Anglicisms. We extended a grapheme-to-phoneme model with a classification task to distinguish Anglicisms from native German words. With this approach, the model learns to generate different pronunciations depending on the classification result. We used our model to create supplementary Anglicism pronunciation dictionaries to be added to an existing German speech recognition model. Tested on a special Anglicism evaluation set, we improved the recognition of Anglicisms compared to a baseline model, reducing the word error rate by a relative 1 % and the Anglicism error rate by a relative 3 %. With our experiment, we show that multitask learning can help solving the challenge of Anglicisms in German speech recognition.
Genuine network quantum nonlocality and self-testing

The network structure offers in principle the possibility for novel forms of quantum nonlocal correlations, that are proper to networks and cannot be traced back to standard quantum Bell nonlocality. Here we define a notion of genuine network quantum nonlocality. Our approach is operational and views standard quantum nonlocality as a resource for producing correlations in networks. We show several examples of correlations that are genuine network nonlocal, considering the so-called bilocality network of entanglement swapping. In particular, we present an example of quantum self-testing which relies on the network structure; the considered correlations are non-bilocal, but are local according to the usual definition of Bell locality.
Adversarial Attack Framework on Graph Embedding Models With Limited Knowledge

With the success of the graph embedding model in both academic and industrial areas, the robustness of graph embeddings against adversarial attacks inevitably becomes a crucial problem in graph learning. Existing works usually perform the attack in a white-box fashion: they need to access the predictions/labels to construct their adversarial losses. However, the inaccessibility of predictions/labels makes the white-box attack impractical for a real graph learning system. This paper promotes current frameworks in a more general and flexible sense – we consider the ability of various types of graph embedding models to remain resilient against black-box driven attacks. We investigate the theoretical connection between graph signal processing and graph embedding models, and formulate the graph embedding model as a general graph signal process with a corresponding graph filter. Therefore, we design a generalized adversarial attack framework: GF-Attack. Without accessing any labels and model predictions, GF-Attack can perform the attack directly on the graph filter in a black-box fashion. We further prove that GF-Attack can perform an effective attack without assumption on the number of layers/window-size of graph embedding models. To validate the generalization of GF-Attack, we construct GF-Attack on five popular graph embedding models. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of GF-Attack on several benchmark datasets.