Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Diversification in the Chinese Stock Market

Modern finance theory suggests that individual investor should hold a well diversified portfolio instead of individual stocks. In practice, one only needs to hold limited number of stocks to achieve the effect of diversification. In this study, we revisit the same issue for the Chinese equity market in three different dimensions. They are (1) relative idiosyncratic risk and risk adjusted portfolio returns; (2) the likelihood of achieving diversification; and (3) turnover of a portfolio. Due to faster declining in the market volatility relative to the aggregate idiosyncratic volatility, one needs to hold 20 stocks in a portfolio in order to diversify away 90% of the total idiosyncratic volatility or equivalent to 95% of the market volatility nowadays. In addition, we have shown that holding one or two stocks will subject to huge negative risk adjusted returns. Therefore, Chinese investors can benefit greatly from diversification with a relatively long investment horizon.
Leptin, leptin receptors, nerve growth factor and TrkA in women with metabolic syndrome

Correspondence: Nadya I. Penkova Department of Anatomy, Histology and Embryology, Medical University Plovdiv, 15-A, Vasil Aprilov Blvd., 4002 Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Tel. : +359 89 8274344 e-mail: nadja_penkova@abv.bg ABSTRACT Adipose tissue is now recognized to be an important endocrine organ, secreting a variety of adipokines that are involved in the regulation of energy metabolism, insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome (MetSyn) corresponds to a sub-clinical inflammatory condition in which white adipose tissue (WAT) is characterized by an increased production and secretion of inflammatory molecules which may have local effects on WAT physiology but also systemic effects on other organs. Our purpose is to study the expression of some adipokines (leptin, Ob-R, NGF and TrkA) in women with metabolic syndrome. Our results reveal that women with MetSyn have significantly higher BMI, WC, insulinemia, total cholesterol and low high-density lipoproteincholesterol levels. Plasma levels of leptin and NGF are over-expressed. The immunohistochemical expression of leptin, leptin receptors, NGF and TrkA are very strong thus corresponding immunochemical data. The locally-produced proinflammatory adipokines leptin and NGF and their receptors are overproduced in MetSyn.They probably contribute to the ethiopathogenic mechanism underlying the metabolic derangements and cardiovascular disorders in MetSyn implicating in the obese state, insulin resistance and hypertension.
Analysis of Information and Communications Technologies Adoption by Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Kogi State

This study focused on Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) adoption by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in Kogi State. The study determined the constraints against the adoption of ICT by SMEs in Kogi State. This study used survey research design. The population of the study comprised of 2027 SMEs. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to choose the required sample size of 323. Descriptive statistics and Binary Logit Regression were used for analysis. Findings show that excessive reliance on foreign technology, unreliability of e-commerce systems, high costs of ICT equipment, insecurity and legal and regulatory issues has significant influence on the adoption of ICT by SMEs in Kogi State. The study concluded that despite the benefits of ICT, some constraints detract its adoption by SME owners in Kogi State. The study recommended that SME owners should have positive perception of the usefulness of ICT, find alternative way of using ICT, source for adequate fund and acquire better ICT knowledge to have better chance of ICT adoption in Kogi State.
Entropy , Elasticity , and the Isometric Embedding Problem : M 3 ! R 6

The balance laws for isometric embedding of a 3-dimensional Riemannian manifold into the 6-dimensional Euclidean space are exposited. It is shown that a necessary and sufficient condition for solving the equations of these balance laws is a system reminiscent of the equations of elastostatics. In turn, this elastostatic system possesses an elementary entropy equation in the sense of Lax. In addition, we use an entropy equality for the linearized system (linearized about a known embedding) to develop L estimates for the dependent variables.
Ex-Post Change in Conservatism and Debt-Covenant Slack

I examine the relation between firms’ debt-covenant slack and their change in conservatism following borrowing. I posit that a firm’s decision to maintain its precontracting level of conservatism reflects a trade-off between the expected cost of lost reputation and the expected cost of a debt covenant breach, with firms being more likely to reduce their conservatism after borrowing when covenant slack is tight or the cost of a covenant breach is high. Results show that debt-covenant slack is positively related to ex-post changes in conservatism. I find that this positive relation is more pronounced when the expected cost of a debt-covenant breach is greater. Further, I find firms with tighter slack tend to have fewer amount of negative special items after borrowing. This study provides evidence that firms’ overall ex-ante level of conservatism is increased after borrowing, and supports the argument that conservatism is an effective mechanism for the enhancement of debt-contract efficiency.
Using Living Germplasm Collections to Characterize, Improve, and Conserve Woody Perennials

Woody perennial plants make up nearly half of plant diversity and represent one-third of the world’s major crop species, yet effective strategies to maintain and preserve these important species require additional attention. The majority of conservation programs focus on seed storage; however, seeds of many woody perennial plants are difficult to maintain in seed banks because they are recalcitrant. In addition, most woody perennial crops are clonally propagated, and seed-based conservation efforts miss clonal lineages that form the foundation of woody perennial agriculture. Woody crops are often best maintained as living collections, but these compose only 5.8% of ex situ germplasm collections. Living germplasm collections are critical resources for exploring and conserving genetic and phenotypic diversity and provide novel material for breeding efforts. In this review, we examine how living germplasm collections can be used for for phenotypic description, genetic characterization, and plant breeding. Lastly, we outline the importance of conserving these valuable resources and highlight the need for conservation strategies that are appropriately designed for woody perennial species. Z. Migicovsky, Dep. of Plant, Food, and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Agriculture, Dalhousie Univ., Truro, NS B2N 5E3, Canada; E. Warschefsky, Dep. of Botany, Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada; L.L. Klein and A.J. Miller, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, St. Louis, MO 63132-2918, USA, Dep. of Biology, Saint Louis Univ., St. Louis, MO 63103-2010, USA. Received 31 May 2019. Accepted 7 Oct. 2019. *Corresponding authors (zoe.migicovsky@dal.ca; amiller@danforthcenter.org). Assigned to Associate Editor Dina St. Clair. Abbreviations: ABC, Apple Biodiversity Collection; BGCI, Botanic Gardens Conservation International; CBD, Convention for Biological Diversity; GSPC, Global Strategy for Plant Conservation; GWAS, genome-wide association study; HT, high-throughput; ICRAF, International Centre for Research in Agroforestry; SNP, single nucleotide polymorphism; SSR, simple sequence repeat. Published in Crop Sci. 59:2365–2380 (2019). doi: 10.2135/cropsci2019.05. 0353 © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Published November 21, 2019
AN OVERVIEW OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH IN CONSTRUCTION PROJECT MANAGEMENT: METHODOLOGICAL CONCERNS

The aim of this paper is to present an overview of previous studies on Emotional Intelligence (EI) in construction project management. The literature was surveyed to identify and describe the characteristics of previous studies of EI in the construction industry. Research themes and methods are reviewed in order to establish how EI of construction project managers are assessed. The findings indicate that majority of the studies applied a positivist methodology in investigating EI which may cloud the actual perception of the individual and consequently the relevance of the concept. Furthermore, the deficit of any alternative methodology may prevent elucidation of new informative ways to explain EI in a unique context such as construction. The study recommends the exploration of construction professionals' identities through their real life experiences by applying the grounded theory approach in order to better understand how EI can be developed and applied in construction project management.
1 OWNERSHIP CONCENTRATION WEAKENS THE CORPORATE GOVERNANCE SYSTEM OF BRAZILIAN FIRM

Since shareholders look for a Corporate Governance system that protects their interests, ownership concentration is seen as able to strengthen shareholders and mitigate the principalagent conflict. This is the picture in markets with diffuse firm ownership. Nonetheless, in markets characterized by the presence of a few large controlling blockholders, the principalprincipal conflict seems to be the main agency problem. This is the situation in developing and emerging economies, where large controlling blockholders may be powerful enough, not only to align managers' and their interests, but also impose their interests over minority shareholders. In scenario, large controlling blockholders might not be interested in very good corporate governance practices. For a balanced panel data of Brazilian firms in the period 2010-2013, the results suggest that ownership concentration is detrimental to corporate governance quality in Brazil. Indeed, the inverse effect of ownership concentration on corporate governance quality proposes that large controlling shareholders may be interested in the use of private benefits of control, in accordance with the expropriation hypothesis. Another important finding is the adverse effect of ownership concentration on the quality of the board composition which signals that large controlling shareholders are, in fact, substituting the monitoring function of the board. As a whole, minority shareholders are not properly protected by the weaker corporate governance system of firms with high ownership concentration, highlighting the principalprincipal problem in Brazil.
Asymptotic properties of pivotal sampling with application to spatial sampling

Unequal probability sampling without replacement is commonly used for sample selection. To produce estimators with associated condence intervals, some basic statistical properties like consistency and asymptotic normality of the Horvitz-Thompson estimator are desirable. These properties have been mainly studied for large entropy sampling designs. On the other hand, spatial sampling designs rather make use of sampling algorithms which take into account the order of units in the population, like systematic sampling or pivotal sampling. So far, the statistical properties of such procedures have not been investigated. In this work, we study the asymptotic properties of the pivotal sampling design. Under mild assumptions, we prove that the Horvitz-Thompson estimator is asymptotically normally distributed and that a conservative variance estimator can always be computed. We also introduce a general spatial sampling design which is spatially balanced, which possesses good statistical properties and which is computationally very ecient, even for large databases.
GMM Estimation of the Spatial Autoregressive Model in a System of Interrelated Networks

In this paper, I extend the generalized method of moments framework based on linear and quadratic moment conditions for the estimation of the first-order spatial autoregressive model introduced by Lee (2001; 2007) to estimate the SAR model in a system of interrelated networks. The SAR model in a system of interrelated networks can be used to describe a market situation with several chain stores competing against one another. Each chain is represented by a vector. The strategy of a store in the chain does not only involve coordination with the other stores in the same chain, but also competition against opponent stores in the other chains. Thus, we need to set up a SAR equation for each chain. These equations need to be estimated simultaneously because each equation contains spatial lag terms for every chain in the market. This setting complicated the estimation of the model in two ways. First, all the spatial lag terms have different coefficients. This makes it hard to implement the method of maximum likelihood even when the disturbances are normally distributed because the Jacobian transformation becomes very complicated. Ord’s (1975) device cannot be extended into this model. Second, the disturbances are assumed to be correlated across equations. Because of this assumption, the estimation method developed by Lee and Liu (2010) cannot be directly applied in this model. Although this model can be rewritten into the form of a high order SAR model like in their paper, the heteroskedasticity and correlation affect the efficiency of their GMM estimator.
THE BEREITSCHAFTSPOTENTIAL IN JERKY MOVEMENT DISORDERS

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An Experimental Study on Pounding Force between Reinforced Concrete Slabs

Building pounding, defined as the earthquake induced collision between insufficiently spaced buildings, has been recognized as a recurring urban seismic hazard. Numerous studies have been carried out in the past decades on the severity of the hazard. Most of the studies employ a contact force approach, where an elastic or viscoelastic link is placed between the colliding masses in series with a gap. The link is activated when the gap is closed and the pounding force is calculated from the deformation, and rate of change of deformation of this link. Several numerical models have been proposed to compute the pounding force. Past studies have compared the performance of these models in predicting force due to the impact of a sphere falling on a floor or a beam. However, building pounding is the collision of distributed masses i.e. slabs or beams of structures and few such experimental results exist. This study presents the force due to the pounding of two suspended reinforced concrete slabs. The effects of variation in velocity are shown. The experimental results were compared with the predictions of numerical models. The results show that the updated Hertzdamp model had the least error in the prediction of pounding force.
Identification and welfare evaluation in sequential sampling models

Consider an agent who faces choice problems and learns information about an objective state of the world through a technology of sequential experiments. We consider two cases of learning costs. In the first, the agent discounts future payoffs geometrically. In the second, she incurs a constant flow cost of time. If the observable data consist only of the joint distributions over chosen actions and decision times, an analyst can uniquely identify the discount factor in the first case and the flow cost of time in the second case. Moreover, we show how an analyst can recover the agent’s ex ante welfare in both cases, besides identifying her prior belief. Our approach does not rely on any knowledge about the underlying sequential experiment.
PRELIMINARY STUDIES OF CELLULOSE FROM SUGARCANE BAGASSE HYDROLYSIS USING ELECTRON BEAM ACCELERATOR

Under normal conditions Brazil annually produces and processes more than 300 million metric tons of sugarcane, that corresponds a quarter of the 1300 million tons grown worldwide in more than 100 countries. The Brazilian sugar cane sector gross annual income of US$ 10 billion represents around 2% of the Gross National Product. Besides its economic importance, sugar cane heavily contributes for the country’s energy matrix. Around 55% of sucrose in the cane is directed to the production of 12 million cubic meters of ethanol per year, displacing 11 million cubic meters of gasoline. This situation has a huge potential for improvement bearing in mind that ethanol represents only one third of the energy available in cane; the other two thirds represented by fibber in the cane stalks (bagasse) and in cane leaves (trash). Cellulose is the most abundant biopolymer in nature and is therefore attractive as a sustainable source of materials to obtain energy. The sugar in cellulose biomass is locked up in cellulose and, the main obstacle to produce ethanol bio-fuel from cellulose is how to accelerate the hydrolysis reaction, which breaks cellulose down into starches and sugars suitable for fermentation. The major cellulose hydrolysis processes, as chemical or enzymatic reactions, are so harsh that toxic degradation products are produced that can interfere with fermentation. The reactive species generated by the interaction of ionizing radiation with water (OH radicals, e-aq, and H) have been successfully applied as advanced oxidation process to organic pollutant degradation in environmental samples and industrial effluents. Upon hydrolysis, plant biomass would yield a variety of fermentable sugars and chemicals useful for production of energy and food. The main objective of this project is to study the cleavage of cellulose from sugarcane bagasse using ionizing radiation from electron beam industrial accelerator, in order to facilitate its fermentation and improves the production of ethanol. The main benefit of production of ethanol by sugarcane bagasse is the environmental protection and recovery that reduces greenhouse gas emissions compared to oil derivatives and the increase of ethanol production per planted hectare.
Lived experiences of stigma: Nurses who work in abortion clinics

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . iv LIST OF TABLES . vii LIST OF FIGURES . viii CHAPTER I. BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE . 1 Statement of the Problem . 1 Purpose of the Study . 2 Significance for Nursing . 2 CHAPTER II. LITERATURE REVIEW AND STUDY FRAMEWORK . 4 Review of Related Literature . 4 Theoretical Framework . 22 Research Questions . 22 Conceptual and Operational Definitions . 22 Assumptions . 24 CHAPTER III. METHODOLOGY . 26 Research Design. 26 Population and Sample . 27 Institutional Review Board Approval . 27 Data Collection . 27 Data Analysis . 30 CHAPTER IV. RESULTS . 32 Demographic Information . 32
Minimal clinically important differences in the Edmonton Symptom Assessment Scale in cancer patients: A prospective study.

9601 Background: ESAS is widely used for symptom assessment in the clinical and research settings. We determined the MCID for improvement and deterioration for each of the 10 ESAS symptoms using the anchor based sensitivity-specificity approach. Methods: This multicenter, prospective, longitudinal study enrolled patients with advanced cancer. ESAS was measured at a first palliative care clinic visit and a second visit 3 weeks later. For each symptom, we assessed the Patient’s Global Impression (PGI) (“better”, “about the same”, or “worse”) at the second visit as the external criterion. We determined the MCID based on the optimal cutoff for sensitivity/specificity in receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve using the Youden’s J method. We conducted sensitivity analyses by estimating MCIDs using other anchor-based and distribution-based approaches. The planned sample size was powered to estimate sensitivity/specificity with 80% power at 0.5% significance (accounting for 10 symptoms). Results: Among the.
Socio-demographic profile of emergency contraceptive users.

The search for a more convenient effective and culturally acceptable method of contraception continues. A dramatic shift in the initiation of contraceptive use has taken place across the country and demand for effective contraceptives is rising rapidly. In the next two or three decades the demand for fertility control is expected to increase further as the number of couples in the reproductive age group in developing countries is expected to reach nearly one billion. In the absence of an ideal method one out of every five women abort an unwanted and unplanned pregnancy. Globally 40-60 million women seek termination of pregnancy every year. In India 11 million medical termination of pregnancy (MTP) is performed yearly. The National Family Health Survey 1992-93 indicated that an estimated 78 per cent of conceptions are unplanned and at least 25 per cent of these are unwanted. The development of emergency contraception used during the post coital period offers another option to women seeking an abortion. Yuzpe and his colleagues introduced the first scientific safe and effective method for emergency contraception. Subsequently several methods of emergency contraception were available but did not gain acceptance either at the provided level or at the user level. One of the reasons could be the concern often expressed by the gatekeepers of social norms that emergency contraception may lead to sexual promiscuity. This paper addresses the concern that emergency contraception may lead to sexual promiscuity. (excerpt)