Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Foreign Equity Ownership and Information Asymmetry: Evidence from Japan

Using a large sample of Japanese firms, we investigate whether the level of foreign ownership in a firm is inversely related to information asymmetry between firm (managers) and market (outside investors). Since information asymmetry is not directly observable and, thus, is difficult to measure empirically, our analysis focuses on the link between foreign shareholding and a measurable consequence of information asymmetry; that is, the timing and magnitude of intertemporal return-earnings associations. The empirical results support our hypothesis, and subsequent tests based on residual foreign ownership show that the relation between foreign ownership and information asymmetry is robust to the addition of various control variables such as market capitalization and cross-corporate holdings. We also show that foreign investors tend to avoid stocks with high cross-corporate holdings. Overall, our results suggest that foreign (institutional) investors are likely to be efficient processors of public information and are attracted to Japanese firms with low information asymmetry.
An exploration of the attitudes and strategic responses of sole-proprietor micro-enterprises in adopting information and communication technology

This article analyses longitudinal case-based research exploring the attitudes and strategic responses of micro-enterprise owners in adopting information and communication technology (ICT). In so doing, it contributes to the limited literature on micro-enterprise ICT adoption, with a particular focus on sole proprietors. It provides a basis for widening the theoretical base of the literature pertaining to ICT adoption on two levels. First, a framework is developed which integrates the findings to illustrate the relationships between attitudes towards ICT adoption, endogenous and exogenous influencers of these attitudes and subsequent strategic response in ICT adoption. Second, building upon this framework the article reveals the unique challenges, opportunities and implications of ICT adoption for sole-proprietor micro-enterprises.
Alternative models framing UK independent hoteliers' adoption of technology

Purpose – While there is a plethora of literature examining the antecedents affecting technology adoption decision, there have been limited investigations into the various stages of technologies adoption by hoteliers. This paper aims to examine two established theoretical paradigms jointly, facilitating an understanding of not only the antecedents affecting technology adoption but also the hoteliers' intensity of technology adoption.Design/methodology/approach – The development of Davis's Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) will be explored, from its adaptation of the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) to the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). Following which, Roger's Diffusion of Innovation will be discussed and whether the concepts should jointly be explored so as to provide a more comprehensive elucidation of hoteliers' internet technologies adoption decisions.Findings – The literature has corroborated that the TAM is effective in evaluating the concept of the user's perception of technology use by includin.
The Labor Supply of Married Men: A Switching Regressions Model

According to the family utility function approach, the labor supply functions of married men should differ according to whether their wives also work. In this paper, I explicitly model the switching nature of labor supply while also accounting for the endogeneity of the labor force participation decision of the wife, using an endogenous switching regressions model based on the quadratic family utility function. The model is estimated from a cross section of 1,210 married couples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.
Start-up and frequency stability analysis using time varying root locus

Undesired points of operation i.e. real pole in the right half of s-plane causes relaxation oscillation, especially in GHz-range of monolithic oscillators. They also prove to be ‘hard’ target for most of the very powerful circuit simulators, like SpecterRF for example. Since the behavior is best described by the Eigen values of characteristic polynomial, then we settle on investigating the operating points using the time varying root locus (TVRL) method. The numerical QZ algorithm has been practiced to compute the characteristic roots relative to periodic steady-state (PSS). The circuit is modified to avoid relaxation process and it confirms the proper sinusoidal operation of oscillator.
Revisiting the High-Yield Bond Market

The low-grade, high-yield corporate debt market is revisited after it has persevered through a tumultuous 14-year 1978-1991 ) modern junk" bond period. Empirical findings are combined with conceptual issues to shed further light on the continuing debate surrounding the measurement and interpretation of defaults and returns. We find evidence of a resiliency in this market and a profile that has gone front a moderately risky market in the early 1980s to much higher risk in the late 1980s and a return to more conservatively financed issues in the early 1990s. Our forecast is for a continued presence of publicly issued low-grade corporate debt although the size of the market has decreased of late.
A knowledge transfer perspective of strategic assignment purposes and their path-dependent outcomes

Our research not only addresses the strategic purposes of expatriate assignments within multinational corporations but, unlike most earlier studies, extends the investigation to include their path-dependent outcomes. Adopting a knowledge transfer perspective we first re-define the principal assignment purpose categories of Edström and Galbraith (1977a) as business applications, organization applications and expatriate learning. These purpose categories are then conceptually related in terms of a four-part typological matrix based on individual-level knowledge-flow direction and role focus. Following a review of prior assignment purpose studies we posit that strategic expatriate assignment purposes should be considered not in isolation but relative to their potential outcomes. Adopting a single-case research design with multi-method data collection, we demonstrate the emergent nature of strategic assignment outcomes. It is shown for our transnational case organization that knowledge acquisition or learning by expatriates is an underestimated strategic assignment outcome, more so than either business or organization-related knowledge applications.
Induction of a prolonged hypothermic state by drug-induced reduction in the thermoregulatory set-point.

BACKGROUND The marked improvement in outcome following induction of hypothermia after cardiac arrest has spurred the search for better methods to induce cooling. A regulated decrease in core temperature mediated by a drug-induced reduction in the set point for thermoregulation may be an ideal means of inducing hypothermia. To this end, the exploratory drug HBN-1 was assessed as a means to induce mild and prolonged hypothermia. METHODS Free moving rats were infused i.v. for 12 hours with: a vehicle at room temperature (normothermia), a vehicle chilled to 4°C (forced hypothermia), or HBN-1 (mixture of ethanol, lidocaine, and vasopressin) at room temperature. Core (intra-abdominal) temperature (Tc) was measured telemetrically, tail skin temperature (Ttail) by infrared thermography, metabolic rate (MR) was estimated with indirect calorimetery, and shivering was scored visually. RESULTS HBN-1 elicited a reduction in Tc from 37.5°C to 34°C within 80 minutes after initiation of the infusion; Tc was maintained between 33°C and 34°C for more than 13 hours. HBN-1 infusion was associated with a reduction in MR (p=0.0006), a slight reduction in Ttail, and no evidence of shivering (p<0.001). The forced hypothermia group displayed shivering (p<0.001), a significant increase in MR, and a decrease in Ttail, indicative of peripheral vasoconstriction to reduce heat loss. CONCLUSION HBN-1 infusion induced a mild and prolonged hypothermia in free moving, unanesthetized rats characterized by modulation of thermoeffectors to reduce heat gain and increase heat loss. HBN-1 thus appears to elicit regulated hypothermia and may provide a new method for achieving a prolonged state of therapeutic hypothermia.
Impact of lung volume reduction surgery versus rehabilitation on quality of life

This study aims at evaluating the effects of lung volume reduction versus respiratory rehabilitation on quality of life, assessed by three different questionnaires. Sixty emphysematous patients were randomised by computer to receive either surgery (n=30) or rehabilitation (n=30). Life quality was evaluated by the Nottingham Health Profile, the Short Form (SF)‐36 item and the St George's questionnaires. As reported previously, dyspnoea index, forced expiratory volume in one second, residual volume, 6‐min walk test and arterial oxygen tension improved after surgery more than after rehabilitation. Quality of life was significantly improved after surgery as follows Nottingham Health Profile physical mobility; SF‐36 physical and social functioning, mental and general health, emotional role; St George's general, activity. At multivariate analysis 6‐ and 12‐month changes after surgery of Short Form‐36 physical functioning, general health, and St George's activity domains were significantly correlated with forced expiratory volume in one second, while Short Form‐36 social functioning and Nottingham Health Profile isolation correlated with residual volume. Functional and especially symptomatic improvements persisted: dyspnoea index, residual volume, and Short Form‐36 and St Georges's physical scores were still significant at 4 yrs. Surgery produces greater and longer effects than rehabilitation on quality of life by improving both physical and psychosocial domains. Symptomatic improvements persisted at 4 yrs.
Rural nonfarm income and its impact on agriculture: evidence from Albania

Using data from the 2005 Albania Living Standards Measurement Study (ALSMS05) survey, this article analyzes the overall impact of household nonfarm income-generating activities (RIGA) on agricultural expenditures as well as technical efficiency of rural farm households. We also differentiate the impact for subsistence and commercial farmers, who are in the top 25% of the distribution of value of annual agricultural sales. Our results show that on the whole, Albanian rural households utilize their nonfarm earnings not to invest in time-saving, efficiency-increasing technologies, but to move out of crop production. We derive similar findings when we try to estimate the same relation separately for commercial and subsistence farmers. However, for commercial farmers, we find a positive impact of household nonfarm earnings on livestock expenditures.
Optical wireless underwater communication for AUV: Preliminary simulation and experimental results

An optical wireless underwater communication simulation model is proposed, which serves as the theoretical model of the underwater optical wireless communication simulator for AUVs. Various parameters that will influence the light distribution and optical communication performance are explored. As a preliminary result, this paper focuses on the light distribution and propagation in water, and the communication channel characteristics. Given the parameters of the transmitter and water turbidity, the model provides the received light power in every position. With the calculation of the noise power in the receiver, an estimation of data rate capacity is provided. This research aims at building the simulator, which eventually will help the underwater optical wireless communication system design.
Index policies for the routing of background jobs

Arriving (generic) jobs may be processed at one of several service stations, but only when no other (dedicated) jobs are waiting there. We consider the problem of how to route these incoming background jobs to make best use of the spare service capacity available at the stations. We develop an approximative approach to Whittle's proposal for restless bandits to obtain an index policy for routing. The indices concerned are increasing and nonlinear in the station workload. A numerical study testifies to the strong performance of the index policies developed. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004
A new integrated temperature and humidity

MEMS-based integrated temperature and humidity sensor has the advantages of low weight, small size, low cost, easy integrity and is a highly advanced apparatus of identity, reliability, easy production. The feasibility of thermal conductivity method used to measure humidity and structure of the integrated temperature and humidity sensor are analyzed in this paper, and provides the measuring methods in detail. We mainly focus on measuring result of the humidity part, and verify the excellent performance of the integrated temperature and humidity sensor, then introducing a function W(h)=V22−k*V12, here k is a constant expressed by k=R2/R1, and W(h) becomes a simple monotonic curve independent of the ambient temperature. Based on designed integrated sensor, the portable measurement device have been designed and tested in field.
From Vanguard of the Proletariat to Vox Populi: Left-Populism as a 'Shadow' of Contemporary Socialism

Left-populism is a phenomenon attracting much attention, particularly in Latin America, but also increasingly in Europe. It is not a wholly new phenomenon; indeed it is a longstanding tradition shadowing more orthodox socialist approaches. However, the decline of traditional Marxism allows contemporary left-populism to adopt a specific post-Cold War form with some parallels and key differences between Europe and Latin America. This new left-populism has the potential to become a major feature of contemporary (left) politics, albeit one often still in the shadow of traditional socialist approaches. Like so many other forms of populism, left-populism has both a progressive and an illiberal 'dark side' that depends very much on context and the nature of the populist actor, but it should not be seen as inevitably inimical to democracy.
An Efficient Data Assimilation Schema for Restoration and Extension of Gene Regulatory Networks Using Time-Course Observation Data

Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) play a central role in sustaining complex biological systems in cells. Although we can construct GRNs by integrating biological interactions that have been recorded in literature, they can include suspicious data and a lack of information. Therefore, there has been an urgent need for an approach by which the validity of constructed networks can be evaluated; simulation-based methods have been applied in which biological observational data are assimilated. However, these methods apply nonlinear models that require high computational power to evaluate even one network consisting of only several genes. Therefore, to explore candidate networks whose simulation models can better predict the data by modifying and extending literature-based GRNs, an efficient and versatile method is urgently required. We applied a combinatorial transcription model, which can represent combinatorial regulatory effects of genes, as a biological simulation model, to reproduce the dynamic behavior of gene expressions within a state space model. Under the model, we applied the unscented Kalman filter to obtain the approximate posterior probability distribution of the hidden state to efficiently estimate parameter values maximizing prediction ability for observational data by the EM-algorithm. Utilizing the method, we propose a novel algorithm to modify GRNs reported in the literature so that their simulation models become consistent with observed data. The effectiveness of our approach was validated through comparison analysis to the previous methods using synthetic networks. Finally, as an application example, a Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG)-based yeast cell cycle network was extended with additional candidate genes to better predict the real mRNA expressions data using the proposed method.
A note on advertising policy under uncertainty and dynamic conditions

IN his pioneering model published in this Journal, I. Horowitz has analysed the impact of uncertainty on advertising expenditures under static conditions [3]. He considers two models of the firm, a quantity setting price taker and a price setting quantity taker, and shows that risk aversion implies that the firm will advertise less than under risk neutrality for a given output level or for a given price level. The purpose of the present paper is to show the vulnerability of this unambiguous prediction and its dependence upon rather unsatisfying implicit as well as explicit assumptions in the case of a price setting quantity taker firm. On the one hand, in the static approach, it would be necessary to take into account the simultaneity of the decisions taken by the firm: optimal price and optimal advertising must be jointly determined, while Horowitz implicitly assumes that they are independent. On the other hand, it is well-known that advertising expenditures affect the future demand for the product as well as that of the present. An optimal decision rule for this market conduct must take into account both the present and the future net revenue of the firm which advertises, hence the combined impact of uncertainty and dynamic conditions. In the following sections, we shall try to take account of these elements and show the extent to which it is still possible to derive determinate predictions. In the first section, we shall study the impact of uncertainty into the framework of a static model, when the interaction between the two decision variables, price and advertising, is explicitly introduced. The second section proposes an extension of the Horowitz model, where the monopolistic firm acts under dynamic conditions as well as under uncertainty.
Uptake of [3H] uridine into precursor pools and RNA in osteogenic cells.

SUMMARY Young rabbits were given a single intraperitoneal injection of fHjuridine. Using the technique of water-soluble autoradiography a study was made of the uptake of the radioactive label into soluble precursors and RNA in cells on an actively growing bone surface. Labelling of the soluble intracellular pools was immediate, but incorporation of label from these pools into RNA was not completed until 24 h after injection. At this time all the label in the sections was in RNA but this represented only 30 % of the total label initially in the soluble pools. This means that 70 % of the label is lost from the cell in the first 24 h either as degradation products of RNA synthesis or by other as yet unknown mechanisms. The pattern of labelling of the RNA was similar to that previously found for other mammalian cells in vivo or in vitro. There was a rapid uptake of label into nuclear RNA which reached a maximum by 2 h after injection and a slower uptake into cytoplasmic RNA which reached a maximum by 24 h after injection. There was a slow loss of label from the cells after 24 h indicating a half-life of about 8 days for this relatively stable RNA. A comparison was made of RNA synthesis in the proliferating preosteoblasts and the highly differentiated nondividing osteoblasts. Labelling of the nuclear RNA for the two cell types was identical. The rate of labelling of the cytoplasmic RNA was similar for the two cell types but the maximum level of labelling in the cytoplasm of the osteoblasts was 2 to 3 times that in the preosteoblasts. This could be correlated with the more active protein synthesis by the osteoblasts. There was a slow loss of labelled RNA by the osteoblasts and preosteoblasts and a rapid loss by the osteocytes after the cells had been incorporated within the bone. It was suggested that this loss paralleled the decline in the rate of protein synthesis by the cells as their environment changed.
A hybrid approach to sentiment analysis

This contribution presents a hybrid approach to Sentiment Analysis (SA) encompassing the use of semantic rules, fuzzy sets, unsupervised machine learning techniques and a sentiment lexicon improved with the support of Senti-WordNet. A Hybrid Standard Classification is first carried out, which is further enhanced into a Hybrid Advanced approach incorporating linguistic classification of semantic polarity modelled using fuzzy sets. The mechanism of the new SA methodology is illustrated by applying it to compute the polarity of a given sentence and to a benchmarking publicly available dataset: the Movie Review Dataset.
Characterisation of lipid‐protein interactions using a surface plasmon resonance biosensor

The binding of proteins to lipid surfaces is of fundamental importance when considering the mechanisms of lipases and lipid transfer proteins. Current procedures for determining the binding constants suffer from problems related to poor sensitivity, poor reproducibility and to the use of restrictive assumptions in the analysis. We demonstrate here the use of the surface plasmon resonance biosensor to determine the association and dissociation kinetics of binding of cholesteryl ester transfer protein to the surface of emulsion particles of defined size and composition. Uncertainty about the emulsion valency, that is, the number of sites on the lipid particle occupied by the immobilised transfer protein on the biosensor surface, means that the association kinetics can only be characterised in terms of the product of the association rate constant and the concentration of sites, whereas the dissociation rate constant can be obtained unambiguously. The technique will prove useful in characterising the binding of proteins to lipid surfaces.
Divergent Spatiotemporal Interaction of Angiotensin Receptor Blocking Drugs with Angiotensin Type 1 Receptor

Crystal structures of the human angiotensin II type 1 receptor (AT1R) complex with the antihypertensive agent ZD7155 (PDB id: 4YAY ) and the blood pressure medication Benicar (PDB id: 4ZUD ) showed that binding poses of both antagonists are similar. This finding implies that clinically used angiotensin receptor blocking (ARB) drugs may interact in a similar fashion. However, clinically observed differences in pharmacological and therapeutic efficacies of ARBs lead to the question of whether the dynamic interactions of AT1R with ARBs vary. To address this, we performed induced-fit docking (IFD) of eight clinically used ARBs to AT1R followed by 200 ns molecular dynamic (MD) simulation. The experimental Ki values for ARBs correlated remarkably well with calculated free energy with R2 = 0.95 and 0.70 for AT1R-ARB models generated respectively by IFD and MD simulation. The eight ARB-AT1R complexes share a common set of binding residues. In addition, MD simulation results validated by mutagenesis data discovered distinctive spatiotemporal interactions that display unique bonding between an individual ARB and AT1R. These findings provide a reasonably broader picture reconciling the structure-based observations with clinical studies reporting efficacy variations for ARBs. The unique differences unraveled for ARBs in this study will be useful for structure-based design of the next generation of more potent and selective ARBs.
A Hipótese de Kuznets para os Municípios Brasileiros: Testes para as Formas Funcionais e Estimações Não-Paramétricas

The main aim of this paper was to analyse the existence of Kuznets hypothesis for the Brazilian Municipalities from 1991 to 2000. The empirical strategy was based on three steps. The first one consists in testing the quantile specification proposed by Racine (2006). The second was to use the non-parametrical estimation B-splines according to Koenker et alii (1994). Finally, the third step was to test Fan et alii (2001) Likelihood ratio. The results show that the quantile linear specification is inconsistent. The non parametrical estimation confirms the Kuznets hypothesis. The Likelihood ratio proves the goodness to fit of the non parametrical estimations comparing to the linear ones.