Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Some Implications of Auditor and Client Lobbying Activities: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract This paper examines the degree to which auditor and client lobbying is related in a UK context. This may help to identify any linkage between the wealth of clients and auditors that is affected by accounting standards, as propounded in the ‘economic consequences’ literature. It also might have some implications for the independence question. Three tests are conducted to see if auditors tend to support the lobbying position of the majority, or the most financially influential, of their clients. The third test is also used to identify any evidence that the comments of smaller clients tend to follow the lead of their audit firms/professional advisors. Auditor and corporate client written submissions on 22 proposed accounting standards are included in the study. The analyses are conducted both at an aggregated and also at a disaggregated level. The results do not indicate that auditor and client collusion took place. In particular, the results are consistent with the view that auditors are independen.
Solid-Phase Extraction of Several Phthalate Esters from Environmental Water Samples on a Column Packed with Polytetrafluoroethylene Turnings

A method for the determination of several phthalate esters in water samples using solid-phase extraction coupled to high-performance liquid chromatography was developed. A polytetrafluoroethylene turnings packed column was used as a SPE adsorbent material. The analytes were sorbed on polytetrafluoroethylene turnings, from which they were eluted by a small amount of acetonitrile, followed by a RP-HPLC-UV analysis. Detection limits (3a) of 4.7, 3.1, 3.6, 4.3, and 5.8 ng mL^-1 for di-n-butyl-phthalate, di-cyclohexyl-phthalate, di-n-octyl-phthalate, di-n-nonyl-phthalate and di-iso-decyl- phthalate, respectively, were achieved. Acceptable recovery results (92.1–127.5%) were obtained on five phthalate esters spiked samples.
Will unit‐pricing enhance recycling?

Unit pricing is a program in solid waste management that integrates market instruments to encourage households to reduce waste generation and increase recycling. Many studies have shown that unit pricing is effective, especially when the evaluation is based on comparing outcomes before and after implementation. In this paper, we use the so-called difference-in-differences approach to evaluate unit pricing. This approach can provide a less-biased estimation, and can help to examine whether a unit pricing program generates less waste and higher recycling or results in illegal dumping in neighboring regions. Using the fee-per-bag program implemented in Taipei City, Taiwan, as a case study, we found that unit pricing does reduce the amount of garbage but its impact on recycling is not as significant as the current literature suggests. Moreover, the program causes a serious negative externality: more than 60% of the garbage reduction in the city is due to increased dumping of waste in neighboring regions. As the impact of unit‐pricing on recycling is limited, policy-makers cannot rely solely on this program to enhance recycling in the management of municipal solid waste.
Barriers or Opportunities? The Causes of Contingent and Part-Time Work Among People with Disabilities

Why are workers with disabilities about twice as likely as nondisabled workers to be in contingent and part-time jobs? This study finds that disability income program earnings limits and employer discrimination play relatively minor roles, whereas the primary explanation is health problems that make traditional full-time jobs difficult or impossible for many people with disabilities. Despite the lower pay and other drawbacks of many nonstandard jobs, they enable many people with disabilities to work who otherwise would not be employed. Policy implications are discussed.
Demonstration of regional differences in equine ventricular myocardial velocity in normal 2-year-old Thoroughbreds with Doppler tissue imaging.

REASONS FOR PERFORMING STUDY Doppler tissue imaging (DTI) is a novel noninvasive method by which myocardial velocity can be assessed directly and it allows regional, rather than global, cardiac function to be evaluated. HYPOTHESIS That regional differences in myocardial velocities exist within the equine ventricle. OBJECTIVES To develop a repeatable examination technique for DTI in horses, describe DTI findings in various regions of the normal equine ventricle, compare colour (CDTI) and spectral (SDTI) techniques of DTI, and document regional differences in myocardial velocity. METHODS Five regions of the ventricles (right ventricular wall, interventricular septum and left, right and caudal regions of the left ventricle) were evaluated using SDTI and CDTI in 20 clinically normal Thoroughbreds age 2 years. Individual repeatability of the method was determined by examination of one 6-year-old Thoroughbred on 6 occasions. RESULTS Three major movements were observed in the ventricular walls in systole, early diastole and late diastole. The interventricular septum had a complex pattern of movement. The left region of the left ventricle and interventricular septum had the most rapid movement. The individual repeatability of CDTI was poor, while in systole and early diastole, but not late diastole, SDTI produced repeatable estimates of maximal myocardial velocity. The different velocity estimates obtained with SDTI and CDTI are not interchangeable. Regional differences in the peak mean and maximal myocardial velocities were found in systole and early diastole (P<0.05), but were not identified in late diastole. CONCLUSIONS The SDTI modality appears to produce the most repeatable data. There are regional differences in myocardial velocity within the equine ventricles for systole and early diastole. POTENTIAL RELEVANCE DTI shows potential as a tool for studying regional myocardial movement both in clinical cases suspected of having myocardial dysfunction and in a research setting. In particular, SDTI offers potential as a direct and noninvasive means to study early diastolic function of the equine ventricles.
Inside the Box - Cultures of Innovation in a Mature Industry

Innovation has been regarded a crucial means by which organizations adapt to the changes in the environment. Previous studies have identified organizational culture as a key factor that influences innovation, suggesting that a culture with certain characteristics can lead to superior innovation performance. This culture is referred to as “innovation culture”, a notion which has recently enjoyed great popularity and drawn considerable attention from researchers and practitioners. However, seeing the concept of innovation culture as self-explanatory and therefore taking it as given, the existing literature assumes a static causal relationship between culture and innovation, whereas it has not provided explanation of how culture influences innovation. By means of a case study at three different subsidiaries of a Swedish multinational company in the corrugated packaging industry, this thesis aims to extend our understanding of the culture-innovation relationship by answering the question: “How does organizational culture influence innovation? ”. Based on culture dynamics theory and organizational adaptation theory, this thesis proposes a dynamic and interactive view on the culture-innovation relationship. Using organizational archetype theory as a theoretical lens, it suggests the notion of “innovation dynamics” to illustrate how culture shapes organizations’ innovation processes into different patterns and reveals the underlying dynamic interaction between culture and innovation activities. Moreover, by drawing attention to different functional subcultures and the dynamic interaction between them, this thesis highlights the role of subcultures in organizations’ innovation processes. The findings depict a spiral model of the culture-innovation relationship in which culture and innovation mutually influence each other and alternate between cause and effect. They also suggest that instead of a single unitary innovation culture, there are cultures of innovation within an organization. This thesis contributes to the innovation culture and the innovation management literature and theory of organizational archetypes. By offering a nuanced understanding of the role of culture in innovation, it also provides managerial implications for practitioners in the field of innovation management. (Less)
Multinational Companies and Linkages: Panel-Data Evidence for the Irish Electronics Sector

This paper analyses the extent and determinants of backward local linkages between multinational companies and domestic suppliers in the Irish electronics industry, and their effect on indirect employment generated in domestic supplier firms. Several models in recent literature show that linkages between firms can lead to positive effects on the development of indigenous industry, agglomerations, technology spill-overs and indirect employment generation. Our empirical analysis, using a uniquely generated firm-level panel data set, indicates that the extent of linkages is related in a non-linear fashion to the length of time that the firm is located in Ireland. In the context of the literature on the effects of linkages, we find empirical evidence consistent with the view that growth in employment in upstream supplier firms in electronics is linked to the development of downstream firms.
Risk Management in Law Enforcement: A Model Assessment Tool

Purpose: The purpose of this research is threefold. The first purpose is to establish a practical ideal model to assess risk management practices in law enforcement agencies. Second, using case study, current risk management practices at the Austin Police Department will be assessed. The third purpose is to provide recommendations for improving the risk management practices at the Austin Police Department. A review of the literature has identified four key components of effective risk management programs. These components are program development, risk assessment, solution analysis, and program administration. Methodology: The components of an effective risk management program identified in the literature are used to construct the conceptual framework. A practical ideal type model assessment tool for law enforcement agency risk management programs is created from the framework. The assessment tool is used in a case study of the Austin Police Department to gauge for the presence of an effective risk management program. The case study uses document analysis and survey research to perform the assessment. Findings: The Austin Police Department exists in a high-risk environment. Many of the policies and procedures the Department has in place are designed to mitigate or eliminate risk. The newly formed Risk Management Bureau of the Austin Police Department has been created to formalize many of the policies and procedures into a more comprehensive policy. At this time, the major shortcomings in the program are in the areas of training and communication. There has been limited training for the managers and administrators outside the Risk Management Bureau. Likewise, even though the Department is making progress towards a professional, innovative, risk management program, the communication to those in the organization about what is being done is lacking.
The Costs of Annuitizing Retirement Payouts from Individual Accounts

This paper presents new evidence on the costs of purchasing private annuity contracts to spread a given stock of assets over an uncertain future lifetime. It also describes the operation of individual annuity arrangements within two large group retirement saving plans. First presents information on life annuity contracts that are now available in the individual single-premium-immediate annuity marketplace. For a 65-year-old male annuity buyer present discounted value of the payouts offered by the average policy available in June 1998 was approximately 85 percent of the purchase price. This assumes that the individual faces the mortality risks of the average individual in the population, and that the payouts are discounted at a riskless interest rate. The expected present value of payouts rises if we assume that the buyer faces the mortality rates of the typical annuitant, while it declines if we assume a higher riskier, interest rate for discounting. Second, the paper considers individual annuity policies available to participants in the government's Thrift Savings Plan. Because these annuities are purchased through a large group retirement saving program, some of the administrative costs are lower than those in the national individual annuity market. The expected present value of payouts is correspondingly higher than that in the public' market. Third individual annuity products offered by TIAA-CREF, the retirement system for college and university employees. TIAA offers annuities with non-guaranteed elements the highest payouts in the individual annuity market, mainly due to superior investment returns and low expenses. CREF annuities offer valuable payouts that reflect basis, the investment experience of the accounts.
MEMS-Based Medical Endomicroscopes

Progress toward early diagnosis of cancer would have significant clinical benefits in reducing mortality or prolonging life in cancer patients; thus, there is an important unmet clinical need to image cellular features of cancer in vivo and in real time to correlate pathological symptoms and underlying cells responsible for such symptoms. In this paper, we describe a review of microelectromechanical systems scanners-based endoscopic optical coherence tomography, confocal, two-photon, and photoacoustic microscopy imaging. These advanced optical imaging modalities can provide subcellular (micron-scale) resolution and deep tissue penetration to reveal both cells and molecular features for early cancer diagnosis, cancer staging, and surgical guidance.
Endovascular thrombectomy with or without systemic thrombolysis?

Objectives: Current recommendations advocate that pretreatment with intravenous thrombolysis (IVT) should first be offered to all eligible patients with emergent large vessel occlusion (ELVO) before an endovascular thrombectomy (ET) procedure. However, there are observational data that question the safety and efficacy of IVT pretreatment in patients with ELVO. Methods: We performed a meta-analysis of the included subgroups from ET randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate the comparative efficacy between direct ET without IVT pretreatment and bridging therapy (IVT and ET) in patients with ELVO. Results: We included a total of seven RCTs, including 1764 patients with ELVO (52.8% men). Patients receiving bridging therapy (IVT followed by ET) had lower rates (p = 0.041) of 90-day death/severe dependency (modified Rankin Scale-score of 5–6; 19.0%, 95% CI: 14.1–25.1%) compared with patients receiving only ET (31.0%, 95% CI: 21.2–42.9%). Moreover, patients receiving IVT and ET had a nonsignificant (p = 0.389) trend towards higher 90-day functional independence rates (51.4%, 95% CI: 42.5–60.1%) compared with patients undergoing only ET (41.7%, 95% CI: 24.1–61.7%). Finally, shift-analysis uncovered a nonsignificant trend towards functional improvement at 90 days for bridging therapy over ET (cOR = 1.28, 95% CI: 0.91–1.89; p = 0.155). It should be noted that patients included in the present meta-analysis were not randomized to receive IVT, and thus the two groups (bridging therapy versus ET monotherapy) may differ in terms of baseline characteristics and, in particular, in terms of onset to groin puncture time and thus the risk of confounding bias cannot be ruled out. Conclusion: Despite the limitations and the risk of confounding bias, our findings contradict the recent notion regarding potential equality between ET and bridging therapy in ELVO patients and suggest that IVT and ET are complementary therapies that should be pursued in a parallel and noncompeting fashion.
The Economics of American Theatrical Movie Exports: An Empirical Analysis

Consistent with predictions of an economic model of international trade in media products, we show that in countries that have relatively high consumer spending on movies-notably the United States-domestically produced movies account for relatively large shares of theater box office receipts. We also find that American-produced movies account for relatively small market shares of the box office in high movie-spending foreign countries. We also find that English language fluency, or a dummy variable for non-U.S. countries whose native language is English, generally has an insignificant or marginally significant effect on these results.
CO2 Emissions Allowances. Modeling the Price Dynamics in the EU Emission Trading System

The aim of this paper is to characterize the daily price fundamentals of European Union Allowances (EUAs) traded in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) during the period September 2005 - February 2010. We use GARCH model in order to account for changes in volatility. We split our analysis into two periods according to the two phases of the ETS. We disregard the period 02.04. 2007 – 11.08. 2008, when the trading in the spot market was practically inexistent and the price of EUAs was smaller than 1 Euro. Our findings suggest that weather data does not have a linear influence, while the coldest days, extremely rainy days and extremely windy days have an important impact during the first period. From energy variables, brent is a sustainable factor. Additionally, electricity and coal seem to be substitutes for each other, with electricity having a negative impact on EUAs prices in the first period and coal in the second. We also find that the change in industrial production is not one of the factors that seem to influence the price of emissions allowances.
A 7-segment display for Bangla, english and other Indian numerals

dasiaSeven segment displaypsila is a very popular device that displays Indo-Arabic numerals by turning on or off the individual segments in it. Currently this display device is used to represent the numerals of almost all European languages. However Indian languages are lacking of a proper segmented display device to display its numerals. Over the past few years many research works have been done with Bangla language which result many proposals to display Bangla numerals. However we found very few significant works in displaying the numerals of other Indian languages. Also in the proposed devices for displaying Bangla numerals we found the number of segments are 16, 11, 10, 9, 8, 14 (dual 7 segments) etc. In this paper we are proposing a unified seven segment display device which is capable of displaying Bangla, English and most of the Indian languagespsila numerals that include Assamese, Manipuri, Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada, Telugu, Sikkim, Bhutan etc. Our proposed display device has the same simplicity that of English with an acceptable level of accuracy and uniformity.
Exact symbol-error probability analysis for orthogonal space-time block codes: two- and higher dimensional constellations cases

Exact expressions are obtained for the symbol-error probability of orthogonal space-time block codes at the output of the coherent maximum-likelihood decoder in the general case of arbitrary input signal constellation and code. Such expressions are derived for the cases of both deterministic (fixed) and random Rayleigh/Ricean fading channels, and both the two- and higher dimensional constellations.
DBJ in the stream of various biological data

In the past year we at DDBJ (http://www.ddbj.nig. ac.jp) have made a steady increase in the number of data submissions with a 50.6% increment in the number of bases or 46.5% increment in the number of entries. Among them the genome data of man, ascidian and rice hold the top three. Our activity has extended to providing a tool that enables sequence retrieval using regular expressions, and to launching our SOAP server and web services to facilitate the acquisition of proper data and tools from a huge number of biological data resources on websites worldwide. We have also opened our public gene expression database, CIBEX.
An Iterated GMM Procedure for Estimating the Campbell-Cochrane Habit Formation Model, with an Application to Danish Stock and Bond Returns

We suggest an iterated GMM approach to estimate and test the consumption based habit persistence model of Campbell and Cochrane (1999), and we apply the approach on annual and quarterly Danish stock and bond returns. For comparative purposes we also estimate and test the standard CRRA model. In addition, we compare the pricing errors of the different models using Hansen and Jagannathan’s (1997) specification error measure. The main result is that for Denmark the Campbell-Cochrane model does not seem to perform markedly better than the CRRA model. For the long annual sample period covering more than 80 years there is absolutely no evidence of superior performance of the Campbell-Cochrane model. For the shorter and more recent quarterly data over a 20-30 year period, there is some evidence of counter-cyclical time-variation in the degree of risk-aversion, in accordance with the Campbell-Cochrane model, but the model does not produce lower pricing errors or more plausible parameter estimates than the CRRA model.
Comparative analysis of Twitter data using supervised classifiers

Online Microblogging on social networks have been used for indicating opinions about certain entity in very short messages. Existing some popular microblogs like Twitter, facebook etc, in which Twitter attains maximum amount of attention in the field of research areas related to product, movie reviews, stock exchange etc. We had extracted data from Twitter i.e. movie reviews for sentiment prediction using machine-learning algorithms. We applied supervised machine-learning algorithms like support vector machines (SVM), maximum entropy and Naïve Bayes to classify data using unigram, bigram and hybrid i.e. unigram + bigram features. Result shows that SVM surpassed other classifiers with remarkable accuracy of 84% for movie reviews.
Relative Thresholding With Under-Mattress Pressure Sensors to Detect Central Apnea

Unobtrusive pressure sensors can be used for biological monitoring and long-term health assessment in smart homes. The challenge in detecting events from smart home data is that people have different mattresses, unlike in hospitals where bedding is standardized. This paper proposes to model central apneas using an under-mattress pressure sensor as a measuring instrument. The model uses three parameters, namely, a relative threshold and two time lengths, applied to a moving variance signal. The use of a relative threshold allows apneas to be detected under a variety of different conditions and improves results compared to hard-coded thresholds. The algorithm developed herein was applied to simulated apneas collected from pressure sensors placed under nine different mattresses. The parameters determined from the training set were applied to the test set and produced classification results of 0.78 positive predictive value (PPV) if the bed occupant's position is known and 0.75 PPV if the position is unknown. The use of the relative threshold approach overcomes the variability in mattress types found in smart homes.