Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Financial Flexibility Piece in the Dividend Puzzle - A Study of Firms Listed in Sweden

The purpose of this master thesis is to examine in which way dividend policies are affected by managers strive for financial flexibility in listed Swedish firms. The underlying reason for the thesis is to attain a broader knowledge regarding dividend policies. Since present theories do not provide a satisfactory explanation or are not satisfactory tested, we find it relevant to perform a study within this field. Hypotheses are generated and the means of these tests are compared using independent sample t-test. Further, a panel data multivariate regression is used to control for time trends. Theoretical framework consists of signaling theory regarding dividends, free cash flow hypothesis and financial flexibility. Our study shows that financial flexibility is a piece of the dividend puzzle and therefore managers who value financial flexibility do incorporate this when deciding dividend policy.
A New Formulation for the Radiation Operator: Application to the Fast Computation of the Singular Value Decomposition

This paper proposes a new formula for the operator K given by the product of the radiation operator by its adjoint. The formula expresses K by means of a surface integral, extended to the boundary of the source domain, rather than a volume integral, extended to the whole source domain, as entailed by its mathematical definition. As a result, the computation of K becomes much less onerous than the computation based on its mathematical definition. An immediate application of the derived formula is the fast computation of the singular value decomposition of the radiation operator, through to the fast computation of K. Some possible implications of the derived formula for K are also discussed. Finally, numerical examples are provided as proof of the validity and effectiveness of the formula.
Corporate Governance, Information Intermediation, and Earnings Management

Based on four empirical studies, this thesis investigates the interrelation of corporate governance, information intermediation, and earnings management. First, the thesis complements the discussion initiated by the European Securities and Market Authorities about the role of proxy advisors at European shareholder meetings by providing empirical evidence on the influence and method consistency of these advisors for a European setting (Study 1). The respective findings are twofold; they indicate a significant correlation between negative proxy voting recommendations and voting dissent as well as a certain method consistency of these recommendations with respect to the employed governance perceptions. Second, the thesis augments prior work on the usefulness of commercial corporate governance ratings by shedding light on the incremental contribution of the rating vendor’s information processing activities (Study 2). The findings of this study suggest that governance rating vendors do not create value in the process of converting public data into aggregated ratings. Third, the thesis extends the perspective of prior research on proxy voting advisory and governance ratings by highlighting the role of corporate governance analysts (Study 3). In doing so, it provides empirical evidence on potential economic consequences of governance analyst coverage. The respective findings suggest that governance analysts serve as information intermediaries by enhancing the firm’s information environment and by promoting external monitoring to managers. Fourth and lastly, the thesis adds to research on the link between governance quality and earnings management by highlighting the setting-specific nature of this relationship (Study 4). Specifically, it examines whether the acquirer’s governance quality affects the acquirer’s earnings management behavior prior to share-based M&A transactions. The study’s findings suggest that – in contrast to common claims that strong governance constrains earnings management – acquirers with strong governance engage more aggressively in income-increasing accruals manipulation than those with weak governance. Overall, the thesis contributes to prior literature by, first, providing insights into the economic role of corporate governance advisory on capital markets and, second, by highlighting the setting-specific nature of the governance and earnings management relationship.
Gliomatosis Cerebri – An Uncommon Neuroepithelial Tumor in Children with Oligodendroglial Phenotype

Gliomatosis cerebri(GC) is a highly aggressive, rare form of neuroepithelial tumor. Due to the diffuse nature of the tumor, its pathological grade is not conclusively established unless a biopsy is carried out from multiple sites. The tumor typically infiltrates the cortex in the subpial plane and also insinuates in the perineuronal space and around the Virchow-Robin spaces with relative preservation of the underlying brain parenchyma. Most of the previously reported cases of GC are astrocytic in nature. In this study, we report 2 pediatric patients of GC with oligodendroglial morphology on histopathological examination. In view of the rarity of the oligodendroglial phenotype of gliomatosis cerebri as well as the rare occurrence in children, we report these 2 cases.
From Robot Commands to Real-time Robot Control - Transforming High-level Robot Commands into Real-time Dataflow Graphs

Task descriptions in robotics always provide a level of abstraction in order to simplify the use of robots. Nevertheless, aspects such as execution time determinism and closed-loop control are still essential for industrialstrength robotics systems. For this reason, we propose an approach to combine high-level task description with real-time robot control. At application runtime, coordinated and sensor-guided robot actions are composed using an object-oriented application programming interface. The resulting high-level command descriptions are then automatically transformed into dataflow graphs and executed with real-time guarantees on robot hardware. The approach is illustrated with several examples.
Dialysis in Pregnant Women with Chronic Kidney Disease

Pregnancy occurs uncommonly in women with chronic kidney disease (CKD) and fetal outcome tends to be poor, with high rates of prematurity and mortality. Dialysis, by complementing residual renal function, may improve fetal outcome in pregnant women with CKD. Although there are no prospective or randomized trials that examine the relationship between dialysis and fetal outcome, there is evidence that increased solute clearance, by early initiation of or intensification of dialysis, is beneficial for the health of the fetus. Case reports and observational studies from the United States, Belgium, and Saudi Arabia suggest that there is a relationship between successful pregnancy and the amount of dialysis received. Unfortunately, in these reports, measures of residual renal function and dialysis adequacy are lacking or incomplete. Nonetheless, compared to nonpregnant patients with CKD, in pregnant women with CKD it is reasonable to begin dialysis at a higher level of residual renal function in the hope of improving fetal outcome.
Contagion Effects between Sovereign and Bank Credit Spreads – A Global Analysis of Interdependencies between Sovereign and Bank CDS Spreads

The interdependencies of sovereign and banking sector credit spreads have been the subject of previous research. Since the 2007-2009 financial crisis the topic has an additional dimension as the size and structure of countries’ balance sheets have changed due to various financial sector bailouts. Moreover, the euro zone sovereign debt crisis exposed the relevance of inter-regional sovereign vs. banking sector risk as financial institutions around the globe appear to be affected by euro zone member solvency issues. In this paper, we examine the contagion effects between sovereign and bank CDS spreads on the inter- and intra-regional levels as well as on the intra-country level during four sub-periods between October 2005 and April 2011. Our results show that before the sovereign debt crisis period there are few inter-regional contagion effects between sovereign vs. bank default risk. By contrast, since the sovereign debt crisis period we observe significant dependencies between the regional sovereign CDS and the regional bank CDS in other regions, predominantly for the Asia-Pacific and European sovereign risk. Conversely, we also find that changes in certain regional bank CDS impact on the sovereign CDS in other regions since the financial crisis period. On the intra-regional level, we find that the impact of bank default risk on sovereign default risk increased substantially since the onset of the financial crisis which reflects the contingent liability of the state for the financial sector in its jurisdiction exposed during the financial crisis. The strength of this finding is highest for countries which provided substantial financial support to their banking sectors, namely America and the European countries. This finding is largely confirmed on the country level whereas interesting exceptions are observed also within groups of countries that share certain properties (such as countries affected by sovereign debt problems).
Validity of brief food frequency questionnaire for estimation of dietary intakes of folate, vitamins B6 and B12, and their associations with plasma homocysteine concentrations

Background Low nutrient intakes of folate, vitamins B6 and B12 have been associated with the risk of chronic diseases and neural tube defects. The aim of this study was to develop a brief food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) for the assessment of these nutrient intakes and to assess its validity. Methods We developed a brief FFQ designed specifically for estimating intakes of folate and vitamins B6 and B12 and covering 21 food items, and used it to carry out dietary surveys of 579 Japanese men and women. The associations of these vitamin intakes with their serum levels and homocysteine concentrations were examined using multiple linear regression analysis after adjusting for sex, age and cardiovascular risk factors. Results The Spearman correlation coefficients between vitamin intakes and their serum concentrations were 0.10 for folate, 0.08 for vitamin B6 and 0.22 for B12. Changes in plasma homocysteine concentrations associated with a one-standard-deviation increment were −0.03 for dietary folate, −0.03 for dietary vitamin B6 and −0.03 for dietary vitamin B12, and were −0.06 for serum folate, −0.03 for serum vitamin B6 and −0.06 for serum vitamin B12. Conclusion Positive correlations between dietary intakes estimated from our brief FFQ and serum concentrations for folate and vitamin B12 as well as negative correlations between dietary intakes and plasma homocysteine concentrations suggest the usefulness of this questionnaire.
Assessing the Stages of Change Among African American Women in a Weight Management Program

The objective of this study was to assess the relationship between stage of change (SOC) and behavioral outcomes among African American women entering obesity treatment in two settings. Fifty-five overweight/obese (body mass index = 26.50-48.13), but otherwise healthy African American women, 23 to 56 years old, attended a 13-week weight loss–treatment program that took place at churches (n = 36) or a university (n = 19). Participants were weighed, completed SOC measures, and had a physical fitness test at pre- and posttreatment. Pretreatment measures of SOC placed 47% of the participants as actors, 31% as contemplators, and 22% as maintainers. Of the 45 women who reported posttreatment SOC, 7% regressed, 44% did not change, and 31% progressed in SOC. Pretreatment SOC predicted posttreatment weight loss in the church setting but not in the university setting. At churches, contemplators lost more weight than actors and maintainers. The church may be a more conducive setting for weight change behaviors for African American women who are categorized as contemplators in the SOC model.
Graph Neural Networks for Object Localization

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a recently proposed connectionist model that extends previous neural methods to structured domains. GNNs can be applied on datasets that contain very general types of graphs and, under mild hypotheses, they have been proven to be universal approximators on graphical domains. Whereas most of the common approaches to graphs processing are based on a preliminary phase that maps each graph onto a simpler data type, like a vector or a sequence of reals, GNNs have the ability to directly process input graphs, thus embedding their connectivity into the processing scheme. In this paper, the main theoretical properties of GNNs are briefly reviewed and they are proposed as a tool for object localization. An experimentation has been carried out on the task of locating the face of a popular Walt Disney character in comic covers. In the dataset the character is shown in a number of different poses, often in cluttered backgrounds, and in high variety of colors. The proposed learning framework provides a way to deal with complex data arising from image segmentation process, without exploiting any prior knowledge on the dataset. The results are very encouraging, prove the viability of the method and the effectiveness of the structural representation of images.
Twelve tips for teaching with concept maps in medical education

Background: Concept maps have been used as a learning tool in a variety of educational setting and provide an opportunity to explore learners’ knowledge structures and promote critical thinking and understanding. Concept mapping is an instructional strategy for individual and group learning that involves integration of knowledge and creation of meaning by relating concepts. Aims: The following tips outline an approach to foster meaningful learning using concept maps. Methods: A total of 12 tips on the use and applications of concept mapping based on the authors’ experiences and the available literature. Results: The 12 tips provide an overview of the theoretical framework and structure of concept maps, suggesting specific uses, and applications in medical education. Conclusions: We describe different types of concept maps based on learners’ task, and how they can be utilized in different educational settings. We provide ideas for educators to integrate this novel educational resource in their teaching and educational practices. Medical educators can utilize concept maps to detect students’ misunderstandings of concepts and to identify knowledge gaps that need to be corrected. Finally, we outline the potential role of concept maps as an assessment tool.
Teratocarcinomas and embryonic stem cells : a practical approach

Abbreviations Poduction of teratocarcinomas from embryos transplanted to extra-uterine sites Cell culture methods and induction of differentiation of embryonal carcinoma cell lines Isolation of genetic variants and fusion hybrids from embryonal carcinoma cell lines Embryo-derived stem cell lines Production and analysis of chimaeric mice Introduction of DNA into embryonic stem cells Experimental analysis of teratocarcinoma cell multiplication and purification of embryonal carcinoma-derived growth factor Cell lines from human germ cell tumours Appendix Index
The COL1A1 gene and acute soft tissue ruptures

Three studies have suggested that the rare TT genotype of the functional Sp1 binding site polymorphism within intron 1 of COL1A1 is associated with cruciate ligament ruptures (CL), shoulder dislocations (SD) and/or Achilles tendon ruptures. Similar genotype distributions were reported for the control and the injury groups in all three studies. In this report, the data from these studies were combined and analyzed. The TT genotype, when compared to the control group (4.1%, n=24 of 581), was significantly under-represented in the (1) CL (0.3%, n=1 of 350, OR=15.0, P=0.0002), (2) CL and SD (0.4% TT genotype, n=2 of 476, OR=10.2, P<0.0001), and (3) CL, SD and Achilles tendon ruptures (0.4% TT genotype, n=2 of 517, OR=11.1, P<0.0001) groups. This combined analysis indicates that the TT genotype appears to be protective against acute soft tissue ruptures and should be incorporated into multifactorial models determining risk of acute soft tissue ruptures.
Clickbait Detection in Tweets Using Self-attentive Network

Clickbait detection in tweets remains an elusive challenge. In this paper, we describe the solution for the Zingel Clickbait Detector at the Clickbait Challenge 2017, which is capable of evaluating each tweet's level of click baiting. We first reformat the regression problem as a multi-classification problem, based on the annotation scheme. To perform multi-classification, we apply a token-level, self-attentive mechanism on the hidden states of bi-directional Gated Recurrent Units (biGRU), which enables the model to generate tweets' task-specific vector representations by attending to important tokens. The self-attentive neural network can be trained end-to-end, without involving any manual feature engineering. Our detector ranked first in the final evaluation of Clickbait Challenge 2017.
Balance of Local Search and Diversity in Sub-swarms of PSO

In this paper, the original particle swarm optimization is divided into several sub-swarms, and we investigate the variation of performance with different sub-swarm numbers under the constraint that the total particle number is fixed. Each sub-swarm works individually for its local optimal solution and the best solution among them is then output as the final solution. Experiments are conducted on some test functions, such as Rastrigin, Schwefel and Rosenbrock functions for verifying the effects of sub-swarms.
Multiple Large Shareholders And Owner-Manager Compensation: Evidence From French Listed Firms

The objective of this study is to examine the relation between complex ownership structures and managerial compensation. More specifically, we examine the impact of the owner-manager’s excess control and the presence of multiple large shareholders (MLS) on the owner-manager’s compensation. Using a sample of French publicly listed firms, the results reveal several important points. First, the owner-manager’s compensation increases with the owner-manager’s excess control. This finding indicates that managers use their power to increase their pay, hence expropriating minority shareholders. Second, the presence of MLS decreases managerial opportunism and prevents owner-managers from diverting corporate resources for their own benefit. Hence, MLS play an important monitoring role.
Crystal structures of the Klenow fragment of DNA polymerase I complexed with deoxynucleoside triphosphate and pyrophosphate.

Crystal structures of the Klenow fragment (KF) of DNA polymerase I from Escherichia coli complexed with deoxynucleoside triphosphate (dNTP) or with pyrophosphate (PPi) determined to 3.9-A resolution by X-ray crystallography show these molecules binding within the cleft of the polymerase domain and surrounded by residues previously implicated in dNTP binding. The dNTP binds adjacent to the O-helix [Ollis, D. L. , Brick, P., Hamlin, R. , Xuong, N. G. , & Steitz, T. A. (1985a) Nature 313, 762-766] with its triphosphate moiety anchored by three positively charged residues, Arg 754, Arg 682, and Lys 758, plus His 734 and Gln 708. The dNTP binding site observed in the crystal is consistent with the results of chemical modification including cross-linking and is also near many of the amino acid residues whose mutation affects catalysis [Polesky, A. H. , Steitz, T. A. , Grindley, N. D. F. , & Joyce, C. M. (1990) J. Biol. Chem. 265, 14579-14591; Polesky, A. H. , Dahlberg, M. E. , Benkovic, S. J., Grindley, N. D. F. , & Joyce, C. M. (1992) J. Biol. Chem. 267, 8417-8428]. However, we conclude that the position of at least the dNMP moiety of dNTP in the binary complex is not likely to be the same as in its catalytically relevant complex with primer-template DNA.
Phytobacterial Type VI Secretion System - Gene Distribution, Phylogeny, Structure and Biological Functions

Panagiotis F. Sarris1,2, Emmanouil A. Trantas2, Nicholas Skandalis3, Anastasia P. Tampakaki4, Maria Kapanidou1, Michael Kokkinidis1,5 and Nickolas J. Panopoulos1,6 1Department of Biology, University of Crete, Heraklion 2Department of Plant Sciences, School of Agricultural Technology, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Heraklion 3Benaki Phytopathological Institute, Kifisia, Athens 4Department of Agricultural Biotechnology, Agricultural University of Athens, Athens 5Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas, Heraklion 6University of California, Berkeley, CA, 1,2,3,4,5Greece 6USA
Computing with Hereditarily Binary Natural Numbers

Can we do arithmetic in a completely different way, with a radically different data structure? Could this approach provide practical benefits, like operations on giant numbers while having an average performance similar to traditional bitstring representations? Our Hereditarily binary numbers introduced in this paper provide compact tree-representations of the largest known prime number and its related perfect number. The same also applies to Fermat numbers and interesting complexity reductions happen to important computations like bitsize, while exponentiation of two becomes a constant time operation.
Position sensorless control for interior permanent magnet synchronous motors using H∞ flux observer

Generally, a back electro-motive-force or flux observer is used for position sensorless drive of permanent magnet synchronous motors from middle to high speed range. Thus, the estimation accuracy of the observer influences position sensorless drive performance. This paper proposes a position sensorless drive system using the Hinfin flux observer in which the observer gain is designed by using the Hinfin control theory. This observer is insensitive to high frequency disturbances such as voltage disturbance due to nonlinearity of PWM voltage source inverter, measurement noise of current sensors, and modeling errors. The detailed configuration of the Hinfin flux observer is given. Then, the performances of the proposed system are shown by computer simulations.
Regulated Intramembrane Proteolysis of Bri 2 ( Itm 2 b ) by ADAM 10 and SPPL 2 a / SPPL 2 b *

Lucas Martin, Regina Fluhrer, Karina Reiss, Elisabeth Kremmer, Paul Saftig, and Christian Haass From the Center for Integrated Protein Science Munich and the Adolf Butenandt Institute, Department of Biochemistry, Laboratory for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, Ludwig Maximilians University, 80336 Munich, Germany, the Biochemical Institute, University of Kiel, 24098 Kiel, Germany, and Gesellschaft für StrahIenforschung-Forschungszentrum, Institute for Molecular Immunology, 81377 Munich, Germany
Bargaining with Multinationals: The Investment of Siemens and Nissan in North-East England

Introduction PART 1: GLOBALISATION OF PRODUCTION, TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION Theoretical Approaches and Structural Changes Foreign Direct Investment and Location Decision Making Globalisation and Economic Development PART 2: THE BARGAINING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GOVERNMENTS AND MNCS Government-MNC Relations A Model of Government-MNC Bargaining Nissan's Investment in the UK Siemens' Investment in the UK PART 3: INWARD INVESTMENT POLICY AND THE IMPACT OF ON ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Inward Investment in the UK Inward Investment in the UK regions Inward Investment and Regional Development in North East England Conclusions and Policy Recommendations