Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Selective Auditor Rotation and Earnings Management: Evidence from Korea

In Korea, the regulatory authority designates external auditors for firms that are deemed to have high incentives and/or great potential for opportunistic earnings management, and mandates these firms to replace their incumbent auditors by new designated auditors and requires them to keep the designated auditor for a period of typically one to three years. We call this regulatory regime selective auditor rotation. This paper investigates whether the selective auditor rotation rule in Korea is effective in deterring income-increasing earnings management. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that the level of discretionary accruals is significantly lower for firms with designated auditors than firms that freely select their auditors. We also find that the level of discretionary accruals is significantly lower during the designation period, compared to the level during a year prior to the imposed rotation. The above findings are robust to a battery of robustness checks. Overall, our results are consistent with the notion that the selective auditor rotation enhances audit quality and thus the credibility of financial reporting.
Gene duplication as the basis for amino acid ambiguity in the alpha-chain polypeptides of mouse hemoglobins.

The solubility of mouse hemoglobin in potassium phosphate buffers1 is af-fected by amino acid replacements as shown by the primary structure of the a-chain polypeptides of hemoglobins from C57BL, NB, and BALB/c mice.2 Two forms of a-chain polypeptides have been found in BALB/c and SEC mice.2' Hemoglobins from C3H.B and C3H mice are likewise composed of mixtures of two forms of a-chain polypeptides and are well suited to amplify and clarify the genetic and biochemical bases for multiple forms of a-chain polypeptides in mice. Some unique characteristics of a of facili-tated this study, which shows that the multiple forms of a chains in C3H mice result from gene duplication rather than translational ambiguity in codon recog-nition.
Methods of information retrieval using Web of Science: pulmonary hypertension as a subject example

Discusses search operations using the Web of Science via a server on the World Wide Web. The facilities include the usual Boolean etc., search on subject and bibliographic details; cited reference query; and related records. A search example is presented from the field of pulmonary hypertension, concluding that the combination of Web technology and the use of citation interconnections provides a fast and useful retrieval mechanism.
Query Processing Based on Compressed Intermediates

Modern in-memory column-stores employ lightweight data compression to tackle the growing gap between processor speed and main memory bandwidth. However, the compression of intermediate results has not been investigated sufficiently although accessing intermediates is as expensive as accessing the base data in these systems. Therefore, we introduce our vision of a balanced query processing based on compressed intermediates to improve query performance. In this paper, we provide an overview of the important research challenges on the way to this goal, present our contributions so far, and give an outlook on our remaining steps.
A 2.45GHz, 50uW wake-up receiver front-end with −88dBm sensitivity and 250kbps data rate

This paper presents a 2.45 GHz wake-up receiver front-end intended for use in sensor networks, and is designed to receive data modulated with on-off-keying. Manufactured in 65 nm CMOS it employs an uncertain IF structure with three-phase passive mixer and high gain amplifier chain. With the modulation frequency response tailored to the detector behavior, it achieves a sensitivity of -88 dBm at BER of 10-3 with a data rate of 250kbps. Operating on a 0.75V supply it has a power consumption of just 50μW. It provides a 50 Ω input match completely on-chip using a compact inductor and has an active area of just 0.07mm2.
Evaluating the plasticity potential of the auditory brain stem nucleus in the rat.

OBJECTIVE To study the adaptation of the auditory brainstem to auditory loss. STUDY DESIGN Growth-associated protein 43 (GAP-43) immunoreactivity was studied in in rats whose cochleas had been removed. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Neurons in the lateral superior olive were found to synthesize GAP-43 in a pattern that paralleled the changes in GAP-43 immunoreactivity in the cochlear nucleus after cochlear ablation. These findings suggest that new patterns of synaptic communication can be established after damage to the cochlea.
An exploration of how shared corporate service operate and perform in English local government

The concept of shared services has been heavily promoted by UK central government, reportedly offering a mechanism to reduce costs and improve service performance. This advocacy of shared services has advanced ahead of academic research and evidence. This thesis aims to assess whether using this model results in reduced costs and improved performance in local government. A theory-driven research framework is used to assess the impact of using this form of partnership. The dominant theoretical rationale underpinning shared services is the intention to create a partnership to generate economies of scale, achieving reduced costs and improved performance. The model is thought to benefit from effective relationships which reduce supervision costs, and is dependent on effective implementation processes. The research project also incorporates counter-perspectives, which suggest there are limits to economies of scale, and potential challenges to the partnership relationship. The findings of the study indicate that, firstly, in comparison with other models of service delivery, clients of shared services report a more negative perception of performance. Secondly, it seems respondents in those authorities using shared services extensively are more likely to perceive that performance has declined. Thirdly, qualitative data indicate that shared corporate services have been implemented in a limited form, most often constituting a shared management arrangement, perceived to deliver cost reduction but with little evidence of performance improvement. Finally, the findings offer limited evidence of economies of scale, although the data provides some support for the notion that high-trust partnership relationships can reduce supervision costs, and conversely, finding that partnership working can also result in disruption or dysfunction which may bring the partnership to an end. The thesis offers recommendations for theory, research and policy. Overall, it would seem that the effectiveness of shared service partnerships is highly contingent upon the form they take, the effectiveness of the implementation process and a clear understanding of the associated benefits and risks
A Three-protein Charge Zipper Stabilizes a Complex Modulating Bacterial Gene Silencing*

Background: The complex between Hha and H-NS selective represses genes in Enterobacteria acquired by horizontal transfer. Results: A structural model for the regulatory complex is described. Conclusion: A charge zipper formed by interdigitation of residues from three proteins stabilizes the complex. Significance: Charge zippers provide selectivity to electrostatic protein complexes. Understanding selective gene silencing may help fighting antibiotic resistance. The Hha/YmoA nucleoid-associated proteins help selectively silence horizontally acquired genetic material, including pathogenicity and antibiotic resistance genes and their maintenance in the absence of selective pressure. Members of the Hha family contribute to gene silencing by binding to the N-terminal dimerization domain of H-NS and modifying its selectivity. Hha-like proteins and the H-NS N-terminal domain are unusually rich in charged residues, and their interaction is mostly electrostatic-driven but, nonetheless, highly selective. The NMR-based structural model of the complex between Hha/YmoA and the H-NS N-terminal dimerization domain reveals that the origin of the selectivity is the formation of a three-protein charge zipper with interdigitated complementary charged residues from Hha and the two units of the H-NS dimer. The free form of YmoA shows collective microsecond-millisecond dynamics that can by measured by NMR relaxation dispersion experiments and shows a linear dependence with the salt concentration. The number of residues sensing the collective dynamics and the population of the minor form increased in the presence of H-NS. Additionally, a single residue mutation in YmoA (D43N) abolished H-NS binding and the dynamics of the apo-form, suggesting the dynamics and binding are functionally related.
BPR and ERP: A Chinese Case

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is defined as the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes. BPR is also known as a major approach widely used in facilitating Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems implementation. In addition it has been suggested that an awareness of cultural differences is critical to ERP success. In this paper we examine the impact of human and management organizational subsystems on business process change and performance. We use a comparative study of four Chinese organizations with and without ERP systems. The findings of this study prove the importance of soft aspects in business process change through implementation of ERP systems.
The Pension Inducement to Retire: an Option Value Analysis

The option value model developed in an earlier paper is used to simulate the effect on retirement of changes in a firm's pension plan compared to the effect of changes in Social Security provisions. The provisions of the firm's pension plan have a much greater effect than Social Security regulations on the retirement decisions of the firm's employees. The analysis supports the following conclusions: (1) Increasing the firm's early retirement age from 55 to 60, for example, would reduce by almost 40 percent, from . 48 to . 30, the fraction of employees that is retired by age 60. (2) The effect of changes in Social Security rules, on the other hand, would be small. Raising the Social Security retirement ages by one year, for example, has very little effect on employee retirement rates. The proportion retired by age 62 is reduced by only about 4 percent. (3) Changes in Social Security provisions that would otherwise encourage workers to continue working can easily be offset by countervailing changes in the provisions of the firm's pension plan. Firm responses, like delaying the Social Security offset to correspond to m later Social Security retirement age, may simply be m logical revision of current firm plan provisions.
A comparison of service quality dimensions conveyed in advertisements for service providers in the USA and Korea

Purpose – This cross‐national study seeks to examine the service quality dimensions and advertising appeals conveyed in services advertisements in the USA and Korea.Design/methodology/approach – Using Hofstede's cultural dimensions as a basis for distinguishing cultures, this study explores the role of culture in services advertising strategy. Content analysis was used to examine services advertising in the USA and Korea.Findings – The results of a content analysis of over 400 magazine advertisements suggest that advertisers may be able to standardize services advertising in magazines by type of advertising appeal and on specific service quality dimensions.Research limitations/implications – As the service sector continues to grow, future research is needed to compare services advertising for different types of services and in other media. Experimental studies that explicitly examine what types of cues are effective with Korean consumers are needed.Practical implications – Implications for advertisers att.
Network analysis of the hominin origin of Herpes Simplex virus 2 from fossil data

Herpes simplex virus 2 is a human herpesvirus found worldwide that causes genital lesions and more rarely causes encephalitis. This pathogen is most common in Africa, and particularly in central and east Africa, an area of particular significance for the evolution of modern humans. Unlike HSV1, HSV2 has not simply co-speciated with humans from their last common ancestor with primates. HSV2 jumped the species barrier between 1.4 and 3 MYA, most likely through an intermediate but unknown hominin species. In this paper, we use probability-based network analysis to determine the probable path between intermediate hosts of HSV2, from chimpanzees to modern humans, using paleoenvironmental data on the distribution of African tropical rainforest over the last 3 million years and data on the age and distribution of fossil species of hominin present in Africa between 1.4 and 3 MYA. Our model identifies Homo rudolfensis as the most likely intermediate host of HSV2
Emerging Software as a Service and Analytics

This special issue of Open Journal of Cloud Computing (OJCC) (www.ronpub.com/journals/ojcc) reports work in the field of emerging software as a service and analytics, and presents innovative approaches to delivering software services in research and enterprise communities. It contains extended versions of papers selected from the international workshop on Emerging Software as a Service and Analytices (ESaaSA) in association with the international conference on cloud computing and serviced science taken place in Barcelona, Spain during April 2014. OJCC is published by RonPub (www.ronpub.com), which is an academic publisher of online, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
An efficient data collection scheme through multi-path routing structures in wireless sensor networks

An essential method to overcome the high loss rates of wireless communication in sensor data collection is to use multi-path routing. In this paper, we investigate the construction of multi-path routing structures and develop an enhanced scheme for sensor data collection. In constructing multi-path routing structures, we limit the number of messages that each node transmits and receives in data collection to achieve a required energy efficiency level. Then, we design and analyse an enhanced data collection scheme in which sensor nodes exploit the broadcast nature of wireless transmission to overhear their neighbours. This increases the numbers of data propagation paths from sensor nodes to the base station and improves the robustness of data collection without sacrificing the latency of data collection. Experimental results show that our methods achieve significantly better trade-offs among the robustness, latency and energy efficiency of data collection.
Forest certification: a policy perspective

This paper analyses the development of certification programmes in three countries (Indonesia, Canada and Sweden) using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) as a theoretical reference point. The ACF is an actor-based framework for analysing policy processes and has not previously been applied in a developing country. Actors in the three countries took different approaches to certification. In Canada, in a programme development process supported by the forest products industry, a management systems approach was taken. In Sweden, performance standards were developed in a process initially driven by NGOs. In Indonesia, certification was led by an NGO within a framework established by government, and a performance standards approach was used. The paper concludes that forest certification can be best understood as a policy instrument that promotes and facilitates policy-orientated learning among actors, and provides indirect incentives for improved forest management. Learning occurs both as the standards to be used for certification are developed, and as they are implemented. The benefits of learning and consensus building among actors (such as NGOs, forest companies, private forest owners, indigenous peoples, governments, etc.) who have traditionally been in conflict with each other can be significant. On the other hand, where fundamental changes in forest policy (such as tenure and forest revenue reform) are needed, certification should not be seen as a substitute for these A further conclusion is that, while public policies change over periods of decades, the private policies of retailers and forest product companies can adapt more rapidly to changing circumstances. The concept of a ‘fast track' of private policy change, compared to the slower track of governmental policy change, is therefore proposed and described. A number of interesting theoretical and empirical avenues for further research on certification are discussed.
Human-Based Video Browsing - Investigating Interface Design for Fast Video Browsing

The Video Browser Showdown (VBS) is an annual event where researchers evaluate their video search systems in a competitive setting. Searching in videos is often a two-step process: first some sort of pre-filtering is done, where, for example, users query an indexed archive of files, followed by a human-based browsing, where users skim the returned result set in search for the relevant file or portion of it. The VBS aims at this whole search process, focusing in particular on its interactive aspects. Encouraged by previous years' results, we created a system that purely addresses the latter issue, i.e., interface and interaction design. By eliminating all kind of video indexing and query processing, we were aiming to demonstrate the importance of good interface design for video search and that its relevance is often underestimated by today's systems. This claim is clearly proven by the results our system achieved in the VBS 2015 competition, where our approach was on a par with the top performing ones. In this paper, we will describe our system along with related design decisions, present our results from the VBS event, and discuss them in further detail.
Achieving personalized and privacy-preserving range queries over outsourced cloud data

With the increasing prevalence of cloud computing, data owners prefer to outsource their databases to the cloud. For the protection of data privacy, sensitive data have to be encrypted before outsourcing, which introduces much difficulty into effective data utilization. Most previous studies either suffer from privacy disclosure and low efficiency, or do not support personalized multidimensional range queries. In this paper, we focus on personalized private range queries over outsourced data. We propose a personalized and privacy-preserving private range query protocol (PPP), which uses bounding-box PIR (bbPIR) to trade access pattern privacy for flexible privacy and high efficiency, and satisfies various quality of service (QoS) requirements. To our best knowledge, PPP is the first to achieve personalized search according to owner-specified privacy-cost tradeoff. Furthermore, PPP is secure against semi-honest adversaries under known ciphertext model. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that PPP is efficient and able to achieve diverse QoS requirements.
A Quantitative Analysis of Spectral Occupancy Measurements for Cognitive Radio

Cognitive radio (CR) is viewed as a possible solution to the problem of radio spectrum congestion. The CR technique utilizes a temporarily unoccupied licensed band. Before investigating the technical and political implications of CR, it is necessary to know to what extent the licensed bands are temporally unoccupied. This paper describes a spectral occupancy measurement campaign conducted in the frequency range between 806 MHz and 2750 MHz in urban Auckland, New Zealand. The purpose of the measurement is to identify potential spectral opportunities for CR. Statistical analysis of the measurement results are presented in the form of noise distributions, signal amplitude probability distributions, and spectral occupancy rates as percentages of time. These analyses indicate that, on average, the actual spectral usage in this band is only about 6.2%. Pint-to-point links and some mobile uplink channels are identified as the most probable candidates for future CR operations. These results suggest that CR could bring significant gains in spectral usage. These results also imply that, in order to provide a reliable detection of the primary signal, cooperative sensing techniques may be necessary to mitigate various wireless channel effects.
Estimating Equity Premia from CDS Spreads

We propose a new approach to estimate the equity premium using CDS spreads and structural models of default. Our estimates yield equity premia of 6.50% for the U.S., 5.44% for Europe and 6.21% for Asia based on 5-year CDS spreads from 2003-2007. Due to some conservative assumptions these estimates are upper limits for the equity premium. Using 3-, 7- and 10-year CDS maturities yields similar results and offers an opportunity to estimate the term structure of risk premia. Although our estimator is developed in a Merton framework it is robust with respect to model changes. In fact, we obtain similar results when extending the approach to a first-passage-time framework, strategic default frameworks or a framework with unobservable asset values (Duffie/Lando (2001)).
Some Characteristics of Mouse Platelet Aggregation and a Comparison of the Activity of a Range of Compounds in Mouse and Human Platelet-Rich Plasma in Vitro

Summary Collagen-induced platelet aggregation in mouse citrated platelet-rich plasma (PRP) was associated with 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) release and degranulation. Adenosine 5’-diphosphate (ADP) induced monophasic and reversible aggregation with no degranulation. Mouse platelets gave no response to adrenaline but changed shape and sometimes aggregated in response to 5-HT. Both amines potentiated the effect of ADP. The respective potencies of prostaglandin E1, papaverine, VK 774, BL 3459 and adenosine as inhibitors of ADP-induced aggregation were similar in mouse and human PRP. Although ticlopidine had similar activity in the two species, aspirin and flurbiprofen were considerably less potent in mouse than human PRP as inhibitors of collagen-induced aggregation. It is suggested that collagen-induced aggregation of mouse platelets in vitro occurs by a mechanism largely independent of arachidonic acid metabolites.
The PROMISE Study: A Phase 2b Multicenter Study of Voclosporin (ISA247) Versus Tacrolimus in De Novo Kidney Transplantation

Voclosporin (VCS, ISA247) is a novel calcineurin inhibitor being developed for organ transplantation. PROMISE was a 6‐month, multicenter, randomized, open‐label study of three ascending concentration‐controlled groups of VCS (low, medium and high) compared to tacrolimus (TAC) in 334 low‐risk renal transplant recipients. The primary endpoint was demonstration of noninferiority of biopsy proven acute rejection (BPAR) rates. Secondary objectives included renal function, new onset diabetes after transplantation (NODAT), hypertension, hyperlipidemia and pharmacokinetic–pharmacodynamic evaluation. The incidence of BPAR in the VCS groups (10.7%, 9.1% and 2.3%, respectively) was noninferior to TAC (5.8%). The incidence of NODAT for VCS was 1.6%, 5.7% and 17.7% versus 16.4% in TAC (low‐dose VCS, p = 0.03). Nankivell estimated glomerular filtration rate was respectively: 71, 72, 68 and 69 mL/min, statistically lower in the high‐dose group, p = 0.049. The incidence of hypertension and adverse events was not different between the VCS groups and TAC. VCS demonstrated an excellent correlation between trough and area under the curve (r2= 0.97) and no difference in mycophenolic acid exposure compared to TAC. This 6‐month study shows VCS to be as efficacious as TAC in preventing acute rejection with similar renal function in the low‐ and medium‐exposure groups, and potentially associated with a reduced incidence of NODAT.