Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Three Essays on Mergers and Acquisitions: Negative Premium, Failed Mergers, and Deal Quality Implications of Medium of Exchange

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are important economic events. They not only transform firms and industries but also have significant wealth implications for shareholders. In the past decade, investment in merger and acquisition activity has reached unprecedented levels, and the increase in M&A activity and the economic significance of this form of corporate restructuring provide the fundamental motivation for the study of the antecedents and consequences of mergers and acquisitions. In particular, this thesis is motivated by three areas within the M&A literature that demand further research, and it intends to address these gaps in the literature in three separate but interrelated essays. The results from the first essay provides evidence that while target firm’s financial distress and overvaluation permit the bidder to offer a negative acquisition premium, it is the combination of the negative market reaction to the negative premium bid (resulting in a convergence of the target’s stock price to bid price) and high block ownership (resulting in lower share liquidity) that lead target shareholders to prefer the negative premium bid over selling at market prices. The second essay investigates the issue of long-run post-acquisition underperformance, and contributes evidence to the literature that target firms in terminated deals not only outperform their own pre-acquisition performance but also outperform financial and operating performance of targets in completed deals. The third essay investigates the issue medium of exchange choice (i.e., cash or stock) under conditions of asymmetric information. This third essay reports evidence that the information content of announcement returns of bidding firms in stock financed deals is associated with the bidder valuation and the quality of the combination, but only the quality of the combination for cash bidders. The three essays, though investigating different aspects of the construction of the acquisition bid, each identify that the deal construction (e.g., deal consideration, medium of exchange) and deal outcomes (e.g., failure or success) is a key determinant of post-combination outcomes, both in terms of financial and operating performance.
Deep penetrating nevus-like borderline tumors: A unique subset of ambiguous melanocytic tumors with malignant potential and normal cytogenetics

BackgroundDeep penetrating nevi (DPN) are a relatively uncommon subtype of melanocytic nevi. A small subset of these lesions exhibit atypical features (cytologic and architectural atypia, mitotic activity) seen in melanoma. These lesions we term the deep penetrating nevuslike borderline tumor. Unequivocal melanomas can show overlapping morphologic features of DPN, which have been termed plexiform melanomas.Patients and methods40 cases of DPN-like borderline tumor were identified along with 6 cases of plexiform melanoma. Clinical follow up was obtained, along with cytogenetic analysis in the form of fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) and/or comparative genomic hybridization (CGH). ResultsThe DPN-like borderline tumor cases included 24 females and 16 males. Of sentinel lymph node biopsies performed, 1/3 of cases showed lymph node involvement. All patients where an aggressive clinical approach was adopted remain free of disease. All 6 DPN-like borderline tumor cases tested by CGH showed normal cytogenetics, as did 7 of 9 cases tested by FISH. Of the plexiform melanomas, 4/6 patients died of disease. In 3 cases there was morphologic progression from a DPN-like borderline tumor to overt melanoma. In one case of progression, cytogenetics was normal in the DPN-like borderline tumor and then abnormal in the progressed melanoma.ConclusionDPN-like borderline tumors are melanocytic tumors associated with a high incidence of regional lymph node disease and exhibiting the potential for melanoma progression despite a normal cytogenetic profile. Patients with these lesions should be aggressively managed, with at least complete re-excision and consideration of sentinel node biopsy, regardless of cytogenetic data.
Reactance to Recommendations: When Unsolicited Advice Yields Contrary Responses

Recommendations often play a positive role in the decision process by reducing the difficulty associated with choosing between options. However, in certain circumstances recommendations play a less positive and more undesirable role from the perspectives of both the recommending agent or agency and the person receiving the recommendation. Across a series of four studies, we explore consumer response when recommendations by experts and intelligent agents contradict the consumer's initial impressions of choice options. We find that unsolicited advice that contradicts initial impressions leads to the activation of a reactant state on the part of the decision maker. This reactance, in turn, leads to a behavioral backlash that results not only in consumers ignoring the agents' recommendations but in intentionally contradicting them.
Prediction of Pareto dominance by reducing equivalent and redundent dimensions in decision vectors

In order to increase accuracy predicting Pareto dominance in optimizing expensive multi-objective problems with high dimensional decision vector space, a method to identifying the equivalent and redundant dimensions in decision vector space is proposed. A kind of satisfaction degree based on the contribution of each decision component to each objective function is defined and used to determine the equivalent and redundant dimensions. In calculating the similarity of two candidate solutions based on distance measurement, equivalent components in decision vectors are mapped into a single component by using Sammon nonlinear mapping, and the redundant components are directly ignored. The reduced decision vector space of the observed data is used in the nearest neighbor method of predicting Pareto dominance. The experiment results on 6 typical unconstrained multi-objective optimization problems show that the proposed method is capable of increasing the accuracy of predicting Pareto dominance significantly.
Endosulfan Sulfate Mobility in Soil Columns and Pesticide Pollution of Groundwater in Northwest Morocco

Groundwater pollution from agricultural practices is a serious environmental and health problem. In this work, stir bar sorptive extraction (SBSE) and gas chromatography (GC) with mass spectrometry (MS) detection were used to determine phytosanitary products in groundwater samples from the Loukkos perimeter in Northwest Morocco. Some pesticides—in particular, endosulfan and its metabolites—were found in water destined for human consumption. Analyses of soil samples were also carried out, and the results showed endosulfan sulfate and endosulfan ether in abundance. Endosulfan sulfate leaching was also performed in undisturbed soil columns to obtain more information on the vertical migration of pesticides used in the perimeter. The kinetic study showed a high recovery rate (73%) after 10 days of experimental work.
Comprehensive geriatric assessment and home-based rehabilitation for elderly people with a history of recurrent non-elective hospital admissions.

OBJECTIVE To determine whether a co-ordinated programme of geriatric assessment and multidisciplinary home-based rehabilitation reduces disability and prevents non-elective hospital readmission in high-risk elderly patients. DESIGN Nested case-control study comparing usual post-discharge care versus usual care plus a comprehensive geriatric assessment and home-based rehabilitation service, comprising nursing, occupational therapy and physiotherapy with geriatric medical review. Patients were >or=65 years with >or=2 non-elective hospital admissions within the previous 12 months. Disability was assessed using the 100-point Barthel index and Nottingham extended activities of daily living (EADL) score. Non-elective hospital admissions were recorded over 1-year follow-up. RESULTS We studied 84 patients; 56 receiving the new service were matched to 28 controls. Intervention subjects received a median of 19 h [interquartile range (IQR) (7,35)] rehabilitation over 19 [IQR (6,42)] domiciliary visits. At 3 months, there was improvement in median Barthel and Nottingham EADL scores in the intervention group of 3 and 2 points, respectively, compared with reductions in controls of 3 and 6 points (both P<0.001, changes in intervention group versus controls); similar differences persisted in survivors at 12 months. There was a non-significant trend for reduction in the proportion of patients with further non-elective hospital admission in the intervention group (36/56, 64%) compared with controls (21/28, 75%; OR 0.70, 95% CI 0.34, 1.46). CONCLUSIONS A co-ordinated programme of geriatric assessment and multidisciplinary home-based rehabilitation reduced disability in elderly patients at high risk for non-elective hospital admission. Further research is required to determine whether this approach can reduce the need for hospital admission.
Atom stabilization algorithm and its real life applications

This work introduces an optimization algorithm based on Bohr's atomic model. Microcosm of physics and chemistry such as excitation and de-excitation of electrons in atom and bond formation phenomenon are the key mechanism of this algorithm. Performance of proposed algorithm is analyzed with six standard benchmark functions. Results are compared with three competitor algorithms. Results indicate competency of the proposed algorithm in generating good quality solutions with high convergence rate. Proposed algorithm is also applied to real life applications and examined comparative performance with respect to existing implementation of optimization techniques.
Comparison of a Commercially Available Repetitive-Element PCR System (DiversiLab) with PCR Ribotyping for Typing of Clostridium difficile Strains

ABSTRACT This study compared a repetitive-element PCR (rep-PCR) method (DiversiLab system) to PCR ribotyping. The discriminatory power of rep-PCR was 0.997. Among the PCR ribotype 027 isolates tested, different rep types could be distinguished. rep-PCR showed a higher discriminatory power than PCR ribotyping. Nevertheless, this method requires technical skill, and visual interpretation of rep-PCR fingerprint patterns may be difficult.
Physiological basis for BOLD MR signal changes due to neuronal stimulation: Separation of blood volume and magnetic susceptibility effects

An NMR method is applied for separating blood volume and magnetic susceptibility effects in response to neuronal stimulation in a rat model. The method uses high susceptibility contrast agents to enhance blood volume induced signal changes. In the absence of exogenous agent, the dominant source of signal change on neuronal activation is associated with the signal increase from the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) effect. The relative negative contribution of blood volume changes to BOLD changes is maximally estimated to be 34%. The blood volume changes associated with median nerve stimulation (7 Hz) in the motor cortex are 26 ± 7% and the corresponding blood susceptibility changes are 0.021 ± 0.006 ppm. These methods can be applied to enhance the sensitivity of fMRl signal response and provide accurate quantitative measures of blood volume response to stimulation.
E-Governance as an Alternative Antecedent to a Lean Public Sector : Theory and Evidence

The ever growing size of the public sector has been a contention in theory and practice. In parallel, the public sector use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), otherwise known as Electronic Government has had a transformative potential. Inspired by these competing interests, this paper set out to study the relationship between investments in e-Government and the size of public sector. Informed by Banks-Weingast model of bureaucratic discretion drawn upon political science, the research estimated the linkage. Using a balanced panel data of Kenya’s key ministries for a 10 year period (2004-2014), e-Government expenditure, consumer price indices (CPI) and gross domestic product (GDP), the study found that 1 per cent increase in the intensity of investment in e-Government infrastructure leads to 0.295 per cent reduction in the size of the public sector, and this forms the main contribution in the paper. In theory, the study presents a robust model that enables the viewing of the interrelationship from a newer vantage point using a perspective foreign to information systems discipline. In practice, the integrative thinking reveals that while investments in e-Government may control government’s recurrent costs, it does counter bureaucrats’ self-interestedness, an ideology which appears to thrive in a world of information asymmetry. Thus, the paper demonstrates that eGovernment is a technological determinant of the size of a bureaucracy and may act as an alternative consideration to achieve a leaner public sector.
Giving Fuzziness to Spatial Clusters: a New Index for Choosing the Optimal Number of Clusters

Choosing the optimal number of clusters is a key issue in cluster analysis. Especially when dealing with more spatial clustering, things tend to be more complicated. Cluster validation helps to determine the appropriate number of clusters present in a dataset. Furthermore, cluster validation evaluates and assesses the results of clustering algorithms. There are numerous methods and techniques for choosing the optimal number of clusters via crisp and fuzzy clustering. In this paper, we introduce a new index for fuzzy clustering to determine the optimal number of clusters. This index is not another metric for calculating compactness or separation among partitions. Instead, the index uses several existing indices to give a degree, or fuzziness, to the optimal number of clusters. In this way, not only do the objects in a fuzzy cluster get a membership value, but the number of clusters to be partitioned is given a value as well. The new index is used in the fuzzy c-means algorithm for the geodemographic segmentation of 285 postal codes.
A TAXONOMY OF STRATEGIES FOR MULTIMODAL PERSUASIVE MESSAGE GENERATION

Future intelligent systems will have contextual goals to pursue. As opposed to more traditional scenarios of human computer interaction, intelligent persuasive systems may also aim to induce the user or, in general, the audience, to perform some actions in the real world. Some scenarios of application are dynamic advertisement, preventive medicine, social action, and edutainment. As a step in this direction, a prototype called Promoter was developed for the production of persuasive messages. In modeling persuasion, the cognitive state of the participants (beliefs, desires, and intentions) is taken into account, as well as their social relations, their emotions, and the context of interaction. In this article, a taxonomy of persuasive strategies and the meta-reasoning model that works on this taxonomy is described. The taxonomy is built by taking into consideration studies coming both from social psychology and philosophy, and from the area of natural argumentation. The taxonomy is not domain specific and it helps to bridge persuasion strategies and rhetorical relations, a fundamental element in text planning. The use of this taxonomy also permits reasoning on the basis of emotion expression in accordance with persuasion strategies for multimodal message generation.
The UMD Machine Translation Systems at IWSLT 2016: English-to-French Translation of Speech Transcripts

We describe the University of Maryland machine translation system submitted to the IWSLT 2016 Microsoft Speech Language Translation (MSLT) English-French task. Our main finding is that translating conversation transcripts turned out to not be as challenging as we expected: while translation quality is of course not perfect, a straightforward phrase-based system trained on movie subtitles yields high BLEU scores (high 40s on the development set) and manual analysis of 100 examples showed that 61 of them were correctly translated, and errors were mostly local disfluencies in the remaining examples.
Interaction Effects of System-Generated Information and Consumer Skepticism: An Evaluation of Issue Support Behavior in CSR Twitter Campaigns

Abstract This study examines the impact of Twitter followers and consumer skepticism on issue support behavior advocated in Twitter-based corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication. A 2 × 2 experiment demonstrated the interaction effect of the number of followers and consumer skepticism on issue support behavior, drinking and driving prevention behavior. Effects of consumer skepticism on issue support behavior were lessened when participants saw the Twitter-based CSR campaign with a higher number of Twitter followers. The study has implications for system-generated information and CSR skepticism research based on attribution theory.
Efficient 1-out-of-n oblivious transfer schemes with universally usable parameters

We propose efficient and secure (string) oblivious transfer (OT/sup 1//sub n/) schemes for any n/spl ges/2. We build our OT/sup 1//sub n/ scheme from fundamental cryptographic techniques directly. The receiver's choice is unconditionally secure and the secrecy of the unchosen secrets is based on the hardness of the decisional Diffie-Hellman problem. Some schemes achieve optimal efficiency in terms of the number of rounds and the total number of exchanged messages for the case that the receiver's choice is unconditionally secure. The distinct feature of our scheme is that the system-wide parameters are independent of n and universally usable, that is, all possible receivers and senders use the same parameters and need no trapdoors specific to each of them. We extend our OT/sup 1//sub n/ schemes to distributed oblivious transfer schemes. Our distributed OT/sup 1//sub n/ schemes take full advantage of the research results of secret sharing. For applications, we present a method of transforming any (single-database) PIR protocol into a symmetric PIR protocol by slightly increasing the communication cost only.
Bruit d'Alimentation et Couplage par le Substrat dans les Circuits Mixtes

La maitrise de la conception de circuits integres mixtes est un des points cles pour la realisation des futurs systemes integres monolithiques (Systems On Chip). Des blocs analogiques sont places dans le meme substrat, la meme puce, que des blocs de traitement logique de plusieurs millions de transistors. Le bruit de commutation numerique peut s'averer genant pour l'acquisition de signaux analogiques mais aussi pour le fonctionnement du circuit numerique lui-meme. La prise en compte du bruit d'alimentation et du couplage par le substrat dans ce type de circuit est difficile. Il est necessaire d'elaborer une methodologie permettant de modeliser le bruit d'alimentation et le couplage par le substrat dans ces circuits mixtes. Une premiere partie decrit les differents phenomenes impliques dans le bruit d'alimentation et le bruit substrat. Une bonne comprehension de ces mecanismes permet de les modeliser de maniere fidele et ainsi de mettre en place une methodologie de conception prenant en compte le bruit d'alimentation et le couplage par le substrat dans un circuit mixte. L'utilisation d'un modele standard (ICEM) est montree. Ce modele est utilisable des les premieres etapes d'elaboration du circuit. Une seconde partie met en pratique les principes et methodes decrites. Differents outils informatiques ont ete mis en place pour modeliser le bruit d'alimentation et la propagation des signaux parasites dans le substrat. Un circuit de test, dedie a la caracterisation du couplage par le substrat dans les circuits mixtes et decline sous plusieurs versions, valide les methodes de simulation electrique mises en place, par de nombreuses comparaisons entre mesures et simulations
BALB/c Mice Bearing a Transgenic IL-12 Receptor β2 Gene Exhibit a Nonhealing Phenotype to Leishmania major Infection Despite Intact IL-12 Signaling

In BALB/c mice infected with Leishmania major, early secretion of IL-4 leads to a Th2-type response and nonhealing. We explored the role of IL-4-induced down-regulation of the IL-12Rβ2 chain in the establishment of this Th2 response. First, we showed that the draining lymph nodes of resistant C57BL/6 mice infected with L. major were enriched in CD4+/IL-12Rβ2 chain+ cells producing IFN-γ. Next, we demonstrated that BALB/c background mice bearing an IL-12Rβ2-chain transgene manifested a nonhealing phenotype similar to wild-type littermates despite the persistence of their ability to undergo STAT4 activation. Finally, we found that such transgenic mice display more severe infection than wild-type littermates when treated with IL-12 7 days after infection, and under this condition, the mice display increased Leishmania Ag-induced IL-4 secretion. These studies indicate that although CD4+/IL-12Rβ2 chain+ T cells are important components of the Th1 response, maintenance of IL-12Rβ2 chain expression is not sufficient to change a Th2 response to a Th1 response in vivo and thus to allow BALB/c mice to heal L. major infection.
Evaluation of Qualitative Value for Money of Public-private Partnership Projects in Vietnam

It is expected that in the period of 2011-2020 projects under the model of public- private partnership (PPP) in Vietnam will continue to increase in both number and volume of financing. Despite the substantial volumes of the already performed investments, many practitioners in the field question the viability of Vietnamese PPP projects, in the road sector in particular. Enhancing the viability of these projects is, therefore, vital in the context of the ongoing economic growth. This research is proposing a qualitative value for money assessment, in order to examine the factors influencing PPP projects’ viability in Vietnam. Employing the method of Structural Equation Modeling, the following two aspects will be included in the analysis: 1) financial performance & economic environment; 2) technical capacity & legal environment. The former encompasses “financial interest”, “profitability”, “economic policy” and “demand of service”; while the latter covers “service quality”, “flexibility of contracts”, “legal framework” and “statutory compliance”.
Threshold logic and two-person, zero-sum games

It is shown that the problem of determining whether or not a given switching function is realizable with a single threshold gate can be reduced directly to that of determining the value of a two-person, zero-sum game. If this value is $\gt$ 1/2, the function is realizable. If the value is $\geq$ 1/2, the function cannot be realized. In the case of realizability the solution of the game gives the set of weights which accomplishes the realization. The method works equally well with functions having "don't care" conditions. When a function is not realizable a threshold gate is, nevertheless, defined together with a "zone of uncertainty. " This gate is such that for a given input, gamma, if the weighted sum is above this "zone of uncertainty" then F(gamma) = 1, within the zone F(gamma;) is uncertain, and below the zone F(gamma) = 0. The larger the value of the game the smaller this "zone of uncertainty. " A method for solving two-person zero-sum games is described and several examples are given.