Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Patent disclosure and R&D competition in pharmaceuticals

The prominent role played by patents within the pharmaceutical domain is unquestionable. In this paper, we focus on a relatively neglected implication of patents: the effect of patent-induced information disclosure on the dynamics of R&D and market competition. The study builds upon the combination of two large datasets, linking the information about patents to firm-level data on R&D projects and their outcome. Two case studies in the fields of anti-inflammatory compounds and cancer research complement our analysis. We argue that patent disclosure induces R&D competition and shapes firms’ technological trajectories. In fact, we show that under conditions of uncertainty, patent disclosure can contribute to generate knowledge spillovers, promoting multiple parallel research efforts on plausible targets and stimulating private investment and competition.
A Survey on Easy OCR Techniques used to build Systems for Visually Impaired People

: Recently, Optical Character Recognition is usually being employed in most of the easy approach. OCR techniques facilitate you to convert pictures, PDF files and numerous different kinds of documents into editable and \searchable information. Acceptable character recog-nition from all variations of pictures could be an up to date drawback. Various tools, algorithms and implement-tations are obtainable to discover characters from pictures. This survey paper presents a quick summary on favoured OCR techniques like matrix matching, feature extraction; neural network primarily based OCR and discusses OCR software system Tesseract.
Amazing Abiotic Stress Response of a Novel Strain Bacillus alveiNRC-14Isolated from Egyptian Soil

A variety of amazing extracellular metabolites produced by the novel strain Bacillus alvei NRC-14 have been studied. During a long-term of experiments with the strain, it was found that it, interestingly, produces extracellular metabolites whether under normal or stress environments. Exopolysaccharides synthesized by B. alvei NRC-14 under stress growth conditions were found to protect the bacterium from extreme pH values, elevated temperature, drying, and water activity-reducing components. Strain B.alvei NRC-14 was examined for anexopolysaccharide (EPS)production when exposed to abiotic stress shock. A tentative bioassay showed that the stress increased the EPS formation which was associated with about 10-fold encrease in the viscosity.It was clearly shown that the biosynthesis of EPS biofilm from strain NRC-14is growth-associated and hence displays primary metabolite kinetics. The production kinetics and EPS yields were strongly dependent on the abiotic stress conditions. Physical factors such as temperature, pH and oxygen tension as well as chemical factors such as medium composition, element concentration, and carbon source were of utmost importance. It is observed that, cells treated with ethanol or exposed to heat elevation displayed irregular and wrinkled shapes on agar surfaces. The adapted cells to each stress under sub-lethal conditions exhibited increased resistance to the same stress of lethal conditions. For example, cells adapted to 42°C exhibited markedly increased resistance to the lethal stresses of 45°C as well as to 20% ethanol.
Performance and Interpretation of Classification Models

Classification is a common statistical task in many areas. In order to ameliorate the performance of the existing methods, there are always some new classification procedures proposed. These procedures, especially those raised in the machine learning and data-mining literature, are usually complicated, and therefore extra effort is required to understand them and the impacts of individual variables in these procedures. However, in some applications, for example, pharmaceutical and medical related research, future developments and/or research plans will rely on the interpretation of the classification rule, such as the role of individual variables in a diagnostic rule/model. Hence, in these kinds of research, despite the optimal performance of the complicated models, the model with the balanced ease of interpretability and satisfactory performance is preferred. The complication of a classification rule might diminish its advantage in performance and become an obstacle to be used in those applications. In this paper, we study how to improve the classification performance, in terms of area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of a conventional logistic model, while retaining its ease of interpretation. The proposed method increases the sensitivity at the whole range of specificity and hence is especially useful when the performance in the high-specificity range of a receiver operating characteristic curve is of interest. Theoretical justification is presented, and numerical results using both simulated data and two real data sets are reported.
Digital Image Watermarking Based on LSB for Gray Scale Image

In recent years, internet revolution resulted in an explosive growth in multimedia applications. The rapid advancement of internet has made it easier to send the data/image accurate and faster to the destination. Besides this, it is easier to modify and misuse the valuable information through hacking at the same time. Digital watermarking is one of the proposed solutions for copyright protection of multimedia data. A watermark is a form, image or text that is impressed onto paper, which provides evidence of its authenticity. In this paper an invisible watermarking technique (least significant bit) and a visible watermarking technique is implemented. This paper presents the general overview of image watermarking and different security issues. In this paper, Image Watermarking using Least Significant Bit (LSB) algorithm has been used for embedding the message/logo into the image. This work has been implemented through MATLAB.
THE EFFECTS OF CORPORATE GOVERNANCE ON CAPITAL STRUCTURE IN TAIWANESE CORPORATIONS AFTER CONTROLLING FOR THE HETEROGENEITY OF INDUSTRIES AND FIRM SIZE

Since the MM theory, scholars have discussed capital structure issues from the perspectives of agency problems in corporate governance. Corporate governance has been seen as the means to reducing the agency costs produced by aligning the interests of management and shareholders, and the incentive for the management to engage in opportunistic behavior has been influenced by the firm’s ownership and board of director structures. Previous studies, however, focus on traditional financial factors and neglect the debt and equity agency problems triggered by corporate governance and their possible influences on capital structure decisions. The sample used in this study consists of 317 firms listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange from 1998 to 2007. By controlling for the heterogeneity of industries and firm size, our models incorporate the cash flow rights-voting rights-seat control divergence, the ownership structure, and the structure of the board of directors to examine the effects of corporate governance on the firm’s capital structure. The results show that, when the divergence between cash flow rights and seat control is lower or when the divergence between voting rights and seat control is higher, the controlling shareholders can either control the board of directors to better monitor the firm or exhibit a preference for debt financing based on entrenchment motives. Further analysis indicates that blockholders prefer lower debt financing and do not expropriate minority shareholders. Financial institutional shareholders function through their provision of monitoring and the certification of debts for technological firms and can decrease the firms’ debts. The management in the technological industry firms prefers debt financing in order to obtain agency-related benefits. While directors in traditional industries or large firms might use personal or firm debt to tunnel the firm’s assets, the function of independent directors in technological firms or large firms of lowering debts in order to reduce the firm’s bankruptcy risks is more evident.
Global patterns of change in discharge regimes for 2100

This study makes a thorough global assessment of the effects of climate change on hydrological regimes and their accompanying uncertainties. Meteorological data from twelve GCMs (SRES scenarios A1B and control experiment 20C3M) are used to drive the global hydrological model PCR-GLOBWB. This reveals in which regions of the world changes in hydrology can be detected that have a high likelihood and are consistent amongst the ensemble of GCMs. New compared to existing studies is: (1) the comparison of spatial patterns of regime changes and (2) the quantification of notable consistent changes calculated relative to the GCM specific natural variability. The resulting consistency maps indicate in which regions the likelihood of hydrological change is large. Projections of different GCMs diverge widely. This underscores the need of using a multi-model ensemble. Despite discrepancies amongst models, consistent results are revealed: by 2100 the GCMs project consistent decreases in discharge for southern Europe, southern Australia, parts of Africa and southwestern South-America. Discharge decreases strongly for most African rivers, the Murray and the Danube while discharge of monsoon influenced rivers slightly increases. In the Arctic regions river discharge increases and a phase-shift towards earlier peaks is observed. Results are comparable to previous global studies, with a few exceptions. Globally we calculated an ensemble mean discharge increase of more than ten percent. This increase contradicts previously estimated decreases, which is amongst others caused by the use of smaller GCM ensembles and different reference periods.
Making matters? Unpacking the role of practical aesthetic making activities in the general education through the theoretical lens of embodied learning

Abstract New knowledge on cognition and learning generated in the various fields of neuroscience is now being incorporated into the learning sciences. This development might have broad significance for the theoretical development of the field of education, in particular leading to a renewed and more nuanced understanding of learning as an embodied process. The Nordic countries have a long and rich tradition of including arts and crafts as core subjects in children’s education; however, there is an ongoing discussion of its potential role in the twenty-first century. The new knowledge on cognition and learning opens up new vistas on practical-aesthetic “making” activities in the general education of children. This article establishes a theoretical lens of embodied learning as an operational translational framework for questioning the assumption that “making matters” and uses it as a tentative analytical tool to unpack an example of making activities.
Reflective Teaching and Learning: Why We Should Make Time to Think

The demanding, competitive, and output-centred culture of higher education often trickles into our teaching where focus is on the summative product rather than the process of learning. Reflection is one means of encouraging deeper and richer understandings during the learning process, and is a form of purposeful thinking that can be used to explore complex problems, anticipate outcomes, or be used on unstructured ideas to gain clarification (Larrivee & Cooper, 2006; Ryan, 2013). Reflection can be applied in higher education to enable a learner to grow intellectually, professionally and personally (Rogers, 2001; Ryan, 2011). The process of reflection allows the learner to seek out personal meanings and identifications with the learning material and create connections with the ideas and content already known (Ash & Clayton, 2009). This process fosters further learning, as the individual develops new concepts, relationships, and perspectives and also reinforces their current understandings through this feedback system (Rogers, 2001). This workshop engages participants in a pre-facilitation activity on reflective writing used to represent the reflection process and to further illustrate what reflection is, how it can be used as a learning skill, and how it can be assessed.
Revisiting the Bradley-Terry model and its application to information retrieval

The Bradley-Terry model is widely used for analysis of pairwise preference data. We explain that the popularity of Bradley-Terry model is gained due to not only easy computation but also some nice asymptotic properties when the model is misspecified. For information retrieval required to analyze big ranking data, we propose to use a pseudo likelihood based on the Bradley-Terry model even when the true model is different from the Bradley-Terry model. We justify using the Bradley-Terry model by proving that the estimated ranking based on the proposed pseudo likelihood is consistent when the true model belongs to the class of Thurstone models, which is much bigger than the Bradley-Terry model.
Asset prices and information disclosure under recency-biased learning

Much of the literature on how to avoid bubbles in international financial markets has addressed the role of monetary policy and macroprudential regulation. This paper focuses on the role of information disclosure, which has recently emerged as a new financial risk management tool. It does so in a consumption-based asset pricing model in which fluctuations in asset prices are persistently driven by time-varying expectations due to learning on the fundamental process from agents who weight more recent observations relative to earlier ones. When the regulator knows the true law of motion driving the fundamental process, perfect information disclosure about the unknown fundamental process straightforwardly rules out non-fundamental fluctuations in asset prices. However, as highlighted by various commentators of the recent financial crisis in 2007-2008, the regulator might also have to learn the true fundamental process and be recency-biased. I investigate the consequences of this assumption on the efficiency of public disclosure about the model actual parameter and identify under which conditions on the regulator learning process, information dissemination could have contributed to significantly reduce the boom and bust episode in the US S&P 500 price index in the run-up to the recent financial crisis. I show that persistent imprecision in the regulator’s estimate, which arises as soon as the regulator is recency-biased, can significantly call into question the efficiency of information disclosure for mitigating non-fundamental volatility in asset prices.
MAGENTIX: Una Plataforma de Sistema Multiagente Integrada en Linux TIN2005-03395

Agent-based systems are one of most important and exciting research areas which have arisen within the Information Technologies in the last decade. However, if competitive advantages for the Spanish industry have to be achieved through increasing the use of agent-based technologies, it will be necessary to invest a great deal of effort in solving some major flaws which currently affect such technologies. In particular, two of the weaknesses of current multiagent systems platforms are their low performance and their poor scalability, even with a relatively small number of agents and interactions among them. Both problems are related to the software technologies which have traditionally been used for building such platforms. In general, these technologies have favored portability and interoperability aspects rather than efficiency. The main objective of this project is to try to solve both weaknesses. In order to achieve this, we plan to develop an agent platform, conforming to the FIPA standard, integrated in the Linux operating system. The services offered by Linux will be directly used and extended for supporting multi-agent systems technology.
Properties of Hydrogenated Nanoporous SiC : An Ab Initio Study

Nanoporous silicon carbide is part of the important organosilicate class of low dielectric constant alloys. We report first-principles microscopic calculations of the properties of crystalline nanoporous SiCH systems. Properties examined include the density, pore size, dielectric constant, and strain moduli. We examined the relationship between the various properties and the amount of hydrogen in the material. In addition, the bonding topology is examined. The present results are compared with a variety of experiments.
Amplification of hypoxic and acidic events by La Niña conditions on the continental shelf off California

Low‐oxygen and low‐pH events are an increasing concern and threat in the Eastern Pacific coastal waters, and can be lethal for benthic and demersal organisms on the continental shelf. The normal seasonal cycle includes uplifting of isopycnals during upwelling in spring, which brings low‐oxygen and low‐pH water onto the shelf. Five years of continuous observations of subsurface dissolved oxygen off Southern California, reveal large additional oxygen deficiencies relative to the seasonal cycle during the latest La Niña event. While some changes in oxygen related to the isopycnal depression/uplifting during El Niño/La Niña are not unexpected, the observed oxygen changes are 2–3 times larger than what can be explained by cross‐shore exchanges. In late summer 2010, oxygen levels at mid‐depth of the water column reached values of 2.5 ml/L, which is much lower than normal oxygen levels at this time of the seasons, 4–5 ml/L. The extra uplifting of isopycnals related to the La Niña event can explain oxygen reductions only to roughly 3.5 ml/L. We find that the additional oxygen decrease beyond that is strongly correlated with decreased subsurface primary production and strengthened poleward flows by the California Undercurrent. The combined actions of these three processes created a La Niña‐caused oxygen decrease as large and as long as the normal seasonal minimum during upwelling period in spring, but later in the year. With a different timing of a La Niña, the seasonal oxygen minimum and the La Niña anomaly could overlap to potentially create hypoxic events of previously not observed magnitudes.
Labour Market Racial Discrimination in South Africa Revisited

Discrimination is a significant issue in labour market economics across developed as well as developing countries. In this paper we inquire the actual size of wage discrimination in the Republic of Soutn Africa, accounting for large differences in individual endowments. We apply the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition as well as propensity score matching to adequately determine the role of discrimination in the wage gaps observed. Although the size of the absolute racial wage gap is enormous, amounting for more than 500%, the actual estimated effect non-attributable to other factors ranges between 45%-55%. This estimator, however, assumes homogenous discrimination across the wage distribution, while data suggest that there are significant educational, sectoral and occupational differentials. To account for these effects, we implement propensity score matching by finding “statistical twins” of the White population among the Black population, thus we demonstrate how wages differ between these groups in comparable labour market situations. Here too we find that wages for the White are on average approximately 30%, while the effects vary at quartiles of the wage distribution.
Extinction debt and species credit in boreal forests: modelling the consequences of different approaches to biodiversity conservation.

The extinction debt of boreal forest species is estimated to be of the order of 1 000 species in Finland. Using a spatially explicit metapopulation model, this paper examines the likely consequences for the survival of species of different scenarios of forest management and conservation. The results point to the conclusion that it generally pays to concentrate the efforts of improving forest quality at certain areas rather than to spread the same total effort evenly and therefore thinly throughout the entire forest landscape. The practical conclusion is that in southern Finland an extensive restoration program of managed forests to natural-like successional forests is needed to avert the imminent wave of extinctions of specialist forest species. The greatest positive effect is obtained if forests located close to the existing remnants of biologically diverse forests are restored, which would facilitate the migration of target species to the restored forests.
Buckling, propagation and stability of delaminated anisotropic layers

Previously, the authors have developed a modelling methodology that establishes a threshold strain below which damage propagation will not occur in laminates subject to Compression After Impact (CAI). In order to validate this methodology, a number of quasi-istropic coupons each containing a circular artificial delamination have been tested in axial compression. These coupons had 0o, ±45o and 90o dominated thin sublaminates placed above the delamination in order to prove the applicability of the model to sublaminates with high anisotropy. Results indicate the model can predict both the strain at which delaminations in the coupons with 0o and ±45o dominated sublaminates propagate from their original sites and the stability with which propagation occurred. Analysis of the coupon with a 90o dominated sublaminate was inconclusive due to an unexpected experimental propagation mode. For all coupons delamination propagation was in the direction of the dominant fibre direction in the sublaminate. The established methodology is shown to be suitable for assessing the damage tolerance of composite laminates.
Follower perceptions of the emotional intelligence of change leaders: A qualitative study

We present and explore a follower-centric model of how employees perceive the emotional intelligence (EI) of change leaders. Qualitative investigations of EI are rare and have not explored the field of organizational change leadership. Accordingly, we analyse qualitative data from a series of interviews set within the context of organizational change. We examine follower attributions about the abilities of their leaders to manage and express their own emotions and to respond appropriately to the followers’ emotions. The findings reveal that the ways in which leaders deal with emotion might be the key to followers sharing their own emotions with them. The impact of perceived leader EI on follower responses to change is also discussed. The complexity and ambivalence of our participants’ perceptions of the EI of their change leaders highlight the utility of a qualitative investigation.