Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Informed Repurchases, Information Asymmetry and the Market Response to Open Market Share Repurchases

This paper relates informed repurchases to firm information asymmetry. We propose a new measure of informed repurchases, which is based on causality tests relating repurchase information to firm returns. Our results indicate that informed repurchases show larger abnormal returns surrounding the announcement of an open market share repurchase, which suggests the market at least partially recognizes informed repurchases. This holds after controlling for conventional information asymmetry proxies, such as firm size, number of analysts following, and analyst forecast dispersion, indicating that the market is aware of repurchase specific information not captured by traditional information asymmetry proxies. Informed repurchases demonstrate larger long-term abnormal returns at one, two, and three-year windows than high traditional information asymmetry repurchases.
Copper-resistant, biofilm-forming bacteria for potential use in rehabilitation of copper-contaminated wastewater

Ninety bacterial isolates from copper-contaminated wastewater from a local semiconductor company were screened for resistance to varying concentrations of copper. Of the copper-resistant isolates, 49 produced biofilm at varying thickness on microtiter plate using Tryptic Soy Broth as substrate. Isolate T21 could tolerate up to 125 ppm copper and was provisionally identified as Bacillus megaterium based on comparative analysis of 16S rRNA sequences. Isolate T21 was immobilized as biofilm on a 30-liter fixed-bed upflow reactor using polyvinyl chloride corrugated pipe and Tryptic Soy Broth combined with alcohol distillery slop (75:25 v/v) as carrier and growth medium, respectively. When used to treat copper-containing wastewater effluent from a local semiconductor company, the immobilized biofilm reduced copper to as much as 65.95%, showing potential to clean up copper-contaminated wastewater. Keywords—biofilm, bioremediation, copper, metal resistance, Bacillus megaterium
Demonstration of Fault Detection and Diagnosis Methods for Air-Handling Units

Results are presented from controlled field tests of two methods for detecting and diagnosing faults in HVAC equipment. The tests were conducted in a unique research building that featured two air-handling units serving matched sets of unoccupied rooms with adjustable internal loads. Tests were also conducted in the same building on a third air handler serving areas used for instruction and by building staff. One of the two fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) methods used first-principles-based models of system components. The data used by this approach were obtained from sensors typically installed for control purposes. The second method was based on semiempirical correlations of submetered electrical power with flow rates or process control signals. Faults were introduced into the air-mixing, filter-coil, and fan sections of each of the three air-handling units. In the matched air-handling units, faults were implemented over three blind test periods (summer, winter, and spring operating conditions). In each test period, the precise timing of the implementation of the fault conditions was unknown to the researchers. The faults were, however, selected from an agreed set of conditions and magnitudes, established for each season. This was necessary to ensure that at least some magnitudes of the faults could be detected by the FDD methods during the limited test period. Six faults were used for a single summer test period involving the third air-handling unit. These fault conditions were completely unknown to the researchers and the test period was truly blind. The two FDD methods were evaluated on the basis of their sensitivity, robustness, the number of sensors required, and ease of implementation. Both methods detected nearly all of the faults in the two matched air-handling units but fewer of the unknown faults in the third air-handling unit. Fault diagnosis was more difficult than detection. The first-principles-based method misdiagnosed several faults. The electrical power correlation method demonstrated greater success in diagnosis, although the limited number of faults addressed in the tests contributed to this success. The first-principles-based models require a larger number of sensors than the electrical power correlation models, although the latter method requires power meters that are not typically installed. The first-principles-based models require training data for each subsystem model to tune the respective parameters so that the model predictions more precisely represent the target system. This is obtained by an open-loop test procedure. The electrical power correlation method uses polynomial models generated from data collected from “normal” system operation, under closed-loop control. Both methods were found to require further work in three principal areas: to reduce the number of parameters to be identified; to assess the impact of less expensive or fewer sensors; and to further automate their implementation. The first-principles-based models also require further work to improve the robustness of predictions.
Discriminating Among Several Semiparametric Models

To distinguish between two or more than two models one can use the T-optimality criterion. Another criterion using for discrimination between two or more than two models is KL-criterion, which depend on the Kullback-Leibler distance. KL-criterion can be used to discriminate between two non-normal models and a generalized of the KL-criterion was studied to discriminate more than two non-normal models. In this paper, more than two semiparametric models can be distinguished using generalized KL-criterion. An application was applied to illustrate the proposed technique by using three proportional hazard models via real data.
Virus-Induced LeSPL-CNR Silencing Inhibits Fruit Ripening in Tomato

Fruit ripening is a developmentally and genetically programmed process. In tomato ( Solanum lycopersicum ), ripening determines fruit quality, commodity value, shelf life and many important attributes. To understand this intricate process and its underpinning mechanism, an efficient and effective approach for screening and functional analysis of ripening-associated genes (RAGs) is required. Virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) is a powerful reverse genetics tool for uncovering gene functions in plants. VIGS has been exploited to investigate roles of RAGs in tomato ripening. However in most cases, virus-induced RAG silencing is only assessed and correlated with the chromatic change of fruits. Here we report that silencing of LeSPL-CNR through a Potato virus X -based VIGS inhibited fruit ripening and led to development of non-ripening sectors in Ailsa Craig (AC) tomatoes. Non-ripening sectors remained firmer and possessed greater relative electric conductivity and acidity as well as a higher amount of chlorophyll, but a lower quantity of anthocyanin. VIGS of LeSPL-CNR also affects expression of other key RAGs and genes associated with biogenesis of ripening hormone ethylene. These findings indicate that AC fruits undergoing VIGS of LeSPL-CNR phenocopied physical, physiological, agrochemical, biochemical and molecular characteristics of the Colourless non-ripening epimutant. Thus, the overall phenotypical changes from visual appearance to RAG expression caused by LeSPL-CNR silencing reaffirm the great usefulness of VIGS to reveal biological functions of genes crucial in tomato ripening and fruit quality.
Multiplicity of parents and crossovers, the stud and the neh heuristic for searching the optimal makespan in fssp

Different evolutionary approaches using genetic algorithms were proposed to solve the Flow Shop Scheduling Problem (FSSP). Variants point to the selection mechanism, genetic operators and the decision to include or not in the initial population an individual generated by some conventional heuristic (Reeves). New trends to enhance evolutionary algorithms for solving the FSSP introduced multiple-crossovers-per couple (MCPC) and multiple-crossovers-on-multiple-parents (MCMP). MCMP-S, a multiple-crossovers-on-multiple-parents variant, selects the stud (breeding individual) among the multiple intervening parents and mates it, more than once, with every other parent in a multiple crossover operation. In previous works, two versions of MCMP-S were faced. In the first one (MCMP-SOP), the stud and every other parent were selected from the old population. In the second one (MCMP-SRI), the stud was selected from the old population, and the other parents (random immigrants) were generated randomly. This paper introduces MCMP-NEH. The idea is to use the NEH heuristic, where the stud mates individuals in the mating pool coming from two sources: random immigrants and NEH-based individuals. These NEH-individuals are produced from randomly chosen individuals of the population and used as the starting points of the NEH heuristic. Experiments were conducted to contrast this novel proposal with a conventional evolutionary algorithm, with the only objective of establishing the improvement degree despite computational effort. Implementation details and a comparison of results for a set of flow shop scheduling instances of distinct complexity, using every evolutionary approach, are shown.
842 An Introduction to ANIMAL FARMING SYSTEMS in India TRANSFER OF TECHNOLOGY TO TARGET GROUPS

The words 'Transfer of Technology' are borrowed from the industry, which mean transfer of technology from one country to the other. But in the context of Extension these words imply transfer of research findings or technology or practices from the research institute / station to the farming community or from the researcher to the farmer with or without the involvement of extension agency. Technology transfer includes efficient transfer of agricultural innovations to the farmers and the provision of pre-requisites needed to make adoption possible (Arnon, 1989).
APTAMERS: A NOVEL APPROACH FOR BIO-IMAGING, BIO-SENSING AND TARGETED DRUG DELIVERY SYSTEMS

This review describes recent progress made in the aptamer and application of biomedically relevant aptamers and relates them to their future clinical prospects. Aptamers are single-stranded nucleic acid or amino acid polymers that recognize and bind to targets with high affinity and selectivity. In nature they exist as a nucleic acid based genetic regulatory element called a riboswitch. Aptamers, simply described as chemical antibodies, are synthetic oligonucleotide ligands or peptides that can be isolated in vitro against diverse targets including toxins, bacterial and viral proteins, virus-infected cells, cancer cells and whole pathogenic microorganisms. They are isolated by the technique called SELEX- systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment. The applications of aptamers range from diagnostics and biosensing, target validation, targeted drug delivery, therapeutics, templates for rational drug design to biochemical screening of small molecule leads compounds, in virology,as novel radio pharmaceuticals.
ConceptRank : extractive summarization basede on graph conceptual centrality as salience

Since the access to information is increasing everyday and we can easily acquire knowledge from many resources such as news websites, blogs and social networks, the capacity of processing all this amount of information becomes increasingly difficult. So, a way to deal with this situation is automatically extract the most important sentences, aiming to reduce the amount of text into a shorter version. We can explore this process while preserving the core information content by using a process called Automatic Text Summarization. This work presents a proposal to minimize problems related to the automatic summarization of texts, since some extractive techniques could not totally be prepared to handle with some issues, such as typos, synonyms and other orthographic variations, by evaluating sentences using "concepts" instead of words to represent the content of summaries.
Electromagnetic resonances in linear and nonlinear optics: phenomenological study of grating behavior through the poles and zeros of the scattering operator

The poles and zeros of the scattering operator of a corrugated waveguide and of a bare grating are studied mathematically and numerically. An initial tutorial section recalls how their use can explain grating anomalies and other curious phenomena in linear optics. This approach is then used in nonlinear optics to understand and predict curious efficiency-curve shapes observed in the study of second-harmonic generation and optical bistability enhanced by a corrugated surface.
Growth, Flowering and Fruiting of Manzanillo Olive Trees as Affected by Benzyladenine

2 Abstract: This investigation was carried out to evaluate the effect of foliar application of benzyladenine (BA) at concentration 10, 20, 30 and 40 ppm on growth, photosynthetic pigments, mineral status, total carbohydrates content, flowering, fruiting characteristics, yield/tree and oil content of Manzanillo olive trees. The experiment was performed during seasons 2009 and 2010 in a private orchard located at Cairo - Alexandria, desert road, Egypt (about 50 Km from Cairo). Different concentrations of benzyladenine (BA) were applied twice at the stage of swelling buds and six weeks later. Results obtained showed that all the applied treatments significantly increased vegetative growth characteristics (leaf area, leaf dry weight and specific leaf weight) compared to the control trees in both seasons of the study. Application of benzyladenine (10, 20, 30 and 40ppm) significantly increased photosynthetic pigments in leaves (chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b and total chlorophyll). Benzyladenine application significantly increased leaf P, K and Mg content, whereas leaf N % was not significantly affected in both seasons. Total carbohydrate contents were significantly increased with BA. The highest total carbohydrates content was resulted from higher concentration (40 ppm) in the two successive seasons. All studied parameters of flowering characteristics were significantly increased by spraying BA at all investigated rates over the control. Similarly significant improvements were attained in fruit characteristics as a result of the applied treatments. Results are presented for the studied fruit characteristics which comprised of average weight, size, length, diameter, pulp/seed ratio and fruit moisture content as a result of the applied treatments during the two studied seasons. Increasing concentration of benzyladenine from 10 to 40 ppm was accompanied with significant increase in yield (kg/tree). Foliar application of benzyladenine (BA) significantly increased the oil content in the two seasons compared with the control. It can be recommended from the present study that the application of different concentrations of benzyladenine on Manzanillo olive trees caused significant improvement in growth, photosynthetic pigments concentrations, mineral status, total carbohydrates content, fruit set, yield and most of the studied fruit characteristics and oil content. However, most of the previous characteristics were increased with increasing benzyladenine treatment from 10 to 40 ppm.
Identifying elephant movement patterns by direct observation

Conservation of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) is a national priority in Sri Lanka. Due to crop raiding, property damage, human injury and death caused by elephants, their conservation is also a major socio-economic and political issue. Elephants have comparatively large home ranges, and in Sri Lanka, 70% of elephants live outside Department of Wildlife Conservation protected areas (Fernando et al. 2008a). Some elephant home ranges lie completely outside, some partially, and others completely within protected areas (Fernando et al. 2008a).
Validation of the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment by noncoincident MkIV balloon profiles

[1] We have compared volume mixing ratio profiles of atmospheric trace gases measured by the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (ACE) version 2.2 and the MkIV solar occultation Fourier transform infrared spectrometers. These gases are H2O, O3, N2O, CO, CH4, HNO3, HF, HCl, OCS, ClONO2, HCN, CH3Cl, CF4, CCl2F2, CCl3F, COF2, CHF2Cl, and SF6. Due to the complete lack of close spatiotemporal coincidences between the ACE occultations and the MkIV balloon flights, we used potential temperatures and equivalent latitudes from analyzed meteorological fields to find comparable ACE and MkIV profiles. The results show excellent agreement for CH4, N2O, and other long-lived gases but slightly poorer agreement for shorter-lived species like CO, O3, and HCN. For example, in the upper troposphere (∼400–650 K), maximum differences between MkIV and ACE are 2.4% for CH4, 1.7% for N2O, −12.4% for CO, −15.9% for O3, and −5.6% for HCN. In the lower stratosphere (∼650–900 K), maximum MkIV-ACE differences are 7.6% for CH4, 14.1% for N2O, 7.3% for CO, −9.2% for O3, and 31.5% for HCN. Apart from a small vertical misregistration problem, the overall agreement between MkIV and ACE is very good.
Effect of mechanisation use intensity on the productivity of rice farms in southern Ghana

This study analysed the effect of farm mechanisation on productivity of rice farms in southern Ghana. The empirical results of the stochastic frontier model of primary data solicited from 360 rice farmers in southern Ghana revealed that land size cultivated, agrochemical expenditure, tillage intensity, threshing intensity, education and transportation intensity were significant factors that positively influenced partial factor productivity with respect to mechanisation. On the other hand, reaping intensity, over use of fertilizers, and age of farmers negatively influenced partial factor productivity with respect to mechanisation. These results have implications for capacity building and government support to increase productivity on rice farms.
BlenderCAVE: A multimodal scene graph editor for Virtual Reality

This paper presents the BlenderCAVE project, which extends the 3D creation content software Blender and its Game Engine (BGE) to Virtual Reality (VR) applications. Based on a multi-screen non-stereoscopic adaptation of the BGE [Gascon et al., 2010], BlenderCAVE now integrates a complete framework dedicated to Virtual Reality (VR), compatible with the three main Operating Systems for any given VR architecture configuration. It has been developed by audio and VR researchers with support from the Blender Community on LIMSI's state of the art VR platforms. Acting as a Scene Graph, BlenderCAVE handles multi-screen/multi-user tracked stereoscopic rendering through an efficient low-level master/slave synchronization process while controlling spatial audio rendering (ambisonic, multi-user binaural, WFS, etc.) and haptic events through OSC and VRPN protocols. The scene creation process itself is reduced to simple Blender manipulations including basic python programming easily carried out using standard laptops. OSC client and spatial audio rendering methods have thus far been implemented in the Max/MSP Audio Programming Environment.
The Impact of Path Dependencies on Lean Implementation Within a Construction Company

using a major UK construction company as a case study. This paper describes the nature of the issues arising from path dependency and presents the preliminary findings. Research Design/Method: A literature review on path dependency has been carried out, with emphasis on finding literature concerned with path dependencies in the context of implementing change. Findings: The paper finds that many elements that are required to implement and embed a lean culture are path dependent. Limitations: The findings from the literature review are not limited to a particular company or industry, and so the findings concerning elements that can influence change being path dependent have a wide relevance. Implications: The implication for industry is that history matters, and that it is necessary to understand the past and the path dependencies in existence within a business in order to change the future. Value for practitioners: A study of path dependencies could be considered to be a form of root cause analysis of barriers and/or enablers for change within the business. It is suggested that other practitioners could carry out a study of the path dependencies that exist within their business in order that any lean implementation/change program can be tailored to either overcome or capitalize upon these dependencies and to ensure that the change program will be fully realized and sustainable.
Learning Compound Boundaries for Afrikaans Spelling Checking

Gerhard B. van Huyssteen* & Menno M. van Zaanen North-West University (South Africa) & University of Tilburg (The Netherlands) * Centre for Text Technology, North-West University, Potchefstroom, 2531, South Africa Tel: +27 18 299 1488; Fax: +27 18 299 1562 E-mail: afngbvh@puk.ac. za # ILK, Tilburg University, Tilburg, 5000LE, The Netherlands; Tel: +31 13 466 8260; Fax +31 13 466 3110 E-mail: mvzaanen@uvt.nl Abstract Current spelling checkers for Afrikaans still do not provide full access to desired linguistic performance, especially with respect to high lexical recall and error precision. One of the main problems is that Afrikaans is an agglutinative language with a high lexical generative power using concatenative compound formation. This means that the lexicon in an Afrikaans spelling checker can never account for all possible compounds, and other means should therefore be sought to recognise valid compounds. In this article, we investigate two approaches to finding compound boundaries. First, we describe a longest string-matching algorithm, which searches for known words at the beginning and end of the compound. Next, a machine-learning approach using decision trees is implemented. Results of both approaches are presented, indicating that the longest string-matching algorithm outperforms the machine-learning approach. However, the machine-learning approach has many advantages over the longest string-matching algorithm. The article concludes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the systems, remaining problems and possible solutions.
An Investigation on Well Performing Chinese Enterprise's Features of Human Resources Management

When compared to western enterprises, management practices of eastern enterprises tend to feature distinctive features of the rule of man that focus more on the intricacies of interpersonal relationships and emotional exchange. This study therefore focused upon Taiwanese manufacturing industries as examples to investigate human resource (HR) strategies, amount of planning used for HR strategies and characteristics of organisational culture in high performing entities. The outcomes of this study showed that high performing Chinese enterprises tend to place greater importance upon HR capital and allow HR departments to participate in organisation-level decision making processes and thus exhibit stronger Clan aspects in their organisational cultures. When compared to western enterprises, the core value of Chinese enterprises would be to seek stability and harmony while helping their organisations accumulate human capital and improve competitiveness.