Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Corporate Risk Management Practices in Slovenia and Their Impact on Performance

Article deals with perceived corporate risk management determinants of Slovene firms. There are quite some theoretical explanations of reasonable behavior of financial managers in financial literature. I briefly introduce maximization of wealth theory (Smith and Stulz, 1985; Froot, Scharfstein and Stein, 1993) and agency theory (Tufano, 1998) and point out different techniques firms can use to better decrease various exposures. After the introduction deeper insights into this challenging topic is provided. In the first part I follow some aspects of well-cited article of Graham and Harvey (2001) dealing with modern corporate finance practices of US firms. Paper reveals the determinants of different types of risk Slovene firms consider as crucial. In the second part, hypotheses about performance of 137 surveyed Slovene firms differentiated by risk management practices are presented. Generally, surveyed Slovene firms do not frequently use CAPM as a common base for risk premium determination. Differences are not significant between groups of small and large firms. However, large surveyed firms do pay more attention to information about exchange rate movements, which also holds true in the case of the firms recording substantial proportion of foreign sales. Analysis sheds light on the degree of leverage and firms’ behavior. Levels of debt depend upon degree of operating leverage. However, total debt to a much lesser extent than long-term debt. This effect comes at least to some extent to a surprise, since during transition short-term debt served as close substitute for long-term debt of Slovene firms and was systematically rolled over. Relation is not significantly stronger by firms that are more aware of the need to employ risk management techniques. However, I argue that more risk aware firms show better financial performance, manage assets more efficiently, reach higher productivity are more liquid, and use more debt. That means Slovene corporate reality rather supports wealth maximization theory. What seems to be more of a puzzle are significant differences with counterintuitive direction by efficiency ratios mean comparisons. Firms with more sophistication in the area of risk management have lower total assets - and fixed assets turnover, and employ more assets per employee. Even though efficiency rises with risk awareness, many firms seem to be classified as most risk aware because of the type of assets. The reason in fact comes from the need of more capital-intense firms to better deal with risks.
Funding in Public Sector Pension Plans: International Evidence

Most countries have separate pension plan for public sector employees. The future fiscal burden of these plans can be substantial as the government usually is the largest employer, pension promises in the public sector tend to be relatively generous, and future payments have to be paid out directly from government revenues (pay-as-you-go) or by funded plans (pension funds) which tend to be underfunded. The valuation and disclosure of these promises in some countries lacks transparency, which may be hiding potentially huge fiscal liabilities that are being passed on to future generations of workers. In order to arrive at a fair comparison between countries regarding the fiscal burden of their DB public sector pension plans, this paper gathers more evidence on public sector pension plans regarding the type of pension promise and quantifies the future tax burden related to these pension promises. The reported liabilities are recalculated using both a fair value approach (local market discount rates) and a common, fixed discount rate across all countries which reflects projected growth in national income. We also estimate for a number of plans from a sample of OECD countries the size of the net unfunded liabilities in fair value terms as of the end of 2008. This fiscal burden can also be interpreted as the implicit pension debt in fair value terms.
Buying Manipulation around Seasoned Equity Offerings

We show that seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), in which secondary share-offering size greatly exceeds market share turnover, provide a unique opportunity for stock price manipulation by speculators holding restricted shares. The proposed new theory is consistent with several puzzling empirical findings, for example, the positive abnormal stock return between announcement and issuance and the long-term poorer returns of issuing firms after SEOs. The manipulation is characterized by a strong buying in the secondary market prior to the issuance, which drives up the market price and thereby the offering price of restricted shares, and a large amount of liquidation of restricted shares in the SEO. Our model predicts that favorable market reactions with speculator's manipulative intent after SEO announcement could occur, which naturally leads to a successful issuance and over-investment based long-term underperformance after SEO.
Inhibition of lysine biosynthesis in Phytophthora infestans

Four inhibitors of the lysine biosynthetic enzyme dihydrodipicolinate synthase (DHDPS) were examined for their effects on the late blight fungus Phytophthora infestans. One of these compounds, dipicolinic acid, reduced mycelial growth of P. infestans by 61% and completely controlled blight infection of leaf discs when used at 1 mM. The other inhibitors, chelidamic acid, chelidonic acid and dimethyl cis-piperidine-2,6-dicarboxylate, were less effective against P. infestans in vitro and in vivo. The effects of dipicolinic acid and chelidonic acid on mycelial growth were partly overcome by the addition of lysine to the growth medium. Both of these compounds reduced DHDPS activity and lysine concentrations in P. infestans, although they had no effect on activities of aspartate kinase and diaminopimelic acid decarboxylase. Both dipicolinic acid and chelidonic acid reduced in vitro activity of DHDPS from P. infestans.
Banking Competition, Monitoring Incentives and Financial Stability

This paper addresses the desirability of competition in banking industry. In a model where banks compete on both deposit and loan markets and where banks can use monitoring technology to control entrepreneurs' behavior, we investigate three questions: what are the effects of competition on banks' monitoring incentives? Does competition hurt banks' stability? What can be devices to correct potential negative effcts of competition vis a vis financial stability? We find that impacts of competition on banks' monitoring incentives can be decomposed into two effects: one on the attractiveness of monitoring and the other on the monitoring efficiency. The first effect operates through the link between competition and loan margin. The second effect comes from the fact that marginal effct of monitoring on entrepreneur's effort depends on loan rate. We characterize the sufficient condition under which competition will increase monitoring incentives as well as banks' stability. For the third question, we focus on the role of capital requirement and claim that with capital requirement, we can attain a weak correction but not strong correction.
Short-Selling Status and Asset-Pricing Models

Using the uniqueness of Hong Kong regulations on short selling, I find that the CAPM, the Fama-French Three-Factor and the Four-Factor model fare significantly better in capturing the cross-section of expected returns on the stocks which are shortable than the stocks which are not. The results imply that applying the three asset-pricing models to the stocks/markets where short sales are restricted would produce biased estimates. All the three models for portfolios without short-sale constraints have significantly higher R2 and adjusted R2 than for portfolios that are banned to be sold short. This suggests that the three models are much less capable of capturing the average stock returns in the environment of short-sale ban or constraints than in the environment of no such restrictions. This result is generally supported by other measures I use to evaluate the performance of the models, such as the absolute value of alphas and the GRS statistics (except for the four-factor model), and is robust to higher frequency data (weekly data). The implication is that practitioners and academics alike need to be cautious about applying the extant asset-pricing models to circumstances where short-sale restrictions are present in various forms.
Anthrax Lethal Toxin Inhibits the Production of Proinflammatory Cytokines

In previous studies, we have found that anthrax lethal toxin (LeTx) induces apoptosis in both murine macrophages and human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs). In this study, we further report that bacterial cell wall (CW) components of Bacillus (B.) anthracis are powerful inducers of proinflammatory cytokines from the PBMCs. These effects are deprived when the LeTx is present. The major causative element for this suppression is lethal factor (LF) rather than protective antigen (PA). These results indicate that the roles of LeTx in anthrax pathogenesis, particularly its effects on cytokine production, should be reevaluated as our findings and other reports are controversial to the conventional concept.
Associated growth of wheat and annual ryegrass. III. Effects of early competition on wheat.

The effects of four factors applied in factorial combination, viz. nitrogen application, time of ryegrass germination relative to wheat, roots together or separate and species proportion, were studied during the first few weeks of the associated growth of wheat and annual ryegrass. The experiment was conducted in boxes in a glasshouse at a total density of 355 plants m-2. Many plant variates were measured at 7, 28 and 49 days from sowing. Nitrogen content was determined at 28 and 49 days. Even at 7 days, measurable treatment effects on root and shoot weights of wheat could be detected. The effects could be discerned subsequently in terms of root length, tillering patterns, shoot weight, and ear development. Effects on ear development were observed in the last tiller and on the most recently developed florets. Some of these responses involved interactions of two or more of the factors studied. Treatments modified the relationship between competitive ability and yield in pure culture, more in ryegrass than in wheat. Although nitrogen effects appeared to have a strong influence on the competitive relations between the species, it is suggested that competition for soil factors other than nitrogen may also have been involved.
Comparative performance of five genotypes of Indonesian large ruminants. 1. Effect of dietary quality on liveweight and feed utilization

Diets containing 85% (high concentrate) or 30% (high roughage) concentrate were individually fed for 280 or 224 days, respectively, to young Madura, Ongole, Bali, Grati (or Friesian crossbred) and swamp buffalo bulls. Each feeding trial was divided into early or late periods to study the effects of approaching maturity on growth and feed use. The digestibility of dietary nutrients, the balances of nitrogen, phosphorus and calcium, and the metabolizability of the gross energy of the high-roughage diet were measured. Growth rates in decreasing order were Grati, Ongole, buffalo, Bali and Madura. Genotype differences in growth were generally the result of variations in intake rather than in feed use. There were genotype x trial interactions in feed intake and liveweight gain during the latter part of each trial in that on the high-concentrate diet, the performance of Ongole and Madura bulls was poorer than that of the Grati and buffalo bulls whereas performances were similar on the high-roughage diet. Dietary metabolizable energy contents were estimated to be 11.8 and 9.5 MJ kg-1 dry matter for the two diets, respectively. Liveweights were higher and more divergent between genotypes at the end of the high-concentrate feeding period. As they were also higher than those reported for mature animals maintained under traditional village management, it was concluded that indigenous Indonesian large ruminants would respond to improved feeding and management. However, their feedlot performances would be unlikely to equal that of dairy crossbred cattle.
SmokeBomb: effective mitigation against cache side-channel attacks on the ARM architecture

Cache side-channel attacks abuse microarchitectural designs meant to optimize memory access to infer information about victim processes, threatening data privacy and security. Recently, the ARM architecture has come into the spotlight of cache side-channel attacks with its unprecedented growth in the market. We propose SmokeBomb, a novel cache side-channel mitigation that functions by explicitly ensuring a private space for each process to safely access sensitive data. The heart of the idea is to use the L1 cache of the CPU core as a private space by which SmokeBomb can give consistent results against cache attacks on the sensitive data, and thus, an attacker cannot distinguish specific data used by the victim. Our experimental results show that SmokeBomb can effectively prevent currently formalized cache attack methods.
Accelerating Skill Acquisition of Two-Handed Drumming using Pneumatic Artificial Muscles

While computers excel at augmenting user's cognitive abilities, only recently we started utilizing their full potential to enhance our physical abilities. More and more wearable force-feedback devices have been developed based on exoskeletons, electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) or pneumatic actuators. The latter, pneumatic-based artificial muscles, are of particular interest since they strike an interesting balance: lighter than exoskeletons and more precise than EMS. However, the promise of using artificial muscles to actually support skill acquisition and training users is still lacking empirical validation. In this paper, we unveil how pneumatic artificial muscles impact skill acquisition, using two-handed drumming as an example use case. To understand this, we conducted a user study comparing participants' drumming performance after training with the audio or with our artificial-muscle setup. Our haptic system is comprised of four pneumatic muscles and is capable of actuating the user's forearm to drum accurately up to 80 bpm. We show that pneumatic muscles improve participants' correct recall of drumming patterns significantly when compared to auditory training.
PoseAsQuery: Full-Body Interface for Repeated Observation of a Person in a Video with Ambiguous Pose Indexes and Performed Poses

PoseAsQuery is an interactive browsing system used to repeatedly replay any specific segment of a video. To acquire and improve the body control skills that are essential for physical performance, it is necessary to continuously observe an individual's movement. However, previous research has several issues on the ability to repeatedly observe a user's movement without interruption during personal training. For these scenarios, the proposed system simultaneously provides a pose-based browsing method and its interface. The user can pin any frame from which a replay starts by using the person's body movement without another operation, such as pressing a button, that is not essential for improving the skill. The experimental results suggest that users can use posture to decide where to start replaying when they know that the corresponding pose enables them to replay the scene. We concluded that the proposed method enables users to repeatedly observe scenes more efficiently and in a less stressful way than pressing a button to replay from a fixed scene.
λPSI: exact inference for higher-order probabilistic programs

We present λPSI, the first probabilistic programming language and system that supports higher-order exact inference for probabilistic programs with first-class functions, nested inference and discrete, continuous and mixed random variables. λPSI’s solver is based on symbolic reasoning and computes the exact distribution represented by a program. We show that λPSI is practically effective—it automatically computes exact distributions for a number of interesting applications, from rational agents to information theory, many of which could so far only be handled approximately.
A Contribution to the Phosphorus Loading Concept

For the application of the empirical model of Vollenweider and Dillon (1974). and Vollenweider (1976). to reservoirs, the critical phosphorus loading levels have been related to dissolved orthophosphate. 19 reservoirs and primary reservoirs are in optimum accordance with the extended model. To permit the use of the model also in the range of very short residence times, an extremely simple analytical model of phytoplankton growth has been introduced. The reliability of the resulting outwash limits has been checked by means of random sampling at two primary reservoirs. Among 17 samples only 1 does not fit into the model.
Intellectual Route Planning Methods for Realistic Agents' Movement

Realistic pedestrian flow visualization is a complex problem of multi-agent modeling. It can be applied to different crowd dynamics solutions. This paper presents a new route planning method for agents that can be used in interactive simulation of crowd movement. It is based on game development technologies and modern artificial intelligence techniques. We use reinforcement learning to train the agent to navigate through moving pedestrians. A set of experiments were carried out and the results of the study were evaluated. The proposed approach is compared with existing methods and its perspectives are discussed.
Runtime Abstraction-Level Conversion of Discrete-Event Wafer-fabrication Models for Simulation Acceleration

Speeding up the simulation of discrete-event wafer fab models is essential because optimizing the scheduling and dispatching policies under various circumstances requires repeated evaluation of the decision candidates during parameter-space exploration. In this paper, we present a runtime abstraction-level conversion approach for discrete-event wafer-fabrication (wafer-fab) models to gain simulation speedup. During the simulation, if a machine group of the wafer fab models reaches a steady state, then the proposed approach attempts to substitute this group model with a mean-delay model (MDM) as a high abstraction level model. The MDM abstracts the detailed operations of the group's sub-component models into an average delay based on the queueing modeling, which can guarantee acceptable accuracy under steady state. The proposed abstraction-level converter (ALC) observes the queueing parameters of low-level groups to identify the convergence of each group's work-in-progress (WIP) level through a statistical test. When a group's WIP level is converged, the output-to-input couplings between the models are revised to change a wafer-lot process flow from the low-level group to a mean-delay model. When the ALC detects a divergence caused by a re-entrant flow or a machine-down, the high-level model is switched back to its corresponding low-level group model. The ALC then generates dummy wafer-lot events to synchronize the busyness of high-level steady state. The proposed method was applied to case studies of wafer-fab systems and achieves simulation speedup from 6.1 to 11.8 times with corresponding 2.5 to 5.9% degradation inaccuracy.
SelMon: reinforcing mobile device security with self-protected trust anchor

Higher privileged trust anchors such as thin hypervisors and Trust-Zone have been adopted to protect mobile OSs. For instance, the Samsung Knox security platform implements a kernel integrity monitor based on a hardware-assisted virtualization technique for 64-bit devices. Although it protects the OS kernel integrity, the monitoring platform itself can be a target of attackers if it encompasses exploitable bugs. In this paper, we propose SelMon, a portable way of self-protecting kernel integrity monitors without introducing another higher privileged trust anchor. To this end, we first logically separate the regions of the integrity monitor into two parts: privileged and non-privileged regions. Then, we ensure that only the privileged region code can access the critical data objects that can be exploited to compromise the monitor integrity (e.g., the hypervisor page table). The non-critical operations in terms of preserving the monitor integrity are conducted in the non-privileged region. In addition to the privilege separation, we also illustrate how to utilize the general hardware features, watchpoint and data execution prevention (DEP), to ensure the robustness of the separation. In the evaluation, it was found that our approach imposes a negligible overhead of 2% in the worst case with SPEC CPU2006.
Effect of LED light spectra on exogenous prolactin-regulated circadian rhythm in goldfish, Carassius auratus

We investigated the effect of light spectra on circadian rhythm by exogenous prolactin (PRL) using light-emitting diodes (LEDs): red, green and purple. We injected PRL into live fish or treated cultured brain cells with PRL. We measured changes in the expressions of period 2 (Per2), cryptochrome 1 (Cry1), melatonin receptor 1 (MT1) mRNAs, and MT1 proteins, and in the plasma PRL, serotonin and melatonin levels. After PRL injection and exposure to green light, MT1 expression and plasma melatonin levels were significantly lower, but the expressions of Per2 and Cry1 were significantly higher than the others. Plasma serotonin after PRL injection and exposure to red light was significantly lower than others. These results indicate that injection of high concentration PRL inhibits melatonin, and inhibited melatonin regulates circadian rhythm via clock genes and serotonin. Thus, exogenous PRL regulates the circadian rhythm and light spectra influence the effect of PRL in goldfish.
How does the User Type Affect the Acceptance of Digital Innovation on the Job: Research in Progress

Digital technologies promise greater effectiveness and higher productivity for companies. The question of the factors influencing the success of such technologies has long been a subject of research. However, these factors seem to be depending on the user type. This paper handles the case of the implementation of a new mobile application to support distinct work processes and presents preliminary results. A total of two field observations and 22 interviews were conducted to create a framework that promotes the development of digital innovations by systematically identifying characteristics that improve the adoption rate.
Job Seekers' Artificial Intelligence-related Black Box Concerns

Jessica Ochmann† Institute of Information Systems Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Nürnberg Germany jessica.ochmann@fau.de Sandra Zilker Institute of Information Systems Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Nürnberg Germany sandra.zilker@fau.de Sven Laumer Institute of Information Systems Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Nürnberg Germany sven.laumer@fau.de
WristLens: Enabling Single-Handed Surface Gesture Interaction for Wrist-Worn Devices Using Optical Motion Sensor

WristLens is a system for surface interaction from wrist-worn wearable devices such as smartwatches and fitness trackers. It enables eyes-free, single-handed gestures on surfaces, using an optical motion sensor embedded in a wrist-strap. This allows the user to leverage any proximate surface, including their own body, for input and interaction. An experimental study was conducted to measure the performance of gesture interaction on three different body parts. Our results show that directional gestures are accurately recognized but less so for shape gestures. Finally, we explore the interaction design space enabled by WristLens, and demonstrate novel use cases and applications, such as on-body interaction, bimanual interaction, cursor control and 3D measurement.