Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Shareholder Litigation Rights and Acquisition Decisions: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

This paper examines the effect of shareholder litigation rights on acquisition decisions using an experimental design that exploits the reduction in litigation threat generated by a U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling. We find that firms in the Ninth Circuit states acquire larger targets and acquirer returns are lower after the ruling, especially for acquirers with poor corporate governance. Further analysis shows that the value destruction is due to managers’ freedom to conduct empirebuilding acquisitions with overvalued equity via inflated earnings. Overall, our findings imply that the threat of shareholder litigation significantly reduces managers’ incentives to make self-serving acquisitions. JEL classification: G34, K22, M41
Enhanced Certificateless Security Improved Anonymous Access Control with Obfuscated Quality- Aware Confidential Data Discovery and Dissemination Protocol in WBAN

-Among different researches on Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), Obfuscated Quality Aware Confidential Data Discovery and Dissemination (OQA-CDDD) protocol has been proposed for handling the radio interferences in multiple coexisting WBAN. In this protocol, both interference and power consumption were reduced based on the interference reduction and node level power control techniques. However, different issues were addressed in confidentiality, user access control, computational cost and security. Hence in this paper, an Enhanced Certificateless & Security Improved Anonymous Access Control with OQA-CDDD protocol (ECSIAAC-OQACDDD) is proposed. In this protocol, initially an access control mechanism is designed based on an efficient certificateless modified signcryption scheme for improving the confidentiality, integrity, ciphertext authenticity etc. Moreover, an authentication process is enhanced by anonymous mutual authentication which reduces computational cost and energy consumption. Furthermore, the security vulnerabilities are avoided by introducing secure authentication by using Chaos baker map scheme which utilizes one-way hash chain function and XOR operation for improving the security of WBAN. Finally, the experimental results show that the performance effectiveness of the proposed protocol compared with the other protocols in terms of end-to-end delay, energy consumption, packet delivery ratio, coverage time and throughput. Keywords---WBAN, OQA-CDDD, Certificateless cryptography, Revocation handling, Access control, Anonymous mutual authentication, Chaos baker map
The Effectiveness of a Music and Dance Program on the Task Engagement and Inclusion of Young Pupils on the Autism Spectrum

Inclusion has been a contested concept affecting policy and practice in education for many decades, particularly for individuals on the autism spectrum. Due to the challenges that autistic pupils may face in forming social relationships, they are at a greater risk of isolation and exclusion. This study explored whether music and dance can promote the inclusion of autistic children aged 5–8 years, attending mainstream schools, through participation in a novel music and dance program. A total of 42 pupils (seven autistic), in seven groups, took part in the 6-week program. Engagement on task and physical proximity were used as proxy measures of inclusion. Video observation was used for the collection and analysis of the data. The findings suggest that music is a strong motivational factor for autistic participants and promotes engagement on task. Music and dance have been found to enhance physical contact and cooperation in the group, thus promoting acceptance and inclusion. Implications for practice and directions for further research are discussed.
Essays on Crowdfunding: Information Asymmetry, Signaling and Feedback By

This essay draws on information economics to examine when signals and endorsements obtained from multiple information sources enhance or diminish one another’s effects. We propose that signals through startup actions (use of media) and characteristics (crowdfunding experience) can mitigate information asymmetry concerns about project quality and founder credibility, enhancing the project’s likelihood of attaining funding. Further, we posit that while startuporiginated signals offset each other’s effects, third party endorsements (sentiment expressed in backer comments) validate and complement start-up-originated signals. Empirical analyses based on a comprehensive dataset of crowdfunding projects on the Kickstarter website during 20092015 confirm our predictions.
Coexistence of BRAFV600E mutation and EGFR overexpression is highly associated with adverse clinicopathological features of papillary thyroid carcinoma

Paper description: Papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC), usually curable, sometimes progresses to aggressive forms. Analysis of molecular alterations is helpful in predicting disease course and therapy decisions. BRAF gene mutations and epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) overexpression are associated with advanced stages of malignancy in several human cancers. We report that in PTC, when present as a single alteration, BRAFV600E mutation or EGFR overexpression both correlate with adverse clinical parameters and their simultaneous presence significantly enhances the frequency of lymph metastases and local tumor invasion. The coexistence of BRAFV600E mutation and EGFR overexpression identifies high risk patients as candidates for more serious treatment. Abstract: Papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) generally has a good prognosis, but in a subset of patients it progresses to aggressive forms. Analysis of molecular alterations in relation to clinical phenotype may help in risk stratification of patients by predicting tumor aggressiveness. We analyzed the expression profiles of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) using immunohistochemistry and the presence of BRAF(V600E) mutation by mutant allele-specific PCR in PTC tissue samples (n=92) in relation to clinicopathological parameters. BRAFV600E was detected in 46.7% of patients and correlated with the presence of lymph node metastasis (LNM, p=0.035) and extrathyroid invasion (EI, p<0.0001). EGFR overexpression was detected in 52.2% of the patients and also correlated with LNM (p<0.0001) and EI (p=0.027). Among patients with a single alteration, the presence of BRAFV600E impacted EI, while EGFR overexpression alone had a greater impact on LNM. The strongest association with adverse features was found in PTC patients with coexisting BRAFV600E and EGFR overexpression (28.3%), among whom LNM and EI were evident in 73% and 69%, respectively (p<0.0001, for both). Thus, the coexistence of BRAFV600E mutation and EGFR overexpression identifies high-risk PTC patients, who should be considered for combined molecular therapy offering a better long-term therapeutic outcome. https://doi.org/10.2298/ABS190920064P Received: September 20, 2019; Revised: October 16, 2019; Accepted: October 17, 2019; Published online: October 30, 2019 How to cite this article: Paunovic I, Selemetjev S, Isic Dencic T, Đoric I, Jankovic Miljus J, Roncevic J, Cvejic D. Coexistence of BRAFV600E mutation and EGFR overexpression is highly associated with adverse clinicopathological features of papillary thyroid carcinoma. Arch Biol Sci. 2020;72(1):37-44.
TORSION ON ELLIPTIC CURVES AND MAZUR’S THEOREM

We discuss several results about rational torsion points on elliptic curves. First, we outline the proof of the Mordell-Weil Theorem, a fundamental result which ensures the subgroup is finite. Next, we explain how to compute the torsion of a specific elliptic curve using local methods. Finally, we discuss modular curves, which make it possible to study torsion points of every elliptic curve at once. This allows us to state (but not prove) Mazur’s celebrated torsion theorem, which says that only 15 specific groups can occur as rational torsion subgroups of elliptic curves.
Modeling Air Quality and Cancer Incidences in Proximity to Hazardous Waste and Incineration Treatment Areas

This study analyzes the impact on human exposure and the air quality in the vicinity to hazardous waste and incineration treatment areas. Such an industry produces pollutant emissions that can be dangerous for the human health and the environment. Thus, various techniques have been studied in order to model the relationship between the proximity to these industrial plants, cancer incidences, and the air quality. On the one hand, logistic regressions were carried out by having the distance as a categorical variable. On the other hand, variable where GAM models were performed. The air quality parameters PM10 and NO2 are higher in proximity to industrial areas according to both techniques, whereas O3 happens to be lower. Regarding the incidences of cancer, logistic regressions show that the incidences are higher in proximity to certain industrial plants. However, there is no clear conclusion according to the GAM models.
BUTTONTIPS: DESIGNING WEB BUTTONS WITH SUGGESTIONS

Buttons are fundamental in web design. An effective button is important for higher click-through and conversion rates. However, designing effective buttons can be challenging for novices. This paper presents a novel interactive method to aid the button design process by making design suggestions. Our method proceeds in three steps: 1) button presence prediction, 2) button layout suggestion and 3) button color selection. We investigate two distinct but complementary interfaces for button design suggestion: 1) region selection interface, where the button will appear in a user-specific region; 2) element selection interface, where the button will be associated with a user-selected element. We compare our method with an existing website building tool, and show that for novice designers, both interfaces require significantly less manual efforts, and produce significantly better button design, as evaluated by professional web designers.
What Creates Corporate Risk-Taking? Local Creative Culture and Corporate Decisions

This study uses a novel measure of risk-taking propensity and investigates the role of local risk-taking characteristics on corporate policies. I empirically examine the impact of local risk-taking tendency as measured by local creative culture on corporate risk-taking behavior. I show that firms located in areas with a strong creative culture have higher levels of risk exposure, investment, and growth. I find similar results for corporate cash holdings, showing that firms headquartered in areas with a pronounced creative culture accumulate more cash. These empirical findings remain robust after addressing endogeneity concerns and a series of robustness tests. They are consistent with the risk-taking tendency associated with both creative culture and creative risktaking. This paper also highlights the importance of local factors for corporate culture by introducing the impact of a new local risk-taking measure on corporate decisions. * California State University Fullerton, Mihaylo College of Business and Economics. SGMH-5113 , 800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton, CA 92831. Email:erucar@fullerton.edu.
Fragmentation without Competition: When Multiple ETFs Hold Similar Portfolios

This paper examines competition between ETFs that hold nearly identical portfolios of securities. We provide evidence that incumbent-fund market quality is negatively affected when a new ETF is added to an asset class. The degradation in liquidity is even more severe whenever both funds follow the same benchmark. We also document a decline in primary-market activity for the incumbent ETFs after the arrival of new competitors. Furthermore, increasing the number of funds in an asset class does not put downward pressure on fund management fees. Thus, the deterioration in market quality is not offset by decreasing costs of fund ownership.
Deep neural networks for 1D impedance inversion

Summary We investigate the applicability of different types of deep neural networks for the estimation of subsurface properties from seismic data. The pre-trained networks can predict velocity models from new data in a few milliseconds, which makes this data-driven approach especially important for multidimensional inversion, where conventional methods inversion methods suffer from large computational cost. At the same time, realistic one-dimensional models such as the 160-layer velocity model used as an example in this study require large synthetic datasets for training, which are not always possible to obtain. Hence, we also study the impact of extending the training data by adding random noise to the modelled examples. We observe that enlarging training datasets by adding synthetic noise to existing samples improves the quality of inversion without a significant increase in computational complexity.
Variance of the Variance Risk Premium

The variance risk premium (VRP) is defined as the difference between expected return variance under the risk-neutral measure and the expected return variance under the objective probability measure. We formulate a GARCH-type model for the conditional variance of the variance of the consumption growth rate. We show that for this specification in a representative agent model with Epstein-Zin-Weil recursive preferences, the conditional variance of VRP appears explicitly in the equity risk premium. Then we empirically test the predictive power of the conditional variance of VRP. We find that, while the predictive power of the VRP reaches its maximum at around four months, the predictive power of the conditional variance of VRP becomes significant at four months and remains significant out to the 15 month horizon. It generates an adjusted-R that complements that of VRP and boosts the predictive power over horizons longer than six months. Adding traditional fundamental variables that have been reported to have predictive power further increase the significance of conditional variance of VRP, across the board in monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual return regressions. A back-test of the forecasting power using a simple binary strategy shows that the forecasting power of the variance of VRP improves the Sharpe ratio performance by 17.7% over the model using VRP alone, and almost doubles the Sharpe ratio of holding S&P 500 only.
Rationale in Forum Discussions as Support for Software Upgrading of Online Course Platforms

In online course software platforms, the forum may be an important instrument for feedback on pedagogical aspects. Students’ and instructors’ evaluations spontaneously shared in the forum – in terms of criticism, recommendations or requests – may also regard the platform’s software tools. These evaluations resemble what is called “rationale”, a useful concept from Software Engineering. This paper presents an exploratory study about mining spontaneous user rationale in Massive Open Online Course forum discussions. Results provide qualitative evidence that rationale can be an instrument to collect requirements for the evolution of support software in online educational platforms.
Learning Embeddings from Cancer Mutation Sets for Classification Tasks

Analysis of somatic mutation profiles from cancer patients is essential in the development of cancer research. However, the low frequency of most mutations and the varying rates of mutations across patients makes the data extremely challenging to statistically analyze as well as difficult to use in classification problems, for clustering, visualization or for learning useful information. Thus, the creation of low dimensional representations of somatic mutation profiles that hold useful information about the DNA of cancer cells will facilitate the use of such data in applications that will progress precision medicine. In this paper, we talk about the open problem of learning from somatic mutations, and present Flatsomatic: a solution that utilizes variational autoencoders (VAEs) to create latent representations of somatic profiles. The work done in this paper shows great potential for this method, with the VAE embeddings performing better than PCA for a clustering task, and performing equally well to the raw high dimensional data for a classification task. We believe the methods presented herein can be of great value in future research and in bringing data-driven models into precision oncology.
The Presupernova Core Mass–Radius Relation of Massive Stars: Understanding Its Formation and Evolution

We present a fine grid of solar metallicity models of massive stars (320 in the range 12 ≤ M( ) ≤ 27.95), extending from the main sequence up to the onset of the collapse, in order to quantitatively determine how their compactness ξ2. 5, defined by O’Connor & Ott, scales with the carbon–oxygen core mass at the beginning of core collapse. We find a well defined, nonmonotonic (but not scattered) trend of the compactness with the carbon–oxygen core mass that is strictly (and mainly) correlated to the behavior, i.e., birth, growth, and disappearance, of the various carbon convective episodes that follow one another during the advanced evolutionary phases. Though both the mass size of the carbon–oxygen core and the amount of 12C left by the central He burning play a major role in sculpting the final mass–radius relation, it is the abundance of 12C that is ultimately responsible for the final degree of compactness of a star, because it controls the ability of the carbon-burning shell to advance in mass before the final collapse.
Magnetic switching in Weyl semimetal-superconductor heterostructures

We present a new switching mechanism that utilizes the proximity coupling between the surface spin texture of a Weyl semimetal and a superconductor, in a Weyl semimetal/superconductor/Weyl semimetal trilayer heterostructure. We show that the superconductivity in the middle layer can be fully suppressed by the surface spin texture of the Weyl semimetals in the presence of an external magnetic field, but it can be recovered again by only changing the field direction. The restoration of the middle-layer superconductivity indicates a sharp transition to a low-resistance state. This sharp switching effect, realizable using a Weyl semimetal because of its strong spin-momentum locking and surface spin polarization, is a promising avenue for novel superconducting spin-valve applications.
The Future Time Traveller Project: Career Guidance on Future Skills, Jobs and Career Prospects of Generation Z through a Game-Based Virtual World Environment

Future Time Traveller is a European project that aims at transforming career guidance of generation Z through an innovative, games-based scenario approach and to prepare the next generation for the jobs of the future. The pro-ject objective is to foster innovative thinking and future-oriented mindset of young people, through an innovative game-based virtual world environment. This environment helps them explore the future world, understand the trends that shape the future world of work, the emerging jobs, and the skills they will require. The Future Time Traveller project is implemented by a team of experts in 7 European countries (Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Portugal, and United Kingdom). The project target groups include young people (genera-tion Z), career guidance practitioners and experts, and policymakers. This paper presents, in brief, the Future Time Traveller project and introduces the reader to the main features and functionalities of the 3-dimensional virtual world and the games developed in this environment.
Turán‐type problems for long cycles in random and pseudo‐random graphs

We study the Turán number of long cycles in random and pseudo‐random graphs. Denote by ex(G(n,p),H)$\operatorname{ex}(G(n,p),H)$ the random variable counting the number of edges in a largest subgraph of G(n,p)$G(n,p)$ without a copy of H$H$ . We determine the asymptotic value of ex(G(n,p),Ct)$\operatorname{ex}(G(n,p), C_t)$ , where Ct$C_t$ is a cycle of length t$t$ , for p⩾Cn$p\geqslant \frac{C}{n}$ and Alogn⩽t⩽(1−ε)n$A \log n \leqslant t \leqslant (1 - \varepsilon )n$ . The typical behaviour of ex(G(n,p),Ct)$\operatorname{ex}(G(n,p), C_t)$ depends substantially on the parity of t$t$ . In particular, our results match the classical result of Woodall on the Turán number of long cycles, and can be seen as its random version, showing that the transference principle holds here as well. In fact, our techniques apply in a more general sparse pseudo‐random setting. We also prove a robustness‐type result, showing the likely existence of cycles of prescribed lengths in a random subgraph of a graph with a nearly optimal density. Finally, we also present further applications of our main tool (the Key Lemma) for proving results on Ramsey‐type problems about cycles in sparse random graphs.
Exact and approximation algorithms for the expanding search problem

Suppose a target is hidden in one of the vertices of an edge-weighted graph according to a known probability distribution. Starting from a fixed root node, an expanding search visits the vertices sequentially until it finds the target, where the next vertex can be reached from any of the previously visited vertices. That is, the time to reach the next vertex equals the shortest-path distance from the set of all previously visited vertices. The expanding search problem then asks for a sequence of the nodes, so as to minimize the expected time to finding the target. This problem has numerous applications, such as searching for hidden explosives, mining coal, and disaster relief. In this paper, we develop exact algorithms and heuristics, including a branch-and-cut procedure, a greedy algorithm with a constant-factor approximation guarantee, and a local search procedure based on a spanning-tree neighborhood. Computational experiments show that our branch-and-cut procedure outperforms existing methods for instances with nonuniform probability distributions and that both our heuristics compute near-optimal solutions with little computational effort. Summary of Contribution: This paper studies new algorithms for the expanding search problem, which asks to search a graph for a target hidden in one of the nodes according to a known probability distribution. This problem has applications such as searching for hidden explosives, mining coal, and disaster relief. We propose several new algorithms, including a branch-and-cut procedure, a greedy algorithm, and a local search procedure; and we analyze their performance both experimentally and theoretically. Our analysis shows that the algorithms improve on the performance of existing methods and establishes the first constant-factor approximation guarantee for this problem.
The Evolution of Code Review Research: A Systematic Mapping Study

Code Review (CR) is a cornerstone for Quality Assurance within software development teams. Also known as "software inspections" and "walk-throughs", traditional CR involved time-consuming processes, which is different from more lightweight contemporary forms used today. In this paper, we aim to summarize how CR research has evolved into its current state over the last decade. Our vigorous systematic study revolves around four research questions to uncover changes into the target of contributions and methodologies, replicability of existing studies and the evolution of CR terminology. From a collection of 7,266 papers from the top software engineering venues, we generate visual maps for 148 collected papers including 53 conferences, 16 journals, and 79 snowball papers. Our visual maps provide evidence that CR research does cover more than quality assurance, and will continue to evolve with the availability of datasets and emerging technologies within the CR domain.