Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effect of classification shifting on accruals and cash flow

In recent years, with the development of the economy, scholars have found that earnings managements are widespread in Chinese market. However, the classification shifting earnings management has been found in developed market and Chinese scholars did not do many researches in this field and the understanding is still limited, especially the effect of classification shifting on accruals and cash flow has not been study yet. Therefore, we use Chinese A-share listed companies to test the classification shifting existing and the impact of the earnings quality from accruals and cash flow that can be the index for the affections. Through the empirical results, we can know classification shifting is confusing to investors and the reaction of accruals may be lower in market to make the stock price mispricing in coming years. In a word, this paper fill in the blank of the research of classification shifting, and call the regulators and investors' concerns of classification shifting earnings management in corporations.
Weak Convex Decomposition by Lines‐of‐sight

We define the convexity rank of a set of points to be the portion of mutually visible pairs of points out of the total number of pairs. Based on this definition of weak convexity, we introduce a spectral method that decomposes a given shape into weakly convex regions. The decomposition is applied without explicitly measuring the convexity rank. The method merely amounts to a spectral clustering of a matrix representing the all‐pairs line of sight. Our method can be directly applied on an oriented point cloud and does not require any topological information, nor explicit concavity or convexity measures. We demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm on a large number of examples and compare them qualitatively with competitive approaches.
Local Thresholding Algorithm Based on Variable Window Size Statistics

In an automatic document conversion system, which builds digital documents from scanned articles, there is a need to perform various adjustments before the scanned image is fed to the layout analysis system. This is because the layout detection system is sensitive to errors when the page elements are not properly identified, represented, denoised, etc. Such an adjustment is the detection of foreground and background of a document or simply called a document image binarization. This paper presents a new idea for treating the common problems which may occur during the binarization phase of the documents, that considers a parameter-free local binarization algorithm which dynamically computes the window size after it sets a threshold for the standard variation value of the window. This proved to offer more consistent results for a wide variety of scanned documents consisting of various old newspapers and old library documents in different languages, both handwritten and textual documents. Two methods for computing the local gray level threshold are proposed using the mean and standard deviation of the pixels in the current window:
Capability reconciliation for virtual device composition in mobile ad hoc networks

The proliferation of networked appliances or dedicated function consumer devices with embedded processors and network connection capabilities is driving the virtual device concept, whereby such appliances can be controlled, monitored, managed, and extended beyond what they were initially designed to do. The dynamic and ad hoc nature of the discovery and composition of such devices and the services they provide inevitably leads to capability differences, whereby the input of a service B is not compatible with the output of a service A; A and B needing to be composed. Moreover, current schemes for service composition in MANETs do not consider capability differences. We present a distributed constraint satisfaction problem for capability reconciliation in MANETs, and through simulation show its effectiveness and efficiency.
The Athabasca University Digital Reading Room: Library resources for mobile students

In the first quarter of 2005 there were already more than one billion “data-enabled” mobile devices in use worldwide and this number is growing exponentially (ABI Research, 2005). This abundance of wireless and mobile technology has the potential to increase flexibility for distance learners. For example, not only can they access electronic versions of course materials from their personal computers as they are currently able for many courses through the Athabasca University web site, but they can now download selected course materials to PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistants), mobile phones, ultra computers and other mobile devices for review. Whether learners are on a bus, at a child’s football match or on their lunch break; mobile technology increases the boundaries of anytime, anywhere learning. Mobile technologies illustrate the convergence of the two types of distance education technologies (Hulsmann, 2004). Type I (information media) media such as described earlier carries the distance education content, not only in text but in many multimedia formats as well (audio, video, graphic). Type C (Communication media) include multimedia interactivity options supported by mobile technologies to allow for interaction between and amongst learners, teachers and community members using a variety of modes (audio, text and video conferencing). Together and converged, these types of media allow for the emergence of type S (social) applications that allow learners to become aquainted, work collaboratively, schedule learning and in otherways enhance learning. So, in addition to increasing accessibility, mobile devices have the potential to increase connections between students, tutors, and instructors and decrease isolation. However, these mobile devices have disadvantages as well: small screens, small keyboards if they have them at all, forcing students to learn new ways of note-taking, communicating, sharing, creating and producing information This project has been designed to improve our understanding of ways to maximize the potential of mobile devices, specifically PDA’s on the one hand, while finding ways to minimize their drawbacks. The investigation was an attempt to determine productive learning strategies, from a userperspective, for engaging effectively in distance education activities using PDAs. IADIS International Conference Mobile Learning 2005
Web Image Retrieval Re-ranking with Wikipedia Semantics

Nowadays, to take advantage of tags is a general tendency when users need to store or retrieve images on the Web. In this article, we introduce some approaches to calculate semantic importance of tags attached to Web images, and to make re-ranking the retrieved images according to them. We have compared the results from image re-ranking with two semantic providers, WordNet and Wikipedia. With the semantic importance of image tags calculated by using Wikipedia, we found the superiority of the method in precision and recall rate as experimental results.
The Relationship Between Conscious and Unconscious Processes

As far as the relationship between conscious and unconscious processes is concerned, there are two possible aspects: interactions within conscious/unconscious processes, and influences between conscious and unconscious processes. However, there is little research about the interactions between unconscious processes. Moreover, consciousness is not a dichotomous, but rather a graded, phenomenon. There can be intermediate states between completely conscious and completely unconscious states，in which information at each processing level can be accessed independently of each other. However, little research studies the top-down modulations on the information in partial awareness level. Specifically, how conscious top-down processes interact with the unconscious component of representation in partial awareness is unknown. I will demonstrate these two problems in this book.
VERITAS Observations of MGRO J1908+06/HESS J1908+063

The unidentified TeV gamma‐ray source MGRO J1908+06/HESS J1908+063 was observed with the VERITAS Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Array during October 2007 and May‐June 2008. This extended source is located on the galactic plane at a galactic longitude of 40.45 degrees and has a hard TeV spectrum with an index of Γ≈2.08 [1], The Very High Energy (VHE) gamma‐ray flux was measured by H.E. S.S. out to energies greater than 30 TeV which along with its unidentified nature makes it an interesting hard‐spectrum extended source for study. We confirm the detection of VHE gamma‐ray emission from this source using VERITAS.
Effects of an ambient air pollution intervention and environmental tobacco smoke on children's respiratory health in Hong Kong.

BACKGROUND Two-thirds of complaints received by the Hong Kong Environmental Protection Department in 1988 were related to poor air quality. In July 1990 legislation was implemented to reduce fuel sulphur levels. The objective of this study was to measure the impact of the intervention on respiratory health in primary school children. METHODS In all, 3521 children, mean age 9.51 years (SD = 0.78), from two districts with good and poor air quality respectively before intervention were followed yearly from 1989 to 1991. Children and parents reported the children's respiratory symptoms using self-completed questionnaires. Factor analysis was used to derive independent scores from 12 symptoms. Four groups of related symptoms were identified and binary variables (presence of any symptom in each group) were treated as dependent variables in modelling using generalized estimating equations procedures. RESULTS In 1989 and 1990 an excess of respiratory symptoms was observed in the polluted compared with unpolluted district. The significant effects (odds ratio [OR], 95% confidence interval [CI], P value) associated with living in the polluted district were: cough and sore throat (OR = 1.22, 95% CI: 1.04-1.43, P < 0.01) and wheezing (OR = 1.35, 95% CI: 1.10-1.66, P < 0.01). After the intervention, in the polluted district only, sulphur dioxide levels fell by up to 80% and sulphate concentrations in respirable particulates by 38%. Between 1989 and 1990-1991 there was a greater decline in the polluted compared with the unpolluted district for reported symptoms of cough or sore throat, phlegm, and wheezing. The risks to respiratory health for children exposed to tobacco smoke in the home were higher than those for air pollution in both 1989 and 1990 and remained unchanged in 1991. CONCLUSIONS Air quality can be improved by fuel controls but an effective intersectoral approach is required if other risks from environmental tobacco smoke are to be avoided.
Adoption of Green IS in South Africa: an exploratory study

Scarcity of research in South Africa on adoption of ICTs for environmental sustainability propelled this qualitative study in which data was collected via semi-structured interviews from seven companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. While technology accounts for increased energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, toxic landfill pollution and loss of biodiversity, this exploratory research suggests that corporates in South Africa are slow to engage with environmental sustainability as a strategic issue. A contribution to knowledge is provided in the research indicating that one of the drivers of adoption in South Africa appears to be cost saving (rather than for ethical or regulatory reasons). Data was collected from corporation representatives responsible for Green Information Technology implementation. Butler's Integrative Model of Institutional Theory of Green Information Systems was used as a theoretical framework and the influences of adoption were tested deductively against the research data. The paper concludes by expanding on the Integrative Model to incorporate an additional driver (Cost-saving) and makes recommendations for further research.
The Evolution of the Cover Time

The cover time of a graph is a celebrated example of a parameter that is easy to approximate using a randomized algorithm, but for which no constant factor deterministic polynomial time approximation is known. A breakthrough due to Kahn, Kim, Lovász and Vu [25] yielded a (log logn)2 polynomial time approximation. We refine the upper bound of [25], and show that the resulting bound is sharp and explicitly computable in random graphs. Cooper and Frieze showed that the cover time of the largest component of the Erdős–Rényi random graph G(n, c/n) in the supercritical regime with c > 1 fixed, is asymptotic to ϕ(c)nlog2n, where ϕ(c) → 1 as c ↓ 1. However, our new bound implies that the cover time for the critical Erdős–Rényi random graph G(n, 1/n) has order n, and shows how the cover time evolves from the critical window to the supercritical phase. Our general estimate also yields the order of the cover time for a variety of other concrete graphs, including critical percolation clusters on the Hamming hypercube {0, 1}n, on high-girth expanders, and on tori ℤdn for fixed large d. This approach also gives a simpler proof of a result of Aldous [2] that the cover time of a uniform labelled tree on k vertices is of order k3/2. For the graphs we consider, our results show that the blanket time, introduced by Winkler and Zuckerman [45], is within a constant factor of the cover time. Finally, we prove that for any connected graph, adding an edge can increase the cover time by at most a factor of 4.
A FPGA-based auto focusing system for object ranging estimation

This paper presents a FPGA-based auto focusing system for object ranging. It overcomes the disadvantage of manual focusing wise in traditional method of objects ranging. In our system, the distance of objects can be measured automatically by the auto focusing algorithm. We have experimentally demonstrated the effectiveness of this method. The best performance of our system is about 3% relative errors when the target is around 8 meters far away from the camera.
A Novel E3 Ubiquitin Ligase TRAC-1 Positively Regulates T Cell Activation

TRAC-1 (T cell RING (really interesting new gene) protein identified in activation screen) is a novel E3 ubiquitin ligase identified from a retroviral vector-based T cell surface activation marker screen. The C-terminal truncated TRAC-1 specifically inhibited anti-TCR-mediated CD69 up-regulation in Jurkat cells, a human T leukemic cell line. In this study, we show that TRAC-1 is a RING finger ubiquitin E3 ligase with highest expression in lymphoid tissues. Point mutations that disrupt the Zn2+-chelating ability of its amino-terminal RING finger domain abolished TRAC-1’s ligase activity and the dominant inhibitory effect of C-terminal truncated TRAC-1 on TCR stimulation. The results of in vitro biochemical studies indicate that TRAC-1 can stimulate the formation of both K48- and K63-linked polyubiquitin chains and therefore could potentially activate both degradative and regulatory ubiquitin-dependent pathways. Antisense oligonucleotides to TRAC-1 specifically reduced TRAC-1 mRNA levels in Jurkat and primary T cells and inhibited their activation in response to TCR cross-linking. Collectively, these results indicate that the E3 ubiquitin ligase TRAC-1 functions as a positive regulator of T cell activation.
A New Software Quality Model for Evaluating COTS Components

Studies show that COTS-based (Commercial off the shelf) systems that are being built recently are exceeding 40% of the total developed software systems. Therefore, a model that ensures quality characteristics of such systems becomes a necessity. Among the most critical processes in COTS-based systems are the evaluation and selection of the COTS components. There are several existing quality models used to evaluate software systems in general; however, none of them is dedicated to COTS-based systems. In this contribution, an analysis study has been carried out on several existing software quality models, namely: McCall's, Boehm, ISO 9126, FURPS, Dromey, ISO/IEC TR 15504-2 1998(E), Triangle and Quality Cube, for the purpose of evaluating them and defining a ground to build a new model specializing in evaluating and selecting COTS components. The study also outlines limitations found in the existing models, such as the tendency to ignore a certain quality feature like Functionality or the failure to describe how the quality measurement in these models has been carried out. As a result of this analysis, a new model has been built that supports a standard set of quality characteristics suitable for evaluating COTS components, along with newly defined sets of sub-characteristics associated with them. The new model avoids some of the limitations found in the existing models. The new model ignores quality characteristics that are not applicable to COTS components and is empowered with new ones that are. In addition, it matches the appropriate type of stakeholders with corresponding quality characteristics; such a feature is missing in all existing models. The objective of the new model is to guide organizations that are in the process of building COTS-based systems to evaluate and choose the appropriate products, and that is essential to the success of the entire system.
Joint Dynamic Radio Resource Allocation and Mobility Load Balancing in 3GPP LTE Multi-Cell Network

Load imbalance, together with inefficient utilization of system resource, constitute major factors responsible for poor overall performance in Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. In this paper, a novel scheme of joint dynamic resource allocation and load balancing is proposed to achieve a balanced performance improvement in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) LTE SelfOrganizing Networks (SON). The new method which aims at maximizing network resource efficiency subject to intercell interference and intra-cell resource constraints is implemented in two steps. In the first step, an efficient resource allocation, including user scheduling and power assignment, is conducted in a distributed manner to serve as many users in the whole network as possible. In the second step, based on the resource allocation scheme, the optimization objective namely network resource efficiency can be calculated and load balancing is implemented by switching the user that can maximize the objective function. Lagrange Multipliers method and heuristic algorithm are used to resolve the formulated optimization problem. Simulation results show that our algorithm achieves better performance in terms of user throughput, fairness, load balancing index and unsatisfied user number compared with the traditional approach which takes resource allocation and load balancing into account, respectively.
Anamorphic pixels for multi-channel superresolution

Superresolution from plenoptic cameras or camera arrays is usually treated similarly to superresolution from video streams. However, the transformation between the low-resolution views can be determined precisely from camera geometry and parallax. Furthermore, as each low-resolution image originates from a unique physical camera, its sampling properties can also be unique. We exploit this option with a custom design of either the optics or the sensor pixels. This design makes sure that the sampling matrix of the complete system is always well-formed, enabling robust and high-resolution image reconstruction. We show that simply changing the pixel aspect ratio from square to anamorphic is sufficient to achieve that goal, as long as each camera has a unique aspect ratio. We support this claim with theoretical analysis and image reconstruction of real images. We derive the optimal aspect ratios for sets of 2 or 4 cameras. Finally, we verify our solution with a camera system using an anamorphic lens.
Nutrigenomics, individualism and public health

Issues arising in connection with genes and nutrition policy include both nutrigenomics and nutrigenetics. Nutrigenomics considers the relationship between specifc nutrients or diet and gene expression and, it is envisaged, will facilitate prevention of diet-related common diseases. Nutrigenetics is concerned with the effects of individual genetic variation (single nucleotide polymorphisms) on response to diet, and in the longer term may lead to personalised dietary recommendations. It is important also to consider the surrounding context of other issues such as novel and functional foods in so far as they are related to genetic modification. Ethical issues fall into a number of categories: (1) why nutrigenomics? Will it have important public health benefits? (2) questions about research, e.g. concerning the acquisition of information about individual genetic variation; (3) questions about who has access to this information, and its possible misuse; (4) the applications of this information in terms of public health policy, and the negotiation of the potential tension between the interests of the individual in relation to, for example, prevention of conditions such as obesity and allergy; (5) the appropriate ethical approach to the issues, e.g. the moral difference, if any, between therapy and enhancement in relation to individualised diets; whether the 'technological fix' is always appropriate, especially in the wider context of the purported lack of public confidence in science, which has special resonance in the sphere of nutrition.
Composite Prospect Theory: A proposal to combine ‘prospect theory’ and ‘cumulative prospect theory’

Evidence shows that (i) people overweight low probabilities and underweight high probabilities, but (ii) ignore events of extremely low probability and treat extremely high probability events as certain. The main alternative decision theories, rank dependent utility (RDU) and cumulative prospect theory (CP) incorporate (i) but not (ii). By contrast, prospect theory (PT) addresses (i) and (ii) by proposing an editing phase that eliminates extremely low probability events, followed by a decision phase that only makes a choice from among the remaining alternatives. However, PT allows for the choice of stochastically dominated options, even when such dominance is obvious. We propose to combine PT and CP into composite cumulative prospect theory (CCP). CCP combines the editing and decision phases of PT into one phase and does not allow for the choice of stochastically dominated options. This, we believe, provides the best available alternative among decision theories of risk at the moment. As illustrative examples, we also show that CCP allows us to resolve three paradoxes: the insurance paradox, the Becker paradox and the St. Petersburg paradox.
The capacity region of gaussian broadcast channels with intersymbol interference

The compound of the formula: is useful as an intermediate to prepare a compound having the generic formula wherein X is selected from groups to provide tetrahydropyran type compounds, 1,4 dioxane type compounds or tetrahydrofuran type compounds, and R is selected from the group consisting of alkali metal, NH4+, NH(CH2CH2OH)3+, and lower alkyl, branched or straight chain, with up to about C20 in the chain, useful as a detergent builder.
What makes a good team player? Personality and team effectiveness.

Good team players are often defined in trait terms; that is, they are described as dependable, flexible, or cooperative. Our goal is to examine the relationship between team member personality traits and team effectiveness. However, to understand the effects of personality on team performance requires greater specificity in how personality is described and in how team effectiveness is described. A hierarchical model of team member personality is presented that defines higherlevel personality traits and specific facets relevant to team performance. Next, a classification of the core teamwork dimensions underlying effective team performance is presented. Finally, predictions are derived linking team member personality facets to specific teamwork requirements.