Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The impact of auditor‐client relationships on the reversal of first‐time audit qualifications

Purpose - To examine whether auditor-client relationships have an effect on the decision by an auditor to remove an audit qualification. Design/methodology/approach - The paper tracks the event history of a sample of firms from the issuance of a first time audit qualification for going concern and non-going concern contingencies (initial qualification issued between 1983 and 1987, all pre Statement of Auditing Standard (SAS) 58) to the issuance of a clean opinion (up through 1995 when SAS 79 was issued). Attachment theory provides a theoretical framework for the variables analyzed and discrete time survival analysis is used as the statistical method in the analysis so as to evaluate each company year from the initial unclean opinion to the year a clean opinion is issued. Findings - It is found that interpersonal and interorganizational attachment has a significant impact on those opinion decisions that require more auditor judgment (i.e. going concern). Originality/value - This study examines the linkage between auditor tenure and audit quality in a broader context than has been examined to date. Using attachment theory for the foundation, auditor tenure can be viewed as but one measure of the attachment between auditors and clients. In this study, a number of measures of both interpersonal and interorganizational attachment between auditors and clients are included. Further, auditor opinion judgments are examined as a determinant of auditor quality. Finally, discrete-time survival analysis is employed which allows the tracking of the entire event history from initial qualification to removal of the qualification, something not possible with most standard statistical techniques.
Essays on global coffee supply chains: improving small-scale producers' income

OF THE THESIS Essays on Global Coffee Supply Chains: Improving Small-Scale Producers’ Income By Rose B. Karimi Kiwanuka Dissertation Director: Professor Yao Zhao Many of the world’s poor still directly or indirectly depend upon agricultural commodities for their income, most of them as small-scale producers. Price volatility and agro-climatic risks over the past several decades, however, have threatened the efforts of most producers to secure sustainable livelihoods. This is particularly true for smallscale coffee producers who constitute 70% of the world’s coffee production. Recently, there has been renewed focus on producer organizations as important means of linking producers to markets and ultimately reducing poverty. Yet strategies for producer organizations to make better use of what is already produced, such as improving post-harvest marketing and inventory management have not received much attention. Does collective marketing by small-scale coffee producers improve the prices they receive in world trade? How should they hedge the price risk and judiciously decide how much to sell and carry in inventory? What is the impact of such a hedging strategy relative to the current “selling-all” practice? This dissertation attempts to answer these and other questions by combining empirical and analytical studies. Part I of the dissertation estimates the effect of collective marketing by Kenya Cooperative Coffee Exporters (KCCE) on coffee prices at the auction. We use a ‘difference-in-differences’ approach to compare coffee prices received by small-scale producers with a comparable group (estates) of producers,
Phosphoinositide 3-kinase enhancer (PIKE) in the brain: is it simply a phosphoinositide 3-kinase/Akt enhancer?

Abstract Since its discovery in 2000, phosphoinositide 3-kinase enhancer (PIKE) has been recognized as a class of GTPase that controls the enzymatic activities of phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) and Akt in the central nervous system (CNS). However, recent studies suggest that PIKEs are not only enhancers to PI3K/Akt but also modulators to other kinases including insulin receptor tyrosine kinase and focal adhesion kinases. Moreover, they regulate transcription factors such as signal transducer and activator of transcription and nuclear factor κB. Indeed, PIKE proteins participate in multiple cellular processes including control of cell survival, brain development, memory formation, gene transcription, and metabolism. In this review, we have summarized the functions of PIKE proteins in CNS and discussed their potential implications in various neurological disorders.
Dynamical brain connectivity estimation using GARCH models: An application to personality neuroscience

It has recently become evident that the functional connectome of the human brain is a dynamical entity whose time evolution carries important information underpinning physiological brain function as well as its disease-related aberrations. While simple sliding window approaches have had some success in estimating dynamical brain connectivity in a functional MRI (fMRI) context, these methods suffer from limitations related to the arbitrary choice of window length and limited time resolution. Recently, Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic (GARCH) models have been employed to generate dynamical covariance models which can be applied to fMRI. Here, we employ a GARCH-based method (dynamic conditional correlation - DCC) to estimate dynamical brain connectivity in the Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset and study how the dynamic functional connectivity behaviors related to personality as described by the five-factor model. Openness, a trait related to curiosity and creativity, is the only trait associated with significant differences in the amount of time-variability (but not in absolute median connectivity) of several inter-network functional connections in the human brain. The DCC method offers a novel window to extract dynamical information which can aid in elucidating the neurophysiological underpinning of phenomena to which conventional static brain connectivity estimates are insensitive.
In vitro tuberculin reactivity of lymphocytes from patients with tuberculous pleurisy

Mononuclear cells in pleural fluid from patients with tuberculous pleurisy were predominantly T cells. Responsiveness of pleural fluid T cells to purified protein derivative of tuberculin were studied by the assay of cell proliferation and production of lymphocyte mitogenic factor by the stimulation with purified protein derivative. Peripheral blood lymphocytes were also studied from patients and tuberculin-positive healthy controls. The order of responsiveness was as follows: pleural fluid lymphocytes greater than peripheral blood lymphocytes of patients without effusion = peripheral blood lymphocytes of healthy controls greater than peripheral blood lymphocytes of patients with effusion. The poor response of peripheral blood lymphocytes from pleurisy patients were recovered by the elimination of adherent cells in peripheral blood lymphocytes to the level of the response of peripheral blood lymphocytes from healthy controls. T cells purified from pleural fluid mononuclear cells responded more than those from peripheral blood. These results suggested that in the pleurisy patients purified protein derivative-reactive T cells in peripheral blood did not decrease in activity, but were depressed by suppressor cells, and further suggested that highly purified protein derivative-reactive T cells were accumulated in the pleural fluid.
The Time Course of Emotional Responses to Music

Abstract: Two empirical studies investigate the time course of emotional responses to music. In the first one, musically trained and untrained listeners were required to listen to 27 musical excerpts and to group those that conveyed a similar emotional meaning. In one condition, the excerpts were 25 seconds long on average. In the other condition, excerpts were as short as 1 second. The groupings were then transformed into a matrix of emotional dissimilarity that was analyzed with multidimensional scaling methods (MDS). We compared the outcome of these analyses for the 25‐s and 1‐s duration conditions. In the second study, we presented musical excerpts of increasing duration, varying from 250 to 20 seconds. Participants were requested to evaluate on a subjective scale how “moving” each excerpt was. On the basis of the responses given for the longer duration, excerpts were then sorted into two groups: highly moving and weakly (or less) moving. The main purpose of the analysis was to identify the point in time where these two categories of excerpts started to be differentiated by participants. Both studies provide consistent findings that less than 1 s of music is enough to instill elaborated emotional responses in listeners.
Autocrine activation of EGF receptor promotes oscillation of glutamate‐induced calcium increase in astrocytes cultured in rat cerebral cortex

We previously reported that astrocytes cultured for more than 2 days in a defined medium containing epidermal growth factor (EGF) and basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) showed calcium oscillation in response to glutamate, whereas the response pattern was transient in the absence of the exogenous growth factors. In the present study, we found that astrocytes showed glutamate‐induced calcium oscillation, even in growth factor‐free medium, if the cells had been cultured for more than 5 days. The calcium oscillation promoted by the prolonged culture period was suppressed by an inhibitor of EGF receptor tyrosine kinase, but not by a neutralizing antibody to bFGF, indicating that the accumulation of an autocrine factor that activates the EGF receptor leads to calcium oscillation. Astrocytes in our culture system expressed EGF, transforming growth factor α (TGFα), bFGF and acidic fibroblast growth factor (aFGF). Exogenous aFGF, which induced astrocyte immediate early gene expression to the same extent as EGF or bFGF, did not affect calcium oscillation. Exogenous EGF and bFGF promoted astrocyte hypertrophic morphology and proliferation, as well as calcium oscillation. In contrast, these properties did not accompany calcium oscillation induced by the prolonged culture period. These results suggest that astrocytes possess the ability to promote their own calcium oscillation, which is independent of hypertrophic changes to reactive astrocytes.
The prosodic word is not universal, but emergent

In Prosodic Phonology, domains for the application of phonological patterns are commonly modeled as a Prosodic Hierarchy. The theory predicts, among other things, that (i) prosodic domains cluster on a single universal set of domains (‘Clustering’), and (ii) no level of prosodic structure is skipped in the building of prosodic structure unless this is required by independently motivated higher ranking principles or constraints (‘Strict Succession’). In this paper, we demonstrate that if, as is standardly done, evidence is limited to lexically general phonological processes, some languages systematically violate the Strict Succession Prediction, evidencing no prosodic word domain, and some languages systematically violate the Clustering Prediction, evidencing more than one domain between the phonological phrase and the foot. We substantiate these claims by in-depth studies of phonological rule domains in Vietnamese (Austroasiatic) and Limbu (Sino-Tibetan). As an alternative to the Prosodic Hierarchy framework, we advocate a heuristic for cross-linguistic comparison in which prosodic domains are conceived of as language-particular, intrinsic and highly specific properties of individual phonological rules or constraints. This allows us to explore empirically the actual degree of variation to be encountered across prosodic systems. It turns out that the ‘word’ has no privileged or universal status in phonology, but only emerges through frequent reference of sound patterns to a given construction type in a given language.
Formal equivalence checking between SLM and RTL descriptions

The growing complexity of digital designs makes it harder to discover inconsistency between system level model (SLM) and register transfer level (RTL) model. Equivalence checking is a promising solution to verify that the RTL description meets the requirements of the corresponding SLM description. Finite State Machines with Data Paths (FSMD) based equivalence checking method is widely used in checking the equivalence between system level and RT level designs. The designs without mapping information can not be handled by many formal methods. Deep state sequences (DSS) based equivalence checking method is one of the state of the art FSMD-based methods that can handle designs without mapping information. DSS is the state sequence from start state to final state of FSMD without repeated paths. It proves the equivalence between SLM and RTL by comparing all the DSS-pairs of FSMDs in SLM and RTL. However the previous proposed DSS-based methods compared all the DSS-pairs blindly, which wasted most verification efforts on useless comparisons. This paper proposes a method to improve the DSS-based equivalence checking method by separating and comparing the corresponding potential equivalent DSS-pairs from all the generated paths to avoid blind comparisons. The promising experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the efficiency of DSS-based equivalence checking method.
Specialized Face Learning Is Associated with Individual Recognition in Paper Wasps

Social wasps that can discriminate faces are specialized for facial learning, whereas other closely related species are not. We demonstrate that the evolution of facial recognition in wasps is associated with specialized face-learning abilities. Polistes fuscatus can differentiate among normal wasp face images more rapidly and accurately than nonface images or manipulated faces. A close relative lacking facial recognition, Polistes metricus, however, lacks specialized face learning. Similar specializations for face learning are found in primates and other mammals, although P. fuscatus represents an independent evolution of specialization. Convergence toward face specialization in distant taxa as well as divergence among closely related taxa with different recognition behavior suggests that specialized cognition is surprisingly labile and may be adaptively shaped by species-specific selective pressures such as face recognition.
PENYEBAB UNDERPRICING PADA PENAWARAN SAHAM PERDANA DI BURSA EFEK JAKARTA

The objective of this research is to test the influence of auditor reputation, underwriter reputation and government ownership (BUMN) on initial return share at initial public offerings. At initial public offerings there are tendency that underpricing could happen. Underpricing is a circumstance where a share price is lower at initial public offerings compared to when it is commercialized in secondary market.There are 300 companies listed on the Jakarta Stock Exchange during year if 1990 to 2001. Sample is taken by using purposive sampling with criteria as underpriced stocks. Data are analysed using multiple regression to test the relation between initial return and the auditor reputation, underwriter reputation, company’s age, the percentage of stocks that are offered to the public, company profitability, financial leverage, solvability ratio, size of company and government ownership.Pursuant to the analysis, initial return is influenced significantly by underwriter reputation and company profitability. Auditor reputation and government ownership fail to show significant influence to initial return.
Outcrossing, mitotic recombination, and life-history trade-offs shape genome evolution in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

We carried out a population genomic survey of Saccharomyces cerevisiae diploid isolates and find that many budding yeast strains have high levels of genomic heterozygosity, much of which is likely due to outcrossing. We demonstrate that variation in heterozygosity among strains is correlated with a life-history trade-off that involves how readily yeast switch from asexual to sexual reproduction under nutrient stress. This trade-off is reflected in a negative relationship between sporulation efficiency and pseudohyphal development and correlates with variation in the expression of RME1, a transcription factor with pleiotropic effects on meiosis and filamentous growth. Selection for alternate life-history strategies in natural versus human-associated environments likely contributes to differential maintenance of genomic heterozygosity through its effect on the frequency that yeast lineages experience sexual cycles and hence the opportunity for inbreeding. In addition to elevated levels of heterozygosity, many strains exhibit large genomic regions of loss-of-heterozygosity (LOH), suggesting that mitotic recombination has a significant impact on genetic variation in this species. This study provides new insights into the roles that both outcrossing and mitotic recombination play in shaping the genome architecture of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This study also provides a unique case where stark differences in the genomic distribution of genetic variation among individuals of the same species can be largely explained by a life-history trade-off.
A Near-Infrared-Based Magnetic Induction Tomography Solution to Improve the Image Reconstruction Accuracy in Opaque Environments

In this paper, we propose a new magnetic induction tomography (MIT) system which uses, in addition to the set of magnetic coils, some infrared launch-detector fibers surrounding the cross-sectional image plane. The system is used to reconstruct the interior conductivity distribution of the body and to enhance the accuracy of images obtained by a single MIT. A constrained Landweber algorithm is proposed for image reconstruction. It uses both the boundary data obtained from the coils, and the foreground-background fractions at some neighboring elements of the mesh obtained using the infrared fibers. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by numerical data generated for some circular phantoms. Comparisons, in terms of several metrics, between the reconstructed images obtained using the new method and a conventional MIT based on Landweber reconstruction clearly show the outperformance of the method.
Examining intraday returns with buy/sell information

This paper examines high frequency stock returns with buy/sell signals. It demonstrates how such trading information could be utilized in a qualitative threshold framework to explain and predict the asymmetric behaviour of intraday stock returns. The study discovers that the buyer-dominating regime is consistently associated with negative returns, while the seller-dominating regime is consistently associated with positive returns. This is consistent with a suggestion of using the sign of the net buy/sell trading volume as the threshold indicator. Furthermore, the model renders better predicting power than that produced by a pure generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model. Most interestingly, these results are quite robust across all 12 actively traded stocks on the Australian Stock Exchange that have been examined, and hence provide strong support for the potential usefulness of buy/sell signals and the qualitative threshold model in analysing the dynamics of high frequency financial asset returns.
Use of bovine-derived anorganic bone associated with guided tissue regeneration in intrabony defects. Six-month evaluation at re-entry.

BACKGROUND Different filling materials have been associated with guided tissue regeneration (GTR) in order to improve its regenerative potential and predictability. Anorganic bovine bone (ABB) has demonstrated biocompatibility and osteoconductive properties; however, there are limited data regarding its performance in the treatment of intrabony defects. This investigation aimed to evaluate the clinical outcome of the association of anorganic bovine bone with cellulose membranes in intrabony defects after 6 months. METHODS Twenty-six paired intrabony defects were selected from 11 non-smoking patients with no relevant medical history. The defects were similar regarding the number of bony walls and defect depth, and presented pocket depths > or = 6 mm. Four weeks after completion of basic therapy, probing depth (PD), clinical attachment level (CAL), and gingival margin position (GP) were recorded (baseline values). The defects were then surgically accessed and debrided, and the intrabony component measured to the nearest millimeter with periodontal probes and customized acrylic stents (distance from the stent to the base of the defect and from the stent to the alveolar crest). Each intrabony defect was randomly assigned to receive the membrane alone (control, C) or the membrane with anorganic bovine bone (test, T). The patients were re-evaluated after 6 months, and re-entry procedures were performed. RESULTS Significant (P <0.01) improvement in all variables was observed: mean pocket reduction of 4.61+/-1.60 mm (C) and 4.46+/-1.50 mm (T) and clinical attachment gain of 2.85+/-1.46 mm (C) and 3.15+/-1.40 mm (T); the difference between groups was not significant (P >0.05). Nevertheless, gingival recession in the control group (1.84+/-0.89 mm) was significantly (P <0.05) more pronounced than that observed in the test group (1.30+/-0.48 mm). Bone measurements indicated a significant resolution of the defects (P <0.01). A mean defect resolution of 2.76+/-0.72 mm (C) and 2.69+/-1.03 mm (T) and crestal resorption of 1.07+/-0.64 mm (C) and 1.30+/-0.85 mm (T) were detected (P >0.05). Stepwise multiple regression analysis indicated that for both groups, the baseline depth of the defects and the alveolar crest resorption accounted for 82% of the variability of bone fill observed in the control group (F = 23.65, P <0.001) and 89% in the test group (F = 41.32, P <0.001). CONCLUSIONS ABB may be used in conjunction with GTR in the treatment of intrabony defects. Its use, however, did not result in a better outcome than the use of membranes alone. Studies employing more patients would be of interest in order to determine the advantages and indications of the tested approaches on a more predictable basis.
A Prospective Randomized Study of Systemic Inflammation and Immune Response After Laparoscopic Nissen Fundoplication Performed With Standard and Low-pressure Pneumoperitoneum

Background: The aim of this study was to compare changes in the systemic inflammation and immune response in the early postoperative (p.o.) period after laparoscopic Nissen fundoplication (LNF) was performed with standard-preassure and low-pressure carbon dioxide pneumoperitoneum. Materials and Methods: We studied 68 patients with documented gastroesophageal reflux disease and who underwent a LNF: 35 using standard-pressure (12 to 14 mmHg) and 33 low-pressure (6 to 8 mmHg) pneumoperitoneum. White blood cells, peripheral lymphocites subpopulation, human leukocyte antigen-DR, neutrophil elastase, interleukin (IL)-6 and IL-1, and C-reactive protein were investigated. Results: A significantly higher concentration of neutrophil elastase, IL-6 and IL-1, and C-reactive protein was detected postoperatively in the standard-pressure group of patients in comparison with the low-pressure group (P<0.05). A statistically significant change in human leukocyte antigen-DR expression was recorded p.o. at 24 hours, as a reduction of this antigen expressed on monocyte surface in patients from standard group; no changes were noted in low-pressure group patients (P<0.05). Conclusions: This study demonstrated that reducing the pressure of the pneumoperitoneum to 6 to 8 mm Hg during LNF is reduced p.o. inflammatory response and avoided p.o. immunosuppression.