Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Theory on the Association between Audit Quality and the Accuracy and Dispersion of Analysts' Earnings Forecasts

In this study, we establish a link between audit quality and various characteristics of analysts’ earnings forecasts (i.e., accuracy and dispersion) and present theory which suggests that the audit quality enhances the market’s earnings expectation. Our proposition is that enhancing audit quality improves the quality of accounting numbers, which in turn affects analysts’ forecasting ability. Although prior empirical studies investigated this relation by using various proxies, none of them directly show the relation with theoretical base. In this paper, we model that accounting earnings are in autoregressive process and influenced by earnings shock. The earnings shock is composed of unpredictable random shock and accounting errors. Then we show that high-quality audit can reduce the accounting errors which in turn influence the analysts’ earnings forecasts. The model’s predictions are: (1) forecast accuracy is higher, and (2) forecast dispersion is smaller for
An examination of the use of accounting information systems and the success of small businesses in South Carolina

AN EXAMINATION OF THE USE OF ACCOUNTING INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND THE SUCCESS OF SMALL BUSINESSES IN SOUTH CAROLINA by Tara H. Saracina The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between the use and sophistication of accounting information systems (AISs) and the success of small businesses in South Carolina. Additionally, this study explored the variables that influence South Carolinian small business owners/managers in the extent of adoption (sophistication) of AISs. This study applied the contingency theory of management accounting information systems as the theoretical foundation of the study. The study sought to fill the gap in the literature related to the use of accounting information systems in small businesses. Previous empirical studies of owner/manager behavior have resulted in conflicting findings with respect to accounting and business processes and systems utilized in small businesses. The research question central to this study was whether or not the sophistication of accounting information systems improved the success of South Carolina small businesses. The researcher expected to find that businesses owned by individuals with business-related education and previous business experience would be using more sophisticated AISs, and therefore be more successful. The results of the study did show a positive relationship between the sophistication of the AIS and higher levels of sales in small businesses. Also, the study found a significant positive relationship between the importance the owner/manager placed on AISs and the sophistication of the AIS. The findings indicated no positive significantly related differences in the sophistication of accounting information systems and owner/manager education, experience, ethnicity, or gender.
The Development of a Conceptual Model to Support Sustainable Tourism Policy in North Mediterranean Destinations

Sustainable tourism is a malleable concept that needs to be operationalized for successful implementation. Policies based on firm conceptualizations are needed in order to put sustainable tourism into practice. The present research develops a conceptual model to support sustainable tourism policy making. It brings together, into a single model, knowledge from diverse literature sources and structures it as a system of interrelated components using a holistic, adaptive, and complex systems' approach. In building the model it is the interrelationships of the elements that shape it and underline its contribution as something more than a listing of policy considerations. This comprehensive representation of interrelationships should help policy makers to navigate through the complexities of sustainable tourism and to make more knowledgeable decisions.
Beampattern Optimization for Frequency Diverse Array With Sparse Frequency Waveforms

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar equipped with a frequency diverse array (FDA) can produce a range-dependent beampattern and increase the degrees-of-freedom of the antenna array. In this paper, a new method of designing the MIMO radar beampattern with sparse frequency waveforms is proposed for the FDA, which randomly samples multiple distance points such that the MIMO radar beampattern with the both sparse frequency spectrum and constant modulus constraints are realized by the proposed beampattern design framework. The main steps are as follows. We first obtain the covariance matrix of the transmitted signal by a given ideal beampattern, and formulate the problem of designing the realizable beampattern as a nonconvex optimization problem, which includes the constraints of the both constant modulus of transmitted signals and sparse frequency spectrum. Then, a cyclic optimization algorithm is proposed, which guarantees the monotonic decrease of the objective function as the algorithm proceeds. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed method can achieve smaller errors than the traditional method, which does not consider the frequency diversity.
Cellular senescence, an unpopular yet trustworthy tumor suppressor mechanism

The term “cellular senescence” refers to the state in which normal cells irreversibly stop dividing. Historically, this condition was first inferred from the finding that normal human fibroblasts cease dividing after a limited number of cell divisions. Since then, cellular senescence has been discussed as a potential cause of aging of organisms. However, recent studies have significantly expanded our view of cellular senescence in terms of both mechanistics and biological significance. Accordingly, cellular senescence is now considered to play an important adaptive role, namely, a tumor suppressor function. This review will focus on recent findings that have contributed to the elucidation of the adaptive role of cellular senescence.
APT Threat Detection and Protection of Integrated Network Space

Network’s integration has become the trend of the future development of information technology, and the character of the integration network is different from traditional network. Network threats develop from stragglers random attack toward purposeful, organized, premeditated groups attack , forming the APT attack. These new changes have made the traditional defense difficult to effectively resist the new threat. Therefore, in the confrontation, we must change our thinking,and taking on new forms.
Product Innovation for the Poor: The Role of Microfinance

Poor, food-insecure households seek to avoid the risk of falling below a minimum level of consumption of food and other basic goods that would threaten their survival. In general, there are two types of risk coping, income smoothing and consumption smoothing. Households can smooth income by making conservative production or employment choices, diversifying economic activities, or taking steps to protect themselves from adverse income shocks before they occur. Households can smooth consumption by borrowing and saving and by employing formal and informal insurance arrangements. These actions help insulate consumption from income variability. In short, improved access to financial services can have two principal effects on households. First, it can raise the expected value of income and therefore of consumption and future investment and asset accumulation. This is the traditional and often sole argument for provision of services by MFIs. Second, it can decrease the downward risk of too low an income to satisfy basic consumption needs. Poorer households, for which this consideration is especially important, tend to value financial services that address the risk-coping motive relatively more, while wealthier households tend to place higher value on financial services that generate income and aid the accumulation of assets.
Mixed Motivations and Mixed Blessings: Chinese Investments in Southeast Asian Energy and Mineral Resources

Multi-national energy and mining companies used to play a significant role in exploring and exploiting Southeast Asia’s energy and mineral resources. Their involvement has steadily declined as larger deposits have become available for exploitation elsewhere in the world, and under more attractive fiscal and regulatory conditions. Their place is progressively being taken over by state-owned and state-backed enterprises from different Asian countries, especially China. • Energy and mineral companies play an important part in China’s economic engagement with Southeast Asia. Although Southeast Asia is not a preferred region for Chinese overseas resource investments, it offers distinct locational advantages to China’s energy and mineral companies and to the government. • Most Chinese companies undertaking the projects are wholly or partly owned by the government at either central or local levels, though private companies do engage in smaller projects. Corporate objectives include securing energy or resource supply chains, increasing or diversifying their asset base, and enhancing their profits or market share.The motivations of the government range from straightforward support of the companies for the purpose of industrial strategy and security of resource supply, to development assistance, diplomacy and regional strategic positioning.
Incorporating Intangible Aspects in Performance Evaluation of Indian Banks

This paper evaluates the significance of intangible aspects as a tool for performance measurement in the Indian banking sector. Panel data spread over ten years from 1997 to 2006 and 19 indicators of a representative Indian bank, namely, Bank of Baroda, are used for the purpose. The importance of measurement of intangible assets and integration of contingencies in performance evaluation is discussed initially. Being a part of the service sector, long-term strategic planning in a bank needs to concentrate on these. However, implementation of this technique is difficult due to the problems in measurement of the attributes associated with the intangible assets, complexity of the interrelations among these indicators, differences in the significance assigned to various indicators within the organization and difficulty in linking the reward mechanism to performance.
A prospective, population-based epidemiologic study of status epilepticus in Richmond, Virginia

This report presents the initial analysis of a prospective, population-based study of status epilepticus (SE) in the city of Richmond, Virginia. The incidence of SE was 41 patients per year per 100,000 population. The frequency of total SE episodes was 50 per year per 100,000 population. The mortality rate for the population was 22%, 3% for children and 26% for adults. Evaluation of the seizure types for adult and pediatric patients demonstrated that both partial and generalized SE occur with a high frequency in these populations. Based on the incidence of SE actually determined in Richmond, Virginia, we project 126,000 to 195,000 SE events with 22,200 to 42,000 deaths per year in the United States. The majority of SE patients had no history of epilepsy. These results indicate that SE is a common neurologic emergency. NEUROLOGY 1996;46: 1029-1035
Risk Management in ERP Implementation.

“There can be no great accomplishment without risk”, says by the Neil Armstrong. Risk management is very crucial and vital task in the current era of competitive business for any organization, who takes the various kind of risk in their respective business process and functions. As the organization ready to sustain in the fast processing world of business, many organization adopted technology-based or high-tech business processing. To obtain the all kind of advantages, most of the organization migrate their business process into ERP environment. But, big advantage can also comes with big risk and when there is risk, organization keep their eyes and ears open to indentify, analyze and overcome on the risks. The theme of the paper is to highlighting the importance of risk by organizational view. The research gives the risk management process and listed a variety of risks with their functional types like managerial, Operational, Technical, Financial etc. At the end of this paper, the authors tries to explore various countermeasures to over comes the risk and enlighten the Risk Management in ERP Implementation.
Defending DDoS Attacks in Software-Defined Networking Based on Legitimate Source and Destination IP Address Database

SUMMARY The availability is an important issue of software-deﬁned networking (SDN). In this paper, the experiments based on a SDN testbed showed that the resource utilization of the data plane and control plane changed drastically when DDoS attacks happened. This is mainly because the DDoS attacks send a large number of fake ﬂows to network in a short time. Based on the observation and analysis, a DDoS defense mechanism based on legitimate source and destination IP address database is proposed in this paper. Firstly, each ﬂow is abstracted as a source-destination IP address pair and a legitimate source-destination IP address pair database (LSDIAD) is established by historical normal tra ﬃ c trace. Then the proportion of new source-destination IP address pair in the tra ﬃ c per unit time is cumulated by non-parametric cumulative sum (CUSUM) algorithm to detect the DDoS attacks quickly and accurately. Based on the alarm from the non-parametric CUSUM, the attack ﬂows will be ﬁltered and redirected to a middle box network for deep analysis via south-bound API of SDN. An on-line updating policy is adopted to keep the LSDIAD timely and accurate. This mechanism is mainly implemented in the controller and the simulation results show that this mechanism can achieve a good performance in protecting SDN from DDoS attacks.
Consumer Preferences for Water Supply at Njala University, Njala Campus in Southern Sierra Leone

Suppliers of potable water would benefit from a sustainable business as long as consumers continue to prefer their brand. Some of the reasons for choosing a particular brand include water quality, cost of the finished product, reliability of supply, and supplier ethics. These important determinant factors form the basis of this work. The objective is to delineate consumer preferences for water supplied to the Njala campus community, in southern Sierra Leone, and the underlying determinant factors. A list of questions administered to 140 respondents, are used to help achieve the objective. The results of water quality tests are also used to determine if quality has anything to do with consumer preference. The Oxfam Delagua water testing kit is customized to incubate and enhance counting of fecal and no-fecal coliform bacteria in water samples. Bacterial contamination is the major concern in the study area. The survey results reveal the consumers prefer package water for drinking. Treated water from Tia River is only used for other domestic purposes. The consumers do not trust the quality of water supplied from Tia River, albeit filtration and disinfection at the University’s treatment center. This distrust is confirmed by the bacterial test. None of the campus water sources meet recommended guidelines for drinking water. The consumers are, however, willing to shift preference from package to tap drinking water if treatment comes with quality assurance. The university could benefit through economic gratification, customer protection, and reduced plastic waste from package drinking water.
Supervising Unethical Salesforce Behavior

Supervisory reactions of sales managers to potentially unethical salesperson behavior are examined in a national survey of sales executives. Four scenarios representing ethical issues were presented to the respondents. Salesperson overall work performance, organizational consequences, and gender significantly influenced various supervisory reactions; however, consequence and work performance influences were observed more consistently. Gender differences were marginal and generally confined to only two issues. The findings indicate that sales managers are more likely to use a harsher form of disciplinary action when poor performers, negative consequences, and salesmen are involved in unethical behavior.
Dominating Shareholders in Indian Organizations – Their Relevance for Corporate Governance and Firm Performance

Unlike the central governance issue in the Anglo Saxon world, which is essentially that of disciplining management that may stop being accountable to the owners, who are dispersed shareholders, the central challenge in corporate governance in India is that of disciplining the dominant shareholder and in protecting the interest of the minority shareholders. Other forms of domination, besides family ownership, such as domination by government or a foreign group also exist in Indian organizations; additionally, often promoters of companies exercise influence that is disproportionate to their actual shareholding.Our study finds that differences in the nature of the dominating shareholder result in significant differences in the firm’s corporate governance characteristics. Furthermore, while the corporate governance parameters do not have any significant impact on the firm’s performance, the nature of the dominating shareholder significantly impacts the firm’s performance
Robust speaker identification in babble noise

Performance of speaker recognition systems strongly degrades in the presence of background noise, like the babble noise. Speech babble is one of the most challenging noise interference due to its speaker/speech like characteristics. In contrast to existing works, the aim is to improve noise robustness focusing on the features only. To derive robust features, amplitude modulation - frequency modulation (AM-FM) based speaker model is proposed which combines the speech production and perception mechanism. The performance is evaluated using clean speech corpus from TIMIT database combined with babble noise from the NOISEX-92 database. Experimental results show that the proposed features significantly improve the performance over the conventional Mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features under mismatched training and testing environments.
A key role for Rac and Pak signaling in neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) formation defines a new potential therapeutic target

NET formation in mice (NETosis) is supported by reactive oxygen species (ROS) production by NADPH oxidase and histone hypercitrullination by peptidylarginine deiminase 4 (PAD4). Rac1 and Rac2, expressed in polymorphonuclear neutrophils (PMNs), regulate the cytoskeleton, cell shape, adhesion, and migration and are also essential components of the NADPH oxidase complex. We aimed to explore the role of the Rac signaling pathway including the upstream guanosine exchange factor (GEF) activator, Vav, and a downstream effector, the p21‐activated kinase, Pak, on NETosis in PMNs using a previously described flow‐cytometry‐based assay. Rac2‐/‐ PMNs showed reduced levels of citrullinated histone H3 (H3Cit)‐positive cells and defective NETosis. Rac1Δ/Δ; Rac2‐/‐ PMNs demonstrated a further reduction in PMA‐induced H3Cit levels and a more profound impairment of NETosis than deletion of Rac2 alone, suggesting an overlapping role of these two highly related proteins. Genetic knockouts of Vav1, or Vav2, did not impair H3Cit response to phorbol myristate ester (PMA) or NETosis. Combined, Vav1 and Vav3 deletions decreased H3Cit response and caused a modest but significant impairment of NETosis. Pharmacologic inhibition of Pak by two inhibitors with distinct mechanisms of action, led to reduced H3Cit levels after PMA stimulation, as well as significant inhibition of NETosis. We validated the importance of Pak using Pak2Δ/Δ PMNs, which demonstrated significantly impaired histone H3 citrullination and NETosis. These data confirm and more comprehensively define the key role of the Rac signaling pathway in PMN NETosis. The Rac signaling cascade may represent a valuable target for inhibition of NETosis and related pathological processes.
Anterior uveitis and its relation to stress

BACKGROUND/AIMS Idiopathic recurrent acute anterior uveitis (RAAU) is a common reason for attendance at ophthalmic casualty departments. Patients who suffer with this condition may have multiple recurrent episodes which are often debilitating and necessitate time off work. If recurrences are identified early and treatment initiated rapidly, the inflammation can be minimised and settles quickly on topical treatment with a speedy functional recovery by the patient. It has been our clinical impression that some patients with RAAU relate recurrences of inflammation to psychological factors. Therefore stress could be a trigger factor for recurrence, and at such times, patients should be alert to the early signs of uveitis and seek prompt examination by an ophthalmologist. This study tests the hypothesis that stressful life events are associated with the onset of RAAU. METHODS The number of stressful life events in patients presenting to the casualty department with RAAU in the month immediately preceding symptom onset was compared with a control group of patients with other ocular problems taken from the casualty department using the Holmes and Rahe scale and the Spielberger state-trait anxiety inventory. RESULTS 35 patients with RAAU did not report a higher number of stressful life events or higher levels of anxiety compared with 29 controls in this study on both Holmes and Rahe scale and Spielberger state-trait anxiety inventory. Scores for both groups were comparable with those published for normal adults of the same age and sex. CONCLUSION Stress was not shown in this study to be involved in triggering the recurrence of idiopathic acute anterior uveitis.
Audit Committees: The Journey So Far In Nigeria

Before 1989, there was no issues of audit committee in Nigeria. In 1989 Professor Olowokure article titled a Case for Audit Committee in Nigeria was written drawing the attention of Government, Stakeholders for the use of Audit Committee in public companies in Nigeria. Hence this was captured in the CAMA 1990 as amended Section 359 (3), it then become very important in Nigeria. The importance have led to problematic issues which resulted to why the research is been carried out.
Overexpression of the long non‐coding RNA MEG3 impairs in vitro glioma cell proliferation

Gliomas are the most common type of primary brain tumor in the central nervous system of adults. Maternally Expressed Gene 3 (MEG3) is an imprinted gene located at 14q32 that encodes a non‐coding RNA (ncRNA) associated with tumorigenesis. However, little is known about whether and how MEG3 regulates glioma development. In the present study we assayed the expression of MEG3 in glioma tissue samples by real‐time polymerase chain reaction assay, and defined the biological functions and target genes by CCK‐8 assay, flow cytometry, and RNA immunoprecipitation. We first demonstrated that MEG3 expression was markedly decreased in glioma tissues compared with adjacent normal tissues. Moreover, ectopic expression of MEG3 inhibited cell proliferation and promoted cell apoptosis in U251 and U87 MG human glioma cell lines. We further verified that MEG3 was associated with p53 and that this association was required for p53 activation. These data suggest an important role of MEG3 in the molecular etiology of glioma and implicate the potential application of MEG3 in glioma therapy. J. Cell. Biochem. 113: 1868–1874, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.