bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Which Firms Get Punished for Unethical Behavior? Explaining Variation in Stock Market Reactions to Corporate Misconduct
Authors: Carberry Edward J. , Engelen Peter-Jan , Van Essen Marc 
Published: February 2018

ABSTRACT:Although there is ample evidence that stock markets react negatively to unethical corporate behavior, our understanding of the mechanisms that shape variation in these reactions across different incidents of misconduct remains underdeveloped. We propose and test a framework for explaining this variation by focusing on the role of the media in disseminating initial information about misconduct. We argue that the signaling effects of this information are important for investors because corporations have strong incentives to limit the information they disclose about misconduct. More specifically, we hypothesize that investors are more likely to react negatively when the media presents clear and credible information that misconduct occurred, that the firm was responsible for it, and that the misconduct was the result of deeper organizational problems. We also predict that information which signals that a firm has restorative capacity tempers investor reactions when the media places blame for misconduct on the corporation rather than specific individuals. We test our hypotheses in a unique sample of 345 acts of corporate misconduct in five European countries. Our findings provide broad support for our hypotheses, and we discuss implications for research on corporate misconduct and the role of non-state actors in regulating unethical corporate behavior.
An echinoderm Lagerstätte from the Upper Ordovician (Katian), Ontario: taxonomic re-evaluation and description of new dicyclic camerate crinoids
Authors: Cole Selina R. , Ausich William I. , Wright David F. , Koniecki Joseph M. 
Published: February 2018

AbstractThe Upper Ordovician (lower Katian) Bobcaygeon and Verulam formations from the Lake Simcoe region of Ontario contain a highly diverse echinoderm assemblage that is herein recognized as a Konservat-Lagerstätte. Although fossil crinoids have long been recognized from these formations, the fauna has not received a comprehensive taxonomic evaluation since Springer’s classic 1911 monograph. Recent extensive collection and preparation of new material from the Bobcaygeon and Verulam formations near Brechin, Ontario recovered numerous exceptionally preserved crinoid specimens with arms, stems, and attachment structures intact. The Brechin Lagerstätte is the most taxonomically diverse Katian crinoid fauna, with more than 20 crinoid genera represented in this collection.Here, all dicyclic crinoids belonging to subclass Camerata from the Brechin Lagerstätte are evaluated. The following four genera and seven species are described from the fauna, including one new genus and four new species:Reteocrinus stellaris,Reteocrinus alveolatus,Archaeocrinus sundayaen. sp.,Archaeocrinus maraensisn. sp.,Priscillacrinus elegansn. gen. n. sp.,Cleiocrinus regius, andCleiocrinus lepidotusn. sp. The exceptional preservation of this collection provides an opportunity to describe more fully the morphologic and ontogenetic details of known Ordovician crinoid taxa, to conduct a taxonomic re-evaluation of many species, to describe new taxa, and to provide a framework for subsequent studies of crinoid community paleoecology.UUID:http://zoobank.org/e3e268a7-88e5-43cd-84ea-b40df45e8281
A Comparative Analysis of Widow Dispossession in Francophone and Anglophone Cameroon
Authors: Willis Roxana 
Published: February 2018

AbstractWidows throughout sub-Saharan Africa may be at risk from dispossession when their husbands pass away. Whereas some scholars view widow dispossession as prevalent and global, others suggest that the issue is less common than claimed. This article contributes to understanding about the frequency of, and reasons for, widow dispossession through an empirical investigation of widowhood in Cameroon. By adopting a comparative method, working with similar groups in both francophone and anglophone regions, it presents preliminary findings. These findings include a higher awareness of widow dispossession in anglophone areas compared to francophone samples. Moreover, notably fewer marriages are legally registered in the anglophone dataset, compared to the francophone group, which may place anglophone widows at greater risk of dispossession. The article then assesses the impact of custom, religion, civil law and common law on the findings. In conclusion, it recommends the need for a holistic consideration of land rights.
Bilateral sudden sensorineural hearing loss as a first symptom of infective endocarditis: two case reports
Authors: Chroni M , Prappa E , Kokkevi I 
Published: February 2018

AbstractBackground:Septic emboli are an unusual cause of sudden sensorineural hearing loss, for which few reports exist in the literature.Case report:This paper presents two cases of sudden sensorineural hearing loss, initially considered as idiopathic, but which were caused by septic emboli. Hearing loss in these cases was bilateral, sequential and total. The first patient had mild fever one week prior to their presentation with sudden sensorineural hearing loss; the other patient had no additional symptoms at presentation. These patients were later diagnosed with infective endocarditis, at two and seven months following the sudden sensorineural hearing loss respectively, showing that septic emboli had been the cause of sudden sensorineural hearing loss.Conclusion:Septic emboli should be considered as a possible cause of sudden sensorineural hearing loss in cases of total hearing loss. This form of hearing loss should prompt the otolaryngologist to further investigate for infective endocarditis.
Past trauma and future choices: differences in discounting in low-income, urban African Americans
Authors: van den Berk-Clark Carissa , Myerson Joel , Green Leonard , Grucza Richard A. 
Published: February 2018

AbstractBackgroundExposure to traumatic events is surprisingly common, yet little is known about its effect on decision making beyond the fact that those with post-traumatic stress disorder are more likely to have substance-abuse problems. We examined the effects of exposure to severe trauma on decision making in low-income, urban African Americans, a group especially likely to have had such traumatic experiences.MethodParticipants completed three decision-making tasks that assessed the subjective value of delayed monetary rewards and payments and of probabilistic rewards. Trauma-exposed cases and controls were propensity-matched on demographic measures, treatment for psychological problems, and substance dependence.ResultsTrauma-exposed cases discounted the value of delayed rewards and delayed payments, but not probabilistic rewards, more steeply than controls. Surprisingly, given previous findings that suggested women are more affected by trauma when female and male participants’ data were analyzed separately, only the male cases showed steeper delay discounting. Compared with nonalcoholic males who were not exposed to trauma, both severe trauma and alcohol-dependence produced significantly steeper discounting of delayed rewards.ConclusionsThe current study shows that exposure to severe trauma selectively affects fundamental decision-making processes. Only males were affected, and effects were observed only on discounting delayed outcomes (i.e. intertemporal choice) and not on discounting probabilistic outcomes (i.e. risky choice). These findings are the first to show significant differences in the effects of trauma on men's and women's decision making, and the selectivity of these effects has potentially important implications for treatment and also provides clues as to underlying mechanisms.
Word learning by young sequential bilinguals: Fast mapping in Arabic and Hebrew
Authors: EVIATAR ZOHAR , TAHA HAITHAM , COHEN VIKKI , SCHWARTZ MILA 
Published: February 2018

ABSTRACTWe tested children attending bilingual Hebrew–Arabic kindergartens on a fast mapping task. These early sequential bilinguals included those with Hebrew as their home language and those with Arabic as their home language. They were compared to monolingual Hebrew and Arabic speakers. The children saw pictures of unfamiliar objects and were taught pseudowords as the object names that followed typical Hebrew, typical Arabic, or neutral phonotactics. Memory, phonological, and morphological abilities were also measured. The bilingual groups performed similarly to each other, and better than the monolingual groups, who also performed similarly to each other. Memory and the interaction between language experience and metalinguistic abilities (phonological and morphological awareness) significantly accounted for variance on the fast mapping tasks. We predicted that bilinguals would be more sensitive to phonotactics than monolinguals. Instead, we found that Arabic speakers (bilinguals and monolinguals) performed better with Hebrew-like stimuli than with Arabic-like stimuli, and no effect of phonotactics for Hebrew speakers. This may reflect the diglossia in Arabic language acquisition. The results suggest that the process of fast mapping is sharpened by multilingual experience, and may be sensitive to sociolinguistic factors such as diglossia.
The relationship between elder care-giving and labour force participation in the context of policies addressing population ageing: a review of empirical studies published between 2006 and 2016
Authors: MOUSSA MARGARET MALKE 
Published: February 2018

ABSTRACTThis paper systematically reviews empirical research published between 2006 and 2016 on the relationship between informal care-giving to elders and labour force participation (LFP). It does so in the context of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development policy responses to population ageing. In this context, conclusions regarding the LFP and care-giving relationship should at least be applicable to the sub-population of working-aged individuals who are most likely to provide informal elder care. Currently, these are women in mid-life and the recipients of their care are mostly extra-residential parents. The review's key conclusion is that mid-life women care-givers of elderly parents are significantly likely to reduce their working hours and also to work fewer hours relative to their non-care-giving counterparts. In drawing this conclusion, the review shows that studies finding only modest care-giving effects on LFP either do not adequately control for care-giving intensity or their conclusions apply to sub-populations less likely to be affected by policies addressing population ageing.
Constrained coverage path planning: evolutionary and classical approaches
Authors: Ahmadi S. M. , Kebriaei H. , Moradi H. 
Published: February 2018

SUMMARYThe constrained coverage path planning addressed in this paper refers to finding an optimal path traversed by a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to maximize its coverage on a designated area, considering the time limit and the feasibility of the path. The UAV starts from its current position to assess the condition of a new entry to the area. Nevertheless, the UAV needs to comply with the coverage task, simultaneously and therefore, it is likely that the optimal policy would not be the shortest path in such a condition, since a wider area can be covered through a longer path. From the other side, along with a longer path, the UAV may not reach to the target in due time. In addition, the speed of UAV is assumed to be constant and as a result, a feasible path needs to be smooth enough to support this assumption. The problem is modeled as an Epsilon-constraint optimization in which a coverage function has to be maximized, considering the constraints on the length and the smoothness of the path. For this purpose, a new genetic path planning algorithm with adaptive operator selection is proposed to solve such a complicated constrained optimization problem. The proposed approach has been compared to some classical approaches like, a modified version of the Artificial Potential Field and a modified version of Dijkstra's algorithm (a graph-based approach). All the methods are implemented and tested in different scenarios and their performances are evaluated via the simulation results.
Generic points of shift-invariant measures in the countable symbolic space
Authors: FAN AI–HUA , LI MING–TIAN , MA JI–HUA 
Published: February 2018

AbstractWe are concerned with sets of generic points for shift-invariant measures in the countable symbolic space. We measure the sizes of the sets by the Billingsley-Hausdorff dimensions defined by Gibbs measures. It is shown that the dimension of such a set is given by a variational principle involving the convergence exponent of the Gibbs measure and the relative entropy dimension of the Gibbs measure with respect to the invariant measure. This variational principle is different from that of the case of finite symbols, where the convergent exponent is zero and is not involved. An application is given to a class of expanding interval dynamical systems.
Peripheral Vision: Polish-Jewish Lawyers and Early Israeli Law
Authors: Likhovski Assaf 
Published: February 2018

Some of the founding fathers of Israel's legal system were lawyers educated in Polish law schools. What was the impact of this background on their legal thought? There are few explicit references to Polish law in Israeli legal texts. However, indirectly, legal and constitutional ideas taken from Polish law did appear in Israeli law. This article focuses on the legal writing of four Israeli lawyers in the period immediately after Israel's independence in 1948, showing how Polish law was used by these lawyers as a source for occasional precedents, for critiquing Israeli law (dominated by English law), and, mostly, for constitutional precedents.The relatively greater impact of Polish law in the constitutional realm can be attributed to the fact that Poland (like other new countries established in the interwar period in the periphery of western Europe, such as Ireland) offered Israeli lawyers constitutional models that were both more modern, and more relevant to the specific circumstances of the new state, where religion played an important role in defining the identity of the nation. The history of the impact of Polish law on Israeli law can thus serve as an example of interwar constitutional innovation in the European periphery, and its later impact on post-World War II constitutional law.
Terahertz antenna technology for imaging applications: a technical review
Authors: Malhotra Isha , Jha Kumud Ranjan , Singh Ghanshyam 
Published: February 2018

AbstractThe terahertz (THz) regime of the electromagnetic spectrum is rich with the emerging possibilities in imaging applications with unique characteristics to screening for weapons, explosives and bio-hazards, imaging of concealed objects, water content, and skin, and these advantages can be harnessed by using the effective THz sources and detectors. In THz imaging systems, the pulsed THz sources and detectors find unique applications and thus we have emphasized on re-visiting these kinds of systems. Several novel imaging techniques which exploit the distinctive properties of the THz systems have been presented. Moreover, the THz antenna is one of the most important components of a THz imaging system as it plays a significant role in both impedance matching and power source. Therefore, the recent developments in THz antenna design for imaging applications are reviewed and the potential challenges of such THz systems are investigated. The photoconductive antennas form the basis of many THz imaging and spectroscopy systems and finds promising applications in various scientific fields. However, for the imaging applications, there is a requirement of planar and compact THz antenna sources with on-chip fabrication and high directivity in order to achieve large depth-of-field for better image resolution. Therefore, the key modalities of improving photoconductive dipole antennas performance are identified for imaging applications. Also, the ways to improve the directivity of the photoconductive dipole antenna are discussed. The main purpose of this review is to provide an assortment of all relevant literature to bring researchers up-to-date on the current state-of-the-art and potential challenges of THz antenna technology for imaging applications.
Solid-phase synthesis of protein-polymers on reversible immobilization supports
Authors: Murata Hironobu , Carmali Sheiliza , Baker Stefanie L. , Matyjaszewski Krzysztof , Russell Alan J. 
Published: February 2018

AbstractFacile automated biomacromolecule synthesis is at the heart of blending synthetic and biologic worlds. Full access to abiotic/biotic synthetic diversity first occurred when chemistry was developed to grow nucleic acids and peptides from reversibly immobilized precursors. Protein–polymer conjugates, however, have always been synthesized in solution in multi-step, multi-day processes that couple innovative chemistry with challenging purification. Here we report the generation of protein–polymer hybrids synthesized by protein-ATRP on reversible immobilization supports (PARIS). We utilized modified agarose beads to covalently and reversibly couple to proteins in amino-specific reactions. We then modified reversibly immobilized proteins with protein-reactive ATRP initiators and, after ATRP, we released and analyzed the protein polymers. The activity and stability of PARIS-synthesized and solution-synthesized conjugates demonstrated that PARIS was an effective, rapid, and simple method to generate protein–polymer conjugates. Automation of PARIS significantly reduced synthesis/purification timelines, thereby opening a path to changing how to generate protein–polymer conjugates.
Multi-indicator sustainability assessment of global food systems
Authors: Chaudhary Abhishek , Gustafson David , Mathys Alexander 
Published: February 2018

AbstractFood systems are at the heart of at least 12 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The wide scope of the SDGs call for holistic approaches that integrate previously “siloed” food sustainability assessments. Here we present a first global-scale analysis quantifying the status of national food system performance of 156 countries, employing 25 sustainability indicators across 7 domains as follows: nutrition, environment, food affordability and availability, sociocultural well-being, resilience, food safety, and waste. The results show that different countries have widely varying patterns of performance with unique priorities for improvement. High-income nations score well on most indicators, but poorly on environmental, food waste, and health-sensitive nutrient-intake indicators. Transitioning from animal foods toward plant-based foods would improve indicator scores for most countries. Our nation-specific quantitative results can help policy-makers to set improvement targets on specific areas and adopt new practices, while keeping track of the other aspects of sustainability.
Meta- and cross-species analyses of insulin resistance based on gene expression datasets in human white adipose tissues
Authors: Jung Junghyun , Kim Go Woon , Lee Woosuk , Mok Changsoo , Chung Sung Hyun , Jang Wonhee 
Published: February 2018

AbstractAmple evidence indicates that insulin resistance (IR) is closely related to white adipose tissue (WAT), but the underlying mechanisms of IR pathogenesis are still unclear. Using 352 microarray datasets from seven independent studies, we identified a meta-signature which comprised of 1,413 genes. Our meta-signature was also enriched in overall WAT in in vitro and in vivo IR models. Only 12 core enrichment genes were consistently enriched across all IR models. Among the meta-signature, we identified a drug signature made up of 211 genes with expression levels that were co-regulated by thiazolidinediones and metformin using cross-species analysis. To confirm the clinical relevance of our drug signature, we found that the expression levels of 195 genes in the drug signature were significantly correlated with both homeostasis model assessment 2-IR score and body mass index. Finally, 18 genes from the drug signature were identified by protein-protein interaction network cluster. Four core enrichment genes were included in 18 genes and the expression levels of selected 8 genes were validated by quantitative PCR. These findings suggest that our signatures provide a robust set of genetic markers which can be used to provide a starting point for developing potential therapeutic targets in improving IR in WAT.
Small-Angle Twist Grain Boundaries as Sinks for Point Defects
Authors: Jiang Hao , Szlufarska Izabela 
Published: February 2018

AbstractIt is known that grain boundaries (GBs) provide sinks for defects induced into a solid by irradiation. At the same time radiation can change the atomic structure and chemistry of GBs, which in turn impacts the ability of GBs to continue absorbing defects. Although a number of studies have been reported for tilt GBs acting as defect sinks, the questions of how twist GBs evolve to absorb non-equilibrium concentrations of defects and whether GBs saturate as defect sinks for typical irradiation conditions have remained largely unanswered. Here, we used a combination of molecular dynamics and grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations to determine how twist GBs accommodate point defects. We used SiC and {001} and {111} twist GBs as model systems. We found that diffusion of defects along GBs in this material is slow and for most experimentally relevant conditions point defects will accumulate at twist GBs, driving structural and chemical evolution of these interfaces. During irradiation, screw dislocations within GB planes absorb interstitials by developing mixed dislocation segments that climb. Formation of mixed dislocations occurs either by nucleation of interstitial loops or by faulting/unfaulting of stacking faults. Both types of twist GBs can accommodate a high density of interstitials without losing the crystalline structure, irrespectively of the interstitial flux.
Electrofusion of single cells in picoliter droplets
Authors: Schoeman Rogier M. , van den Beld Wesley T. E. , Kemna Evelien W. M. , Wolbers Floor , Eijkel Jan C. T. , van den Berg Albert 
Published: February 2018

AbstractWe present a microfluidic chip that enables electrofusion of cells in microdroplets, with exchange of nuclear components. It is shown, to our knowledge for the first time, electrofusion of two HL60 cells, inside a microdroplet. This is the crucial intermediate step for controlled hybridoma formation where a B cell is electrofused with a myeloma cell. We use a microfluidic device consisting of a microchannel structure in PDMS bonded to a glass substrate through which droplets with two differently stained HL60 cells are transported. An array of six recessed platinum electrode pairs is used for electrofusion. When applying six voltage pulses of 2–3 V, the membrane electrical field is about 1 MV/cm for 1 ms. This results in electrofusion of these cells with a fusion yield of around 5%. The operation with individual cell pairs, the appreciable efficiency and the potential to operate in high-throughput (up to 500 cells sec−1) makes the microdroplet fusion technology a promising platform for cell electrofusion, which has the potential to compete with the conventional methods. Besides, this platform is not restricted to cell fusion but is also applicable to various other cell-based assays such as single cell analysis and differentiation assays.