5,419 research outputs found
The Effect on Stockholder Wealth of Product Recalls and Government Action: The Case of Toyota\u27s Accelerator Pedal Recall
We analyze the effect of Toyotaâs faulty accelerator pedal on stockholder wealth. Using the event study methodology, we show that a major recall in January of 2010 caused the companyâs cumulative abnormal returns to fall by 19%. Continued concerns that Toyota was unable to identify and adequately fix the problem induced the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to conduct its own investigation in March, 2010. The results of this government investigation exonerated the company and caused Toyotaâs cumulative abnormal returns to rise by almost 9%. The Toyota case provides an opportunity to study a product recall with both company error and a government action that addressed concerns about the safety of the product
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When-issued trading in the Indian IPO market
We examine the contribution of when-issued trading to price discovery and underpricing in the Indian IPO market. Besides the when-issued trading, there exists IPO grading, analyst recommendation, group affiliation, and the subscription rates in the bookbuilding process. We examine the impact of these activities and find three sequential factors that explain the IPO underpricing. Higher grades for an IPO lead to higher when-issued premiums, which in turn leads to higher subscription rates. Then, higher subscription rates lead to higher IPO underpricing. Overall, we find that the when-issued trading plays an important role in price discovery in the Indian IPO market.Keywords: Initial public offering, When-issued trading, Information asymmetry, Indian equity markets, IPO underpricin
Dallas with balls: televized sport, soap opera and male and female pleasures
Two of the most popular of television genres, soap opera and sports coverage have been very much differentiated along gender lines in terms of their audiences. Soap opera has been regarded very much as a 'gynocentric' genre with a large female viewing audience while the audiences for television sport have been predominantly male. Gender differentiation between the genres has had implications for the popular image of each. Soap opera has been perceived as inferior; as mere fantasy and escapism for women while television sports has been perceived as a legitimate, even edifying experience for men.
In this article the authors challenge the view that soap opera and television sport are radically different and argue that they are, in fact, very similar in a number of significant ways. They suggest that both genres invoke similar structures of feeling and sensibility in their respective audiences and that television sport is a 'male soap opera'. They consider the ways in which the viewing context of each genre is related to domestic life and leisure, the ways in which the textual structure and conventions of each genre invoke emotional identification, and finally, the ways in which both genres re-affirm gender identities
Dutch translation and cross-cultural validation of the Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit (ASCOT)
Background: The Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit was developed to measure outcomes of social care in England. In this study, we translated the four level self-completion version (SCT-4) of the ASCOT for use in the Netherlands and performed a cross-cultural validation.
Methods: The ASCOT SCT-4 was translated into Dutch following international guidelines, including two forward and back translations. The resulting version was pilot tested among frail older adults using think-aloud interviews. Furthermore, using a subsample of the Dutch ACT-study, we investigated test-retest reliability and construct validity and compared response distributions with data from a comparable English study.
Results: The pilot tests showed that translated items were in general understood as intended, that most items were reliable, and that the response distributions of the Dutch translation and associations with other measures were comparable to the original English version. Based on the results of the pilot tests, some small modifications and a revision of the Dignity items were proposed for the final translation, which were approved by the ASCOT development team. The complete original English version and the final Dutch translation can be obtained after registration on the ASCOT website (http://www.pssru.ac.uk/ascot).
Conclusions: This study provides preliminary evidence that the Dutch translation of the ASCOT is valid, reliable and comparable to the original English version. We recommend further research to confirm the validity of the modified Dutch ASCOT translation
Signatures of the slow solar wind streams from active regions in the inner corona
Some of local sources of the slow solar wind can be associated with
spectroscopically detected plasma outflows at edges of active regions
accompanied with specific signatures in the inner corona. The EUV telescopes
(e.g. SPIRIT/CORONAS-F, TESIS/CORONAS-Photon and SWAP/PROBA2) sometimes
observed extended ray-like structures seen at the limb above active regions in
1MK iron emission lines and described as "coronal rays". To verify the
relationship between coronal rays and plasma outflows, we analyze an isolated
active region (AR) adjacent to small coronal hole (CH) observed by different
EUV instruments in the end of July - beginning of August 2009. On August 1 EIS
revealed in the AR two compact outflows with the Doppler velocities V =10-30
km/s accompanied with fan loops diverging from their regions. At the limb the
ARCH interface region produced coronal rays observed by EUVI/STEREO-A on July
31 as well as by TESIS on August 7. The rays were co-aligned with open magnetic
field lines expanded to the streamer stalks. Using the DEM analysis, it was
found that the fan loops diverged from the outflow regions had the dominant
temperature of ~1 MK, which is similar to that of the outgoing plasma streams.
Parameters of the solar wind measured by STEREO-B, ACE, WIND, STEREO-A were
conformed with identification of the ARCH as a source region at the
Wang-Sheeley-Arge map of derived coronal holes for CR 2086. The results of the
study support the suggestion that coronal rays can represent signatures of
outflows from ARs propagating in the inner corona along open field lines into
the heliosphere.Comment: Accepted for publication in Solar Physics; 31 Pages; 13 Figure
Virtual Reality Applications in Rehabilitation
The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39510-4_1One of the most valuable applications of virtual reality (VR) is in the domain of rehabilitation. After brain injuries or diseases, many patients suffer from impaired physical and/or cognitive capabilities, such as difficulties in moving arms or remembering names. Over the past two decades, VR has been tested and examined as a technology to assist patientsâ recovery and rehabilitation, both physical and cognitive. The increasing prevalence of low-cost VR devices brings new opportunities, allowing VR to be used in practice. Using VR devices such as head-mounted displays (HMDs), special virtual scenes can be designed to assist patients in the process of re-training their brain and reorganizing their functions and abilities. However, such VR interfaces and applications must be comprehensively tested and examined for their effectiveness and potential side effects. This paper presents a review of related literature and discusses the new opportunities and challenges. Most of existing studies examined VR as an assessment method rather than a training/exercise method. Nevertheless, promising cases and positive preliminary results have been shown. Considering the increasing need for self-administered, home-based, and personalized rehabilitation, VR rehabilitation is potentially an important approach. This area requires more studies and research effort
Hand and Eye Dominance in Sport: Are Cricket Batters Taught to Bat Back-to-Front?
Background:
When first learning to bimanually use a tool to hit a target (e.g., when chopping wood or hitting a golf ball), most people assume a stance that is dictated by their dominant hand. By convention, this means that a âright-handedâ or âleft-handedâ stance that places the dominant hand closer to the striking end of the tool is adopted in many sports.
Objective:
The aim of this study was to investigate whether the conventional stance used for bimanual hitting provides the best chance of developing expertise in that task.
Methods:
Our study included 43 professional (international/first-class) and 93 inexperienced (<5 yearsâ experience) cricket batsmen. We determined their batting stance (plus hand and eye dominance) to compare the proportion of batters who adopted a reversed stance when batting (that is, the opposite stance to that expected based on their handedness).
Results:
We found that cricket batsmen who adopted a reversed stance had a stunning advantage, with professional batsmen 7.1 times more likely to adopt a reversed stance than inexperienced batsmen, independent of whether they batted right or left handed or the position of their dominant eye.
Conclusion:
Findings imply that batsmen who adopt a conventional stance may inadvertently be batting âback-to-frontâ and have a significant disadvantage in the game. Moreover, the results may generalize more widely, bringing into question the way in which other bimanual sporting actions are taught and performed
An ab initio full potential fully relativistic study of atomic carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen chemisorption on the (111) surface of delta-plutonium
Adsorption of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen on the (111) surface of
delta-Plutonium has been studied within the framework of density functional
theory using the full-potential linear augmented plane wave plus local basis
(FP-LAPW+lo) method. All adatoms prefer to bind at the higher coordinated
hollow sites, with the chemisorption energies for C, N, and O being 6.539 eV,
6.714 eV, and 8.2 eV respectively. The work function and the surface Pu
magnetic moments respectively increased and decreased in all cases upon
chemisorption. The partial charges inside the muffin tins spheres, difference
charge density distributions, and the local density of states have been used to
analyze the Pu-adatom bond interactions.Comment: 40 double spaced pages, 6 tables, 6 figure
Alichur Dome, South Pamir, Western India-Asia Collisional Zone: Detailing the Neogene Shakhdara-Alichur Syn-collisional Gneiss-Dome Complex and Connection to Lithospheric Processes
Neogene, synâcollisional extensional exhumation of Asian lowerâmiddle crust produced the ShakhdaraâAlichur gneissâdome complex in the South Pamir. The <1 kmâthick, myloniticâbrittle, topâNNE, normalâsense Alichur shear zone (ASZ) bounds the 125 Ă 25 km Alichur dome to the north. The Shakhdara dome is bounded by the <4 kmâthick, myloniticâbrittle, topâSSE South Pamir normalâsense shear zone (SPSZ) to the south, and the dextral Gunt wrench zone to its north. The Alichur dome comprises Cretaceous granitoids/gneisses cut by early Miocene leucogranites; its hanging wall contains non/weakly metamorphosed rocks. The 22â17 Ma Alichurâdomeâinjectionâcomplex leucogranites transition from foliationâparallel, centimeterâ to meterâthick sheets within the ASZ into discordant intrusions that may comprise half the volume of the dome core. Secondary fluid inclusions in mylonites and mylonitizationâtemperature constraints suggest Alichurâdome exhumation from 10â15 km depth. Thermochronologic dates bracket footwall cooling between ~410â130 °C from ~16â4 Ma; tectonic cooling/exhumation rates (~42 °C/Myr, ~1.1 km/Myr) contrast with erosionâdominated rates in the hanging wall (~2 °C/Myr, <0.1 km/Myr). Domeâscale boudinage, oblique divergence of the ASZ and SPSZ hanging walls, and dextral wrenching reflect minor approximately EâW material flow out of the orogen. We attribute broadly southward younging extensional exhumation across the central South Pamir between ~20â4 Ma to: (i) Mostly northward, forelandâdirected flow of hot crust into a cold foreland during the growth of the Pamir orocline; and (ii) Contrasting effects of basal shear related to underthrusting Indian lithosphere, enhancing extension in the underthrust South Pamir and inhibiting extension in the nonâunderthrust Central Pamir
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