The Effect of National Characteristics on Corporate Disclosure Practices: A Case of ASEAN

This paper aims to extend existing literature by indicating the linkage between national institutions and disclosure practices based on a perspective of a group of developing countries, namely ASEAN. Using a sample of 111 non-financial listed companies in five ASEAN countries, covering Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, from 2011 to 2015, the empirical result reveals that the extent of corporate disclosure in ASEAN is positively related to the level of regulation quality at 99% confidence levels and positively associated with the level of rule of law at 95% confidence levels, meaning that businesses tend to disclose more information when government agencies provide suitable policies that help to facilitate business growth and serious concern about the quality of contract enforcement. On the other hands, the finding also demonstrates that the level of corporate is negatively connected with the level of political stability and absence of violence, the level of government effectiveness, and the level of control of corruption, meaning that the level of corporate disclosure in ASEAN would be increased when the national environment is unstable and improper for investing in new projects, the government lacks capabilities to promote economic development, and the country has a high rate of corruption. The paper contributes to international disclosure literature by extending an understanding of the effects of national factors on disclosure practices. Distinct from the mainstream of disclosure literature, the obtained results could provide empirical evidence not only for regulators who want to reinforce the regional regulations. Keywords: National Characteristics, Corporate Disclosure, ASEAN, Panel Data Analysis, Listed Compan

The Research on Shadow Banking System in China

The shadow banking system has grown stronger in the process of evading supervision. Together with traditional commercial banks, it has become an important participant in the financial system, which has caused a fundamental change in the structure of the global financial system. As an exogenous reform force in China’s special period, Shadow Bank has become an important channel for financial resources to “disconnect from reality”. Despite the lack of substantial securitization, China’s shadow banking system has developed rapidly. This paper analyzes the development motivation.This paper believes that the scope of China’s shadow banking system can be defined according to the nature of the fund supply side

On Finite Difference Jacobian Computation in Deformable Image Registration

Producing spatial transformations that are diffeomorphic has been a central problem in deformable image registration. As a diffeomorphic transformation should have positive Jacobian determinant $|J|$ everywhere, the number of voxels with $|J|<0$ has been used to test for diffeomorphism and also to measure the irregularity of the transformation. For digital transformations, $|J|$ is commonly approximated using central difference, but this strategy can yield positive $|J|$'s for transformations that are clearly not diffeomorphic -- even at the voxel resolution level. To show this, we first investigate the geometric meaning of different finite difference approximations of $|J|$. We show that to determine diffeomorphism for digital images, use of any individual finite difference approximations of $|J|$ is insufficient. We show that for a 2D transformation, four unique finite difference approximations of $|J|$'s must be positive to ensure the entire domain is invertible and free of folding at the pixel level. We also show that in 3D, ten unique finite differences approximations of $|J|$'s are required to be positive. Our proposed digital diffeomorphism criteria solves several errors inherent in the central difference approximation of $|J|$ and accurately detects non-diffeomorphic digital transformations

Survey on the Acquisition of Chinese Vocabulary by International Students—A Case Study of Southwest Petroleum University

Vocabulary is the basic unit that constitutes a language, and is an important carrier for conveying information and constructing meaning. The study of Chinese vocabulary acquisition in China is mostly on the analysis of bias. The study adopts questionnaire survey method which take foreign students from Southwest Petroleum University as an example to study the vocabulary acquisition of the Chinese everyday language. The phenomenon of investigation was analyzed from Atkinson’s social cognitive perspective. The results of the study indicate that vocabulary of everyday terms has not been fully learned by international students even they got certificates. And everyday language vocabulary should receive attention from teachers to international students. In teaching process, it’s vital to give full play to the alignment between the social environment, social activities and learners, which could help international students improve their language competence

Label-Free Liver Tumor Segmentation

We demonstrate that AI models can accurately segment liver tumors without the need for manual annotation by using synthetic tumors in CT scans. Our synthetic tumors have two intriguing advantages: (I) realistic in shape and texture, which even medical professionals can confuse with real tumors; (II) effective for training AI models, which can perform liver tumor segmentation similarly to the model trained on real tumors -- this result is exciting because no existing work, using synthetic tumors only, has thus far reached a similar or even close performance to real tumors. This result also implies that manual efforts for annotating tumors voxel by voxel (which took years to create) can be significantly reduced in the future. Moreover, our synthetic tumors can automatically generate many examples of small (or even tiny) synthetic tumors and have the potential to improve the success rate of detecting small liver tumors, which is critical for detecting the early stages of cancer. In addition to enriching the training data, our synthesizing strategy also enables us to rigorously assess the AI robustness.Comment: CVPR 202

Hyaluronan concentration and size distribution in human knee synovial fluid: variations with age and cartilage degeneration.

BackgroundOne potential mechanism for early superficial cartilage wear in normal joints is alteration of the lubricant content and quality of synovial fluid. The purpose of this study was to determine if the concentration and quality of the lubricant, hyaluronan, in synovial fluid: (1) was similar in left and right knees; (2) exhibited similar age-associated trends, whether collected postmortem or antemortem; and (3) varied with age and grade of joint degeneration.MethodsHuman synovial fluid of donors (23-91 years) without osteoarthritis was analyzed for the concentrations of protein, hyaluronan, and hyaluronan in the molecular weight ranges of 2.5-7 MDa, 1-2.5 MDa, 0.5-1 MDa, and 0.03-0.5 MDa. Similarity of data between left and right knees was assessed by reduced major axis regression, paired t-test, and Bland-Altman analysis. The effect of antemortem versus postmortem collection on biochemical properties was assessed for age-matched samples by unpaired t-test. The relationships between age, joint grade, and each biochemical component were assessed by regression analysis.ResultsJoint grade and the concentrations of protein, hyaluronan, and hyaluronan in the molecular weight ranges of 2.5-7 MDa, 1-2.5 MDa, and 0.5-1 MDa in human synovial fluid showed good agreement between left and right knees and were similar between age-matched patient and cadaver knee joints. There was an age-associated decrease in overall joint grade (-15 %/decade) and concentrations of hyaluronan (-10.5 %/decade), and hyaluronan in the molecular weight ranges of 2.5-7 MDa (-9.4 %/decade), 1-2.5 MDa (-11.3 %/decade), 0.5-1 MDa (-12.5 %/decade), and 0.03-0.5 MDa (-13.0 %/decade). Hyaluronan concentration and quality was more strongly associated with age than with joint grade.ConclusionsThe age-related increase in cartilage wear in non-osteoarthritic joints may be related to the altered hyaluronan content and quality of synovial fluid