The modern Kaoping transient fan offshore SW Taiwan: Morphotectonics and development

Using bathymetry and seismic reflection profiles, this study examined and determined the transient nature of the Kaoping Fan located in the topographically complex slope offshore southwest Taiwan. Kaoping Fan is located west of the lower reach of the Kaoping Canyon at the lower Kaoping Slope, ranging from 2,200 to 3,000 m water depth, and has a relatively small areal extent restricted in the topographic lows confined by structural highs due to mud diapiric uplifting and thrust faulting. Kaoping Fan shows an asymmetrical triangular fan-shaped bathymetric feature elongated in an NW-SE direction but with a strong skew toward the east. The fan deposits consist of three main seismic facies: layered high-amplitude reflections in the upper section and stratified, parallel to sub-parallel low-amplitude reflections with variable continuity and channel fill facies in the lower section. In the absence of ground-truthing from core data, the seismic patterns suggest that the Kaoping Fan recorded the onset of channelized and over-bank deposits in the lower part and layered turbidite facies in the upper part subsequently. The development of the Kaoping Fan can be divided into three stages in terms of canyon activities and fan-feeding processes. Initially, Kaoping Fan was mainly fed by a point sediment source at the apex of the fan. Secondly, Kaoping Fan was maintained as a slope fan, mainly fed laterally by over-spilled sediments from the canyon. Finally, the Kaoping Canyon completely passes through the Kaoping Fan and supplies over-spilled sediments laterally, forming a transient fan with canyon incision and sediment by-passing. The accumulation of sediments and the growth of Kaoping Fan are primarily controlled by inherited complex paleo-topography and the evolution of Kaoping Canyon. The sediment delivery system of Kaoping Fan is characterized by lateral supply of over-spilling sediment flows and sediments bypassing to and beyond the base of slope. The Kaoping Fan together with the ponded Fangliao Fan in the topographically complex Kaoping Slope can be used as a type model for evaluating the topographic effects on the development of submarine fans on complex slopes in general

Determinants and Impacts of the Relative Use of Depository Receipts and Euro Convertible Bonds by High-tech Corporations: An Empirical Study

This paper adopts Taiwan's high-tech companies as the sample to address and examine four new determinants of various foreign financing instruments and test their impacts on the issuing firms. Our empirical findings are consistent with the following notions. First, the firms with higher foreign holding and foreign investment will be likely to adopt foreign financing policy. Moreover, the firms with higher stock dividend payment in Taiwan will adopt both of ECB (Euro convertible bond) and DR (depository receipt). Firm managers with better education background will prefer DR. Second, the use of DR can effectively decrease the volatility of stock returns but also pronounce a negative influence on the mean of stock returns. In contrast, the use of ECB can effectively increase the mean but can not significantly decrease the volatility.

Mixture Selection, Mechanism Design, and Signaling

We pose and study a fundamental algorithmic problem which we term mixture selection, arising as a building block in a number of game-theoretic applications: Given a function $g$ from the $n$-dimensional hypercube to the bounded interval $[-1,1]$, and an $n \times m$ matrix $A$ with bounded entries, maximize $g(Ax)$ over $x$ in the $m$-dimensional simplex. This problem arises naturally when one seeks to design a lottery over items for sale in an auction, or craft the posterior beliefs for agents in a Bayesian game through the provision of information (a.k.a. signaling). We present an approximation algorithm for this problem when $g$ simultaneously satisfies two smoothness properties: Lipschitz continuity with respect to the $L^\infty$ norm, and noise stability. The latter notion, which we define and cater to our setting, controls the degree to which low-probability errors in the inputs of $g$ can impact its output. When $g$ is both $O(1)$-Lipschitz continuous and $O(1)$-stable, we obtain an (additive) PTAS for mixture selection. We also show that neither assumption suffices by itself for an additive PTAS, and both assumptions together do not suffice for an additive FPTAS. We apply our algorithm to different game-theoretic applications from mechanism design and optimal signaling. We make progress on a number of open problems suggested in prior work by easily reducing them to mixture selection: we resolve an important special case of the small-menu lottery design problem posed by Dughmi, Han, and Nisan; we resolve the problem of revenue-maximizing signaling in Bayesian second-price auctions posed by Emek et al. and Miltersen and Sheffet; we design a quasipolynomial-time approximation scheme for the optimal signaling problem in normal form games suggested by Dughmi; and we design an approximation algorithm for the optimal signaling problem in the voting model of Alonso and C\^{a}mara

A LOW-COST METHOD FOR REAL-TIME EVALUATION OF MEDIAN FREQUENCY DURING CYCLIC CONTRACTIONS

The appropriate exercise intensity can be used to improve physical strength as well as to prevent musculoskeletal injuries, and scientific analysis can evaluate the effectiveness of resistance training. The goal of the study was to test a low-cost method for real-time evaluation of median frequency (MDF) during cyclic contractions. Surface electromyography (sEMG) is an objective, non-invasive and pain-free method for assessing and monitoring muscle fatigue in humans performing resistance exercise. In the study, we provided a low-cost method for real-time evaluation of MDF during cyclic contractions. For a well designed program that controls the accumulation of fatigue, local muscle fatigue must be quantified

Signaling in Quasipolynomial time

Strategic interactions often take place in an environment rife with uncertainty. As a result, the equilibrium of a game is intimately related to the information available to its players. The \emph{signaling problem} abstracts the task faced by an informed "market maker", who must choose how to reveal information in order to effect a desirable equilibrium. In this paper, we consider two fundamental signaling problems: one for abstract normal form games, and the other for single item auctions. For the former, we consider an abstract class of objective functions which includes the social welfare and weighted combinations of players' utilities, and for the latter we restrict our attention to the social welfare objective and to signaling schemes which are constrained in the number of signals used. For both problems, we design approximation algorithms for the signaling problem which run in quasi-polynomial time under various conditions, extending and complementing the results of various recent works on the topic. Underlying each of our results is a "meshing scheme" which effectively overcomes the "curse of dimensionality" and discretizes the space of "essentially different" posterior beliefs -- in the sense of inducing "essentially different" equilibria. This is combined with an algorithm for optimally assembling a signaling scheme as a convex combination of such beliefs. For the normal form game setting, the meshing scheme leads to a convex partition of the space of posterior beliefs and this assembly procedure is reduced to a linear program, and in the auction setting the assembly procedure is reduced to submodular function maximization