423 research outputs found
Three Essays on Relationships among Financial Institutions
dissertation investigates relationships among financial institutions. I examine relationships from three different perspectives: relationships among affiliated banks and life insurers, correlated trading among life insurers, and relationships between insurers and bond dealers in the over-the-counter markets. The primary purpose of my research is to examine the benefits and drawbacks of relationships among financial institutions. The main findings are as follows. First, life insurers with bank affiliates had higher growth rates relative to other life insurers during the 2008 financial crisis. However, these Bank-Life Financial Holding Companies performed worse than Non-Bank-Life Financial Holding Companies during the same period. It indicates that the cross-selling effect is not large enough to increase firmâs performance. Second, U.S. life insurersâ investment decisions in corporate bonds are correlated across companies. However, the evidence in this dissertation is mixed as to whether insurersâ investment behavior has the potential to disrupt financial markets. Little evidence shows that this herding pushes prices away from fundamental values. Third, we find that there is variation in the impact of trading relationships on execution costs. The variation is related to the variation in a customerâs market power in the dealer relationship. In addition, the outsourcing of investment services to an affiliate of a dealer help customers with the weak market power to decrease bond execution costs. These findings of three essays add to the financial institution and relationship literature
How corporate social responsibility influences employee job satisfaction in the hotel industry
The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether strategic CSR programs in the hotel industry influence individual job satisfaction. Based on Valentine and Fleischmanâs study in company ethics programs and employeesâ perceived CSR, job satisfaction is related to many significant organizational factors and is usually a major concentration of business research that investigates employee-based phenomena (Valentine & Fleischman, 2008, p. 160). In addition, this paper will seek for the literature supporting the positive correlation between a companyâs strategic CSR activities and its employeesâ job satisfaction. In other words, this study will identify whether and how employeesâ perceptions of their companyâs external CSR practices influence their commitments to the organization. Ultimately, the information summarized in this paper should provide the hotel industryâs management and operators with the information they need to utilize CSR strategies that will improve the company morale and job satisfaction rate for their employees. This paper will be presented in the following sequence. In the first section, the implications that arise from the concept of CSR in the hotel industry will be briefly discussed. The second section will review previous studiesâ findings on strategic CSR and employeesâ reactions to these practices. The third and final section of this paper will analyze the rationale and effectiveness of strategic CSR and summarize its findings and conclusions
Clinfo.ai: An Open-Source Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model System for Answering Medical Questions using Scientific Literature
The quickly-expanding nature of published medical literature makes it
challenging for clinicians and researchers to keep up with and summarize
recent, relevant findings in a timely manner. While several closed-source
summarization tools based on large language models (LLMs) now exist, rigorous
and systematic evaluations of their outputs are lacking. Furthermore, there is
a paucity of high-quality datasets and appropriate benchmark tasks with which
to evaluate these tools. We address these issues with four contributions: we
release Clinfo.ai, an open-source WebApp that answers clinical questions based
on dynamically retrieved scientific literature; we specify an information
retrieval and abstractive summarization task to evaluate the performance of
such retrieval-augmented LLM systems; we release a dataset of 200 questions and
corresponding answers derived from published systematic reviews, which we name
PubMed Retrieval and Synthesis (PubMedRS-200); and report benchmark results for
Clinfo.ai and other publicly available OpenQA systems on PubMedRS-200.Comment: Preprint of an article published in Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing
copyright 2024 World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore,
http://psb.stanford.edu
Semantic Segmentation Using Super Resolution Technique as Pre-Processing
Combining high-level and low-level visual tasks is a common technique in the
field of computer vision. This work integrates the technique of image super
resolution to semantic segmentation for document image binarization. It
demonstrates that using image super-resolution as a preprocessing step can
effectively enhance the results and performance of semantic segmentation
Genetic copy number variants in sib pairs both affected with schizophrenia
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Schizophrenia is a complex disorder with involvement of multiple genes.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this study, genome-wide screening for DNA copy-number variations (CNVs) was conducted for ten pairs, a total of 20 cases, of affected siblings using oligonucleotide array-based CGH.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We found negative symptoms were significantly more severe (p < 0.05) in the subgroup that harbored more genetic imbalance (n ⧠13, n = number of CNV-disrupted genes) as compared with the subgroup with fewer CNVs (n ⊠6), indicating that the degree of genetic imbalance may influence the severity of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Four central nervous system (CNS) related genes including CCAAT/enhancer binding protein, delta (<it>CEBPD</it>, 8q11.21), retinoid à receptor, alpha (<it>RXRA</it>, 9q34.2), LIM homeobox protein 5 (<it>LHX5</it>, 12q24.13) and serine/threonine kinase 11 (<it>STK11</it>, 19p13.3) are recurrently (incidence ⧠16.7%) disrupted by CNVs. Two genes, <it>PVR </it>(poliovirus receptor) and <it>BU678720</it>, are concordantly deleted in one and two, respectively, pairs of co-affected siblings. However, we did not find a significant association of this <it>BU678720 </it>deletion and schizophrenia in a large case-control sample.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We conclude that the high genetic loading of CNVs may be the underlying cause of negative symptoms of schizophrenia, and the CNS-related genes revealed by this study warrant further investigation.</p
UNDERSTANDING COMPETITIVE PERFORMANCE OF SOFTWARE-AS-A-SERVICE (SAAS)âTHE COMPETITIVE DYNAMICS PERSPECTIVE
Understanding the antecedents and consequences of a firmâs agility in cloud software applications is important. This papers draws on the competitive dynamics perspective to develop a model that explains the relationships between collaboration with vendors, agility, and competitive performance in software-as-a-service (SaaS) context. Collaboration reflects a firmâs ability to leverage interfirm resources, characterized as knowledge sharing and process alignment. Agility is measured by a firmâs strategy-oriented agility and service-oriented agility. This study also investigates the moderating effect of environmental turbulence. The proposed hypotheses are supported by the empirical data. The results show that competitive performance is affected by ability, which, in turn, is impacted by collaboration. Environmental turbulence positively moderates the relationship between agility and performance. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results
Positive Effect of Severe Nakagami- m
This paper investigates the positive effect of severe Nakagami-m fading on the performance of multiuser transmit antenna selection/maximal-ratio combining (TAS/MRC) systems with high selection gain. Both amount of fading (AF) and symbol error rate (SER) of M-QAM are derived as closed-form expressions for integer m. For arbitrary m, the AF and the SER are expressible as a single infinite series of Gamma function and Gauss hypergeometric function, respectively. The analytical results lead to the following observations. First, the SER performance can demonstrate the positive effect of severe Nakagami-m fading on multiuser TAS/MRC systems with high selection gain. Second, the AF performance only exhibits the negative impact of severe fading regardless of high selection gain. Last, the benefit of severe fading to the system performance diminishes at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
CCDWT-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks Based on Color Channel Using Discrete Wavelet Transform for Document Image Binarization
To efficiently extract the textual information from color degraded document
images is an important research topic. Long-term imperfect preservation of
ancient documents has led to various types of degradation such as page
staining, paper yellowing, and ink bleeding; these degradations badly impact
the image processing for information extraction. In this paper, we present
CCDWT-GAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) that utilizes the discrete
wavelet transform (DWT) on RGB (red, green, blue) channel splited images. The
proposed method comprises three stages: image preprocessing, image enhancement,
and image binarization. This work conducts comparative experiments in the image
preprocessing stage to determine the optimal selection of DWT with
normalization. Additionally, we perform an ablation study on the results of the
image enhancement stage and the image binarization stage to validate their
positive effect on the model performance. This work compares the performance of
the proposed method with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on DIBCO and
H-DIBCO ((Handwritten) Document Image Binarization Competition) datasets. The
experimental results demonstrate that CCDWT-GAN achieves a top two performance
on multiple benchmark datasets, and outperforms other SOTA methods
Comparison of Different Timing of Multivessel Intervention During Index-Hospitalization for Patients With Acute Myocardial Infarction
Background: Many patients presenting with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) were found to have a multivessel disease. Uncertainty still exists in the optimal revascularization strategy in AMI patients. The purpose of this study was to assess the outcome of immediate multivessel revascularization compared with staged multivessel percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in patients with AMI.Method: This was a nationwide cohort study of 186,112 patients first diagnosed with AMI, 78,699 of whom received PCI for revascularization. Patients who received repetitive PCI during the index hospitalization were referred to as staged multivessel PCI. Immediate multivessel PCI was defined as patients with two-vessel PCI or three-vessel PCI during the index procedure. Cox proportional hazards regression models were performed to evaluate the different indicators of mortality risks in AMI.Result: Immediate multivessel PCI was associated with a worse long-term outcome than staged multivessel PCI during the index admission (log-rank P < 0.001). There was a higher incidence of stroke in patients with multivessel PCI during hospitalization. In Cox analysis, immediate multivessel PCI was an independent risk factor for mortality compared to those with staged multivessel PCI, regardless of the type of myocardial infarction.Conclusion: This study demonstrated that performing immediate multivessel PCI for AMI may lead to worse long-term survival than staged multivessel PCI. Our findings emphasized the importance of PCI timing for non-infarct-related artery stenosis and provided information to supplement current evidence
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