Flow-based Influence Graph Visual Summarization

Visually mining a large influence graph is appealing yet challenging. People are amazed by pictures of newscasting graph on Twitter, engaged by hidden citation networks in academics, nevertheless often troubled by the unpleasant readability of the underlying visualization. Existing summarization methods enhance the graph visualization with blocked views, but have adverse effect on the latent influence structure. How can we visually summarize a large graph to maximize influence flows? In particular, how can we illustrate the impact of an individual node through the summarization? Can we maintain the appealing graph metaphor while preserving both the overall influence pattern and fine readability? To answer these questions, we first formally define the influence graph summarization problem. Second, we propose an end-to-end framework to solve the new problem. Our method can not only highlight the flow-based influence patterns in the visual summarization, but also inherently support rich graph attributes. Last, we present a theoretic analysis and report our experiment results. Both evidences demonstrate that our framework can effectively approximate the proposed influence graph summarization objective while outperforming previous methods in a typical scenario of visually mining academic citation networks.Comment: to appear in IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), Shen Zhen, China, December 201

The impact of investor protection and bank regulation on the shareholder wealth: evidence from merger and acquisition announcements in the banking industry

This thesis studies the impact of investor protection and bank regulation on the shareholder wealth around merger and acquisition announcements in the banking industry during the period 1995-2005. The analysis is based on 508 targets, 1,424 bidders and 388 combined firms covering over 30 countries. Using the event study methodology, the results show that targets, bidders and combined firms obtain 13.25%, -0.63% and 0.39% cumulative abnormal returns over a 3 day (-1,+1) event window, respectively. In addition, cross-sectional analysis reveals that target cumulative abnormal returns are positively related to investor protection measured as the antidirector rights and rule of law in a target country. The findings also indicate that targets gain more when bank regulation in a target country has more restriction on bank activity, official supervisors have more power to intervene the deals and supervisors have more power to correct the problem in mergers and acquisitions separately. Furthermore, the results show that bidders have lower gains when investor protection in a bidder country measured as rule of law is strong. The results also find that bidders gain less when bank regulation in a bidder country has more restriction on bank activity. However, the findings show that bidders gain more when supervisory authority in a bidder country is more independent. With respect to combined firms, the results find that combined firms obtain higher announcement returns when investor protection measured as the combination of the antidirector rights index in a target and bidder country is strong

Mechanical and thermal insulation properties of clay-based lightweight concrete

建材生产和住宅采暖将消耗大量能源并排放大量CO2。在混凝土制备中，使用陶土制备具有优异隔热性能的轻质混凝土，并使用煅烧粘土代替部分波特兰水泥，可以大大降低能耗。本研究采用页岩陶土和陶砂分别作为粗骨料和细骨料制备轻质混凝土。首先，确定最佳体积砂比。然后，使用煅烧粘土和石灰石的剂量从30%，50%到70%。研究了煅烧粘土和石灰石含量对混凝土微观结构、力学性能和隔热性能的影响。结果表明，最佳体积砂比为50%。当煅烧粘土和石灰石的用量为30%时，强度在所有年龄段最高，28 d时强度可达33.6 MPa，比对照组高12%。当更换水平不断增加时，所有年龄段的实力开始下降。所制备的粘土基轻质混凝土的导热系数低至0.144 W/mK，表现出优异的保温性能。本研究制备的轻质混凝土具有较高的强度和优异的保温性能，具有良好的应用前景

Cyclic redundancy check-based detection algorithms for automatic identification system signals received by satellite.

This paper addresses the problem of demodulating signals transmitted in the automatic identification system. The main characteristics of such signals consist of two points: (i) they are modulated using a trellis-coded modulation, more precisely a Gaussian minimum shift keying modulation; and (ii) they are submitted to a bit stuffing procedure, which makes more difficult the detection of the transmitted information bits. This paper presents several demodulation algorithms developed in different contexts: mono-user and multi-user transmissions, and known/unknown phase shift. The proposed receiver uses the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) present in the automatic identification system signals for error correction and not for error detection only. By using this CRC, a particular Viterbi algorithm, on the basis of a so-called extended trellis, is developed. This trellis is defined by extended states composed of a trellis code state and a CRC state. Moreover, specific conditional transitions are defined to take into account the possible presence of stuffing bits. The algorithms proposed in the multi-user scenario present a small increase of computation complexity with respect to the mono-user algorithms. Some performance results are presented for several scenarios in the context of the automatic identification system and compared with those of existing techniques developed in similar scenarios

Technologies for trapped-ion quantum information systems

Scaling-up from prototype systems to dense arrays of ions on chip, or vast networks of ions connected by photonic channels, will require developing entirely new technologies that combine miniaturized ion trapping systems with devices to capture, transmit and detect light, while refining how ions are confined and controlled. Building a cohesive ion system from such diverse parts involves many challenges, including navigating materials incompatibilities and undesired coupling between elements. Here, we review our recent efforts to create scalable ion systems incorporating unconventional materials such as graphene and indium tin oxide, integrating devices like optical fibers and mirrors, and exploring alternative ion loading and trapping techniques.Comment: 19 pages, 18 figure

Synthesis of (+)-Cortistatin A

Steroids have historically elicited attention from the chemical sciences owing to their utility in living systems, as well as their intrinsic and diverse beauty.1 The cortistatin family (Figure 1, 1-7 and others),2 a collection of unusual, marine 9-(10,19)-abeo-androstane steroids, is certainly no exception; aside from challenging stereochemistry and an odd bricolage of functional groups, the salient feature of these sponge metabolites is, inescapably, their biological activity. Cortistatin A, the most potent member of the small family, inhibits the proliferation of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs, IC50) 1.8 nM), evidently with no general toxicity toward either healthy or cancerous cell lines (IC50(testing cells)/IC50(HUVECs) g 3300).2a From initial pharmacological studies, binding appears to occur reversibly, but to an unknown target, inhibiting the phosphorylation of an unidentified 110 kDa protein, and implying a pathway that may be unique to know