Assessing Financial Reporting Quality of Early Stage Private Companies

There are a variety of widely accepted methods that are used in order to evaluate the financial positioning of companies that are traded on stock exchanges. However, these methods that are common in the public markets do not suffice for assessing companies that are privately held. Attempting to devise an intrinsic value using anticipated cash flows is ineffective given that most companies are pre-revenue. Deriving a value based off of assets held is also inaccurate given that a young company will be in the process of capitalizing itself and more of its assets cannot be represented on a balance sheet, compared to public companies. Furthermore, the sheer lack of raw data provided by the companies in some cases can also contribute to pitfalls in valuation attempts. In addition, the lack of reliability of private companies’ financial information makes the valuation of these companies difficult. This study aims to develop a framework to assess the financial reporting quality of these early stage private companies

Can children withhold consent to treatment

A dilemma exists when a doctor is faced with a child or young person who refuses medically indicated treatment. The Gillick case has been interpreted by many to mean that a child of sufficient age and intelligence could validly consent or refuse consent to treatment. Recent decisions of the Court of Appeal on a child's refusal of medical treatment have clouded the issue and undermined the spirit of the Gillick decision and the Children Act 1989. It is now the case that a child patient whose competence is in doubt will be found rational if he or she accepts the proposal to treat but may be found incompetent if he or she disagrees. Practitioners are alerted to the anomalies now exhibited by the law on the issue of children's consent and refusal. The impact of the decisions from the perspectives of medicine, ethics, and the law are examined. Practitioners should review each case of child care carefully and in cases of doubt seek legal advice

Systematic Improvement of Empirical Energy Functions in the Era of Machine Learning

The impact of targeted replacement of individual terms in empirical force fields is quantitatively assessed for pure water, dichloromethane (DCM), and solvated K$^+$ and Cl$^-$ ions. For the electrostatics, point charges (PCs) and machine learning (ML)based minimally distributed charges (MDCM) fitted to the molecular electrostatic potential are evaluated together with electrostatics based on the Coulomb integral. The impact of explicitly including second-order terms is investigated by adding a fragment molecular orbital (FMO)-derived polarization energy to an existing force field, in this case CHARMM. It is demonstrated that anisotropic electrostatics reduce the RMSE for water (by 1.6 kcal/mol), DCM (by 0.8 kcal/mol) and for solvated Cl$^-$ clusters (by 0.4 kcal/mol). An additional polarization term can be neglected for DCM but notably improves errors in pure water (by 1.1 kcal/mol) and in Cl$^-$ clusters (by 0.4 kcal/mol) and is key to describing solvated K$^+$, reducing the RMSE by 2.3 kcal/mol. A 12-6 Lennard-Jones functional form is found to perform satisfactorily with PC and MDCM electrostatics, but is not appropriate for descriptions that account for the electrostatic penetration energy. The importance of many-body contributions is assessed by comparing a strictly 2-body approach with self-consistent reference data. DCM can be approximated well with a 2-body potential while water and solvated K$^+$ and Cl$^-$ ions require explicit many-body corrections. The present work systematically quantifies which terms improve the performance of an existing force field and what reference data to use for parametrizing these terms in a tractable fashion for ML fitting of pure and heterogeneous systems

Exploring Accretion and Disk-Jet Connections in the LLAGN M81*

We report on a year-long effort to monitor the central supermassive black hole in M81 in the X-ray and radio bands. Using Chandra and the VLA, we obtained quasi-simultaneous observations of M81* on seven occasions during 2006. The X-ray and radio luminosity of M81* are not strongly correlated on the approximately 20-day sampling timescale of our observations, which is commensurate with viscous timescales in the inner flow and orbital timecales in a radially-truncated disk. This suggests that short-term variations in black hole activity may not be rigidly governed by the "fundamental plane", but rather adhere to the plane in a time-averaged sense. Fits to the X-ray spectra of M81* with bremsstrahlung models give temperatures that are inconsistent with the outer regions of very simple advection-dominated inflows. However, our results are consistent with the X-ray emission originating in a transition region where a truncated disk and advective flow may overlap. We discuss our results in the context of models for black holes accreting at small fractions of their Eddington limit, and the fundamental plane of black hole accretion.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap

“The great source” microplastic abundance and characteristics along the river Thames

This study focused on quantifying the abundance of microplastics within the surface water of the River Thames, UK. Ten sites in eight areas were sampled within the tidal Thames, starting from Teddington and ending at Southend-on-Sea. Three litres of water was collected monthly at high tide from land-based structures from each site from May 2019 to May 2021. Samples underwent visual analysis for microplastics categorised based on type, colour and size. 1041 pieces were tested using Fourier transform spectroscopy to identify chemical composition and polymer type. 6401 pieces of MP were found during sampling with an average MP of 12.27 pieces L⁻¹ along the river Thames. Results from this study show that microplastic abundance does not increase along the river

A multi-scale study of infrared and radio emission from Scd galaxy M33

We investigate the energy sources of the infrared (IR) emission and their relation to the radio continuum emission at various spatial scales within the Scd galaxy M33. We use the wavelet transform to analyze IR data at the Spitzer wavelengths of 24, 70, and 160$\mu$m, as well as recent radio continuum data at 3.6cm and 20cm. An H$\alpha$ map serves as a tracer of the star forming regions and as an indicator of the thermal radio emission. We find that the dominant scale of the 70$\mu$m emission is larger than that of the 24$\mu$m emission, while the 160$\mu$m emission shows a smooth wavelet spectrum. The radio and H$\alpha$ maps are well correlated with all 3 MIPS maps, although their correlations with the 160$\mu$m map are weaker. After subtracting the bright HII regions, the 24 and 70$\mu$m maps show weaker correlations with the 20cm map than with the 3.6cm map at most scales. We also find a strong correlation between the 3.6cm and H$\alpha$ emission at all scales. Comparing the results with and without the bright HII regions, we conclude that the IR emission is influenced by young, massive stars increasingly with decreasing wavelength from 160 to 24$\mu$m. The radio-IR correlations indicate that the warm dust-thermal radio correlation is stronger than the cold dust-nonthermal radio correlation at scales smaller than 4kpc. A perfect 3.6cm-H$\alpha$ correlation implies that extinction has no significant effect on H$\alpha$ emitting structures.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Journa

Country characteristics and the incidence of capital income taxation on wages: an empirical assessment

This paper examines the incidence of corporate income taxes on wages using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for 13 OECD countries. Within a wage-bargaining framework, our econometric analysis shows that a substantial share of the corporate tax burden is shifted from capital to labour. However, the magnitude of this shift is influenced importantly by country characteristics affecting the process of wage determination, such as the degree of capital mobility, a country's relative influence over the world price of output and trade unions’ strength

Comparison of m-mode echocardiographic left ventricular mass measured using digital and strip chart readings: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study

BACKGROUND: Epidemiological and clinical studies frequently use echocardiography to measure LV wall thicknesses and chamber dimension for estimating quantitative measures of LV mass. While echocardiographic M-mode LV images have traditionally been measured using hand-held calipers and strip-chart paper tracings, digitized M-mode LV image measurements made directly on the computer screen using electronic calipers have become standard practice. We sought to determine if systematic differences in LV mass occur between the two methods by comparing LV mass measured from simultaneous M-mode strip chart recordings and digitized recordings. METHODS: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study applied the latter method. To determine if systematic differences in LV mass occur between the two methods, LV mass was measured from simultaneous M-mode strip chart recordings and digitized recordings. RESULTS: We found no difference in LV mass (p > .25) and a strong correlation in LV mass between the two methods (r = 0.97). Neither age, sex, nor hypertension status affected the correlation of LV mass between the two methods. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that digital estimates of LV mass provide unbiased estimates comparable to the strip-chart method