Fund family tournament and performance consequences: evidence from the UK fund industry

By applying tournament analysis to the UK Unit Trusts data, the results support significant risk shifting in the family tournament; i.e. interim winning managers tend to increase their level of risk exposure more than losing managers. It also shows that the risk-adjusted returns of the winners outperform those of the losers following the risk taking, which implies that risk altering can be regarded as an indication of managers’ superior ability. However, the tournament behaviour can still be a costly strategy for investors, since winners can be seen to beat losers in the observed returns due to the deterioration in the performance of their major portfolio holdings

Development of O,N-bidentate ruthenium catalysts for isomerization and kinetic studies of ruthenium carbenes for C=C coupling reactions

The fountainhead to develop the chemical science is the demand of various compounds by human being. While most of the requirements concerns organic molecules, organometallic compounds have paved the way of homogeneous catalysis in producing bulk, fine chemicals, and even natural products. During the last decade, ruthenium catalysts have provided new indispensable synthetic methods that cannot be promoted by other catalysts and applied in wide range of chemical reactions. This work deals with the development of O,N-bidentate ruthenium homogeneous catalysts for isomerization and kinetic studies of ruthenium cabenes for C=C coupling reactions. Specifically designed ligands are the key in optimizing the efficiency of catalysts. Schiff bases are known to strongly enhance the thermal and moisture stability of the corresponding complexes and isomerization is important in many chemical processes. The above reasons promote the first part of the work to concentrate on the synthesis of a novel class of homogeneous ruthenium complexes containing Schiff bases as O,N-bidentate ligands catalyzing the isomerization reaction. By a proper choice of the Schiff base, the new ruthenium complexes showed improved reactivity, selectivity and stability toward air and moisture during the isomerization reaction. The temperature and solvent tolerance was likewise substantially improved. Later, another series of analogue Schiff bases ruthenium complexes has been synthesized as isomerization catalysts and showed even better reactivity, selectivity and stability. The formation of carbon-carbon bonds is one of the most fundamental chemical processes. In this context, C=C coupling reactions (metathesis, cyclopropanation and etc.) make a significant contribution. Despite the recent advances, the search for commercially relevant catalyst systems remains challenging. The kinetic studies of ruthenium carbenes are useful for fundamental insight to design new catalysts or to improve existing catalytic systems. The second part of this work estabilished a pre-research for the future outlook

Support Neighbor Loss for Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (re-ID) has recently been tremendously boosted due to the advancement of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). The majority of deep re-ID methods focus on designing new CNN architectures, while less attention is paid on investigating the loss functions. Verification loss and identification loss are two types of losses widely used to train various deep re-ID models, both of which however have limitations. Verification loss guides the networks to generate feature embeddings of which the intra-class variance is decreased while the inter-class ones is enlarged. However, training networks with verification loss tends to be of slow convergence and unstable performance when the number of training samples is large. On the other hand, identification loss has good separating and scalable property. But its neglect to explicitly reduce the intra-class variance limits its performance on re-ID, because the same person may have significant appearance disparity across different camera views. To avoid the limitations of the two types of losses, we propose a new loss, called support neighbor (SN) loss. Rather than being derived from data sample pairs or triplets, SN loss is calculated based on the positive and negative support neighbor sets of each anchor sample, which contain more valuable contextual information and neighborhood structure that are beneficial for more stable performance. To ensure scalability and separability, a softmax-like function is formulated to push apart the positive and negative support sets. To reduce intra-class variance, the distance between the anchor's nearest positive neighbor and furthest positive sample is penalized. Integrating SN loss on top of Resnet50, superior re-ID results to the state-of-the-art ones are obtained on several widely used datasets.Comment: Accepted by ACM Multimedia (ACM MM) 201

Dirac nodal line metal for topological antiferromagnetic spintronics

Topological antiferromagnetic (AFM) spintronics is an emerging field of research, which exploits the N\'eel vector to control the topological electronic states and the associated spin-dependent transport properties. A recently discovered N\'eel spin-orbit torque has been proposed to electrically manipulate Dirac band crossings in antiferromagnets; however, a reliable AFM material to realize these properties in practice is missing. Here, we predict that room temperature AFM metal MnPd$_{2}$ allows the electrical control of the Dirac nodal line by the N\'eel spin-orbit torque. Based on first-principles density functional theory calculations, we show that reorientation of the N\'eel vector leads to switching between the symmetry-protected degenerate state and the gapped state associated with the dispersive Dirac nodal line at the Fermi energy. The calculated spin Hall conductivity strongly depends on the N\'eel vector orientation and can be used to experimentally detect the predicted effect using a proposed spin-orbit torque device. Our results indicate that AFM Dirac nodal line metal MnPd$_{2}$ represents a promising material for topological AFM spintronics

Performance Evaluation of Port Enterprise Resource Integration Based on Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation Method

With increasingly mature global supply chain network with ports as the core, competition among ports has gradually turned to the ability and efficiency of resource integration. However, there is a lack of relevant studies on how to scientifically evaluate the resource integration performance of port enterprises. To comprehensively evaluate the actual effect of port enterprises in process of resource integration, a performance evaluation system of port enterprises resource integration covering 19 secondary indicators from the four dimensions of financial integration, operational efficiency, technological innovation, and realized benefit was built, fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) was used to determine weights of various indicators and port enterprises in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Liaoning, Shandong and Guangdong provinces of China were taken as samples, and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) was used to evaluate its resource integration performance. Results show that technological innovation is the primary performance indicator, followed by financial integration indicators, and the impact of realization efficiency and operational efficiency indicators is relatively weak. Resource integration performances of port enterprises in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Liaoning, Shandong, and Guangdong are generally good. Evaluation results of sample ports reflect the actual integration of ports, and the model can effectively evaluate the performance of port enterprise resource integration. Conclusions obtained from this study provide theoretical support for the scientific performance evaluation of port enterprise resource integration