Internet Financial Reporting: the Case of Philippine Banks

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the extent of internet financial reporting (IFR) of Philippine banks. Used as samples were top commercial banks and thrift banks operating in the country considering their total assets as of March, 2012 as published by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas in its website. Financial information in the websites of the sampled banks were evaluated during the third quarter of 2012. The study revealed that the quality and extent of IFR of Philippine commercial banks is “average” based on their IFR index score of 44.50 while thrift banks posted a below average IFR index score of 21.56 resulting to a highly significant difference between bank types. Among the four evaluation criteria used, the subject-banks\u27 content disclosure provides the highest percentage contribution to their IFR index scores as this is the main focus of their financial reporting. Among the components of content disclosure, corporate information, chairman\u27s report and the auditor\u27s report emerged as the top three often included in the financial disclosure of the subject-banks while vision statement and press release are the components often updated by both bank types in their websites with the commercial banks notably updating more frequently compared to thrift banks. Relative to technology, online feedback is the most common component in the banks\u27 website while link to homepage is the most usual user support feature relative to the bank\u27s financial reporting practice. Lastly, asset size and bank type were found to have a high significant relationship with the extent of IFR

Hand Motion Classification Using a Multi-Channel Surface Electromyography Sensor

The human hand has multiple degrees of freedom (DOF) for achieving high-dexterity motions. Identifying and replicating human hand motions are necessary to perform precise and delicate operations in many applications, such as haptic applications. Surface electromyography (sEMG) sensors are a low-cost method for identifying hand motions, in addition to the conventional methods that use data gloves and vision detection. The identification of multiple hand motions is challenging because the error rate typically increases significantly with the addition of more hand motions. Thus, the current study proposes two new methods for feature extraction to solve the problem above. The first method is the extraction of the energy ratio features in the time-domain, which are robust and invariant to motion forces and speeds for the same gesture. The second method is the extraction of the concordance correlation features that describe the relationship between every two channels of the multi-channel sEMG sensor system. The concordance correlation features of a multi-channel sEMG sensor system were shown to provide a vast amount of useful information for identification. Furthermore, a new cascaded-structure classifier is also proposed, in which 11 types of hand gestures can be identified accurately using the newly defined features. Experimental results show that the success rate for the identification of the 11 gestures is significantly high

Bridging the gap between robotic technology and health care

Although technology and computation power have become more and more present in our daily lives, we have yet to see the same tendency in robotics applied to health care. In this work we focused on the study of four distinct applications of robotic technology to health care, named Robotic Assisted Surgery, Robotics in Rehabilitation, Prosthetics and Companion Robotic Systems. We identified the main roadblocks that are limiting the progress of such applications by an extensive examination of recent reports. Based on the limitations of the practical use of current robotic technology for health care we proposed a general modularization approach for the conception and implementation of specific robotic devices. The main conclusions of this review are: (i) there is a clear need of the adaptation of robotic technology (closed loop) to the user, so that robotics can be widely accepted and used in the context of heath care; (ii) for all studied robotic technologies cost is still prohibitive and limits their wide use. The reduction of costs influences technology acceptability; thus innovation by using cheaper computer systems and sensors is relevant and should be taken into account in the implementation of robotic systems

What is new in bladder cancer imaging

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