Are Formal Corporate News Announcements Still Newsworthy? Evidence from Three Decades of U.S. Data on Earnings, Splits, and Dividends

This paper considers the share price reaction to dividend, earnings, and stock split announcements over a 30 year period. It first considers whether there is differential information content in similar corporate news announcements for different types of firms. Second, it investigates whether the value of news information about these firms has declined over time (has become “less newsworthy”). We categorize firms into groups by whether corporate news announcements regarding the firms will be more valuable to the public. For example, since the public may know more about larger firms, we expect the market to react less strongly (in absolute value) to new information from large firms. We find strong support for this idea. We find little evidence that is consistent with the idea that “news is less newsworthy” over the past few decades. Although, we do find that the share price reaction to “good” dividend news has become less positive and to “bad” dividend news has become less negative over time, no such related evidence exists for stock splits and earnings announcements. Additional investigation of entire distributions of returns using kernel density estimators also rejects the “news is no longer newsworthy” idea

An accelerated stochastic vortex structure method for particle collision and agglomeration in homogeneous turbulence

Modeling the response of interacting particles, droplets, or bubbles to subgrid-scale fluctuations in turbulent flows is a long-standing challenge in multiphase flow simulations using the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes approach. The problem also arises for large-eddy simulation for sufficiently small values of the Kolmogorov-scale particle Stokes number. This paper expands on a recently proposed stochastic vortex structure (SVS) method for modeling of turbulence fluctuations for colliding or otherwise interacting particles. An accelerated version of the SVS method was developed using the fast multipole expansion and local Taylor expansion approach, which reduces computation speed by two orders of magnitude compared to the original SVS method. Detailed comparisons are presented showing close agreement of the energy spectrum and probability density functions of various fields between the SVS computational model, direct numerical simulation (DNS) results, and various theoretical and experimental results found in the literature. Results of the SVS method for particle collision rate and related measures of particle interaction exhibit excellent agreement with DNS predictions for homogeneous turbulent flows. The SVS method was also used with adhesive particles to simulate formation of particle agglomerates with different values of the particle Stokes and adhesion numbers, and various measures of the agglomerate structure are compared to the DNS results

Biofuels and their By-Products: Global Economic and Environmental Implications

The biofuel industry has been rapidly growing around the world in recent years. Several papers have used general equilibrium models and addressed the economy-wide and environmental consequences of producing biofuels at a large scale. They mainly argue that since biofuels are mostly produced from agricultural sources, their effects are largely felt in agricultural markets with major land use and environmental consequences. In this paper, we argue that virtually all of these studies have overstated the impact of liquid biofuels on agricultural markets due to the fact that they have ignored the role of by-products resulting from the production of biofuels. Feed by-products of the biofuel industry, such as Dried Distillers Grains with Solubles (DDGS) and biodiesel by-products (BDBP) such as soy and rapeseed meals, can be used in the livestock industry as substitutes for grains and oilseed meals used in this industry. Hence, their presence mitigates the price impacts of biofuel production on the livestock and food industries. The importance of incorporating by-products of biofuel production in economic models is well recognized by some partial equilibrium analyses of biofuel production. However, to date, this issue has not been tackled by those conducting CGE analysis of biofuels programs. Accordingly, this paper explicitly introduces DDGS and BDBP, the major by-products of grain based ethanol and biodiesel production processes, into a worldwide CGE model and analyzes the economic and environmental impacts of regional and international mandate policies designed to stimulate bioenergy production and use. We first explicitly introduce by-products of biofuel production into the GTAP-BIO database, originally developed by Taheripour et al. (2007). Then we explicitly bring in DDGS and BDBP into the Energy-Environmental version of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP-E) model, originally developed by Burniaux and Truong (2002), and recently modified by McDougall and Golub (2007) and Birur, Hertel, and Tyner (2008). The structure of the GTAP-E model is redesigned to handle the production and consumption of biofuels and their by-products, in particular DDGS, across the world. Unlike many CGE models which are characterized by single product sectors, here grain based ethanol and DDGS jointly are produced by an industry, named EthanolC. The biodiesel industry also produces two products of biodiesel and BDBP jointly. This paper divides the world economy into 22 commodities, 20 industries, and 18 regions and then examines global impacts of the US Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 and the European Union mandates for promoting biofuel production in the presence of by-products. We show that models with and without by-products demonstrate different portraits from the economic impacts of international biofuel mandates for the world economy in 2015. While both models demonstrate significant changes in the agricultural production pattern across the world, the model with by-products shows smaller changes in the production of cereal grains and larger changes for oilseeds products in the US and EU, and the reverse for Brazil. For example, the US production of cereal grains increases by 10.8% and 16.4% with and without by-products, respectively. The difference between these two numbers corresponds to 646 million bushels of corn. In the presence of by-products, prices change less due to the mandate policies. For example, the model with no by-products predicts that the price of cereal grains grows 22.7% in the US during the time period of 2006 to 2015. The corresponding number for the model with by-products is 14%. The model with no by-products predicts that the price of oilseeds increases by 62.5% in the EU during 2006-2015. In the presence of by-products, this price grows 56.4%. Finally, we show that incorporating DDGS into the model significantly changes the land use consequences of the biofuel mandate polices.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy,

Optimized Microstrip Antennas with Metamaterial Superstrates Using Particle Swarm Optimization

Two new designs of compact microstrip antennas, where metamaterials are placed on structure as superstrate, are proposed. The newly designed metamaterial unit cell and antenna feed position optimized by particle swarm optimization. It was found that the characteristics of novel microstrip antennas with designed metamaterials placed on the superstrate are comparable to the conventional patch antennas, while their gain, directivity and radiating efficiency are noticeably improved. Gain of microstrip antenna is increased 3dB to 4dB and level of back lobe is decresed

A stochastic vortex structure method for interacting particles in turbulent shear flows

In a recent study, we have proposed a new synthetic turbulence method based on stochastic vortex structures (SVSs), and we have demonstrated that this method can accurately predict particle transport, collision, and agglomeration in homogeneous, isotropic turbulence in comparison to direct numerical simulation results. The current paper extends the SVS method to non-homogeneous, anisotropic turbulence. The key element of this extension is a new inversion procedure, by which the vortex initial orientation can be set so as to generate a prescribed Reynolds stress field. After validating this inversion procedure for simple problems, we apply the SVS method to the problem of interacting particle transport by a turbulent planar jet. Measures of the turbulent flow and of particle dispersion, clustering, and collision obtained by the new SVS simulations are shown to compare well with direct numerical simulation results. The influence of different numerical parameters, such as number of vortices and vortex lifetime, on the accuracy of the SVS predictions is also examined

Cloud Ownership and Reliability – Issues and Developments

Cloud computing is a composite paradigm that provides crucial services to individuals and organisations over networked infrastructure at a cost. The Cloud provides custom built applications, made available by a CSP to customers. Several customers can access an instance of one application. The Cloud also affords an avenue for customers to build their own application in a language compatible with a CSP and subsequently deploy that application on the Cloud. In addition, massive scalable storage and computing devices are available on the Cloud. A customers expects optimum services whenever and wherever it is required. Hence, system failure on the part of a CSP must not affect the services being provided to the customer. This paper examines present trends in the area of Cloud ownership reliability and provides a guide for future research. The paper aims to answer the following question: what is the current trend and development in Cloud ownership reliability? In addition, analysis was done on existing work published in journals, conferences, white papers and those published in reputable magazines, to answer the question raised. The expected result is the identification of trends in Cloud ownership and reliability which will be of benefit to prospective Cloud users and service providers alike

The term a_4 in the heat kernel expansion of noncommutative tori

We consider the Laplacian associated with a general metric in the canonical conformal structure of the noncommutative two torus, and calculate a local expression for the term a4 that appears in its corresponding small-time heat kernel expansion. The final formula involves one variable functions and lengthy two, three and four variable functions of the modular automorphism of the state that encodes the conformal perturbation of the flat metric. We confirm the validity of the calculated expressions by showing that they satisfy a family of conceptually predicted functional relations. By studying these functional relations abstractly, we derive a partial differential system which involves a natural action of cyclic groups of order 2, 3 and 4 and a flow in parameter space. We discover symmetries of the calculated expressions with respect to the action of the cyclic groups. In passing, we show that the main ingredients of our calculations, which come from a rearrangement lemma and relations between the derivatives up to order 4 of the conformal factor and those of its logarithm, can be derived by finite differences from the generating function of the Bernoulli numbers and its multiplicative inverse. We then shed light on the significance of exponential polynomials and their smooth fractions in understanding the general structure of the noncommutative geometric invariants appearing in the heat kernel expansion. As an application of our results we obtain the a4 term for noncommutative four tori which split as products of two tori. These four tori are not conformally flat and the a4 term gives a first hint of the Riemann curvature and the higher-dimensional modular structure