Venture capitalists in Asia: a comparison with the U.S. and Europe.

This research utilizes an institutional perspective to examine the behavior of venture capital professionals in three distinct regions of the world (Asia, U.S., Europe). Based upon a mail survey, we find reasonably consistent views around the world on the relative importance of various venture capitalist roles. However, we find that how those roles are implemented is shaped by cognitive institutional influences in the given region. We find that a model developed in the U.S. to predict the amount of venture capitalist/CEO interaction is not valid in Asia. Further, Asian boards have much greater insider representation than do U.S. or European boards. We attribute these difference to the greater emphasis in Asia on the importance of collective action

New mechanism for the production of the extremely fast light particles in heavy-ion collisions in the Fermi energy domain

Employing a four-body classical model, various mechanisms responsible for the production of fast light particles in heavy ion collisions at low and intermediate energies have been studied. It has been shown that at energies lower than 50 A MeV, light particles of velocities of more than two times higher than the projectile velocities are produced due to the acceleration of the target light-particles by the mean field of the incident nucleus. It has also been shown that precision experimental reaction research in normal and inverse kinematics is likely to provide vital information about which mechanism is dominant in the production of fast light particles.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, LaTeX, to be published in Proceedings of VII International School-Seminar on Heavy Ion Physics, May 27 - June 1, 2002, Dubna, Russi

Strong enhancement of extremely energetic proton production in central heavy ion collisions at intermediate energy

The energetic proton emission has been investigated as a function of the reaction centrality for the system 58Ni + 58Ni at 30A MeV. Extremely energetic protons (EpNN > 130 MeV) were measured and their multiplicity is found to increase almost quadratically with the number of participant nucleons thus indicating the onset of a mechanism beyond one and two-body dynamics.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Physical Review Letter

Ecologically Different Fungi Affect Arabidopsis Development: Contribution of Soluble and Volatile Compounds

<div><p>Plant growth and development can be influenced by mutualistic and non-mutualistic microorganisms. We investigated the ability of the ericoid endomycorrhizal fungus <i>Oidiodendron maius</i> to influence growth and development of the non-host plant <i>Arabidopsis thaliana</i>. Different experimental setups (non-compartmented and compartmented co-culture plates) were used to investigate the influence of both soluble and volatile fungal molecules on the plant phenotype. <i>O</i>. <i>maius</i> promoted growth of <i>A</i>. <i>thaliana</i> in all experimental setups. In addition, a peculiar clumped root phenotype, characterized by shortening of the primary root and by an increase of lateral root length and number, was observed in <i>A</i>. <i>thaliana</i> only in the non-compartmented plates, suggesting that soluble diffusible molecules are responsible for this root morphology. Fungal auxin does not seem to be involved in plant growth promotion and in the clumped root phenotype because co-cultivation with <i>O</i>. <i>maius</i> did not change auxin accumulation in plant tissues, as assessed in plants carrying the DR5::GUS reporter construct. In addition, no correlation between the amount of fungal auxin produced and the plant root phenotype was observed in an <i>O</i>. <i>maius</i> mutant unable to induce the clumped root phenotype in <i>A</i>. <i>thaliana</i>. Addition of active charcoal, a VOC absorbant, in the compartmented plates did not modify plant growth promotion, suggesting that VOCs are not involved in this phenomenon. The low VOCs emission measured for <i>O</i>. <i>maius</i> further corroborated this hypothesis. By contrast, the addition of CO₂ traps in the compartmented plates drastically reduced plant growth, suggesting involvement of fungal CO₂ in plant growth promotion. Other mycorrhizal fungi, as well as a saprotrophic and a pathogenic fungus, were also tested with the same experimental setups. In the non-compartmented plates, most fungi promoted <i>A</i>. <i>thaliana</i> growth and some could induce the clumped root phenotype. In the compartmented plate experiments, a general induction of plant growth was observed for most other fungi, especially those producing higher biomass, further strengthening the role of a nonspecific mechanism, such as CO₂ emission.</p></div

Mitigation of Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection in Venture Capital Financing: The Influence of the Country’s Institutional Setting

A venture capitalist (VC) needs to trade off benefits and costs when attempting to mitigate agency problems in their investor-investee relationship. We argue that signals of ventures complement the VC’s capacity to screen and conduct a due diligence during the pre-investment phase, but its attractiveness may diminish in institutional settings supporting greater transparency. Similarly, whereas a VC may opt for contractual covenants to curb potential opportunism by ventures in the post-investment phase, this may only be effective in settings supportive of shareholder rights enforcement. Using an international sample of VC contracts, our study finds broad support for these conjectures. It delineates theoretical and practical implications for how investors can best deploy their capital in different institutional settings whilst nurturing their relationships with entrepreneurs

Comparative Analysis of the Mechanisms of Fast Light Particle Formation in Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions at Low and Intermediate Energies

The dynamics and the mechanisms of preequilibrium-light-particle formation in nucleus-nucleus collisions at low and intermediate energies are studied on the basis of a classical four-body model. The angular and energy distributions of light particles from such processes are calculated. It is found that, at energies below 50 MeV per nucleon, the hardest section of the energy spectrum is formed owing to the acceleration of light particles from the target by the mean field of the projectile nucleus. Good agreement with available experimental data is obtained.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, LaTeX, published in Physics of Atomic Nuclei v.65, No. 8, 2002, pp. 1459 - 1473 translated from Yadernaya Fizika v. 65, No. 8, 2002, pp. 1494 - 150

Metric learning for Parkinsonian identification from IMU gait measurements

Diagnosis of people with mild Parkinson’s symptoms is difficult. Nevertheless, variations in gait pattern can be utilised to this purpose, when measured via Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). Human gait, however, possesses a high degree of variability across individuals, and is subject to numerous nuisance factors. Therefore, off-the-shelf Machine Learning techniques may fail to classify it with the accuracy required in clinical trials. In this paper we propose a novel framework in which IMU gait measurement sequences sampled during a 10 metre walk are first encoded as hidden Markov models (HMMs) to extract their dynamics and provide a fixed-length representation. Given sufficient training samples, the distance between HMMs which optimises classification performance is learned and employed in a classical Nearest Neighbour classifier. Our tests demonstrate how this technique achieves accuracy of 85.51% over a 156 people with Parkinson’s with a representative range of severity and 424 typically developed adults, which is the top performance achieved so far over a cohort of such size, based on single measurement outcomes. The method displays the potential for further improvement and a wider application to distinguish other conditions

The Threat of Capital Drain: A Rationale for Public Banks?

This paper yields a rationale for why subsidized public banks may be desirable from a regional perspective in a financially integrated economy. We present a model with credit rationing and heterogeneous regions in which public banks prevent a capital drain from poorer to richer regions by subsidizing local depositors, for example, through a public guarantee. Under some conditions, cooperative banks can perform the same function without any subsidization; however, they may be crowded out by public banks. We also discuss the impact of the political structure on the emergence of public banks in a political-economy setting and the role of interregional mobility