On the importance of clean accounting measures for the tests of stock market efficiency

Tests of the semi-strong form of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) typically use earnings and book value of equity as benchmarks of fundamental value. Accounting earnings, however, are contaminated by noise due to their transient component and book value of equity tends to be biased downwards due to accounting conservatism. We investigate whether controlling for these effects impacts on the implications concerning the information efficiency of the Swedish stock market. We conclude that relevant adjustments increase both the magnitude and the consistency of the value premium earned on a contrarian investment strategy that buys (shorts) stocks with low (high) relative market valuation. The existence of the value premium cannot be explained by common risk proxies or transaction costs argument. Using cleaner accounting proxies thus strengthens the evidence on the imperfect efficiency of the Swedish stock market.market efficiency, investment, contrarian strategy, transitory earnings, accounting conservatism, Sweden, Scandinavia

Collinear and soft resummation in the large-x limit

I discuss general unified formulas for resumming collinear and soft contributions to QCD hard scattering cross sections at large x. Expansions of the resummed cross sections to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order are also shown along with applications of the formalism.Comment: 4 pages, presented at DPF 2004, Riverside, California, August 26-31, 200

Electroweak Measurements

The measurements of electroweak sector of the Standard Model are presented, including most recent results from LEP, Tevatron and HERA colliders. The robustness of the Standard Model is illustrated with the precision measurements, the electroweak fits and the comparisons to the results obtained from low energy experiments. The status of the measurements of the $W$ boson properties and rare production processes involving weak bosons at colliders is examined, together with the measurements of the electroweak parameters in $ep$ collisions.Comment: 12 pages, Proceedings of "Lepton-Photon 2005", Upsalla, Swede

A Mellin Space Program for W^{+/-} and Z^0 Production at NNLO

We present a program for the evaluation of full unpolarized cross sections for the W^{+/-} and Z^0 production in the narrow width approximation at NNLO in perturbative QCD using Mellin space techniques.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. Proceedings of the 10th Hellenic School on Elementary Particle Physics and Gravity, Corfu 2010, to be published in Fortschritte der Physi

As Natural as the Birds and the Bees

Theologians and other moralists have said that homosexual acts violate the natural law” and that they are therefore immoral and ought to be prohibited by the state. The word nature has a built-in ambiguity that can lead to serious misunderstandings

Truth, beauty and authenticity in folk music

Publisher PD

A Social Media Analysis of Users, Their General Happiness, and the Impact on Marketers

As the internet and social media become more prominent in today’s society, it is important for marketers and others to understand who is using these platforms and how this usage affects overall happiness. Using data gathered from the General Social Survey (GSS) 2016 Cross-Section and a survey created and distributed to Western Kentucky University (WKU) Students, this research examines the effect of demographic variables on whether or not respondents utilize Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. Then, the impact of having accounts on these social media platforms on users’ overall general happiness is analyzed. Several other regressions were run and analyzed based on the WKU survey results to examine the impact of a variety of social media aspects on overall happiness. The main findings revealed that females have a predominant and statistically significant presence over males on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat and those younger in age are more likely to be present on all platforms examined. Contrary to many diversifying opinions shown in previous research on the impact of social media on overall happiness, there was no statistical significance from these findings from either data source. However, it was found that motivation to use social media influenced happiness as well as frequency of usage. The impact of these results on marketers is then discussed

Association Rule Discovery from Collaborative Mobile Data

Sophisticated mobile devices have rapidly become essential tools for various daily activities of billions of people worldwide. Subsequently, the demand for longer battery lives is constantly increasing. The Carat project is advancing the understanding of mobile energy consumption by using collaborative mobile data to estimate and model energy consumption of mobile devices. This thesis presents a method for estimating mobile application energy consumption from mobile device system settings and context factors using association rules. These settings and factors include CPU usage, device travel distance, battery temperature, battery voltage, screen brightness, used mobile networking technology, network type, WiFi signal strength, and WiFi connection speed. The association rules are mined using Apache Spark cluster-computing framework from collaborative mobile data collected by the Carat project. Additionally, this thesis presents a prototype of a web based API for discovering these association rules. The web service integrates Apache Spark based analysis engine with a user friendly front-end allowing an aggregated view of the dataset to be accessible without revealing data of individual participants of the Carat project. This thesis shows that association rules can be used effectively in modelling mobile device energy consumption. Example rules are presented and the performance of the implementation is evaluated experimentally

Physical capacity and work-related musculoskeletal symptoms

Bongers, P.M. [Promotor]Mechelen, W. van [Promotor]Beek, A.J. van der [Copromotor]Blatter, B.M. [Copromotor