Target CEO turnover and acquiring shareholders' returns in the Fourth M&A Wave in the UK

This research provides an up-to-date perspective on the impact of the fourth M&A wave in the UK, on the target CEOs and the acquiring shareholder wealth around the takeover announcement. The novelty of this study stems from the characteristics of the recent M&A activities. Beyond being the most important M&As waves in history, recent M&As are characterized by many interesting features such as the large cross-border takeovers, the use of equity as opposed to debt as in the 1980s and a preference for friendly, strategically motivated deals instead of hostile financially motivated deals. Another distinctive feature of recent years is the increased focus on improving internal corporate governance mechanisms in order to maximise firm value. In addressing of these characteristics, we distinguish between cross-border and domestic deals, takeovers on the rising side (the takeover active period) and the slumping side (the takeover less active period) of the M&A wave. Both univariate tests and multivariate tests are employed in our empirical studyWe find a significant negative relation between the probability of post-takeover target CEO turnover and pre-takeover performance in the full samples. This indicates the disciplinary function of UK takeovers in the recent M&A wave. Such a relation only exists on the rising side of the M&A wave, implying that such disciplinary takeovers are confined only to the active period. However, a lower CEO turnover follows cross-border takeovers, indicating that the local CEO's experience and knowledge of the business and of the environment appear to be valuable to foreign acquirers. There is some evidence to point that better governance, such as greater blockholder ownership and a greater proportion of non-executive, lowers the probability of CEO turnover in the takeover active period. The results are similar to findings by Kini et al. (2004) suggesting that takeovers play less of a disciplinary role in the more recent M&A wave and act as a court of last resort when other governance mechanisms are weak.Focusing on the short-term return, we find significant losses for acquiring firms around the takeover announcement. The losses mainly existed in UK domestic takeovers, while the returns for foreign acquirers are not significantly different form zero. Legal difference and culture difference are positively associated with the gains of acquiring firms. Moreover, we find no relationship between acquirer's returns and the intensity of M&A. High-tech takeovers brought lower abnormal returns to acquiring firms than non-high-tech takeovers, which is even worse after the crash of global IT industry in 2000. Further, we find that the acquiring firms have better returns, when target firms have post-takeover CEO turnover, a greater proportion of non-executive and a lower blockholder ownership. The results indicate the significant influence of the target governance on acquirer's gains

Dehumidification Technology Evaluation and Moisture Balance Modelling for Greenhouse Humidity Control

Excessively high relative humidity (RH) occurred in the greenhouses almost all year around. Various methods of dehumidification are available for greenhouses. To find a feasible method for greenhouse dehumidification, three methods including air-to-air heat exchangers, exhaust ventilation system, as well as the mechanical refrigeration dehumidification were compared in a tomato greenhouse in the cold region of Canadian Prairies. The experiment results showed that dehumidification by the exhaust fan system was the most cost-effective method with the lowest capital and maintenance cost. However, similar to the heat exchangers, the exhaust fan system is only effective during cold and mild seasons, and not during warm weather conditions. Even though the mechanical refrigeration dehumidifiers consumed the highest amount of electrical energy thus resulting in the highest cost, they were effective in controlling the indoor moisture year-round due to their independence from outside air conditions. Mechanical refrigeration is recommended for summer dehumidification which is only needed at night and early morning before ventilation cooling starts. Both methods could be used during different seasons to achieve good moisture control year-round. A moisture balance model for simulating the greenhouse indoor RH and air water vapor partial pressure was developed. The model, named HumidMod, takes plant evapotranspiration as the main moisture source of greenhouse air, which is calculated by a modified Penman-Monteith evapotranspiration model. Condensation on the greenhouse inner cover surface as one of the moisture sinks or sources is calculated by two statistical models developed in a Venlo-type plastic greenhouse. Ventilation or infiltration is estimated as a function of the indoor solar radiation. In the model, the indoor RH and water vapor partial pressure can be directly calculated as a function of the indoor and outdoor air conditions, as well as the plant and greenhouse characteristics. The model was validated by comparing predictions with measured data in a tomato greenhouse, which had a commercial-grade refrigeration dehumidifier for humidity control. The mean absolute uncertainty between the predicted and measured results was about 6.9% for both RH and water vapor partial pressure. The coefficient of determinations were 0.59 and 0.75 for RH and water vapor partial pressure, respectively. A good agreement was found between the predicted and measured results with root mean square error of 5.6% for RH and 0.144 kPa for water vapor partial pressure. This model provides a reliable tool for the estimation of dehumidification requirement inside a greenhouse to achieve a desired humidity level. Sensitivity analysis of this model to several important input parameters was also conducted in three different seasons: cold winter (January), mild season (April), and summer season (July). The results indicate that the input parameters including the indoor air temperature, incoming solar radiation, air exchange rate, as well as plant leaf area index have a significant influence on the model output so should be decided carefully

Absence of a transport signature of spin-orbit coupling in graphene with indium adatoms

Enhancement of the spin-orbit coupling in graphene may lead to various topological phenomena and also find applications in spintronics. Adatom absorption has been proposed as an effective way to achieve the goal. In particular, great hope has been held for indium in strengthening the spin-orbit coupling and realizing the quantum spin Hall effect. To search for evidence of the spin-orbit coupling in graphene absorbed with indium adatoms, we carry out extensive transport measurements, i.e., weak localization magnetoresistance, quantum Hall effect and non-local spin Hall effect. No signature of the spin-orbit coupling is found. Possible explanations are discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, with supplementary material

Characterization of a novel curled-cotyledons mutant in soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.]

Cotyledons that affect the plant development are important part of soybean. We describe a recessive soybean mutant, designated as curled-cotyledons mutant which is derived from sodiumazide (NaN3) and 60Coγ ray mutagenized seeds of the ‘Nannong 94-16’ cultivar. The curled-cotyledons mutant has defective morphology in cotyledons development, compared to the wild-type plants. Additionally, it also has other aberrant agronomic character, such as longer growth period, and smaller plants. In the mutant, the embryo sac becomes smaller and bulbous, and ultrastructure of developing cotyledons exhibits larger vacuole, some organelles degradation, and membranous multilamellar appear at different stages. Protein and amino acid contents in seeds of mutant are higher than those of the wild type, especially methionine and cysteine. These results suggest that the curled-cotyledons mutant is a novel cotyledon development mutant, which could serve as a basic material to study seed composition and cotyledon development in soybean.Keywords: Soybean, mutant, curled-cotyledons, gene

Hierarchical Text Classification with Reinforced Label Assignment

While existing hierarchical text classification (HTC) methods attempt to capture label hierarchies for model training, they either make local decisions regarding each label or completely ignore the hierarchy information during inference. To solve the mismatch between training and inference as well as modeling label dependencies in a more principled way, we formulate HTC as a Markov decision process and propose to learn a Label Assignment Policy via deep reinforcement learning to determine where to place an object and when to stop the assignment process. The proposed method, HiLAP, explores the hierarchy during both training and inference time in a consistent manner and makes inter-dependent decisions. As a general framework, HiLAP can incorporate different neural encoders as base models for end-to-end training. Experiments on five public datasets and four base models show that HiLAP yields an average improvement of 33.4% in Macro-F1 over flat classifiers and outperforms state-of-the-art HTC methods by a large margin. Data and code can be found at https://github.com/morningmoni/HiLAP.Comment: EMNLP 201

Anti-inflammatory effects, nuclear magnetic resonance identification, and high-performance liquid chromatography isolation of the total flavonoids from Artemisia frigida

AbstractThe aerial parts of Artemisia frigida Willd. are used to treat joint swelling, renal heat, abnormal menstruation, and sore carbuncle. The anti-inflammatory effects of A. frigida have been well-known in folk medicine, suggesting that components extracted from A. frigida could potentially treat inflammatory disease. With the aim of discovering bioactive compounds, in this study, we extracted total flavonoids from the aerial parts of A. frigida and investigated their anti-inflammatory effects against inflammation induced by carrageenan and egg albumin in rats. At the doses studied, total flavonoids (100 mg/kg, 200 mg/kg, and 400 mg/kg) and some isolated compounds (30 mg/kg) showed significant and dose-dependent anti-inflammatory effects. According to the high-performance liquid chromatography analysis of the total flavonoids from A. frigida, there are five major compounds, namely, 5-hydroxy-3′,4′-dimethoxy-7-O-β-d-glucuronide (F1), 5-hydroxy-3′,4′,5′-trimethoxy-7-O-β-d-glucuronide (F2), 5,7,3′-trihydroxy-6,4′-dimethoxyflavone (F3), 5,3′-dihydroxy-6,7,4′-trimethoxyflavone (F4), and 5,3′-dihydroxy-3,6,7,4′-tetramethoxyflavone (F5), which may explain the anti-inflammatory activity