The impact of foreign trading information on emerging futures markets: a study of Taiwan's unique data set

Using a unique dataset from the Taiwan Futures Exchange, this paper investigates whether trading imbalances by foreign investors affect emerging Taiwan futures market in terms of returns and volatility. First, this evidence demonstrates a positive relation between contemporaneous futures returns and net purchases by foreign investors when other market factor effects are controlled. Second, this failure to detect price reversals is inconsistent with the price pressure hypothesis. Third, foreign investors do not exhibit positive feedback trading patterns. Fourth, a bi-directional Granger-causality relationship exists between futures volatility and foreign trading flows. As found for other stock or foreign exchange markets, our empirical results demonstrate that foreign trading flows do have impacts on the return and volatility of developing futures market, suggesting that trading by foreign investors may enhance the information flow of the local futures market.Foreign trading

Dynamics of Jovian and Saturnian Stream Particles

Stromteilchen sind nanometer-groe Festkörperteilchen, welche mit Geschwindigkeiten > 100 km/s aus dem Jupiter- und Saturnsystem entweichen. Aufgrund ihrer winzigen Gre wird ihre Dynamik durch elektromagnetische Kräfte beherrscht. Die starke Korrelation zwischen dem Stromteilchenflu und der Stärke des interplanetaren Feldes wurde zuerst von den Staubdetektoren der Ulysses- und Galileo-Misionen beocbachtet. Der Staubdetektor CDA der Cassini-Sonde bietet aufgrund seiner hohen Empfindlichkeit als auch wegen seiner Fähigkeit, die Zusammensetzung der Staubteilchen zu bestimmen, die einzigartige Möglichkeit, daß Stromteilchenphänomen grundsätzlich zu verstehen. Darüber hinaus ist der CDA der einzige Detektor, welcher Stromteilchen von beiden bisher bekannten planetaren Quellen beobachtet hat. Der direkte Vergleich zwischen den Eigenschaften von Stromteilchen verschiedener Herkunft ermglicht einen tiefen Einblick in die Physik der Staub-Magneotsphären-Wechselwirkung. Da die Beobachtungen von Jupiter-Stromteilchen durch die 3 Detektoren einen sehr langen Zeitraum abdecken, kann auerdem die Langzeitentwicklung des Stromteilchenflusses analysiert werden. Diese Arbeit zeigt, daß der von CDA im interplanetaren Raum gemessene Fluß von Jupiter-Stromteilchen einen ähnlichen Trend als der von Galileo gleichzeitig im inneren Jupitersystem gemessene Fluß folgt. Es wird mittels eines auf der UV-Emmision des Io-Torus beruhenden Plasmamodells gezeigt, daß die Aufladungsbedingungen in der Nähe Io's mit der Zunahme der aus Galileo-Daten abgeleiteten Stromteilchenproduktion konsistent ist. Dieses Ergebnis weist auf eine bisher unverstandene komplexe Wechselwirkung zwischen Io, den Staubteilchen und der Magnetosphäre hin. Ein bedeutender Fokus dieser Arbeit sind die durch Cassini entdeckten Saturn-Stromteilchen. Deren dynamische Entwicklung sowohl im interplanetaren Raum als auch innerhalb der Saturn-Magnetosphäre wird detailliert untersucht. Das interplanetare Magnetfeld zeigte während Cassinis Annäherung an den Saturn im Jahre 2004 eine ausgeprägte, mit sogenannten "Corotation Interaction Regions" verbundene 2-Sektor-Struktur. CDA Beobachtungen während dieses Zeitraums zeigten eine deutliche Veränderung der dynamischen Eigenschaften der Stromteilchen, wenn diese aus einer "rarefaction region" in Gebiete komprimierten Sonnenwindes eindrangen. Dies bedeutet, daß das Stromteilchenphänomen auf lokale Wechselwirkungen zwischen dem interplanetaren Magnetfeld und dem Staub zurckzuführen ist. Mittels zeitlich inverser (backward tracing), auf Cassini-Sonnenwindaten beruhender Simulationen wird gezeigt, daß Stromteilchen Größen zwischen 2 und 8 nm und Geschwindigkeiten zwischen 50 und 200 km/s aufweisen. Das neuentwickelte Beschleunigungsmodell, welches Effekte der stochastischen Aufladung berücksichtigt und auf neuesten Cassini-Plasma-daten beruht, reproduziert die aus den zeitlich inversen Simulationen abgeleiteten dynamischen Eigenschaften der Stromteilchen. Dieses Ergebnis ist die Grundlage für die Identifizierung der Stromteilchenquelle im inneren Saturnsystem. In einer Analyse von CDA Massenspektren wird gezeigt, dass die Partikelzusammensetzung in der Quellregion (Wassereis im E ring) sich von der Zusammensetzung der Saturn Stromteilchen unterscheidet, welche eine drastisch erhoehte silikatische Komponente aufweisen. Die stark unterschiedlichen Sputtereffizienzen und Sekundärelektronenergiebigkeiten von Wassereis und Silikaten indizieren, daß das Plasmasputtering nicht die Lebenszeit der E-Ring-Teilchen bestimmt, sondern auch ein materialselektiver Prozeßist, welcher für die beobachtete unterschiedliche Zusammensetzung von Ring- und Stromteilchen verantwortlich ist. Die hohe Sputtereffizienz von Wassereis unterstützt die Annahme, daß Saturn-Stromteilchen die durch Plasmaerosion freigesetzten silikatischen Verunreinigungen in den Wassereisteilchen sind. Abschlieend zeigt diese Arbeit, daß die Radiolyse der Wassereisteilchen eine mögliche Erklärung der beobachteten Verteilung von atomaren und molekularen Sauerstoffionen im Saturnsystem ist

Reduction in magnetic coercivity of Co nanomagnets by Fe alloying

We measured the magnetic hysteresis and coercivity of individual Co and Co$_{0.8}$Fe$_{0.2}$ bilayer nano-sized island structures formed on Cu (111) substrate using spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy. From the hysteresis taken on various sizes of islands, we found that the alloyed islands are ferromagnetic with out-of-plane magnetic anisotropy, same as the pure islands. Coercivity of the alloy islands, which is dependent on their size, was significantly reduced to ≈40% of that of the pure islands. Based on the Stoner–Wohlfarth model, we evaluated the amount of magnetic anisotropic energy and anisotropy constant for both pure and alloy islands. Since tunneling spectra taken on the alloy islands show upward shifts of the valence electronic states as compared to the pure ones, fewer electrons populated in the valence band of the alloy islands are presumably responsible for the reduction in the magnetic anisotropic energy

Reduction of Residual Stresses in Sapphire Cover Glass Induced by Mechanical Polishing and Laser Chamfering Through Etching

Sapphire is a hard and anti-scratch material commonly used as cover glass of mobile devices such as watches and mobile phones. A mechanical polishing using diamond slurry is usually necessary to create mirror surface. Additional chamfering at the edge is sometimes needed by mechanical grinding. These processes induce residual stresses and the mechanical strength of the sapphire work piece is impaired. In this study wet etching by phosphate acid process is applied to relief the induced stress in a 1” diameter sapphire cover glass. The sapphire is polished before the edge is chamfered by a picosecond laser. Residual stresses are measured by laser curvature method at different stages of machining. The results show that the wet etching process effectively relief the stress and the laser machining does not incur serious residual stress

Neuroprotective Effect of Uncaria rhynchophylla in Kainic Acid-Induced Epileptic Seizures by Modulating Hippocampal Mossy Fiber Sprouting, Neuron Survival, Astrocyte Proliferation, and S100B Expression

Uncaria rhynchophylla (UR), which is a traditional Chinese medicine, has anticonvulsive effect in our previous studies, and the cellular mechanisms behind this are still little known. Because of this, we wanted to determine the importance of the role of UR on kainic acid- (KA-) induced epilepsy. Oral UR for 6 weeks can successfully attenuate the onset of epileptic seizure in animal tests. Hippocampal mossy fiber sprouting dramatically decreased, while neuronal survival increased with UR treatment in hippocampal CA1 and CA3 areas. Furthermore, oral UR for 6 weeks significantly attenuated the overexpression of astrocyte proliferation and S100B proteins but not γ-aminobutyric acid A (GABAA) receptors. These results indicate that oral UR for 6 weeks can successfully attenuate mossy fiber sprouting, astrocyte proliferation, and S100B protein overexpression and increase neuronal survival in KA-induced epileptic rat hippocampu

Various criteria in the evaluation of biomedical named entity recognition

BACKGROUND: Text mining in the biomedical domain is receiving increasing attention. A key component of this process is named entity recognition (NER). Generally speaking, two annotated corpora, GENIA and GENETAG, are most frequently used for training and testing biomedical named entity recognition (Bio-NER) systems. JNLPBA and BioCreAtIvE are two major Bio-NER tasks using these corpora. Both tasks take different approaches to corpus annotation and use different matching criteria to evaluate system performance. This paper details these differences and describes alternative criteria. We then examine the impact of different criteria and annotation schemes on system performance by retesting systems participated in the above two tasks. RESULTS: To analyze the difference between JNLPBA's and BioCreAtIvE's evaluation, we conduct Experiment 1 to evaluate the top four JNLPBA systems using BioCreAtIvE's classification scheme. We then compare them with the top four BioCreAtIvE systems. Among them, three systems participated in both tasks, and each has an F-score lower on JNLPBA than on BioCreAtIvE. In Experiment 2, we apply hypothesis testing and correlation coefficient to find alternatives to BioCreAtIvE's evaluation scheme. It shows that right-match and left-match criteria have no significant difference with BioCreAtIvE. In Experiment 3, we propose a customized relaxed-match criterion that uses right match and merges JNLPBA's five NE classes into two, which achieves an F-score of 81.5%. In Experiment 4, we evaluate a range of five matching criteria from loose to strict on the top JNLPBA system and examine the percentage of false negatives. Our experiment gives the relative change in precision, recall and F-score as matching criteria are relaxed. CONCLUSION: In many applications, biomedical NEs could have several acceptable tags, which might just differ in their left or right boundaries. However, most corpora annotate only one of them. In our experiment, we found that right match and left match can be appropriate alternatives to JNLPBA and BioCreAtIvE's matching criteria. In addition, our relaxed-match criterion demonstrates that users can define their own relaxed criteria that correspond more realistically to their application requirements

Implementing Coastal Inundation Data with an Integrated Wind Wave Model and Hydrological Watershed Simulations

Coastal inundation due to wave overtopping coastal structures and storm surges often causes serious damage and danger to the population of Taiwan. Ascertaining the areas that are prone to coastal inundation is essential to provide countermeasures for mitigating the problem. Simulations without precipitation are examined in this study since overtopping has been determined to be a controlling factor in coastal flooding. We present scenarios for the simulation of coastal flooding with a unified wind wave and hydrological watershed model. The eastern coastal areas in Taiwan are selected as the study area. Simulations show that the resulting waves and tidal levels, generated by the Rankin-Vortex model and wind wave calculations, can be successfully obtained from the input data during wave overtopping simulations. A watershed model, WASH123D, was then employed for surface routing. The simulations indicate that the low-lying Yilan River and Dezikou Stream drainage systems were among the primary areas subject to inundation. Extensive inundation along both sides of the river banks was obtained in the case of extreme overtopping events. Coastal inundation could occur between the estuary of the Meilun Stream and most of the Nan-Bai-Bin areas in Hualien City. Calculations showed that more croplands flooded than did residential regions. No further damage to the upland of Hualien City was identified. The remaining study sites, Sinchen Township, Taitung City and Taimali Township, would only be slightly affected by seawater run-ups. Inundations caused by overtopping under extreme circumstances only affected the coast with almost trifling influence inland