The Relationship between Stock Price and EPS: Evidence Based on Taiwan Panel Data

In this study, we use panel cointegration methods to investigate the relationship between stock prices and earnings-per-share (EPS). Furthermore, we consider whether stock prices respond to EPS under the different level of growth rate of operating revenue. The empirical result indicated that the cointegration relationship existed between stock prices and EPS in the long-run. Furthermore, we found that for the firm with a high level of growth rate, EPS has less power in explaining the stock prices however, for the firm with a low level of growth rate, EPS has a strong impact in stock prices.Earnings Response Coefficient (ERC)

Parental bonding and personality characteristics of first episode intention to suicide or deliberate self-harm without a history of mental disorders

BACKGROUND: There is substantial overlap between deliberate self-harm (DSH) and intention to suicide (ITS), although the psychopathologies and motivations behind these behaviors are distinctly different. The purpose of this study was to investigate (i) the pathway relationship among parental bonding, personality characteristics, and alexithymic traits, and (ii) the association of these features with ITS and DSH using structural equation modeling to determine the risks and protective factors for these behaviors. METHODS: Sixty-nine first-time DSH and 36 first-time ITS patients without medical or psychiatric illnesses, and 66 controls were recruited. The Parental Bonding Inventory (PBI), Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ), 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), and the Chinese Health Questionnaire (CHQ) were filled out by the participants. RESULTS: Our structural equation models showed that parental bonding had the greatest influence on the development of DSH behavior in patients. On the other hand, participants who were younger, less extraverted, with a greater extent of the alexithymic trait of difficulty identifying feeling (DIF), and a worse mental health condition, were more likely to develop ITS behavior. Males were more likely than females to develop the alexithymic trait of DIF. CONCLUSIONS: Although there are many covariates that affect both ITS and DSH behaviors, these covariates may have different functions in the development of these behaviors, thus revealing the psychopathological difference between DSH and ITS. Policymakers should consider these differences and build intervention and prevention programs for gender- and age-specific high-risk groups to target the differences, with a focus on family counseling to treat DSH and a focus on attempting to increase emotional awareness to treat ITS

EFFECTS OF FUNCTIONAL KNEE BRACES ON NEUROMUSCULAR ADAPTATION IN ANTERIOR CRUCIATE LIGAMENT INJURED PATIENTS

INTRODUCTION: Neuromuscular adaptation in the lower extremity has been found in anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injured patients, with mechanical and electromyographic alterations such as reduced knee extensor moment and power, increased hamsrings muscle activity, and decreased muscle strength (Berchuck, Andriacchi, Bach, & Reider, 1990; DeVita, Lassiter, Hortobagyi, & Torry, 1998). Functional knee bracing has been a common method to enhance functional knee stability in these patients for the past three decades. However, the long-term effects of knee bracing on ACL-reconstructed (ACL-R) patients have not been reported in the literature. There is thus an urgent need to identify the effects of bracing on the gait displayed by these patients

Apoptosis Induction in Primary Human Colorectal Cancer Cell Lines and Retarded Tumor Growth in SCID Mice by Sulforaphane

We have investigated the anticancer effects of the dietary isothiocyanate sulforaphane (SFN) on colorectal cancer (CRC), using primary cancer cells lines isolated from five Taiwanese colorectal cancer patients as the model for colorectal cancer. SFN-treated cells accumulated in metaphase (SFN 6.25 μM) and subG1 (SFN 12.5 and 25 μM) as determined by flow cytometry. In addition, treated cells showed nuclear apoptotic morphology that coincided with an activation of caspase-3, and loss of mitochondrial membrane potential (ΔΨm). Incubations at higher SFN doses (12.5 and 25 μM) resulted in cleavage of procaspase-3 and elevated caspase-2, -3, -8, and -9 activity, suggesting that the induction of apoptosis and the sulforaphane-induced mitosis delay at the lower dose are independently regulated. Daily SFN s.c. injections (400 micromol/kg/d for 3 weeks) in severe combined immunodeficient mice with primary human CRC (CP1 to CP5) s.c. tumors resulted in a decrease of mean tumor weight by 70% compared with vehicle-treated controls. Our findings suggest that, in addition to the known effects on cancer prevention, sulforaphane may have antitumor activity in established colorectal cancer

High-throughput Automated Muropeptide Analysis (HAMA) Reveals Peptidoglycan Composition of Gut Microbial Cell Walls

Peptidoglycan (PGN), a net-like polymer constituted by muropeptides, provides protection for microorganisms and has been a major target for antibiotics for decades. Researchers have explored host-microbiome interactions through PGN recognition systems and discovered key muropeptides modulating host responses. However, most common characterization techniques for muropeptides are labor-intensive and require manual analysis of mass spectra due to the complex cross-linked PGN structures. Each species has unique moiety modifications and inter-/intra-bridges, which further complicates the structural analysis of PGN. Here, we developed a high-throughput automated muropeptide analysis (HAMA) platform leveraging tandem mass spectrometry and in silico muropeptide MS/MS fragmentation matching to comprehensively identify muropeptide structures, quantify their abundance, and infer PGN cross-linking types. We demonstrated the effectiveness of HAMA platform using well-characterized PGNs from E. coli and S. aureus and further applied it to common gut bacteria including Bifidobacterium, Bacteroides, Lactobacillus, Enterococcus, and Akkermansia muciiniphila. Specifically, we found that the stiffness and strength of the cell envelopes may correspond to the lengths and compositions of interpeptide bridges within Bifidobacterium species. In summary, the HAMA framework exhibits an automated, intuitive, and accurate analysis of PGN compositions, which may serve as a potential tool to investigate the post-synthetic modifications of saccharides, the variation in interpeptide bridges, and the types of cross-linking within bacterial PGNs.</p

Using Rare Earth Elements to Constrain Particulate Organic Carbon Flux in the East China Sea

Fluxes of particulate organic carbon (POC) in the East China Sea (ECS) have been reported to decrease from the inner continental shelf towards the outer continental shelf. Recent research has shown that POC fluxes in the ECS may be overestimated due to active sediment resuspension. To better characterize the effect of sediment resuspension on particle fluxes in the ECS, rare earth elements (REEs) and organic carbon (OC) were used in separate two-member mixing models to evaluate trap-collected POC fluxes. The ratio of resuspended particles from sediments to total trap-collected particles in the ECS ranged from 82-94% using the OC mixing model, and 30-80% using the REEs mixing model, respectively. These results suggest that REEs may be better proxies for sediment resuspension than OC in high turbidity marginal seas because REEs do not appear to undergo degradation during particle sinking as compared to organic carbon. Our results suggest that REEs can be used as tracers to provide quantitative estimates of POC fluxes in marginal sea

Effects of orthographic consistency and homophone density on Chinese spoken word recognition

Studies of alphabetic language have shown that orthographic knowledge influences phonological processing during spoken word recognition. This study utilized the Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to differentiate two types of phonology-to-orthography (P-to-O) mapping consistencies in Chinese, namely homophone density and orthographic consistency. The ERP data revealed an orthographic consistency effect in the frontal-centrally distributed N400, and a homophone density effect in central-posteriorly distributed late positive component (LPC). Further source analyses using the standardized low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA) demonstrated that the orthographic effect was not only localized in the frontal and temporal-parietal regions for phonological processing, but also in the posterior visual cortex for orthographic processing, while the homophone density effect was found in middle temporal gyrus for lexical-semantic selection, and in the temporal-occipital junction for orthographic processing. These results suggest that orthographic information not only shapes the nature of phonological representations, but may also be activated during on-line spoken word recognition

The feedback consistency effect in Chinese character recognition:evidence from a psycholinguistic norm

Researchers have demonstrated the importance of phonology in literacy acquisition and in visual word recognition. For example, the spelling-to-sound consistency effect has been observed in visual word recognition tasks, in which the naming responses are faster and more accurate for words with the same letters that also have the same pronunciation (e.g. -ean is always pronounced /in/, as in lean, dean, and bean). In addition, some studies have reported a much less intuitive feedback consistency effect when a rime can be spelled in different ways (e.g. /ip/ in heap and deep) in lexical decision tasks. Such findings suggest that, with activation flowing back and forth between orthographic and phonological units during word processing, any inconsistency in the mappings between orthography and phonology should weaken the stability of the feedback loop, and, thus, should delay recognition. However, several studies have failed to show reliable feedback consistency in printed word recognition. One possible reason for this is that the feedback consistency is naturally confounded with many other variables, such as orthographic neighborhood or bigram frequency, as these variables are difficult to tease apart. Furthermore, there are challenges in designing factorial experiments that perfectly balance lexical stimuli on all factors besides feedback consistency. This study aims to examine the feedback consistency effect in reading Chinese characters by using a normative data of 3,423 Chinese phonograms. We collected the lexical decision time from 180 college students. A linear mixed model analysis was used to examine the feedback consistency effect by taking into account additional properties that may be confounded with feedback consistency, including character frequency, number of strokes, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, semantic ambiguity, phonetic consistency, noun-to-verb ratios, and morphological boundedness. Some typical effects were observed, such as the more frequent and familiar a character, the faster one can decide it is a real character. More importantly, the linear mixed model analysis revealed a significant feedback consistency effect while controlling for other factors, which indicated that the pronunciation of phonograms might accommodate the organization of Chinese orthographic representation. Our study disentangled the feedback consistency from the many other factors, and supports the view that phonological activation would reverberate to orthographic representation in visual word recognition