A Model of Optimal Capital Sucture with Stochastic Interest Rates

This paper develops a model of optimal capital structure with stochastic interest rate which is assumed to follow a mean-reverting process. Closed-form solutions are obtained for both the value of the firm and the value of its risky debt. The paper finds that the current level and the long-run mean of the interest rate process play distinctive roles in our integrated model. The current level of the interest rate is critical in the pricing of risky bonds, while the long-run mean plays a key role in the determination of a firm’s optimal capital sucture such as the optimal coupon rate and leverage ratio. Our findings demonsate that a model of optimal capital sucture with a constant interest rate cannot price risky bonds and determine the optimal capital sucture simultaneously in a satisfactory manner. Furthermore, our numerical results indicate that the correlation between the stochastic interest rate and the asset return of a firm has little impact on the firm’s optimal capital structure

Disturbance observer enhanced variable gain controller for robot teleoperation with motion capture using wearable armbands

Disturbance observer (DOB) based controller performs well in estimating and compensating for perturbation when the external or internal unknown disturbance is slowly time varying. However, to some extent, robot manipulators usually work in complex environment with high-frequency disturbance. Thereby, to enhance tracking performance in a teleoperation system, only traditional DOB technique is insufficient. In this paper, for the purpose of constructing a feasible teleoperation scheme, we develop a novel controller that contains a variable gain scheme to deal with fast-time varying perturbation, whose gain is adjusted linearly according to human surface electromyographic signals collected from Myo wearable armband. In addition, for tracking the motion of operator’s arm, we derive five-joint-angle data of a moving human arm through two groups of quaternions generated from the armbands. Besides, the radial basis function neural networks and the disturbance observer-based control (DOBC) approaches are fused together into the proposed controller to compensate the unknown dynamics uncertainties of the slave robot as well as environmental perturbation. Experiments and simulations are conducted to demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed strategy

Synthesis and characterization of photoaffinity labelling reagents towards the Hsp90 C-terminal domain

Glucosyl-novobiocin-based diazirine photoaffinity labelling reagents (PALs) were designed and synthesized to probe the Hsp90 C-terminal domain unknown binding pocket and the structure-activity relationship. Five PALs were successfully synthesized from novobiocin in six consecutive steps employing phase transfer catalytic glycosylation. Reactions were monitored and guided by analytical LC/MS which led to different strategies of adding either a PAL precursor or a sugar moiety first. The structures and bonding linkages of these compounds were characterised by various 2D-NMR spectroscopy and MS techniques. Synthetic techniques provide powerful probes for unknown protein binding pockets

BiANE: Bipartite Attributed Network Embedding

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When Social Influence Meets Item Inference

Research issues and data mining techniques for product recommendation and viral marketing have been widely studied. Existing works on seed selection in social networks do not take into account the effect of product recommendations in e-commerce stores. In this paper, we investigate the seed selection problem for viral marketing that considers both effects of social influence and item inference (for product recommendation). We develop a new model, Social Item Graph (SIG), that captures both effects in form of hyperedges. Accordingly, we formulate a seed selection problem, called Social Item Maximization Problem (SIMP), and prove the hardness of SIMP. We design an efficient algorithm with performance guarantee, called Hyperedge-Aware Greedy (HAG), for SIMP and develop a new index structure, called SIG-index, to accelerate the computation of diffusion process in HAG. Moreover, to construct realistic SIG models for SIMP, we develop a statistical inference based framework to learn the weights of hyperedges from data. Finally, we perform a comprehensive evaluation on our proposals with various baselines. Experimental result validates our ideas and demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model and algorithms over baselines.Comment: 12 page

JOINT MOBILIZATION CHANGES ACTIVATIONS IN GLUTEUS AND VASTI MUSCLES DURING FUNCTIONAL ACTIVITIES IN PEOPLE WITHOUT AND WITH PATELLOFEMORAL PAIN SYNDROME

We aimed to examine whether patellofemoral joint mobilization altered the activation in vasti and gluteus muscles in people with and without PFPS during functional activities. A total of 40 young collegiate students with and without PFPS were recruited. After the intervention of patellofemoral joint mobilization, there were significant earlier activations of vasti muscles and delayed activation of gluteus muscles such as heel rise, step up and down and drop landing in people with PFPS compared to that of healthy controls (

Assessing Computational Amino Acid β-Turn Propensities with a Phage-Displayed Combinatorial Library and Directed Evolution

SummaryStructure propensities of amino acids are important determinants in guiding proteins' local and global structure formation. We constructed a phage display library—a hexa-HIS tag upstream of a CXXC (X stands for any of the 20 natural amino acids) motif appending N-terminal to the minor capsid protein pIII of M13KE filamentous phage—and developed a novel directed-evolution procedure to select for amino acid sequences forming increasingly stable β-turns in the disulfide-bridged CXXC motif. The sequences that emerged from the directed-evolution cycles were in good agreement with type II β-turn propensities derived from surveys of known protein structures, in particular, Pro-Gly forming a type II β-turn. The agreement strongly supported the notion that β-turn formation plays an active role in initiating local structure folding in proteins