Media ownership, concentration and corruption in bank lending

Building on the pioneering study by Beck, Demirguc-Kunt, and Levine (2006), this study examines the effects of media ownership and concentration on corruption in bank lending using a unique World Bank data set covering more than 5,000 firms across 59 countries. We find strong evidence that state ownership of media is associated with higher levels of bank corruption. We also find that media concentration increases corruption both directly and indirectly through its interaction with media state ownership. In addition, we find that media state ownership and media concentration both accentuate the positive link between official supervisory power and lending corruption and attenuate the negative link between the regulations that empower private monitoring and corruption in lending. Media state ownership or media concentration also accentuates the positive link between banking concentration and corruption in lending. Furthermore, the links between media structure and corruption are more pronounced when the borrowing firm is privately owned.postprin

Polaronic effect in the x-ray absorption spectra of La1-x Ca x MnO3 manganites.

X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is performed to study changes in the electronic structures of colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) and charged ordered (CO) La1-x Ca x MnO3 manganites with respect to temperature. The pre-edge features in O and Mn K-edge XAS spectra, which are highly sensitive to the local distortion of MnO6 octahedral, exhibit contrasting temperature dependence between CMR and CO samples. The seemingly counter-intuitive XAS temperature dependence can be reconciled in the context of polarons. These results help identify the most relevant orbital states associated with polarons and highlight the crucial role played by polarons in understanding the electronic structures of manganites

Segmentation of lecture videos based on text: A method combining multiple linguistic features

In multimedia-based e-Learning systems, there are strong needs for segmenting lecture videos into topic units in order to organize the videos for browsing and to provide search capability. Automatic segmentation is highly desired because of the high cost of manual segmentation. While a lot of research has been conducted on topic segmentation of transcribed spoken text, most attempts rely on domain-specific cues and formal presentation format, and require extensive training; none of these features exist in lecture videos with unscripted and spontaneous speech. In addition, lecture videos usually have few scene changes, which implies that the visual information that most video segmentation methods rely on is not available. Furthermore, even when there are scene changes, they do not match with the topic transitions. In this paper, we make use of the transcribed speech text extracted from the audio track of video to segment lecture videos into topics. We review related research and propose a new segmentation approach. Our approach utilizes features such as noun phrases and combines multiple content-based and discourse-based features. Our preliminary results show that the noun phrases are salient features and the combination of multiple features is promising to improve segmentation accuracy.published_or_final_versio

Measuring the Accuracy of Object Detectors and Trackers

The accuracy of object detectors and trackers is most commonly evaluated by the Intersection over Union (IoU) criterion. To date, most approaches are restricted to axis-aligned or oriented boxes and, as a consequence, many datasets are only labeled with boxes. Nevertheless, axis-aligned or oriented boxes cannot accurately capture an object's shape. To address this, a number of densely segmented datasets has started to emerge in both the object detection and the object tracking communities. However, evaluating the accuracy of object detectors and trackers that are restricted to boxes on densely segmented data is not straightforward. To close this gap, we introduce the relative Intersection over Union (rIoU) accuracy measure. The measure normalizes the IoU with the optimal box for the segmentation to generate an accuracy measure that ranges between 0 and 1 and allows a more precise measurement of accuracies. Furthermore, it enables an efficient and easy way to understand scenes and the strengths and weaknesses of an object detection or tracking approach. We display how the new measure can be efficiently calculated and present an easy-to-use evaluation framework. The framework is tested on the DAVIS and the VOT2016 segmentations and has been made available to the community.Comment: 10 pages, 7 Figure

MTNR1B rs10830963 is associated with fasting plasma glucose, HbA1C and impaired beta-cell function in Chinese Hans from Shanghai.

BACKGROUND: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in White Europeans have shown that genetic variation rs10830963 in melatonin receptor 1B gene (MTNR1B) is associated with fasting glucose and type 2 diabetes, which has also been replicated in several Asian populations. As a variant in the gene involved in the regulation of circadian rhythms, the effect of the variant on sleep status remains unknown. This study aimed to investigate the effects of MTNR1B rs10830963 on fasting glucose, type 2 diabetes and sleep status in Chinese Hans. METHODS: MTNR1B rs10830963 was genotyped in a population-based cohort including 3,210 unrelated Chinese Hans from Beijing and Shanghai, and tested for associations with risk of type 2 diabetes, diabetes-related traits and sleep status. RESULTS: We confirmed the associations of MTNR1B rs10830963 with fasting glucose (beta = 0.11 mmol/l, 95%CI [0.03, 0.18], P = 0.005), glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) (beta = 0.07%, 95%CI [0.02,0.12], P = 0.004) and homeostasis model assessment of beta-cell function (HOMA-B) (beta = -5.01%, 95%CI [-8.24,-1.77], P = 0.003) in the Shanghai, but not in the Beijing subpopulation (P >or= 0.58). The effect size of MTNR1B rs10830963 on fasting glucose in Shanghai Chinese Hans was comparable to that reported from other Asian populations. We found no evidence of associations with type 2 diabetes (OR 1.05 [0.90-1.23], P = 0.54), homeostasis model assessment of insulin sensitivity (HOMA-S) (P = 0.86) or sleep status (P >or= 0.44). CONCLUSIONS: A common variant in MTNR1B was associated with fasting glucose, HbA1C and HOMA-B but not with sleep status in Chinese Hans from Shanghai, strengthening the role of MTNR1B rs10830963 in fasting glycemia and impaired beta-cell function.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Genetic diversity among Toxoplasma gondii isolates from different hosts and geographical locations revealed by analysis of ROP13 gene sequences

Toxoplasma gondii can infect almost all the warm-blooded animals and human beings, causing serious public health problems and economic losses worldwide. Rhoptry protein 13 (ROP13) plays some roles in the invasion process of T. gondii. In this study, sequence variation in ROP13 gene among 14 T. gondii isolates from different geographical locations and hosts was examined. The ROP13 gene was amplified from individual isolates and sequenced. Results show that the length of the ROP13 sequences was 1203 bp. In total, there were 44 variable nucleotide positions in the ROP13 sequences, and sequence variations were 0.1 to 2.0% among the 14 examined T. gondii isolates, representing higher rate in transversion than in transition. Intra-specific nucleotide variations were mainly at the second codon positions. Phylogenetic analysis of the 14 examined T. gondii isolates indicate that the ROP13 sequence was not a suitable genetic marker to differentiate T. gondii isolates of different genotypes from different hosts and geographical regions. Low variation in ROP13 gene sequence may suggest that ROP13 gene could represent a good vaccine candidate against toxoplasmosis.Key words: Toxoplasma gondii, toxoplasmosis, rhpotry protein 13 (ROP13), sequence variation, phylogenetic analysis

Synthesis, structure, and magnetism in the ferromagnet La_{3}MnAs_{5}: Well-separated spin chains coupled via itinerant electrons

In this work, we systematically report the synthesis, structure, and magnetism of a compound of filled anti-Mn3Si5 type La3MnAs5. It crystallizes in a hexagonal structure with the space group of P63/mcm (193). The structure consists of face-sharing MnAs6 octahedral chains along the c axis, which are well separated by a large distance of 8.9913 Å, demonstrating a strong one-dimensional (1D) structural character. Physical property measurements indicate that La3MnAs5 is a ferromagnetic metal with TC ∼ 112 K. Due to the short-range intrachain spin coupling, the susceptibility deviates from the Curie-Weiss behavior in a wide temperature window and the magnetic entropy corresponding to the ferromagnetic transition is significantly lower than that expected from the fully saturated state. The magnetic critical behavior studies show that La3MnAs5 can be described by the three-dimensional Heisenberg model. The orbital hybridization between the 1D MnAs6 chain and intermediate La atom near the Fermi level reveals that the itinerant electrons play a key role in transmitting spin interaction among the MnAs6 spin chains. Our results indicate that La3MnAs5 is a rare ferromagnetic metal with well-separated spin chains, which provides a good opportunity to study the mechanism of interchain spin coupling via itinerant electrons

Cargo scheduling decision support for offshore oil and gas production: a case study

Woodside Energy Ltd (Woodside), Australia’s largest independent oil and gas company, operates multiple oil and gas facilities off the coast of Western Australia. These facilities require regular cargo shipments from supply vessels based in Karratha, Western Australia. In this paper, we describe a decision support model for scheduling the cargo shipments to minimize travel cost and trip duration, subject to various operational restrictions including vessel capacities, cargo demands at the facilities, time windows at the facilities, and base opening times. The model is a type of non-standard vehicle routing problem involving multiple supply vessels—a primary supply vessel that visits every facility during a round trip taking at most 1 week, and other supply vessels that are used on an ad hoc basis when the primary vessel cannot meet all cargo demands. We validate the model via test simulations using real data provided by Woodside