Why did some firms perform better in the global financial crisis?

We explore what firm and macroeconomic factors assisted Chinese firms to resist the global financial crisis. We find that firms with higher top ten shareholder ratios or firms that are older exhibited saliently higher performance during the crisis, but performed poorly during the non-crisis period. Firm size has a notably negative impact on firm performance. Firms audited by the Big Four accounting firms have a significantly negative correlation with performance. During the crisis, stock markets became less efficient in incorporating firm-specific information into stock prices, signifying that the determinants of firm performance vary across non-crisis and crisis periods

Paxillin facilitates timely neurite initiation on soft-substrate environments by interacting with the endocytic machinery.

Neurite initiation is the first step in neuronal development and occurs spontaneously in soft tissue environments. Although the mechanisms regulating the morphology of migratory cells on rigid substrates in cell culture are widely known, how soft environments modulate neurite initiation remains elusive. Using hydrogel cultures, pharmacologic inhibition, and genetic approaches, we reveal that paxillin-linked endocytosis and adhesion are components of a bistable switch controlling neurite initiation in a substrate modulus-dependent manner. On soft substrates, most paxillin binds to endocytic factors and facilitates vesicle invagination, elevating neuritogenic Rac1 activity and expression of genes encoding the endocytic machinery. By contrast, on rigid substrates, cells develop extensive adhesions, increase RhoA activity and sequester paxillin from the endocytic machinery, thereby delaying neurite initiation. Our results highlight paxillin as a core molecule in substrate modulus-controlled morphogenesis and define a mechanism whereby neuronal cells respond to environments exhibiting varying mechanical properties

Corpus of public writing and its interest for the history of spanish: votive paintings of the province of Guadalajara

El objetivo del presente trabajo es dar a conocer un especial corpus de escrituras expuestas populares ubicadas en los centros de devoción de la provincia de Guadalajara; en concreto un corpus de exvotos pintados datados entre los siglos XVII al XX. Los cuadros representan el suceso que dio origen al milagro o favor recibido con su cartela; pero en nuestro corpus solo se recogen aquellos exvotos que van acompañados de texto explicativo, en el que se da testimonio del favor recibido con datos precisos, como nombre, causa, fecha, lugar, etc. En el corpus que presentamos se incluye la reproducción del exvoto, la transcripción paleográfica del documento y su presentación crítica. El estudio detenido de estos tres elementos permitirá extraer interesantes conclusiones para la historia del español en aspectos relacionados con las grafías, la ortografía, la puntuación, las estructuras sintácticas y fórmulas empleadas, el léxico, etc.; se recogen en este artículo algunas muestras de ello.El objetivo del presente trabajo es dar a conocer un especial corpus de escrituras expuestas populares ubicadas en los centros de devoción de la provincia de Guadalajara; en concreto un corpus de exvotos pintados datados entre los siglos XVII al XX. Los cuadros representan el suceso que dio origen al milagro o favor recibido con su cartela; pero en nuestro corpus solo se recogen aquellos exvotos que van acompañados de texto explicativo, en el que se da testimonio del favor recibido con datos precisos, como nombre, causa, fecha, lugar, etc. En el corpus que presentamos se incluye la reproducción del exvoto, la transcripción paleográfica del documento y su presentación crítica. El estudio detenido de estos tres elementos permitirá extraer interesantes conclusiones para la historia del español en aspectos relacionados con las grafías, la ortografía, la puntuación, las estructuras sintácticas y fórmulas empleadas, el léxico, etc.; se recogen en este artículo algunas muestras de ello.El objetivo del presente trabajo es dar a conocer un especial corpus de escrituras expuestas populares ubicadas en los centros de devoción de la provincia de Guadalajara; en concreto un corpus de exvotos pintados datados entre los siglos XVII al XX. Los cuadros representan el suceso que dio origen al milagro o favor recibido con su cartela; pero en nuestro corpus solo se recogen aquellos exvotos que van acompañados de texto explicativo, en el que se da testimonio del favor recibido con datos precisos, como nombre, causa, fecha, lugar, etc. En el corpus que presentamos se incluye la reproducción del exvoto, la transcripción paleográfica del documento y su presentación crítica. El estudio detenido de estos tres elementos permitirá extraer interesantes conclusiones para la historia del español en aspectos relacionados con las grafías, la ortografía, la puntuación, las estructuras sintácticas y fórmulas empleadas, el léxico, etc.; se recogen en este artículo algunas muestras de ello.The objective of this work is to present a special corpus of popular public writing in the centres of devotion of the province of Guadalajara; in particular a corpus of painted votive offering dating from the 17th to the 20th centuries. The pictures represent the event that gave rise to the miracle or favour received with his card; but in our corpus are only included those votive offerings that are accompanied by explanatory text, which testifies to the favour received with precise information, as name, cause, date, place, etc.The Corpus includes the reproduction of the votive offering, the paleographic transcription of the document and its critical presentation. The careful study of these three elements will allow us to extract interesting conclusions for the history of Spanish in aspects related to spelling, punctuation, syntactic structures and formulas used, lexicon, etc.; some samples that are collected in this article

Discussion on the Relevance of Old Low-lying Land Reclamation and Soil Liquefaction

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchive

Kinetics of Oxygen Surface Exchange on Epitaxial Ruddlesden–Popper Phases and Correlations to First-Principles Descriptors

Through alignment of theoretical modeling with experimental measurements of oxygen surface exchange kinetics on (001)-oriented La[subscript 2–x]Sr[subscript x]MO[subscript 4+δ] (M = Co, Ni, Cu) thin films, we demonstrate here the capability of the theoretical bulk O 2p-band centers to correlate with oxygen surface-exchange kinetics of the Ruddlesden–Popper oxide (RP[subscript 214]) (001)-oriented thin films. In addition, we demonstrate that the bulk O 2p-band centers can also correlate with the experimental activation energies for bulk oxygen transport and oxygen surface exchange of both the RP[subscript 214] and the perovskite polycrystalline materials reported in the literature, indicating the effectiveness of the bulk O 2p-band centers in describing the associated energetics and kinetics. We propose that the opposite slopes of the bulk O 2p-band center correlations between the RP[subscript 214] and the perovskite materials are due to the intrinsic mechanistic differences of their oxygen surface exchange kinetics and bulk anionic transport.United States. Department of Energy. Solid State Energy Conversion Allianc (Core Technology Program Funding Opportunity Number DEFE0009435)Skoltech-MIT Center for Electrochemical EnergyOak Ridge National Laboratory. Scientific User Facilities DivisionUnited States. Department of Energy. Office of Basic Energy Science. Division of Materials Sciences and EngineeringNational Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (U.S.) (grant number CNMS2013-292

On the English Learning with NNS-NNS Pair Work Format in “EZ TALK” Program

[[abstract]]Since the late 20th century globalization has become a worldwide trend and English is by far the language of choice for international communications. Hence, learning English as a lingua franca (ELF) is a pressing issue for many non-English-speaking countries. In response to this issue the program “EZ TALK,” pairs international graduate students on campus with domestic college students in an informal setting to engage in casual conversations in English in a NNS-NNS (non native speaker of English) pair work format. It provides the participants with a simulated environment where English is the only way to communicate, and thus encourages participants to practice oral communication skills. The objectives of this study aim to explore the learning attitudes of the participants and to measure the program effectiveness in improving their oral communication skills. Through quantitative research methods this study found that most “EZ TALK” participants had a clear focus on developing the skills of English listening and speaking when coming into the program, but with certain learning preferences and difficulties. This study also showed that the program was effective as an extracurricular aid in improving the oral communications skill of the participants. Based on the research results, specific suggestions are provided for further improvement of the “EZ TALK” program design

Role of strain in the blistering of hydrogen-implanted silicon

The authors investigated the physical mechanisms underlying blistering in hydrogen-implanted silicon by examining the correlation between implantation induced damage, strain distribution, and vacancy diffusion. Using Rutherford backscattering, scanning electron microscopy, and atomic force microscopy, they found that the depth of blisters coincided with that of maximum implantation damage. A model based on experimental results is presented showing the effect of tensile strain on the local diffusion of vacancies toward the depth of maximum damage, which promotes the nucleation and growth of platelets and ultimately blisters. © 2006 American Institute of Physics

Assessment of density functional approximations for the hemibonded structure of water dimer radical cation

Due to the severe self-interaction errors associated with some density functional approximations, conventional density functionals often fail to dissociate the hemibonded structure of water dimer radical cation (H2O)2+ into the correct fragments: H2O and H2O+. Consequently, the binding energy of the hemibonded structure (H2O)2+ is not well-defined. For a comprehensive comparison of different functionals for this system, we propose three criteria: (i) The binding energies, (ii) the relative energies between the conformers of the water dimer radical cation, and (iii) the dissociation curves predicted by different functionals. The long-range corrected (LC) double-hybrid functional, omegaB97X-2(LP) [J.-D. Chai and M. Head-Gordon, J. Chem. Phys., 2009, 131, 174105.], is shown to perform reasonably well based on these three criteria. Reasons that LC hybrid functionals generally work better than conventional density functionals for hemibonded systems are also explained in this work.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 4 table