The Effect of the PCAOB’s Restrictions on Auditor-Provided Tax Services on Audit Quality, Earnings Quality, and Tax Avoidance

This study examines whether the PCAOB’s restrictions on auditor-provided tax services (APTS) in 2005 curtail the potential negative impact on companies’ audit quality, earnings quality, and tax avoidance activities. Using a difference-in-differences research design, this study focuses on firms that retained APTS after the SOX and then significantly reduced APTS purchases after the PCAOB’s restrictions. I find that the PCAOB’s restrictions on APTS are associated with fewer subsequent financial restatements and higher discretionary permanent book-tax differences. Further analysis shows that firms with more effective audit committees are less likely to meet or beat earnings targets and have smaller discretionary permanent booktax differences following the PCAOB’s restrictions. This finding supports the notion that audit committee effectiveness plays an important role in alleviating the negative impact of APTS on earnings quality and curtailing aggressive tax planning. The results should be of interest to the U.S. accounting and audit regulators such as the SEC and PCAOB, public accounting firms, auditors, and corporate audit committees

Theoretical Exploration on the Magnetic Properties of Ferromagnetic Metallic Glass: An Ising Model on Random Recursive Lattice

The ferromagnetic Ising spins are modeled on a recursive lattice constructed from random-angled rhombus units with stochastic configurations, to study the magnetic properties of the bulk Fe-based metallic glass. The integration of spins on the structural glass model well represents the magnetic moments in the glassy metal. The model is exactly solved by the recursive calculation technique. The magnetization of the amorphous Ising spins, i.e. the glassy metallic magnet is investigated by our modeling and calculation on a theoretical base. The results show that the glassy metallic magnets has a lower Curie temperature, weaker magnetization, and higher entropy comparing to the regular ferromagnet in crystal form. These findings can be understood with the randomness of the amorphous system, and agrees well with others' experimental observations.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Prognostic and Clinicopathological Value of ZWINT Expression Levels in Patients with Lung Adenocarcinoma: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

The current study found that high Zeste White 10 interactor (ZWINT) expression is related to the poor prognosis of patients with a variety of cancers. This study mainly explored the relationship between the expression level of ZWINT and the prognosis of patients with lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD). Briefly, four English databases and two high-throughput sequencing databases were searched and relevant data for meta-analysis were extracted. Pooled mean difference and 95% confidence interval (CI) were used to assess the relationships between clinical features and the expression of ZWINT. Pooled hazard ratio and 95% CI were also used to assess the relationships between clinical features and the expression level of ZWINT. This meta-analysis was registered in PROSPERO (CRD42021249475). A total of 16 high-quality datasets comprising 2,847 LUAD patients were included in this study. Higher ZWINT expression levels were found in patients younger than 65 years, males, and smokers, and were correlated with advanced TNM stages and poor prognosis. Notably, there was no publication bias in this meta-analysis. Overall, our findings indicate that ZWINT is a potential biomarker for poor prognosis and clinicopathological outcomes of patients with LUAD

Experimental observation of Weyl points

In 1929, Hermann Weyl derived the massless solutions from the Dirac equation - the relativistic wave equation for electrons. Neutrinos were thought, for decades, to be Weyl fermions until the discovery of the neutrino mass. Moreover, it has been suggested that low energy excitations in condensed matter can be the solutions to the Weyl Hamiltonian. Recently, photons have also been proposed to emerge as Weyl particles inside photonic crystals. In all cases, two linear dispersion bands in the three-dimensional (3D) momentum space intersect at a single degenerate point - the Weyl point. Remarkably, these Weyl points are monopoles of Berry flux with topological charges defined by the Chern numbers. These topological invariants enable materials containing Weyl points to exhibit a wide variety of novel phenomena including surface Fermi arcs, chiral anomaly, negative magnetoresistance, nonlocal transport, quantum anomalous Hall effect, unconventional superconductivity[15] and others [16, 17]. Nevertheless, Weyl points are yet to be experimentally observed in nature. In this work, we report on precisely such an observation in an inversion-breaking 3D double-gyroid photonic crystal without breaking time-reversal symmetry.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

The existence of ground state solutions for semi-linear degenerate Schrödinger equations with steep potential well

In this article, we study the following degenerated Schrödinger equations: −∆γu + λV(x)u = f(x, u) in RN, u ∈ Eλ , where λ > 0 is a parameter, ∆γ is a degenerate elliptic operator, the potential V(x) has a potential well with bottom and the nonlinearity f(x, u) is either super-linear or sub-linear at infinity in u. The existence of ground state solution be obtained by using the variational methods

Co-gasification of woody biomass and chicken manure: Syngas production, biochar reutilization, and cost-benefit analysis

The management and disposal of livestock manure has become one of the top environmental issues at a global scale in line with the tremendous growth of poultry industry over the past decades. In this work, a potential alternative method for the disposal of chicken manure from Singapore local hen layer farms was studied. Gasification was proposed as the green technology to convert chicken manure into clean energy. Through gasification experiments in a 10 kW fixed bed downdraft gasifier, it was found that chicken manure was indeed a compatible feedstock for gasification in the presence of wood waste. The co-gasification of 30 wt% chicken manure and 70 wt% wood waste produced syngas of comparable quality to that of gasification of pure wood waste, with a syngas lower heating value (LHV) of 5.23 MJ/Nm3 and 4.68 MJ/Nm3, respectively. Furthermore, the capability of the gasification derived biochar in the removal of an emerging contaminant (artificial sweetener such as Acesulfame, Saccharin and Cyclamate) via adsorption was also conducted in the second part of this study. The results showed that the biochar was effective in the removal of the contaminant and the mechanism of adsorption of artificial sweetener by biochar was postulated to be likely via electrostatic interaction as well as specific interaction. Finally, we conducted a cost-benefit analysis for the deployment of a gasification system in a hen layer farm using a Monte Carlo simulation model