FACTORS INFLUENCING BEST ANNUAL RACING TIME IN FINNISH HORSES

The fixed effects of year of race, season of race, sex, method of start, annual number of starts, length of race and racetrack were evaluated on best annual racing time in Finnish Horses. Data included 1,378 records for 554 horses by 206 sires. Five models were assumed within the age groups from 3 to 6 yr. The annual number of starts, method of start and season of race effects were interrelated. An increase in number of starts was associated with considerable improvement in a horse\u27s best annual racing time. Records should not, however, be adjusted for effect of annual number of starts because it would simultaneously account for part of genetic differences among horses. The largest estimates of heritability were obtained for best annual racing time when the model included the fixed year-season and sex effects. Corresponding to this model, the estimate of repeatability for best annual racing time over the four age groups was .60 ± .03. An example of best linear unbiased predictions of sires\u27 breeding values based on progeny records in one or several ages is presented

MEASURES OF RACETRACK PERFORMANCE WITH REGARD TO BREEDING EVALUATION OF TROTTERS

Trotting records on the Finnish Horse were divided into two subsets: the total data set, with 13,000 race records on 554 horses by 206 sires, and the summary data set, with 1,378 records summarized annually for each horse. The purpose of the study was to determine whether these data could be utilized in a simple, yet useful way for the assessment of breeding value. A total of 24 measures of performance based on time at finish, money won and rank at finish were studied in the summary data set. The total data set included four traits compiled from records made at ages of 3 through 6 years. The proportion of horses that started races and at the end of a race year had records different from those of unraced horses, i.e., different from zero, was 95, 82 and 40 through 77% for measures of performance based on time, money and rank, respectively. Simple correlations between best and average time for a year were in excess of .90. Repeatabilities for time at finish during a year were about .70. Both estimates imply that time records are relatively consistent over an entire year. Estimates of heritability for best time were about .30, whereas those for money and rank traits were small or even negative. The results from this study support the concept that best time in a year is the most useful measure for assessing sire breeding values based on progeny records

Unintended consequences of changes in the regulatory landscape on the statutory audit processNie

We examine the effect of changes in the regulatory environment on the conduct of financial statement audits in a European setting. These changes include the adoption of risk-based auditing, new Audit Risk Standards and increased scrutiny of audit quality by a new, co-ordinated oversight body in each Member State. We investigate this by analysing the audit hours and fees and their determinants for clients of Big N audit firms in Finland in 1996 and 2010. Our results show that audit fees and audit effort by senior auditors were generally higher for high risk clients in 2010 than in 1996. Second, we find that the relationship in 1996 between the client being owner-managed and lower audit hours for both senior and junior auditors is absent in 2010. This supports our argument that the increased auditor scepticism has increased audit effort for owner-managed firms. Third, we find that the average number of junior staff hours increased between 1996 and 2010, but the variance across engagements declined. In contrast, senior auditor hours (and total audit hours) decreased, but the variance across engagements increased. This supports the view that risk-based auditing has increased the efficiency of audits. However, it suggests that the general increase in regulation and the tightening of audit standards, reinforced by the new quality inspections, have led to less emphasis on processes requiring professional judgment and more emphasis on compliance with rules. These unintended consequences should be of interest to the auditing profession and policy makers

LBP and irregular graph pyramids

In this paper, a new codification of Local Binary Patterns (LBP) is given using graph pyramids. The LBP code characterizes the topological category (local max, min, slope, saddle) of the gray level landscape around the center region. Given a 2D grayscale image I, our goal is to obtain a simplified image which can be seen as “minimal” representation in terms of topological characterization of I. For this, a method is developed based on merging regions and Minimum Contrast Algorithm

Effect of Process Parameters on Catalytic Incineration of Solvent Emissions

Catalytic oxidation is a feasible and affordable technology for solvent emission abatement. However, finding optimal operation conditions is important, since they are strongly dependent on the application area of VOC incineration. This paper presents the results of the laboratory experiments concerning four most central parameters, that is, effects of concentration, gas hourly space velocity (GHSV), temperature, and moisture on the oxidation of n-butyl acetate. Both fresh and industrially aged commercial Pt/Al(2)O(3) catalysts were tested to determine optimal process conditions and the significance order and level of selected parameters. The effects of these parameters were evaluated by computer-aided statistical experimental design. According to the results, GHSV was the most dominant parameter in the oxidation of n-butyl acetate. Decreasing GHSV and increasing temperature increased the conversion of n-butyl acetate. The interaction effect of GHSV and temperature was more significant than the effect of concentration. Both of these affected the reaction by increasing the conversion of n-butyl acetate. Moisture had only a minor decreasing effect on the conversion, but it also decreased slightly the formation of by products. Ageing did not change the significance order of the above-mentioned parameters, however, the effects of individual parameters increased slightly as a function of ageing

Expanding the Family of Grassmannian Kernels: An Embedding Perspective

Modeling videos and image-sets as linear subspaces has proven beneficial for many visual recognition tasks. However, it also incurs challenges arising from the fact that linear subspaces do not obey Euclidean geometry, but lie on a special type of Riemannian manifolds known as Grassmannian. To leverage the techniques developed for Euclidean spaces (e.g, support vector machines) with subspaces, several recent studies have proposed to embed the Grassmannian into a Hilbert space by making use of a positive definite kernel. Unfortunately, only two Grassmannian kernels are known, none of which -as we will show- is universal, which limits their ability to approximate a target function arbitrarily well. Here, we introduce several positive definite Grassmannian kernels, including universal ones, and demonstrate their superiority over previously-known kernels in various tasks, such as classification, clustering, sparse coding and hashing

World Conference on Transport Research - WCTR 2016 Shanghai. 10-15 July 2016

This paper summarizes the key developments of carrier selection literature, especially from the view of survey research. Based on the literature review suggestions on how to make the analysis of carrier selection more rigorous are made. In addition to the most predominant determinants of carrier selection such as cost, reliability and service level, new constructs measuring the role of information sharing capabilities and environmental issues are introduced.The second objective of the paper is to empirically test the suggested improvements in methodology with survey data. Research constructs measuring the role of both the old and new determinants of carrier selection are formulated and tested. Further, the constructs of carrier selection are tested against set of variables classifying the firms such as firm size, industry and strategic orientation of the firm in order to see if the strategic orientation of the firm is influencing the carrier selection criteria. Methods of content analysis are used to sum up the previous literature in order to identify the key determinants of carrier selection that have previously been used. Based on the literature review, updated research constructs of carrier selection are formulated. Further, these constructs are tested with factor analysis in order to analyze the validity of the constructs.The empirical data employed in the analysis consists of a self-reported survey data of 483 manufacturing and trading firms operating in Finland. The survey data is analyzed by using descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and ANOVA in order to see whether the carrier selection criteria are dependent on the characteristics of the firm.The paper is expected to contribute on two separate levels. First, the paper introduces and empirically tests an improved survey methodology of how to analyse the carrier selection. As the survey methodology includes new constructs such as the role of information sharing and environmental questions, the empirical results presents evidence on what is their relative role compared to more traditional determinants of carrier selection. Further, the results provide empirical evidence on the effect of firm characteristics on the importance of carrier selection criteria. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

Correlating Notch Signaling with Thymocyte Maturation

AbstractThe Notch receptor and its ligands are involved in many developmental processes. They are highly expressed in the thymus and have been implicated in the CD4 versus CD8 lineage decision. We identified the constitutively active intracellular fragment of murine Notch-1 as capable of rendering thymomas resistant to glucocorticoid-induced apoptosis. This effect was confirmed in other T cell lines and in CD4+CD8+ DP thymocytes. Activation of the Notch signaling pathway also upregulated a number of other markers that, like steroid resistance, correlate with DP maturation into both the CD4 and CD8 lineages. These results suggest that Notch signaling is critically involved in the maturation of DP thymocytes into both CD4+ and CD8+ SP thymocytes

Nerve Detection in Ultrasound Images Using Median Gabor Binary Pattern

International audienceUltrasound in regional anesthesia (RA) has increased in pop-ularity over the last years. The nerve localization presents a key step for RA practice, it is therefore valuable to develop a tool able to facilitate this practice. The nerve detection in the ultrasound images is a challeng-ing task, since the noise and other artifacts corrupt the visual properties of such kind of tissue. In this paper we propose a new method to address this problem. The proposed technique operates in two steps. As the me-dian nerve belongs to a hyperechoic region, the first step consists in the segmentation of this type of region using the k-means algorithm. The second step is more critical; it deals with nerve structure detection in noisy data. For that purpose, a new descriptor is developed. It combines tow methods median binary pattern (MBP) and Gabor filter to obtain the median Gabor binary pattern (MGBP). The method was tested on 173 ultrasound images of the median nerve obtained from three patients. The results showed that the proposed approach achieves better accuracy than the original MBP, Gabor descriptor and other popular descriptors