Analyst Coverage Of Small Cap Firms In A Period Of Brokerage Firm Retrenchment

We examine analysts’ incentives to cover small cap firms in the year 2002, a period following stock market declines and brokerage firm retrenchment.  Brokerage companies were losing a substantial number of sell-side analysts during this period and small firms were having unusual difficulty in attracting analyst coverage.  Consistent with analysts’ normal economic incentives and earlier research, we find that firm size, trading volume, and beta are all positively related to the number of analysts that cover a firm, whereas firm complexity is negatively related to analyst coverage.  In contrast to some earlier research, we find no evidence that analysts were more likely to follow glamour (or growth) stocks.  Specifically, price-to-book and revenue growth are not related to analyst coverage, and recent stock performance (price momentum) is negatively related to analyst coverage.  Our interpretation of this evidence is that analysts had reduced incentives to cover glamour stocks following the severe stock market declines in the early 2000s, the increased regulatory scrutiny of securities firms, and the resulting brokerage firm retrenchment.&nbsp

Ownership Structure And Market Valuation: The Case Of Very Small, Young, And Fast-Growing Firms

In studies of primarily large, established firms, researchers find that increasing managerial ownership increases firm value, at least in some ranges of ownership.  This evidence suggests that increasing managerial ownership can decrease net agency costs.  Our study investigates managerial ownership and firm value for an atypical sample: very small, young, and fast-growing firms.  We argue that increasing managerial ownership likely increases net agency costs in small, entrepreneurial firms.  Consistent with this argument, we find that entrepreneurial firm value is positively related to outside board member ownership, but negatively related to inside board member ownership.&nbsp

Determinants Of CEO Cash Compensation In Small, Young, Fast Growing Firms

This study examines factors related to CEO cash compensation for a sample of publicly-held firms that are small, young, and growing.  Our key finding is that founder CEOs accept lower cash compensation than non-founder CEOs.  This evidence suggests that, for small, young, and growing firms, founder CEOs do not extract unusually large private benefits that harm outside shareholders.  Weaker evidence suggests: firms with greater growth opportunities pay higher cash compensation to CEOs; firms with greater outsider representation on the board pay lower cash compensation to CEOs; and firms with greater inside director share ownership pay higher cash compensation to CEOs. &nbsp

The Development of Attentional Biases for Faces in Infancy: A Developmental Systems Perspective

We present an integrative review of research and theory on major factors involved in the early development of attentional biases to faces. Research utilizing behavioral, eye-tracking, and neuroscience measures with infant participants as well as comparative research with animal subjects are reviewed. We begin with coverage of research demonstrating the presence of an attentional bias for faces shortly after birth, such as newborn infants’ visual preference for face-like over non-face stimuli. The role of experience and the process of perceptual narrowing in face processing are examined as infants begin to demonstrate enhanced behavioral and neural responsiveness to mother over stranger, female over male, own- over other-race, and native over non-native faces. Next, we cover research on developmental change in infants’ neural responsiveness to faces in multimodal contexts, such as audiovisual speech. We also explore the potential influence of arousal and attention on early perceptual preferences for faces. Lastly, the potential influence of the development of attention systems in the brain on social-cognitive processing is discussed. In conclusion, we interpret the findings under the framework of Developmental Systems Theory, emphasizing the combined and distributed influence of several factors, both internal (e.g., arousal, neural development) and external (e.g., early social experience) to the developing child, in the emergence of attentional biases that lead to enhanced responsiveness and processing of faces commonly encountered in the native environment

A Model for Testing New Seed Technologies

Extension specialists from several North Central states recently proposed a new approach to expedite and facilitate evaluation of new genetically modified organism (GMO) hybrids through multi-state testing. As an example of this approach, newly released GMO glyphosate tolerant (GT) corn hybrids were evaluated at multiple locations across five states in 1999 and nine states in 2001. This cooperative testing effort demonstrated that powerful sets of data across a range of production environments could be generated with a minimal amount of input and resource allocation for the individual states

Neural correlates of individuation and categorization of other-species faces in infancy

The goal of this study was to investigate 9-month-old infants' ability to individuate and categorize other-species faces at the subordinate level. We were also interested in examining the effects of initial exposure conditions on infant categorization and individuation processes. Infants were either familiarized with a single monkey face in an individuation procedure or familiarized with multiple exemplars of monkey faces from the same species in a categorization procedure. Event-related potentials were recorded while the infants were presented: familiar faces, novel faces from the familiar species, or novel faces from a novel species. The categorization group categorized monkey faces by species at the subordinate level, whereas the individuation group did not discriminate monkey faces at the individual or subordinate level. These findings indicate initial exposure to multiple exemplars facilitates infant processing of other-species faces, and infants are efficient at subordinate-level categorization at 9 months of age

Value Added Grains for Local and Regional Food Systems

Small grains provide numerous benefits for organic farming systems. However, because they have relatively low value and require special equipment, many organic farming systems do not integrate them. Heritage varieities of ommon wheat (Triticum aestivum ssp. Aestivum) and its antecedents spelt (Triticum aestivum, ssp. spelta), emmer (Triticum turgidum subsp. dicoccum) and einkorn (Triticum monococcum) are the subject of a project that looks at their viability. Preliminary results of variety trials show that organic farmers have several promising small grain options. Improved management and appropriate equipment are barriers to adoption that the project aims to overcome. Viability will depend on overcoming marketing as well as production obstacles

Endoluminal surface registration for CT colonography using Haustral Fold Matching

Computed Tomographic (CT) colonography is a technique used for the detection of bowel cancer or potentially precancerous polyps. The procedure is performed routinely with the patient both prone and supine to differentiate fixed colonic pathology from mobile faecal residue. Matching corresponding locations is difficult and time consuming for radiologists due to colonic deformations that occur during patient repositioning. We propose a novel method to establish correspondence between the two acquisitions automatically. The problem is first simplified by detecting haustral folds using a graph cut method applied to a curvature-based metric applied to a surface mesh generated from segmentation of the colonic lumen. A virtual camera is used to create a set of images that provide a metric for matching pairs of folds between the prone and supine acquisitions. Image patches are generated at the fold positions using depth map renderings of the endoluminal surface and optimised by performing a virtual camera registration over a restricted set of degrees of freedom. The intensity difference between image pairs, along with additional neighbourhood information to enforce geometric constraints over a 2D parameterisation of the 3D space, are used as unary and pair-wise costs respectively, and included in a Markov Random Field (MRF) model to estimate the maximum a-posteriori fold labelling assignment. The method achieved fold matching accuracy of 96.0% and 96.1% in patient cases with and without local colonic collapse. Moreover, it improved upon an existing surface-based registration algorithm by providing an initialisation. The set of landmark correspondences is used to non-rigidly transform a 2D source image derived from a conformal mapping process on the 3D endoluminal surface mesh. This achieves full surface correspondence between prone and supine views and can be further refined with an intensity based registration showing a statistically significant improvement (p<0.001p<0.001), and decreasing mean error from 11.9mm11.9mm to 6.0mm6.0mm measured at 1743 reference points from 17 CTC datasets

Influence of Corn Stover Harvest on Soil Quality Assessments at Multiple Locations Across the U.S.

Corn (Zea mays L.) stover has been identified as a biofuel feedstock due to its abundance and a perception that the residues are unused trash material. However, corn stover and other plant residues play a role in maintaining soil quality (health) and enhancing productivity, thus use of this abundant material as feedstock must be balanced with the need to protect the vital soil resource. Plant residues provide physical protection against erosion by wind and water, contribute to soil structure, nutrient cycling, and help sustain the soil microbiota. Replicated plots were established on productive soils at several locations (IA, IN, MN, NE, PA, SD, and SC) and a multi-year study was carried out to determine the amount of corn stover that can be removed while maintaining the current level of soil quality for each soil. These sites represented a range of soil types and climatic conditions, and have been ongoing for and least five years with some much longer studies. All sites had at least three levels of stover harvest: grain only (control), maximum removal (90-100%) and a mid-range removal rate (~50%). Data from 4 sites are presented (IA, IN, MN, and NE). The Soil Management Assessment Framework (SMAF) was used to score and assess changes in selected soil quality indicators. Data shows that removal at the highest rates resulted in some loss in soil quality with respect to soil organic carbon and bulk density. These sites were converted to no-till when the experiments were initiated, thus SOC accrual because of the shift in tillage management appeared to balance any losses due to feedstock harvest

Four-channel WDM transmitter with heterogeneously integrated III-V/Si photonics and low power 32 nm CMOS drivers

Artículo científicoWe experimentally demonstrate a novel four-channel wavelength division multiplexing transmitter operating at 1.3 μm wavelength employing heterogeneously integrated III-V/Si photonic circuit copackaged with low-power 32-nm SOI CMOS driver integrated circuits (ICs). Error-free operation (BER < 10−12 ) has been achieved across all four channels for back-to-back, 2 and 10 km single-mode fiber transmission at 25 Gb/s per each channel, targeting intra- and inter-datacenter interconnect applications. Power consumption as low as 19.2 mW for four CMOS driver ICs has been recorded, which yields 0.19 pJ/bit energy efficiency