Family Business Succession Planning Opportunities

Family businesses account for over 50% of U.S. GDP, and 35% of Fortune 500 companies are controlled by families. These companies are vital to the economy, offering stability, a long-term commitment, and responsibility to their communities and employees. Although family-owned businesses are responsible for 60% of jobs in America, a recent family business survey done by the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Family Business Alliance indicates that despite succession being a critical issue for many family companies, only 15% of them have anything resembling a succession plan in place. Furthermore, businesses have a difficult time surviving through multiple generations; just making it to the second generation is a milestone event; only 30% make it through the second generation, and just 12% make it through the third (“The Family Business Sector in 2016: Success and Succession,” PricewaterhouseCoopers, https://pwc.to/2D3ftcF). This article explains how CPAs, as trusted advisors, can play a significant role in establishing prudent and functional succession plans for their business owner clients

Bayesian sequential change diagnosis

Sequential change diagnosis is the joint problem of detection and identification of a sudden and unobservable change in the distribution of a random sequence. In this problem, the common probability law of a sequence of i.i.d. random variables suddenly changes at some disorder time to one of finitely many alternatives. This disorder time marks the start of a new regime, whose fingerprint is the new law of observations. Both the disorder time and the identity of the new regime are unknown and unobservable. The objective is to detect the regime-change as soon as possible, and, at the same time, to determine its identity as accurately as possible. Prompt and correct diagnosis is crucial for quick execution of the most appropriate measures in response to the new regime, as in fault detection and isolation in industrial processes, and target detection and identification in national defense. The problem is formulated in a Bayesian framework. An optimal sequential decision strategy is found, and an accurate numerical scheme is described for its implementation. Geometrical properties of the optimal strategy are illustrated via numerical examples. The traditional problems of Bayesian change-detection and Bayesian sequential multi-hypothesis testing are solved as special cases. In addition, a solution is obtained for the problem of detection and identification of component failure(s) in a system with suspended animation

Multisource Bayesian sequential change detection

Suppose that local characteristics of several independent compound Poisson and Wiener processes change suddenly and simultaneously at some unobservable disorder time. The problem is to detect the disorder time as quickly as possible after it happens and minimize the rate of false alarms at the same time. These problems arise, for example, from managing product quality in manufacturing systems and preventing the spread of infectious diseases. The promptness and accuracy of detection rules improve greatly if multiple independent information sources are available. Earlier work on sequential change detection in continuous time does not provide optimal rules for situations in which several marked count data and continuously changing signals are simultaneously observable. In this paper, optimal Bayesian sequential detection rules are developed for such problems when the marked count data is in the form of independent compound Poisson processes, and the continuously changing signals form a multi-dimensional Wiener process. An auxiliary optimal stopping problem for a jump-diffusion process is solved by transforming it first into a sequence of optimal stopping problems for a pure diffusion by means of a jump operator. This method is new and can be very useful in other applications as well, because it allows the use of the powerful optimal stopping theory for diffusions.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AAP463 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Bladder injury during infected tola hip arthroplasty prosthesis removal: Report of a case and review of the literature

The bladder is the most frequently injured organ during pelvic surgery. However, during hip surgery, this complication is extremely rare. We report a case of bladder injury during total hip arthroplasty prosthesis removal surgery. A 65-year-old male was admitted to our hospital with left hip pain and wound infection. On plain radiograms, acetabular protrusion was identified. We decided to remove protruzed acetabular cup and place spacer. During the operation, unexpectedly bladder injury occurred. The rupture was sutured intraoperatively. We left a catheter in the bladder after internal urethrotomy to drain the urine.Keywords: Arthroplasty, Bladder injury, Cystogram, Hip prosthesis removal, Infectio

Noise Induces Hopping between NF-kappa B Entrainment Modes

Oscillations and noise drive many processes in biology, but how both affect the activity of the transcription factor nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) is not understood. Here, we observe that when NF-κB oscillations are entrained by periodic tumor necrosis factor (TNF) inputs in experiments, NF-κB exhibits jumps between frequency modes, a phenomenon we call “cellular mode-hopping.” By comparing stochastic simulations of NF-κB oscillations to deterministic simulations conducted inside and outside the chaotic regime of parameter space, we show that noise facilitates mode-hopping in all regimes. However, when the deterministic system is driven by chaotic dynamics, hops between modes are erratic and short-lived, whereas in experiments, the system spends several periods in one entrainment mode before hopping and rarely visits more than two modes. The experimental behavior matches our simulations of noise-induced mode-hopping outside the chaotic regime. We suggest that mode-hopping is a mechanism by which different NF-κB-dependent genes under frequency control can be expressed at different times.ISSN:2405-472

A Comparative Study of Different Phase Detrending Algorithms for Scintillation Monitoring

Rapid and sudden fluctuations of phase and amplitude in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals due to diffraction of the ionosphere phase components when signals passing through small-scale irregularities (less than hundreds meters) are commonly so-called ionospheric scintillation. The aim of the paper is to analyze the implementation and compare the performance of different phase detrending algorithms to improve scintillation monitoring. Three different phase detrending methods, namely, three cascaded second-order high pass filters, six order Butterworth filter conducted by cascading six first-order high pass Butterworth filters, and Fast Iterative Filter (FIF) are considered in this paper. The study exploits real GNSS signals (GPS L1, Galileo E1b) affected by significant phase scintillation effects, collected in early September 2017 at Brazilian Centro de Radioastronomia e Astrofisica Mackenzie (CRAAM) monitoring station and at Adventdalen (Svalbard, Norway) research station. In this study, a software defined radio (SDR) based GNSS receiver is used to process GNSS signals and to implement the aforementioned detrending algorithms

Colony-stimulating factor-1 (CSF-1) rescues osteoblast attachment, survival and sorting of beta-actin mRNA in the toothless (tl-osteopetrotic) mutation in the rat

We have shown that in the osteopetrotic rat mutation toothless (tl) osteoblasts are absent from older bone surfaces in mutants and that mutant osteoblasts in vivo lack the prominent stress fiber bundles polarized along bone surfaces in osteoblasts from normal littermates. Our recent data demonstrate that in normal osteoblasts in vitro beta- and gamma-actin mRNAs have different, characteristic intracellular distributions and that tl (mutant) osteoblasts fail to differentially sort these mRNAs. Because bone resorption and formation are highly interdependent and injections of CSF-1, a growth factor, increase bone resorption and growth in tl rats, we examined the effects of CSF-1 treatment on osteoblast survival and ultrastructure in vivo and ability to sort actin mRNAs in vitro. Neonatal CSF-1 treatment of mutants restores osteoblasts on older bone surfaces, normalizes the intracellular distribution of stress fibers in osteoblasts in vivo and promotes normal sorting of beta-actin mRNA in mutant osteoblasts in vitro without normalizing gamma-actin distribution. These data suggest the beta- and gamma-actin mRNAs in osteoblasts are sorted by different mechanisms and that the differential sorting of beta-actin mRNA is related to the characteristic polarization of stress fibers in osteoblasts and their survival on bone surfaces. This experimental system can be used to explore the relationships and regulation of these aspects of cell and tissue biology

Implications of Low Energy Supersymmetry Breaking at the Tevatron

The signatures for low energy supersymmetry breaking at the Tevatron are investigated. It is natural that the lightest standard model superpartner is an electroweak neutralino, which decays to an essentially massless Goldstino and photon, possibly within the detector. In the simplest models of gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking, the production of right-handed sleptons, neutralinos, and charginos leads to a pair of hard photons accompanied by leptons and/or jets with missing transverse energy. The relatively hard leptons and softer photons of the single e^+e^- \gamma \gamma + \EmissT event observed by CDF implies this event is best interpreted as arising from left-handed slepton pair production. In this case the rates for l^{\pm} \gamma \gamma + \EmissT and \gamma \gamma + \EmissT are comparable to that for l^+l^- \gamma \gamma + \EmissT.Comment: 18 pages, Latex, tables correcte

Myeloperoxidase enzyme levels and oxidative stress in bipolar disorders

Oxidative stress and generalized inflammatory state are features of bipolar disorders (BD). The objective of this study was to compare the levels of products of inflammatory reaction and oxidative stress markers in patients with bipolar disorders and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and to determine the relationship between oxidative stress and inflammation in bipolar disorders. ADHD+BD (n = 30) and BD (n = 30) and healthy controls (n = 30) were enrolled. A clinical evaluation andmeasurements of malondialdehyde (MDA), high sensitive C reactive protein (hsCRP) and myeloperoxidase (MPO) were performed. Patients with BD+ADHD comorbidity had significantly higher mean MPO levels than BD. Patients with BD had significantly higher mean hsCRP levels than healthy controls. However, there was no significant difference in mean serum hsCRP levels between patients with BD+ADHD and healthy controls. Patients with BD and BD+ADHD had significantly higher mean MDA levels than healthy controls. Our data showed that there is an increased susceptibility to oxidative stress which is strongly related to the serum levels of MDA produced in the serum. hsCRP levels were higher in BD patients than in BD+ADHD and this is suggestive of a higher degree of inflammatory activity in BD patients. ADHD+BD comorbidity seems to augment oxidative stress which is expressed as increased MPO level in the present study. Further large scale studies are needed to extend ourresults