Otter Tail Corporation

In my valuation model I gathered Otter Tail Corporation’s financial statements, historical and industry data, public information and ratio analysis from Mergent Online, Yahoo Finance and Otter Tail Corporation’s 2018 annual report. I discount the expected free cash flows at the WACC and estimate that Otter Tail Corporation’s stock is price is at USD 56.36 per share as of November 1st, 2019, given the small difference between my estimated price per share and the current price per share in the market, and consistent with the EV/EBITDA multiple, I recommend a HOLD on the stock of the company

Investors’ Digital Myopia - The Information Value of Being Digital

Portraying a digital business strategy seems to be what capital markets are looking for in firms. Tech companies raise staggering amounts of capital and long-established companies that announce a digital business strategy double their firm value over night. By drawing from information economics literature, this study investigates drivers and outcomes of a firm’s digital business strategy by utilizing the new construct of a firm-wide digital orientation. Applying a cross-industry longitudinal study, results indicate that initial public offerings provide financial flexibility to drive a firm’s digital orientation. Yet, against expectations, capital markets react negatively to firms depicting a digital orientation post share issuance. We explain this finding on the basis of investors’ digital myopia. Our analysis yields surprising, yet promising results

Get the Crypto Crowd Going: Evaluating the Signaling Effect of Motivational Cues on Crowd Involvement

Numerous blockchain projects employ open-source software development to create innovative solutions in collaboration with the crowd. They rely on the voluntary involvement of OSS developers from the crowd who follow several ideological tenets that shape their motivation. Yet, we lack knowledge on how blockchain projects can address the developers’ motivation to increase the level of crowd involvement. We draw on a unique panel dataset with 1,893 observations to investigate the association between specific intrinsic and extrinsic motivational cues emitted by blockchain project initiators and crowd involvement. Based on signaling theory, we argue that the level of crowd involvement depends on the signal fit of project-initiated motivational cues with the developers’ motivation. We find that higher levels of profit and human interest language relate negatively and higher levels of risk-taking and diversity language relate positively to crowd involvement. Further, our results show that lower quantity of electronic word-of-mouth strengthens these relationships

Predicting the Effects of Attorney Fee Shifting

Background: Lateral Gene Transfer (LGT) has recently gained recognition as an important contributor to some eukaryote proteomes, but the mechanisms of acquisition and fixation in eukaryotic genomes are still uncertain. A previously defined norm for LGTs in microbial eukaryotes states that the majority are genes involved in metabolism, the LGTs are typically localized one by one, surrounded by vertically inherited genes on the chromosome, and phylogenetics shows that a broad collection of bacterial lineages have contributed to the transferome. Results: A unique 34 kbp long fragment with 27 clustered genes (TvLF) of prokaryote origin was identified in the sequenced genome of the protozoan parasite Trichomonas vaginalis. Using a PCR based approach we confirmed the presence of the orthologous fragment in four additional T. vaginalis strains. Detailed sequence analyses unambiguously suggest that TvLF is the result of one single, recent LGT event. The proposed donor is a close relative to the firmicute bacterium Peptoniphilus harei. High nucleotide sequence similarity between T. vaginalis strains, as well as to P. harei, and the absence of homologs in other Trichomonas species, suggests that the transfer event took place after the radiation of the genus Trichomonas. Some genes have undergone pseudogenization and degradation, indicating that they may not be retained in the future. Functional annotations reveal that genes involved in informational processes are particularly prone to degradation. Conclusions: We conclude that, although the majority of eukaryote LGTs are single gene occurrences, they may be acquired in clusters of several genes that are subsequently cleansed of evolutionarily less advantageous genes

The Dual Imperative of Digital Transformers – The Relationship between a Firm\u27s Digital Orientation and Innovation Ambidexterity

The disruptive power of digitalization has called into question how we think and theorize about innovation management in a digital context. To thrive in a digital world, companies need to increasingly follow the dual imperative of constantly reinventing themselves while simultaneously refining current viability, that is, achieve innovation ambidexterity. Complementing research that has theorized digitalization as context or outcome of such ambidexterity, we study how a firm’s digital orientation (DO), a strategic posture aimed at realizing vital gains from digital technologies, can function as a driver for resolving the tensions of this dual imperative. In addition, we analyze the roles of absorptive capacity (ACAP) and market turbulence as contingency factors for this relationship. In deriving our hypotheses, we rely on the resource-based view (RBV) and extend our theorizing by building on the dynamic capabilities view. Our research model is empirically tested through multi- industry survey data obtained from 1,474 German firms

The double-edged sword of entrepreneurial orientation: a configurational perspective on failure in newly public firms

This study draws on the notion of entrepreneurial orientation-as-experimentation to investigate the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and firm failure. For the context of newly public firms after their initial public offering, we hypothesize that EO reduces firm failure particularly in specific configurations of EO, working capital efficiency, and technological turbulence. In a sample of 2578 firms that went public between 1997 and 2018, we find support for this configurational perspective. We contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by showing that the relationship between EO and firm failure needs to be understood in the context of organizational and environmental factors

Vibrotactile Signal Generation from Texture Images or Attributes using Generative Adversarial Network

Providing vibrotactile feedback that corresponds to the state of the virtual texture surfaces allows users to sense haptic properties of them. However, hand-tuning such vibrotactile stimuli for every state of the texture takes much time. Therefore, we propose a new approach to create models that realize the automatic vibrotactile generation from texture images or attributes. In this paper, we make the first attempt to generate the vibrotactile stimuli leveraging the power of deep generative adversarial training. Specifically, we use conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs) to achieve generation of vibration during moving a pen on the surface. The preliminary user study showed that users could not discriminate generated signals and genuine ones and users felt realism for generated signals. Thus our model could provide the appropriate vibration according to the texture images or the attributes of them. Our approach is applicable to any case where the users touch the various surfaces in a predefined way.Comment: accepted for EuroHaptics 2018: Haptics: Science, Technology, and Applications, pp.25-3

Spectral geometry of etaeta-Einstein Sasakian manifolds

We extend a result of Patodi for closed Riemannian manifolds to the context of closed contact manifolds by showing the condition that a manifold is an $\eta$-Einstein Sasakian manifold is spectrally determined. We also prove that the condition that a Sasakian space form has constant $\phi$-sectional curvature $c$ is spectrally determined.Comment: 8 page

MicroMHiDe: A Multispectral Sub-Meter Resolution Payload for SmallSats

The Earth Observation market has been going through a complete mutation during the last decade with the deployment of constellations of nano- and smallsats. These can offer shorter revisit time and capture relevant information for specific applications, and this for a significantly lower cost