Use of IC information in Japanese financial firms

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions of: how Japanese financial firms (JFF) acquire and use company intellectual capital (IC) information in their common routine equity investment decisions, how this activity contributes to knowledge creation in the JFFs, and how investee company knowledge creation is affected by the JFFs.<p></p> Design/methodology/approach – The research employed a multi-case design, using four JFF cases. The investigation was performed in terms of Nonaka and Toyama's “theory of the knowledge creating firm”.<p></p> Findings – IC information contributed to earnings estimates and company valuation. Emotional information contributed to JFF feelings and confidence in their information use and valuation. JFF knowledge was an important component of the key interacting and informed contexts used by JFFs. This generated opportunities to improve disclosure and accountability between JFFs and their investee companies. Common patterns of behaviour across the JFFs were counterbalanced by variety and differences noted in JFF behaviour.<p></p> Practical implications – The findings provide important insights into how JFF knowledge creating patterns could limit or progress a common language of communication between companies and markets on the subject of IC. This could impact on the quality of corporate disclosure and accountability processes.<p></p> Originality/value – The paper demonstrates that there is a need for further use of qualitative studies of financial market behavior. Especially in the area of understanding the communication of IC between firms and financial markets, the potential of using sociology of finance approaches appears to be considerable

Progress using generalized lattice Dirac operators to parametrize the Fixed-Point QCD action

We report on an ongoing project to parametrize the Fixed-Point Dirac operator for massless quarks, using a very general construction which has arbitrarily many fermion offsets and gauge paths, the complete Clifford algebra and satisfies all required symmetries. Optimizing a specific construction with hypercubic fermion offsets, we present some preliminary results.Comment: Lattice 2000 (Improvement), 9 pages, based on a talk by K.H. and a poster by T.J. References adde

The construction of generalized Dirac operators on the lattice

We discuss the steps to construct Dirac operators which have arbitrary fermion offsets, gauge paths, a general structure in Dirac space and satisfy the basic symmetries (gauge symmetry, hermiticity condition, charge conjugation, hypercubic rotations and reflections) on the lattice. We give an extensive set of examples and offer help to add further structures.Comment: 19 pages, latex, maple code attache

HST/STIS Imaging of the Host Galaxy of GRB980425/SN1998bw

We present HST/STIS observations of ESO 184-G82, the host galaxy of the gamma-ray burst GRB 980425 associated with the peculiar Type Ic supernova SN1998bw. ESO 184-G82 is found to be an actively star forming SBc sub-luminous galaxy. We detect an object consistent with being a point source within the astrometric uncertainty of 0.018 arcseconds of the position of the supernova. The object is located inside a star-forming region and is at least one magnitude brighter than expected for the supernova based on a simple radioactive decay model. This implies either a significant flattening of the light curve or a contribution from an underlying star cluster.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, AASTeX v5.02 accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

Strategy bifurcation and spatial inhomogeneity in a simple model of competing sellers

We present a simple one-parameter model for spatially localised evolving agents competing for spatially localised resources. The model considers selling agents able to evolve their pricing strategy in competition for a fixed market. Despite its simplicity, the model displays extraordinarily rich behavior. In addition to ``cheap'' sellers pricing to cover their costs, ``expensive'' sellers spontaneously appear to exploit short-term favorable situations. These expensive sellers ``speciate'' into discrete price bands. As well as variety in pricing strategy, the ``cheap'' sellers evolve a strongly correlated spatial structure, which in turn creates niches for their expensive competitors. Thus an entire ecosystem of coexisting, discrete, symmetry-breaking strategies arises.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, epl2; 1 new figure, include nash equilibrium analysis, typo fixe

Meron-Cluster Simulation of a Chiral Phase Transition with Staggered Fermions

We examine a (3+1)-dimensional model of staggered lattice fermions with a four-fermion interaction and Z(2) chiral symmetry using the Hamiltonian formulation. This model cannot be simulated with standard fermion algorithms because those suffer from a very severe sign problem. We use a new fermion simulation technique - the meron-cluster algorithm - which solves the sign problem and leads to high-precision numerical data. We investigate the finite temperature chiral phase transition and verify that it is in the universality class of the 3-d Ising model using finite-size scaling.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure

The Coulomb Interaction between Pion-Wavepackets: The piplus-piminus Puzzle

The time dependent Schr\"odinger equation for $\pi^+$--$\pi^-$ pairs, which are emitted from the interaction zone in relativistic nuclear collisions, is solved using wavepacket states. It is shown that the Coulomb enhancement in the momentum correlation function of such pairs is smaller than obtained in earlier calculations based on Coulomb distorted plane waves. These results suggest that the experimentally observed positive correlation signal cannot be caused by the Coulomb interaction between pions emitted from the interaction zone. But other processes which involve long-lived resonances and the related extended source dimensions could provide a possible explanation for the observed signal.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX, 1 figur

A Spectral Algorithm with Additive Clustering for the Recovery of Overlapping Communities in Networks

This paper presents a novel spectral algorithm with additive clustering designed to identify overlapping communities in networks. The algorithm is based on geometric properties of the spectrum of the expected adjacency matrix in a random graph model that we call stochastic blockmodel with overlap (SBMO). An adaptive version of the algorithm, that does not require the knowledge of the number of hidden communities, is proved to be consistent under the SBMO when the degrees in the graph are (slightly more than) logarithmic. The algorithm is shown to perform well on simulated data and on real-world graphs with known overlapping communities.Comment: Journal of Theoretical Computer Science (TCS), Elsevier, A Para\^itr

The Host Galaxy and Optical Light Curve of the Gamma-Ray Burst GRB 980703

We present deep HST/STIS and ground-based photometry of the host galaxy of the gamma-ray burst GRB 980703 taken 17, 551, 710, and 716 days after the burst. We find that the host is a blue, slightly over-luminous galaxy with V_gal = 23.00 +/- 0.10, (V-R)_gal = 0.43 +/- 0.13, and a centre that is approximately 0.2 mag bluer than the outer regions of the galaxy. The galaxy has a star-formation rate of 8-13 M_sun/yr, assuming no extinction in the host. We find that the galaxy is best fit by a Sersic R^(1/n) profile with n ~= 1.0 and a half-light radius of 0.13 arcsec (= 0.72/h_100 proper kpc). This corresponds to an exponential disk with a scale radius of 0.22 arcsec (= 1.21/h_100 proper kpc). Subtracting a fit with elliptical isophotes leaves large residuals, which suggests that the host galaxy has a somewhat irregular morphology, but we are unable to connect the location of GRB 980703 with any special features in the host. The host galaxy appears to be a typical example of a compact star forming galaxy similar to those found in the Hubble Deep Field North. The R-band light curve of the optical afterglow associated with this gamma-ray burst is consistent with a single power-law decay having a slope of alpha = -1.37 +/- 0.14. Due to the bright underlying host galaxy the late time properties of the light-curve are very poorly constrained. The decay of the optical light curve is consistent with a contribution from an underlying Type Ic supernova like SN1998bw, or a dust echo, but such contributions cannot be securely established.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, LaTeX using A&A Document Class v4.05, to appear in A&