Inflationary Hubble Parameter from the Gravitational Wave Spectrum in the General Slow-roll Approximation

Improved general slow-roll formulae giving the primordial gravitational wave spectrum are derived in the present work. Also the first and second order general slow-roll inverse formulae giving the Hubble parameter $H$ in terms of the gravitational wave spectrum are derived. Moreover, the general slow-roll consistency condition relating the scalar and tensor spectra is obtained

Managers’ Incentives to Manipulate Earnings in Management Buyout Contests: An Examination of How Corporate Governance and Market Mechanisms Mitigate Earnings Management

In an MBO contest, managers offer to buy the firm from public shareholders at a premium to the current market price and thus have incentives to buy the firm “cheap.” Prior studies have found evidence that managers, on average, manipulate earnings downward prior to an MBO offer in an attempt to convince shareholders that their offer is fair. We extend this finding by attempting to explain the substantial cross sectional variation in the degree of manipulation across firms reported in these earlier studies. We find that boards with more independent directors and higher levels of incentive based compensation for the CEO act to discourage such manipulation. Additionally, our results show that some shareholders, minority and preexisting large outside blockholders, appear to be misled by the manipulation. However, new blockholders that acquire large shareholdings in the year before the offer are not. We also discover that managers are more likely to revise their bid upwards when the manipulation is most severe and that these new blockholders put pressure on managers to make these revisions. Finally, we investigate whether the manipulation has an impact on the final buyout contest outcome. We find that downward manipulation does not prevent managers from retaining control of the firm; however, they pay a higher premium

China: An Expatriates Discovery Of Culture And Customs

The purpose of this research paper is to share and uncover the differences between American and Chinese culture and customs. These revelations illustrate the culture and customs of various Chinese provinces and how they differ from those of the United States. Moreover, an analysis of etiquettes, business practices, the concept of face, and teaching experiences are provided. In conclusion, this paper will touch upon the experiences of an expatriate while teaching at a renowned Chinese university. The viewpoints are based on experiences and observations only and, in no way, reflect the nature and culture of China as a whole. The findings of this paper will also help Americans, either traveling or teaching overseas, to prepare themselves, and will enable the reader to form his or her own perception and draw conclusions from an individual perspective

Phase transitions and bubble nucleations for a phi^6 model in curved spacetime

Condsidering a massive self-interacting phi ^6 scalar field coupled arbitrarily to a (2+1) dimensional Bianchi type-I spacetime, we evaluate the one-loop effective potential. It is found that phi ^6 potential can be regularized in (2+1) dimensional curved spacetime. A finite expression for the energy-momentum tensor is obtained for this model. Evaluating the finite temperature effective potential, the temperature dependence of phase transitions is studied. The crucial dependence of the phase transitions on the spacetime curvature and on the coupling to gravity are also verified. We also discuss the nucleation of bubbles in a phi ^6 model. It is found that there exists an exact solution for the damped motion of the bubble in the thin wall regime.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

Technology and Autism Spectrum Disorders

This meta-synthesis of empirical and non-empirical literature reviewed 43 journal articles that evaluated the availability and use of technology to educate and socialize learners with Autism Spectrum Disorder or Aspersers Disorder. Students with these disorders cannot be defined or categorized each individual is unique and elegant; challenging caregiver's and educator's creativity to teach and guide them toward a quality of life they would not find on their own. There are tools and research to support unique education on many levels of learning from academics to socialization. The literature indicates that while there is a wealth of technology available and new technology is constantly being developed cost can not only prohibit production it can lessen the quality. What gets into the classroom tool box is determined by the tenacity of the educator

Tests for complete and mosaic lethal mutation in Neurospora crassa

Atwood's method for the detection of recessive lethal mutation in Neurospora crasse and its adaptation for the detection of mosaic lethal mutation, was investigated with the aim of determining the best conditions under which these two types of mutations could be detected.The strain used was a balanced heterokaryon between arginineless and methionineless amycelial nuclei. . Mutations are scored only in the methionineless amycelial nuclei, where the presence of the gene amycelial,which gives a morphological modification, greatly facilitates scoring.The presence of more than one methionineless amycelial nucleus per heterokaryotic conidium results in the observed values for lethal and mosaic lethal mutations being not the true values. This effect was minimised by selecting conditions under which the majority of conidia contained two nuclei, and the observed results were corrected for the effect of conidia with more than one methionineless amycelial nucleus. As the corrections made depend on whether or not the mutagen acts by nucle?r killing, this was also taken into account.The proportion of mosaics among mutations was found to decrease from nitrous acid, to ultraviolet light, to X- rays. In all cases the lethal sector of a mosaic was much smaller than one half, the majority comprising 20% or less. As the reconstruction experiments showed, this was due to selection against the lethal sectors. This would lead to an underestimate of mutant sector size, and also to the non -detection of mosaics with very small mutant sectors. This might possibly be the cause for the inconclusive results obtained with 2-chloroethyl methane sulphonate.The advantages of an alternative strain in which this selection might not occur is discussed.Possible mechanisms for the origin of complete and mosaic lethal mutations are proposed

An improved Gaussian Mixture Model with post-processing for multiple object detection in surveillance video analytics

Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is an effective method for extracting foreground objects from video sequences. However, GMM fails to detect the object in challenging scenarios like the presence of shadow, occlusion, complex backgrounds, etc. To handle these challenges, intrinsic and extrinsic enhancement is required in traditional GMM. This paper presents a novel framework that combines improved GMM with postprocessing for multiple object detection. In the proposed system, GMM with parameter initialization is considered an intrinsic improvement. Video preprocessing and postprocessing are considered extrinsic improvements. Integration of morphological operation with GMM helps for better segmentation than traditional GMM, and it also helps to increase detection performance by reducing false positives. Video preprocessing is the process of noise removal that prepares input video ready for further processing. In the final step gradient of morphological operations is used for postprocessing. The proposed approach was tested on challenging surveillance video sequences from benchmark datasets such as PETS 2009 and CD 2014(Change Detection). The experimental results are compared using ground truth and performance evaluation metrics. The results show that the proposed approach performs better than GMM, and the method can detect the object effectively even in illumination variation and partial occlusion

BlogForever D2.4: Weblog spider prototype and associated methodology

The purpose of this document is to present the evaluation of different solutions for capturing blogs, established methodology and to describe the developed blog spider prototype