The Effect of Board Structure and Institutional Ownership on Earnings Management

The study examines the role of outside directors and institutional shareholders in constraining the earnings management activities.A sample of 613 firms from construction, industrial products and consumer products sectors were selected from the Main Board in Bursa Malaysia.The time period covered for this study was from 2001 to 2003.The Modified Jones Model with cross sectional approach was employed in this study.The finding shows that the magnitude of earnings management in Malaysian listed firms was approximately 16% of the previous year total assets. Most firms manage the earnings upward rather than downwards.No relationship was observed between the degree of earnings manipulation and the proportion of outside directors and institutional shareholders.This is inconsistent with most studies which provide evidence that outside directors and institutional shareholders are effective corporate governance mechanisms in constraining the earnings management.However,there is weak evidence to show that outside directors have some effect in curbing the earnings management in the construction sector.The findings suggest that outside directors have the ability to constrain the earnings management as indicated in the construction sector.Adding more outside directors in the board and having institutional shareholders may not reduce earnings management practices if the ownership of a firm is highly concentrated and the process of selecting outside directors is not clearly stated and transparent

Tradeoffs in Modified DiscreteCosine Transform implementations

The performance dependence of modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) on hardware architecture is investigated. The oddly stacked architecture is found to be superior to direct computation in terms of accuracy, power consumption, and circuit area.published_or_final_versio

The effect of board structure and institutional ownership structure on earnings management

The study examines the role of outside directors and institutional shareholders in constraining the earnings management activities. A sample of 613 firms from construction, industrial products and consumer products sectors were selected from the main board. The time period covered for this study was from year 2001 to 2003. Modified Jones Model with cross sectional approach was employed in this study. The finding shows that magnitude of earnings management in Malaysian listed firms has approximately 16% of prior year total assets. Most firms manage the earnings upward rather than downwards. No relationship was observed between the degree of earnings manipulation and the proportion of outside directors and institutional shareholders. However, there is weak evidence to show that outside directors have some effect in curbing the earnings management in the construction sector. Adding more outside directors in the board and having institutional shareholders may not be able to reduce earnings management practices if the ownership of a firm is highly concentrated and the process of selecting outside directors is not clearly stated and transparent

Development of ListeriaBase and comparative analysis of Listeria monocytogenes

Background: Listeria consists of both pathogenic and non-pathogenic species. Reports of similarities between the genomic content between some pathogenic and non-pathogenic species necessitates the investigation of these species at the genomic level to understand the evolution of virulence-associated genes. With Listeria genome data growing exponentially, comparative genomic analysis may give better insights into evolution, genetics and phylogeny of Listeria spp., leading to better management of the diseases caused by them. Description: With this motivation, we have developed ListeriaBase, a web Listeria genomic resource and analysis platform to facilitate comparative analysis of Listeria spp. ListeriaBase currently houses 850,402 protein-coding genes, 18,113 RNAs and 15,576 tRNAs from 285 genome sequences of different Listeria strains. An AJAX-based real time search system implemented in ListeriaBase facilitates searching of this huge genomic data. Our in-house designed comparative analysis tools such as Pairwise Genome Comparison (PGC) tool allowing comparison between two genomes, Pathogenomics Profiling Tool (PathoProT) for comparing the virulence genes, and ListeriaTree for phylogenic classification, were customized and incorporated in ListeriaBase facilitating comparative genomic analysis of Listeria spp. Interestingly, we identified a unique genomic feature in the L. monocytogenes genomes in our analysis. The Auto protein sequences of the serotype 4 and the non-serotype 4 strains of L. monocytogenes possessed unique sequence signatures that can differentiate the two groups. We propose that the aut gene may be a potential gene marker for differentiating the serotype 4 strains from other serotypes of L. monocytogenes. Conclusions: ListeriaBase is a useful resource and analysis platform that can facilitate comparative analysis of Listeria for the scientific communities. We have successfully demonstrated some key utilities of ListeriaBase. The knowledge that we obtained in the analyses of L. monocytogenes may be important for functional works of this human pathogen in future. ListeriaBase is currently available at http://listeria.um.edu.my

Multifocal photoacoustic microscopy using a single-element ultrasonic transducer through an ergodic relay

Optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (OR-PAM) has demonstrated high-spatial-resolution imaging of optical absorption in biological tissue. To date, most OR-PAM systems rely on mechanical scanning with confocally aligned optical excitation and ultrasonic detection, limiting the wide-field imaging speed of these systems. Although several multifocal OR-PA (MFOR-PA) systems have attempted to address this limitation, they are hindered by the complex design in a constrained physical space. Here, we present a two-dimensional (2D) MFOR-PAM system that utilizes a 2D microlens array and an acoustic ergodic relay. Using a single-element ultrasonic transducer, this system can detect PA signals generated from 400 optical foci in parallel and then raster scan the optical foci patterns to form an MFOR-PAM image. This system improves the imaging resolution of an acoustic ergodic relay system from 220 to 13 μm and enables 400-folds shorter scanning time than that of a conventional OR-PAM system at the same resolution and laser repetition rate. We demonstrated the imaging ability of the system with both in vitro and in vivo experiments

Multifocal photoacoustic microscopy using a single-element ultrasonic transducer through an ergodic relay

Optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (OR-PAM) has demonstrated high-spatial-resolution imaging of optical absorption in biological tissue. To date, most OR-PAM systems rely on mechanical scanning with confocally aligned optical excitation and ultrasonic detection, limiting the wide-field imaging speed of these systems. Although several multifocal OR-PA (MFOR-PA) systems have attempted to address this limitation, they are hindered by the complex design in a constrained physical space. Here, we present a two-dimensional (2D) MFOR-PAM system that utilizes a 2D microlens array and an acoustic ergodic relay. Using a single-element ultrasonic transducer, this system can detect PA signals generated from 400 optical foci in parallel and then raster scan the optical foci patterns to form an MFOR-PAM image. This system improves the imaging resolution of an acoustic ergodic relay system from 220 to 13 μm and enables 400-folds shorter scanning time than that of a conventional OR-PAM system at the same resolution and laser repetition rate. We demonstrated the imaging ability of the system with both in vitro and in vivo experiments

Joint Communication and Sensing Design in Coal Mine Safety Monitoring: 3D Phase Beamforming for RIS-Assisted Wireless Networks

This paper investigates the resource allocation of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided joint communication and sensing (JCAS) system in a coal mine scenario. In the JCAS system, an RIS is implemented at the corner of the zigzag tunnels to improve the complicated wireless environment, where ground obstacles frequently block direct links. In addition, a wireless backhaul base station with a limited energy budget is deployed in the depth of the mine to sense the target area and provide internet of things (IoT) services and communication services for users. Furthermore, a data center is placed on the ground to analyze the obtained data and route the communication data. Under this deployment, a joint optimization problem of RIS phase shift matrix, RIS element switches, and area sensing time is proposed. We aim to maximize the successful sensed bits under total completion time, and maximum transmit power constraints. In order to solve this problem, an iterative algorithm is proposed. The successive convex approximation (SCA) based algorithm is used for the RIS phase shift matrix optimization subproblem. For the sensing time optimization subproblem, the quadratic approximation method is proposed to optimize the number of area perceptions. The coordinate descent method is utilized to optimize the RIS element switches. Simulation results show that the energy efficiency is improved by up to 38%, and 7% increases the specific data size compared with the benchmark solutions

Label-free cell nuclear imaging by Grüneisen relaxation photoacoustic microscopy

Photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) with ultraviolet (UV) laser illumination has recently been demonstrated as a promising tool that provides fast, label-free, and multilayered histologic imaging of human breast tissue. Thus far, the axial resolution has been determined ultrasonically. To enable optically defined axial resolution, we exploit the Grüneisen relaxation (GR) effect. By imaging mouse brain slices, we show that GRUV-PAM reveals detailed information about three-dimensional cell nuclear distributions and internal structures, which are important diagnostic features for cancers. Due to the nonlinear effect, GRUV-PAM also provides better contrast in images of cell nuclei