Initial public offerings of energy companies in Japan

1 online resource (vi, 38 p.)Includes abstract and appendix.Includes bibliographical references (p. 35-37)This paper analyses the mispricing of 20 energy, utility and natural resources IPOs in Japan from the year 1998 to 2009. The study confirms that the offer price and issue size have positive relationship with the IPO underpricing. It finds that the underwriter’s gross spread is positively related to the degree of underpricing as well. Also, the study suggests that the firm’s age, underwriter’s reputation, listing exchange are inversely correlated with the stocks’ initial return. It also explores that the IPOs listed after 2007 global financial crisis tend to have lower returns than those listed before/in 2007

Occupation Analyzer

Abstract The purpose of this project is to develop a text analytical tool in R that can help student job seekers match their resumes against jobs by a mutual similarity scoring to standard occupations as defined by the BLS O*NET database. Part of the terms of job evaluation for job seekers is to discover their educational preparation for a particular desirable job. The tool scores the resume against a group of jobs and presents the user with the top-scoring jobs to select a target. The resulting top target job table is scored against the occupations. A cosine similarity score is computed between the top job/occupation scores and the resume/occupation. The ranked jobs are then presented to the user as best matched to their resume. Users can interact with this tool on a website that relied on R Shiny. The website contains an occupation database and requires users to upload their resumes and a list of jobs as inputs. The outputs include detailed information about the top 15 jobs and the bottom five jobs. The project expands on existing preliminary work done in Python. The data preprocessing part includes making all text lower cases, removing punctuations, special characters, numbers, English common stop words, extra white spaces, and stemming. It uses the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) algorithm and cosine similarity to measure the similarity among the resume, jobs, and occupations. The final results meet sponsors’ expectations and show significant differences between previous work done in Python. Using n-grams, sliding windows, and named-entity extraction are possible methods to improve the tool’s performance. I will conduct further research this summer to enhance the accuracy. All project files are stored in a GitHub repository.NYU School of Professional Studies, MASY Progra

SYSTEMS CANCER BIOLOGY AND THE CONTROLLING MECHANISMS FOR THE J-SHAPED CANCER DOSE RESPONSE: TOWARDS RELAXING THE LNT HYPOTHESIS

The hormesis phenomena or J-shaped dose response have been accepted as a com- mon phenomenon regardless of the involved biological model, endpoint measured and chemical class/physical stressor. This paper first introduced a mathematical dose response model based on systems biology approach. It links molecular-level cell cycle checkpoint control information to clonal growth cancer model to predict the possible shapes of the dose response curves of Ionizing Radiation (IR) induced tumor transformation frequency. J-shaped dose response curves have been captured with consideration of cell cycle checkpoint control mechanisms. The simulation results indicate the shape of the dose response curve relates to the behavior of the saddle-node points of the model in the bifurcation diagram. A simplified version of the model in previous work of the authors was used mathematically to analyze behaviors relating to the saddle-node points for the J-shaped dose response curve. It indicates that low-linear energy transfer (LET) is more likely to have a J-shaped dose response curve. This result emphasizes the significance of systems biology approach, which encourages collaboration of multidiscipline of biologists, toxicologists and mathematicians, to illustrate complex cancer-related events, and confirm the biphasic dose-response at low doses

Cucurbit[8]uril-Regulated Colloidal Dispersions Exhibiting Photocontrolled Rheological Behavior.

In situ photocontrol over shear-thickening of condensed colloidal dispersions is of paramount importance in a wide range of applications including process technology and photorheological fluids. Its development and practicability, however, are hampered by the lack of well-designed photoresponsive systems. Here, a colloidal suspension whose rheological behavior is readily switchable between shear-thinning and shear-thickening using an external light stimulus is reported. This smart colloidal solution contains hybrid raspberry-like colloids prepared by employing cucurbit[8]uril as a supramolecular linker to assemble functional Fe3 O4 nanoparticles onto a silica core. The formed raspberry colloids are photoresponsive and can be reversibly disassembled under UV irradiation

MULTI-VESSELS COLLISION AVOIDANCE STRATEGY FOR AUTONOMOUS SURFACE VEHICLES BASED ON GENETIC ALGORITHM IN CONGESTED PORT ENVIRONMENT

An improved genetic collision avoidance algorithm is proposed in this study to address the problem that Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASV) need to comply with the collision avoidance rules at sea in congested sea areas. Firstly, a collision risk index model for ASV safe encounters is established taking into account the international rules for collision avoidance. The ASV collision risk index and the distance of safe encounters are taken as boundary values of the correlation membership function of the collision risk index model to calculate the optimal heading of ASV in real-time. Secondly, the genetic coding, fitness function, and basic parameters of the genetic algorithm are designed to construct the collision avoidance decision system. Finally, the simulation of collision avoidance between ASV and several obstacle vessels is performed, including the simulation of three collision avoidance states head-on situation, crossing situation, and overtaking situation. The results show that the proposed intelligent genetic algorithm considering the rules of collision avoidance at sea can effectively avoid multiple other vessels in different situations

Interfacial assembly of dendritic microcapsules with host-guest chemistry.

The self-assembly of nanoscale materials to form hierarchically ordered structures promises new opportunities in drug delivery, as well as magnetic materials and devices. Herein, we report a simple means to promote the self-assembly of two polymers with functional groups at a water-chloroform interface using microfluidic technology. Two polymeric layers can be assembled and disassembled at the droplet interface using the efficiency of cucurbit[8]uril (CB[8]) host-guest supramolecular chemistry. The microcapsules produced are extremely monodisperse in size and can encapsulate target molecules in a robust, well-defined manner. In addition, we exploit a dendritic copolymer architecture to trap a small hydrophilic molecule in the microcapsule skin as cargo. This demonstrates not only the ability to encapsulate small molecules but also the ability to orthogonally store both hydrophilic and hydrophobic cargos within a single microcapsule. The interfacially assembled supramolecular microcapsules can benefit from the diversity of polymeric materials, allowing for fine control over the microcapsule properties.This work was supported by the Engineering Physical Sciences Research Council, Institutional Sponsorship 2012-University of Cambridge EP/K503496/1 and the Translational Grant EP/H046593/1; Dr. Yu Zheng and Dr. Richard M. Parker were also funded from the Starting Investigator grant ASPiRe (No. 240629) from the European Research Council and the Isaac Newton Trust research grant No. 13.7(c).This is the accepted manuscript of a paper published in Nature Communications (Zheng Y, Yu Z, Parker RM, Wu Y, Abell C, Scherman OA, Nature Communications 2014, 5, 5772, doi:10.1038/ncomms6772)