Effects of foreign acquisitions on financial constraints, productivity and investment in R&D of target firms in China

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This paper examines whether foreign acquisitions lessen financial constraints, improve investment in research & development (R&D) and productivity of the target firms in China based on a sample of 914 cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBM&A) over the period of 1994-2011. Using investment to cash-flow sensitivity to measure financial constraints, we find that foreign acquisitions in China are associated with a reduction of target firms’ financial constraints, irrespective of the ownership type of the target firm. However, the extent of financial constraint reduction is pronounced for non-SOEs compared to state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This study also provides evidence that foreign acquisitions improve Chinese target firms’ productivity and investment in R&D

Generalization of Subpixel Analysis for Hyperspectral Data With Flexibility in Spectral Similarity Measures

Several spectral unmixing techniques have been developed for subpixel mapping using hyperspectral data in the past two decades, among which the fully constrained least squares method based on the linear spectral mixture model (LSMM) has been widely accepted. However, the shortage of this method is that the Euclidean spectral distance measure is used, and therefore, it is sensitive to the magnitude of the spectra. While other spectral matching criteria are available, such as spectral angle mapping (SAM) and spectral information divergence (SID), the current unmixing algorithm is unable to be extended to these measures. In this paper, we propose a unified subpixel mapping framework that models the unmixing process as a best match of the unknown pixel\u27s spectrum to a weighted sum of the endmembers\u27 spectra. We introduce sequential quadratic programming to solve the nonlinear optimization problem encountered in the implementation of this framework. The main feature of this proposed method is that it is not restricted to any particular similarity measures. Experiments were conducted with both simulated and Hyperion data. The tests demonstrated the proposed framework\u27s advantage in accommodating various spectral similarity measures and provided performance comparisons of the Euclidean distance measure with other spectral matching criteria including SAM, spectral correlation measure, and SID

Effects of Digestate from Swine Manure Digester on in Vitro Growth of Crop Fungal Pathogens: A Laboratory Study

Anaerobic digestion is one of the most popular methods for swine manure treatment in China, and the resultant digestates are mainly used as fertilizer on arable land. Residues from anaerobic fermentation may be used to mitigate the use of chemical fungicides, but relevant information is lacking. In this lab-scale study, original digestate (OD) from a swine manure-fed digester and centrifuged supernatant liquid (SL) with different storage times (0, 7, 14, or 28 d) were added to potato dextrose agar (PDA) media at a rate of 5% to investigate the effects on in vitro mycelial growth of seven phytopathogenic fungi: Fusarium oxysporum, Sclerotinia sclerotiorum, Rhizotonia cerealis, Bipolaris sorokinianum, Rhizoctonia solani, Exserohilum turcicum, and Bipolaris maydis. Diameters of the fungal colonies were measured at 1 d intervals for 7 consecutive days, and the absolute growth rate (AGR) and growth coefficient (k) were calculated. Results showed that the colony sizes of Fusarium oxysporum, Sclerotinia sclerotiorum, Rhizotonia cerealis, Bipolaris sorokinianum, and Rhizoctonia solani on the OD-treated media were significantly smaller (p \u3c 0.01) than the corresponding controls regardless of the storage time. Similarly, independent of storage time, SL-treated media were shown to significantly (p \u3c 0.01) suppress AGR compared to the controls for all seven fungi except for Exserohilum turcicum, where no significant difference was observed between the 14-day-old SL treatment and control. The average k values of the fungi on the OD-treated media ranged from 29% to 143% of the values on the SL-treated media. The results of this study suggest potential use of digestate for plant disease control, which would reduce the use of chemical fungicides. Further studies are needed to investigate the fungicidal mechanism and fungicidal efficacy of OD and SL under field conditions

Dynamic post-earthquake image segmentation with an adaptive spectral-spatial descriptor

The region merging algorithm is a widely used segmentation technique for very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images. However, the segmentation of post-earthquake VHR images is more difficult due to the complexity of these images, especially high intra-class and low inter-class variability among damage objects. Herein two key issues must be resolved: the first is to find an appropriate descriptor to measure the similarity of two adjacent regions since they exhibit high complexity among the diverse damage objects, such as landslides, debris flow, and collapsed buildings. The other is how to solve over-segmentation and under-segmentation problems, which are commonly encountered with conventional merging strategies due to their strong dependence on local information. To tackle these two issues, an adaptive dynamic region merging approach (ADRM) is introduced, which combines an adaptive spectral-spatial descriptor and a dynamic merging strategy to adapt to the changes of merging regions for successfully detecting objects scattered globally in a post-earthquake image. In the new descriptor, the spectral similarity and spatial similarity of any two adjacent regions are automatically combined to measure their similarity. Accordingly, the new descriptor offers adaptive semantic descriptions for geo-objects and thus is capable of characterizing different damage objects. Besides, in the dynamic region merging strategy, the adaptive spectral-spatial descriptor is embedded in the defined testing order and combined with graph models to construct a dynamic merging strategy. The new strategy can find the global optimal merging order and ensures that the most similar regions are merged at first. With combination of the two strategies, ADRM can identify spatially scattered objects and alleviates the phenomenon of over-segmentation and under-segmentation. The performance of ADRM has been evaluated by comparing with four state-of-the-art segmentation methods, including the fractal net evolution approach (FNEA, as implemented in the eCognition software, Trimble Inc., Westminster, CO, USA), the J-value segmentation (JSEG) method, the graph-based segmentation (GSEG) method, and the statistical region merging (SRM) approach. The experiments were conducted on six VHR subarea images captured by RGB sensors mounted on aerial platforms, which were acquired after the 2008 Wenchuan Ms 8.0 earthquake. Quantitative and qualitative assessments demonstrated that the proposed method offers high feasibility and improved accuracy in the segmentation of post-earthquake VHR aerial images

China Officials’ Property Publicity: A Long Way to Go

Officials’ Property Publicity system is considered to be the basic element of the modern democracy, as a weapon against corruption and to promote clean government, so Chinese people’s desire for the unveiling of related policy is getting more and more intense. All regions in China have actively carried out pilot exploration work in succession, whereas many problems have been exposed. American Officials’ Property Publicity System is representative of the world’s perfect anti-corruption legal system, which after careful examination may have positive significance on the construction of the legal system of our country

Ammonia, Methane, and Carbon Dioxide Concentrations and Emissions of a Hoop Grower-Finisher Swine Barn

Hoop structures have been used quite widely for animal production in the U.S. due to their lower capital costs and multi-purpose versatility. Hoop barns for grower-finisher (G-F) swine production have attracted attention in China as an alternative, environmentally friendly, and water-saving production system. This study was conducted to assess concentrations and emissions of ammonia (NH3) and greenhouse gases (GHGs) for a hoop G-F pig barn at a commercial pig operation in suburban Beijing, China. The NH3 and GHG concentrations and emissions of the facility were measured for three consecutive days during spring and summer seasons. The results revealed the following hourly gaseous concentrations (mean ±SD, mg m-3): 5.9 ±2.7 NH3, 2,183 ±1,376 CO2, and 4.0 ±2.5 CH4 in spring, and 6.8 ±3.4 NH3, 1,530 ±364 CO2, and 5.0 ±2.3 CH4 in summer. The estimated gaseous emissions averaged, in g pig-1 d-1, 22.7 NH3, 2,003 CO2, and 6.7 CH4, or in g AU-1 d-1 (AU = 500 kg), 124 NH3, 11,264 CO2, and 36.2 CH4. The emission values from this study, while being generally comparable with those reported in the literature, add new information concerning emissions from alternative swine housing system

Hong-Ou-Mandel dip using photon pairs from a PPLN waveguide

We experimentally observed a Hong-Ou-Mandle dip with photon pairs generated in a periodically poled reverse-proton-exchange lithium niobate waveguide with an integrated mode demultiplexer at a wavelength of 1.5 um. The visibility of the dip in the experiment was 80% without subtraction of any noise terms at a peak pump power of 4.4 mW. The new technology developed in the experiment can find various applications in the research field of linear optics quantum computation in fiber or quantum optical coherence tomography with near infrared photon pairs.Comment: 5 Pages, 2 figure