CEO Inside Debt and Overinvestment

Theoretical studies suggest that overinvestment is driven by equity holders’ desire to shift wealth from debt holders, while underinvestment is driven by equity holders’ desire to prevent the enhancement of debt-holder wealth. Therefore, debt holders have a stronger incentive to eliminate overinvestment than to eliminate underinvestment. We find that firms with higher inside-debt ratios are less likely to overinvest. Firms with above-median CEO inside-debt ratios drive this negative effect. These results support our expectation that CEO inside debt serves as a curb on overinvestment in order to prevent a wealth shift from debt holders to equity holders

An Overview of the Capital Raising Activities Among Proptech Firms

This article presents an overview of the capital raising activities among property/real estate technology (i.e. Proptech) firms. This overview highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the Proptech sector in recent years. This article provides a detailed summary and description of how the capital raising activities distribute across different Proptech categories and geographic locations in different market conditions. The authors find that the capital-raising activities in Proptech have cooled down despite the rising real estate prices last year. The authors hope that this review can present a more comprehensive picture of the Proptech development and attract more researchers to investigate the costs and benefits of Proptech to the real estate markets. This research contributes to the understanding of Proptech sector more comprehensively by utilizing a unique hand-collected dataset. The results present a different perspective on the recent trends of Proptech firms as they feature both the promising trends and concerning issues within the field

Polar Chemoreceptor Clustering by Coupled Trimers of Dimers

Receptors of bacterial chemotaxis form clusters at the cell poles, where clusters act as "antennas" to amplify small changes in ligand concentration. Interestingly, chemoreceptors cluster at multiple length scales. At the smallest scale, receptors form dimers, which assemble into stable timers of dimers. At a large scale, trimers form large polar clusters composed of thousands of receptors. Although much is known about the signaling properties emerging from receptor clusters, it is unknown how receptors localize at the cell poles and what the cluster-size determining factors are. Here, we present a model of polar receptor clustering based on coupled trimers of dimers, where cluster size is determined as a minimum of the cluster-membrane free energy. This energy has contributions from the cluster-membrane elastic energy, penalizing large clusters due to their high intrinsic curvature, and receptor-receptor coupling favoring large clusters. We find that the reduced cluster-membrane curvature mismatch at the curved cell poles leads to large and robust polar clusters in line with experimental observation, while lateral clusters are efficiently suppressed.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, and 1 tabl

Bacterial Diversity and Bioprospecting for Cold-Active Hydrolytic Enzymes from Culturable Bacteria Associated with Sediment from Nella Fjord, Eastern Antarctica

The diversity and cold-active hydrolytic enzymes of culturable bacteria associated with sandy sediment from Nella Fjord, Eastern Antarctica (69°22′6″ S, 76°21′45″ E) was investigated. A total of 33 aerobic heterotrophic bacterial strains were isolated at 4 °C. These bacterial isolates could be sorted into 18 phylotypes based on the 16S rRNA gene sequence belonging to four phyla, namely Alphaproteobacteria, Gammaproteobacteria, Bacteroidetes and Actinobacteria. Only seven isolates were psychrophilic, 15 isolates were moderately psychrophilic, and 11 isolates were psychrotolerant. More than 72% of the isolates required sodium chloride to grow. Esterase, β-glucosidase and proteases activities at 4 °C were detected in more than 45% of the strains while approximately 21%, 15% and 12% of the strains possessed lipase, amylase and chitinase, respectively. These results indicate that a relatively high culturable bacterial diversity is present within marine sediment of Nella Fjord and it could serve as an ideal candidate region for bioprospecting

Subsurface interactions of actinide species and microorganisms: Implications for the bioremediation of actinide-organic mixtures

We use high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy to investigate the electronic structure of the antiferromagnetic heavy fermion compound CePt2In7, which is a member of the CeIn3-derived heavy fermion material family. Weak hybridization among 4f electron states and conduction bands was identified in CePt2In7 at low temperature much weaker than that in the other heavy fermion compounds like CeIrIn5 and CeRhIn5. The Ce 4f spectrum shows fine structures near the Fermi energy, reflecting the crystal electric field splitting of the 4f^1_5/2 and 4f^1_7/2 states. Also, we find that the Fermi surface has a strongly three-dimensional topology, in agreement with density-functional theory calculations.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Lack of Evidence for Human-to-Human Transmission of Avian Influenza A (H9N2) Viruses in Hong Kong, China 19991

In April 1999, isolation of avian influenza A (H9N2) viruses from humans was confirmed for the first time. H9N2 viruses were isolated from nasopharyngeal aspirate specimens collected from two children who were hospitalized with uncomplicated, febrile, upper respiratory tract illnesses in Hong Kong during March 1999. Novel influenza viruses have the potential to initiate global pandemics if they are sufficiently transmissible among humans. We conducted four retrospective cohort studies of persons exposed to these two H9N2 patients to assess whether human-to-human transmission of avian H9N2 viruses had occurred. No serologic evidence of H9N2 infection was found in family members or health-care workers who had close contact with the H9N2-infected children, suggesting that these H9N2 viruses were not easily transmitted from person to person

Mitochondrial genome nucleotide substitution pattern between domesticated silkmoth, Bombyx mori, and its wild ancestors, Chinese Bombyx mandarina and Japanese Bombyx mandarina

Bombyx mori and Bombyx mandarina are morphologically and physiologically similar. In this study, we compared the nucleotide variations in the complete mitochondrial (mt) genomes between the domesticated silkmoth, B. mori, and its wild ancestors, Chinese B. mandarina (ChBm) and Japanese B. mandarina (JaBm). The sequence divergence and transition mutation ratio between B. mori and ChBm are significantly smaller than those observed between B. mori and JaBm. The preference of transition by DNA strands between B. mori and ChBm is consistent with that between B. mori and JaBm, however, the regional variation in nucleotide substitution rate shows a different feature. These results suggest that the ChBm mt genome is not undergoing the same evolutionary process as JaBm, providing evidence for selection on mtDNA. Moreover, investigation of the nucleotide sequence divergence in the A+T-rich region of Bombyx mt genomes also provides evidence for the assumption that the A+T-rich region might not be the fastest evolving region of the mtDNA of insects

The Majorana Project

Building a \BBz experiment with the ability to probe neutrino mass in the inverted hierarchy region requires the combination of a large detector mass sensitive to \BBz, on the order of 1-tonne, and unprecedented background levels, on the order of or less than 1 count per year in the \BBz signal region. The MAJORANA Collaboration proposes a design based on using high-purity enriched Ge-76 crystals deployed in ultra-low background electroformed Cu cryostats and using modern analysis techniques that should be capable of reaching the required sensitivity while also being scalable to a 1-tonne size. To demonstrate feasibility, the collaboration plans to construct a prototype system, the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR, consisting of 30 kg of 86% enriched \Ge-76 detectors and 30 kg of natural or isotope-76-depleted Ge detectors. We plan to deploy and evaluate two different Ge detector technologies, one based on a p-type configuration and the other on n-type.Comment: paper submitted for the 2008 Carolina International Symposium on Neutrino Physic

Crystal Structure of the Heteromolecular Chaperone, AscE-AscG, from the Type III Secretion System in Aeromonas hydrophila

10.1371/journal.pone.0019208PLoS ONE64