Dividends Distribution and Earnings Persistence: Evidence from Chinese Listed Companies

Dividends distribution of Chinese listed companies is irregular, and the level of dividends can’t match that of earnings persistence. This paper empirically investigates the relationship between dividends distribution, including payout policy and level of cash dividends, and earnings persistence. Different from current literature, this paper is the first to investigate the relationship between dividends and earnings persistence from the perspective of different earnings components. New findings of this paper are as follows. First, the company which distributed dividends, has a stronger earnings persistence than those not. Second, core earnings persistence of listed companies that distributed dividends is significantly stronger than non-core earnings persistence. In addition, the company which distributed cash dividends, has a stronger earnings persistence than those just paid stock dividends, and the higher the level of cash dividends is, the stronger earnings persistence shows. These findings have implications for Chinese listed companies to improve earnings persistence by increasing operating income, and for the guidance of properly developing the company cash dividends distribution policy according to its core earnings persistence

Towards ultra-low-cost smartphone microscopy

The outbreak of COVID-19 exposed the inadequacy of our technical tools for home health surveillance, and recent studies have shown the potential of smartphones as a universal optical microscopic imaging platform for such applications. However, most of them use laboratory-grade optomechanical components and transmitted illuminations to ensure focus tuning capability and imaging quality, which keeps the cost of the equipment high. Here we propose an ultra-low-cost solution for smartphone microscopy. To realize focus tunability, we designed a seesaw-like structure capable of converting large displacements on one side into small displacements on the other (reduced to ~9.1%), which leverages the intrinsic flexibility of 3D printing materials. We achieved a focus-tuning accuracy of ~5 micron, which is 40 times higher than the machining accuracy of the 3D-printed lens holder itself. For microscopic imaging, we use an off-the-shelf smartphone camera lens as the objective and the built-in flashlight as the illumination. To compensate for the resulting image quality degradation, we developed a learning-based image enhancement method. We use the CycleGAN architecture to establish the mapping from smartphone microscope images to benchtop microscope images without pairing. We verified the imaging performance on different biomedical samples. Except for the smartphone, we kept the full costs of the device under 4 USD. We think these efforts to lower the costs of smartphone microscopes will benefit their applications in various scenarios, such as point-of-care testing, on-site diagnosis, and home health surveillance

Big AI Models for 6G Wireless Networks: Opportunities, Challenges, and Research Directions

Recently, big artificial intelligence models (BAIMs) represented by chatGPT have brought an incredible revolution. With the pre-trained BAIMs in certain fields, numerous downstream tasks can be accomplished with only few-shot or even zero-shot learning and exhibit state-of-the-art performances. As widely envisioned, the big AI models are to rapidly penetrate into major intelligent services and applications, and are able to run at low unit cost and high flexibility. In 6G wireless networks, to fully enable intelligent communication, sensing and computing, apart from providing other intelligent wireless services and applications, it is of vital importance to design and deploy certain wireless BAIMs (wBAIMs). However, there still lacks investigation on architecture design and system evaluation for wBAIM. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive discussion as well as some in-depth prospects on the demand, design and deployment aspects of the wBAIM. We opine that wBAIM will be a recipe of the 6G wireless networks to build high-efficient, sustainable, versatile, and extensible wireless intelligence for numerous promising visions. Then, we provide the core characteristics, principles, and pilot studies to guide the design of wBAIMs, and discuss the key aspects of developing wBAIMs through identifying the differences between the existing BAIMs and the emerging wBAIMs. Finally, related research directions and potential solutions are outlined

Analysis on Voluntary Disclosure of Accounting Information for Listed Companies in China

As the capital market develops, listed companies are owning a broader share in the market, but at the same time they are also faced with fiercer competition, which forces listed companies to disclose more reliable information to attract investors for more capitals. Meanwhile, the increase in the number of investors and the improvement of the quality of the capital market have led to a larger demand for the information from listed companies, as well as higher requirements made by all sectors of the community for information disclosure of listed companies; Mandatory accounting information disclosure alone can no longer satisfy the diverse needs of investors. As the opposite of mandatory disclosure, voluntary disclosure of information can improve the quality of corporate information disclosure, thus attracting more and more attention. This article is divided into three parts. Firstly, it expounds the concept of voluntary disclosure of information and relating ideas; secondly, on the basis of the first part, it analyses the current situation of voluntary disclosure in the Chinese market as well as the existing problems, such as, unwillingness of voluntary disclosure, inadequate disclosed content and unregulated disclosure. Finally, corresponding countermeasures to improve voluntary information disclosure are put forward, namely, to strengthen supervision and to complete the corporate governance structure. The countermeasures are designed to improve the quality of voluntary disclosure and facilitate scientific decision-making for investors and other stakeholders, so as to promote the capital market to be healthier and more sustainable. Key words: Listed company; Voluntary disclosure of accounting information; Countermeasur

Mobile MIMO Channel Prediction with ODE-RNN: a Physics-Inspired Adaptive Approach

Obtaining accurate channel state information (CSI) is crucial and challenging for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems. Conventional channel estimation method cannot guarantee the accuracy of mobile CSI while requires high signaling overhead. Through exploring the intrinsic correlation among a set of historical CSI instances randomly obtained in a certain communication environment, channel prediction can significantly increase CSI accuracy and save signaling overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel channel prediction method based on ordinary differential equation (ODE)-recurrent neural network (RNN) for accurate and flexible mobile MIMO channel prediction. Differing from existing works using sequential network structures for exploring the numerical correlation between observed data, our proposed method tries to represent the implicit physics process of path responses changing by specially designed continuous learning network with ODE structure. Due to the targeted design of learning network, our proposed method fits the mathematics feature of CSI data better and enjoy higher network interpretability. Experimental results show that the proposed learning approach outperforms existing methods, especially for long time interval of the CSI sequence and large channel measurement error.Comment: 7 pages, conferenc

Simulation of the Signal Propagation for Thin-gap RPC in the ATLAS Phase-II Upgrade

Thin-gap Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) with a 1 mm gap size are introduced in the Phase-II ATLAS upgrade. Smaller avalanche charge due to the reduced gap size raises concerns for signal integrity. This work focuses on the RPC signal propagation process in lossless conditions, and an analytical study is implemented for the ATLAS RPC. Detector modeling is presented, and the simulation of the RPC signal is discussed in detail. Simulated characteristic impedance and crosstalk have been compared with the measured value to validate this model. This method is applied to different RPC design geometries, including the newly proposed $\eta-\eta$ readout scheme.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, submitted to NIM