The Emergence of Corporate Pyramids in China

We examine the pyramidal ownership structure of a large sample of newly listed Chinese companies controlled by local governments or private entrepreneurs. Both types of the owners use layers of intermediate companies to control their firms. However, their pyramiding behaviors are likely affected by different property rights constraints. Local governments are constrained by the Chinese laws prohibiting free transfer of state ownership. Pyramiding allows them to credibly decentralize their firm decision rights to firm management without selling off their ownership. Private entrepreneurs are constrained by their lack of access to external funds. Pyramiding creates internal capital markets that help relieving their external financing constraints. Our empirical results support these conjectures. Local governments build more extensive corporate pyramids when they are less burdened with fiscal or unemployment problems, when they have more long-term goals, and when their firm decisions are more subject to market and legal disciplines. The more extensive pyramids are also associated with smaller "underpricing" when the firms go public. Entrepreneur owners construct more complex corporate pyramids when they do not have a very deep pocket - as indicated by their personal wealth.

Founder Succession and Accounting Properties

Using a sample of 231 entrepreneurial firm successions in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, we find that firms' unsigned discretionary accruals decrease while timely loss recognition increases subsequent to successions, suggesting a shift in accounting toward a less insider-based system. We argue that the change in accounting properties is due to the loss of specialized assets in the succession process, such as the entrepreneur's reputation and political/social networks, inducing the firm to adapt to market-based rather than relationship-based contracting. Moreover, we find that the extent of the shift in accounting is larger in founder successions than in subsequent (non-founder) successions, as the dissipation of specialized assets is greatest in founder successions.Succession, founder, corporate governance, accounting properties

The Emergence of Corporate Pyramids in China

We examine the pyramidal ownership structure of a large sample of newly listed Chinese companies controlled by local governments or private entrepreneurs. Both types of the owners use layers of intermediate companies to control their firms. However, their pyramiding behaviors are likely affected by different property rights constraints. Local governments are constrained by the Chinese laws prohibiting free transfer of state ownership. Pyramiding allows them to credibly decentralize their firm decision rights to firm management without selling off their ownership. Private entrepreneurs are constrained by their lack of access to external funds. Pyramiding creates internal capital markets that help relieving their external financing constraints. Our empirical results support these conjectures. Local governments build more extensive corporate pyramids when they are less burdened with fiscal or unemployment problems, when they have more long-term goals, and when their firm decisions are more subject to market and legal disciplines. The more extensive pyramids are also associated with smaller "underpricing" when the firms go public. Entrepreneur owners construct more complex corporate pyramids when they do not have a very deep pocket - as indicated by whether they are among the top-100 richest people in China.Pyramidal Ownership, Decentralization, China

Land-use change simulation and assessment of driving factors in the loess hilly region - a case study as Pengyang County

The main objective of this study is to evaluate the land-use change and its relationship with its driving factors in the loess hilly region. In this study, a case study was carried out in Pengyang County. We set two land-use demand scenarios (a baseline scenario (scenario 1) and a real land-use requirement scenario (scenario 2)) during year 2001-2005 via assuming the effect of driving factors on land-use change keeps stable from 1993 to 2005. Two simulated land-use patterns of 2005 are therefore achieved accordingly by use of the conversion of land use and its effects model at small regional extent. Kappa analyses are conducted to compare each simulated land-use pattern with the reality. Results show that (1) the associated kappa values were decreased from 0.83 in 1993-2000 to 0.27 (in scenario 1) and 0.23 (in scenario 2) in 2001-2005 and (2) forest and grassland were the land-use types with highest commission errors, which implies that conversion of both the land-use types mentioned above is the main determinant of change of kappa values. Our study indicates the land-use change was driven by the synthetic multiply factors including natural and social-economic factors (e.g., slope, aspect, elevation, distance to road, soil types, and population dense) in 1993-2000 until "Grain for Green Project" was implemented and has become the dominant factor in 2001-2005

CP-AGCN: Pytorch-based Attention Informed Graph Convolutional Network for Identifying Infants at Risk of Cerebral Palsy

Early prediction is clinically considered one of the essential parts of cerebral palsy (CP) treatment. We propose to implement a low-cost and interpretable classification system for supporting CP prediction based on General Movement Assessment (GMA). We design a Pytorch-based attention-informed graph convolutional network to early identify infants at risk of CP from skeletal data extracted from RGB videos. We also design a frequencybinning module for learning the CP movements in the frequency domain while filtering noise. Our system only requires consumer-grade RGB videos for training to support interactive-time CP prediction by providing an interpretable CP classification result

Estimation of sagittal-plane whole-body angular momentum during perturbed and unperturbed gait using simplified body models

Human whole-body angular momentum (WBAM) during walking typically follows a consistent pattern, making it a valuable indicator of the state of balance. However, calculating WBAM is labor-intensive, where the kinematic data for all body segments is needed, that is, based on a full-body model. In this study, we focused on selecting appropriate segments for estimating sagittal-plane WBAM during both unperturbed and perturbed gaits, which were segments with significant angular momentum contributions. Those major segments were constructed as a simplified model, and the sagittal-plane WBAM based on a simplified model was calculated by combining the angular momenta of the selected segments. We found that the WBAM estimated by seven-segment models, incorporating the head & torso (HT) and all lower limb segments, provided an average correlation coefficient of 0.99 and relative angular momentum percentage of 96.8% and exhibited the most similar sensitivity to external perturbations compared to the full-body model-based WBAM. Additionally, our findings revealed that the rotational angular momenta (RAM) of lower limb segments were much smaller than their translational angular momenta (TAM). The pair-wise comparisons between simplified models with and without RAMs of lower body segments were observed with no significant difference, indicating that RAMs of lower body segments are neglectable. This may further simplify the WBAM estimation based on the seven-segment model, eliminating the need to estimate the angular velocities of lower limb segments. These findings have practical implications for future studies of using inertial measurement units (IMUs) for estimating WBAM, as our results can help reduce the number of required sensors and simplify kinematics measurement

Unifying Human Motion Synthesis and Style Transfer with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Generating realistic motions for digital humans is a core but challenging part of computer animations and games, as human motions are both diverse in content and rich in styles. While the latest deep learning approaches have made significant advancements in this domain, they mostly consider motion synthesis and style manipulation as two separate problems. This is mainly due to the challenge of learning both motion contents that account for the inter-class behaviour and styles that account for the intra-class behaviour effectively in a common representation. To tackle this challenge, we propose a denoising diffusion probabilistic model solution for styled motion synthesis. As diffusion models have a high capacity brought by the injection of stochasticity, we can represent both inter-class motion content and intra-class style behaviour in the same latent. This results in an integrated, end-to-end trained pipeline that facilitates the generation of optimal motion and exploration of content-style coupled latent space. To achieve high-quality results, we design a multi-task architecture of diffusion model that strategically generates aspects of human motions for local guidance. We also design adversarial and physical regulations for global guidance. We demonstrate superior performance with quantitative and qualitative results and validate the effectiveness of our multi-task architecture

Sliding wear of a self-mated thermally sprayed chromium oxide coating in a simulated PWR water environment

Bearing surfaces in the primary circuit of pressurized water reactors (PWR) are prone to damage due to aggressive chemical and tribological conditions under which they operate, and a wide range of materials have been examined in this regard. One of the most promising candidates is chromium oxide in the form of a thermally spayed coating, and in this work, the behaviour of a commercially available Cr2O3 coating in self-mated sliding was considered. Tests consisted of a number of start-stop cycles of sliding between a crowned pin and a rotating disc in a water environment in an autoclave in an attempt to simulate the most aggressive phase of bearing run-up and run-down. Wear and damage mechanisms were examined at temperatures from ambient up to 250 C (a representative PWR environment). Samples were characterized before and after wear testing using mass measurements, profilometry, X-ray diffraction, scanning and transmission electron microscopy (SEM and TEM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Across the temperature range, wear was mild, with no evidence of coating delamination. A five-fold increase in wear was observed between 80 C and 250 C (with wear depths of generally less than 8 µm being observed on the disc samples even at the higher temperature), despite there being only very small changes in hardness of the coating over the same temperature range. Debris was observed on the wear tracks following testing, with the evidence together suggesting that this debris was a very fine-grained mixture of Cr2O3 and amorphous -CrOOH, a corrosion product of Cr2O3

Parameterization and Reconstruction of Quasi Static Universe

We study a possibility of the fate of universe, in which there is neither the rip singularity, which results in the disintegration of bound systems, nor the endless expansion, instead the universe will be quasi static. We discuss the parameterization of the corresponding evolution and the reconstruction of the scalar field model. We find, with the parameterization consistent with the current observation, that the current universe might arrive at a quasi static phase after less than 20Gyr.Comment: minor changes and Refs. added, publish in EPJ

Application of the Graph Theory in Managing Power Flows in Future Electric Networks

No abstract