Guanxi and Corruption Study on the Firm-Level in a Chinese context

China experienced a growing economy with a huge market and business potential and became the second biggest country in terms of GDP. However, because of the limitation of coherent business laws and government supervision, entering the Chinese market became a severe and complicated problem for different kinds of firms. Empirical papers show that networks, called guanxi in China make a primary contribution to the success of the business. This paper contributes to the guanxi in China and discusses what kind of firms are more likely to develop guanxi. Using enterprise- level data on business-government relationships among 2700 firms in China, I reached the conclusion that capital city located firms, foreign-owned firms, national-market- targeted firms and large size firms have demands to build "guanxi" and also have the potential possibility to do the corruption

Bis[2-(pyrrolidin-2-yl)-1H-benzimidazole-κ2 N 2,N 3]copper(II) dinitrate dihydrate

In the title compound, [Cu(C11H13N3)2](NO3)2·2H2O, synthesized by hydro­thermal reaction of Cu(NO3)2 and racemic 2-(pyrrolidin-2-yl)-1H-1,3-benzimidazole, the CuII atom lies on an inversion centre. The distorted octa­hedral CuII environment contains two planar trans-related N,N-chelating 2-(pyrrolidin-2-yl)-1H-1,3-benzimidazole ligands in the equatorial plane and two monodentate nitrate anions, which are in weak inter­action with the Cu atom, in the axial positions. The two benzimidazole ligands have opposite configurations (R/S and S/R) and compound is a meso complex. In the crystal, N—H⋯O and O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds generate an infinite three-dimensional network. One methylene group of the pyrrolidine ring is disordered over two position with a 0.56 (3):0.44 (3) occupancy

Social Capital and Analyst Forecasts

This study examines the effect of social capital on analyst forecast accuracy. Using a county-level measure of social capital, I find that firms headquartered in counties with high social capital have greater forecast accuracy than firms headquartered in low social capital counties. In addition, I conduct two cross-sectional tests under conditions where social capital facilitates analyst forecast information collection and where social capital provides more assurance of information reliability. I find that the effect of social capital is more pronounced when firms’ headquarters are close to analyst brokerage firms. This is because geographically proximate analysts may have more channels to collect information. I also show that since high social capital can reduce analysts’ time and effort to verify the reported earnings when a firm has complicated operation, effect of social capital is more pronounced when a firm’s operation is complex. I also find that investors react more strongly to analyst forecast for firms headquartered in counties with low social capital, suggesting that the analyst’s role as an information intermediary is more valuable in this setting. Additionally, I employ the relocation of firms headquarters to better establish causality. The results are robust to regional fixed effect, accounting quality, management guidance, analyst fixed effect, and alternative measure of social capital. In sum, these findings suggest that social capital is an important factor that affects analysts forecast accuracy and informativenesss

Forward Attention in Sequence-to-sequence Acoustic Modelling for Speech Synthesis

This paper proposes a forward attention method for the sequenceto- sequence acoustic modeling of speech synthesis. This method is motivated by the nature of the monotonic alignment from phone sequences to acoustic sequences. Only the alignment paths that satisfy the monotonic condition are taken into consideration at each decoder timestep. The modified attention probabilities at each timestep are computed recursively using a forward algorithm. A transition agent for forward attention is further proposed, which helps the attention mechanism to make decisions whether to move forward or stay at each decoder timestep. Experimental results show that the proposed forward attention method achieves faster convergence speed and higher stability than the baseline attention method. Besides, the method of forward attention with transition agent can also help improve the naturalness of synthetic speech and control the speed of synthetic speech effectively.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Published in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing 2018 (ICASSP2018

Correcting for the solar wind in pulsar timing observations: the role of simultaneous a nd l ow-frequency observations

The primary goal of the pulsar timing array projects is to detect ultra-low-frequency gravitational waves. The pulsar data sets are affected by numerous noise processes including varying dispersive delays in the interstellar medium and from the solar wind. The solar wind can lead to rapidly changing variations that, with existing telescopes, can be hard to measure and then remove. In this paper we study the possibility of using a low frequency telescope to aid in such correction for the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) and also discuss whether the ultra-wide-bandwidth receiver for the FAST telescope is sufficient to model the solar wind variations. Our key result is that a single wide-bandwidth receiver can be used to model and remove the effect of the solar wind. However, for pulsars that pass close to the Sun such as PSR J1022+1022, the solar wind is so variable that observations at two telescopes separated by a day are insufficient to correct the solar wind effect.Comment: accepted by RA

2-(2-Pyrrolidinio)-1H-benzimidazol-3-ium dinitrate

In the title compound, C11H15N3 2+·2NO3 −, one of the imidazole N atoms and the N atom of the pyrrolidine ring are protonated. The pyrrolidine ring adopts an envelope conformation, with the C atom carrying the benzoimidazolium substituent as the flap atom. In the crystal structure, cations and anions are linked through N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, forming chains that run parallel to the c axis

Integrated Deep and Shallow Networks for Salient Object Detection

Deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based salient object detection methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance and outperform those unsupervised methods with a wide margin. In this paper, we propose to integrate deep and unsupervised saliency for salient object detection under a unified framework. Specifically, our method takes results of unsupervised saliency (Robust Background Detection, RBD) and normalized color images as inputs, and directly learns an end-to-end mapping between inputs and the corresponding saliency maps. The color images are fed into a Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNN) adapted from semantic segmentation to exploit high-level semantic cues for salient object detection. Then the results from deep FCNN and RBD are concatenated to feed into a shallow network to map the concatenated feature maps to saliency maps. Finally, to obtain a spatially consistent saliency map with sharp object boundaries, we fuse superpixel level saliency map at multi-scale. Extensive experimental results on 8 benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches with a margin.Comment: Accepted by IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) 201