Directed research: tax considerations for business and investments in Portugal and China

Since the last decade, the level of commercial and investment activities between Portugal and China has entered a new era in terms of intensity and prosperity. With the expectation that more entrepreneurs and investors from the two countries are elaborating their business plans to enter the market of the other country, this paper tries to answer the question of what are the tax related factors and reasonable planning strategies that should be considered to lower the effective tax burden, so as to achieve a higher return on capital and to promote the success of the business

Multi-Resolution Functional ANOVA for Large-Scale, Many-Input Computer Experiments

The Gaussian process is a standard tool for building emulators for both deterministic and stochastic computer experiments. However, application of Gaussian process models is greatly limited in practice, particularly for large-scale and many-input computer experiments that have become typical. We propose a multi-resolution functional ANOVA model as a computationally feasible emulation alternative. More generally, this model can be used for large-scale and many-input non-linear regression problems. An overlapping group lasso approach is used for estimation, ensuring computational feasibility in a large-scale and many-input setting. New results on consistency and inference for the (potentially overlapping) group lasso in a high-dimensional setting are developed and applied to the proposed multi-resolution functional ANOVA model. Importantly, these results allow us to quantify the uncertainty in our predictions. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed model enjoys marked computational advantages. Data capabilities, both in terms of sample size and dimension, meet or exceed best available emulation tools while meeting or exceeding emulation accuracy

Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and English Love Proverbs from the Perspective of Ontological Metaphor

With the advancement of technology, the communication among diverse cultures has grown rapidly, which brings more opportunities to people in all countries who can have mutual understandings and then fall in an international love. Nevertheless, as an abstract conception, love in different countries has metaphorical expressions basically. Therefore, the development of international love could be influenced by misunderstanding caused by cultural differences. The paper makes a contrastive analysis of Chinese and English love proverbs from the perspective of ontological metaphor. The result proves that it has further the cultural, economic and environmental reasons, as for the abstract conception of ‘love’, that the similarities and difference of Chinese and English nations’ cognition, thus enriching recognitions and comprehensions about “love” between these two nations and eliminating communication misunderstandings from cultural difference to a certain extent

A Case Study on Ren Rongrong’s Translation of Charlotte’s Web from the Perspective of Translational Poetics

Andre Lefevere believes that translators must adapt the translation to the requirements of the times in the translation of literary works, so the language of the translation is inevitably manipulated by the dominant poetics. Children’s literature is a work that is instructive to children and can arouse children’s interest in reading, whose language requires vitality and attractiveness, therefore the linguistic level of children’s literature translation is bound to be manipulated by translational poetics. In the light of Levefere’s poetics of translation, the paper attempts to analyze Ren Rongrong’s translation of Charlotte’s Web and finds out that the translated version’s poetics have actually changed, including lexicon, syntax and rhetoric, to restore the characteristic language form of the original text. And it concludes amplification, literal translation and those translation methods which applied in it, with the desire for providing an innovative theoretical direction for the study of translation of children’s literature

The Network Of Interlocking Directorates And Firm Performance In Transition Economies: Evidence From China

Using a Chinese sample containing 8727 firm-years over the period from 2005 to 2010, we investigate the economic effect of interlocking directorate networks, and find that firms with central position measured by network centrality in interlocking directorate networks earn superior one- to three-year ahead performance measured by return on assets (ROA) and return on Sales (ROS). We also show that the economic effect of interlocking directorate network is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises (NSOEs) compared to state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Our evidence is important, because it shows that to some extent the interlocking directorate network can serve as an solution to the institutional voids which are derived from the reform in Chinese translation economy

Automated Segmentation of Pulmonary Lobes using Coordination-Guided Deep Neural Networks

The identification of pulmonary lobes is of great importance in disease diagnosis and treatment. A few lung diseases have regional disorders at lobar level. Thus, an accurate segmentation of pulmonary lobes is necessary. In this work, we propose an automated segmentation of pulmonary lobes using coordination-guided deep neural networks from chest CT images. We first employ an automated lung segmentation to extract the lung area from CT image, then exploit volumetric convolutional neural network (V-net) for segmenting the pulmonary lobes. To reduce the misclassification of different lobes, we therefore adopt coordination-guided convolutional layers (CoordConvs) that generate additional feature maps of the positional information of pulmonary lobes. The proposed model is trained and evaluated on a few publicly available datasets and has achieved the state-of-the-art accuracy with a mean Dice coefficient index of 0.947 $\pm$ 0.044.Comment: ISBI 2019 (Oral