DIVIDEND POLICY DECISIONS AND SHARE PRICES RELATIONSHIP

Dividend policy is about a company’s decision related to the retention of profit and distribution of profit. In this study, the objective is to understand the effects of dividend policy on share prices for the selected companies in the Indonesian stock exchange. The findings of the study are that higher dividend yield stocks along with higher pre-tax risk adjusted returns give investor some compensation for the disadvantageous position of tax return. The findings are matching with the Brennan’s model (Brennan, 1970). The findings of the study also pointed out that increase in a company’s stock trading volume influence the share prices and investors who wanted current investment income owned shares in high dividend payout firms. Free cash flow is causing conflict between management and shareholders and this is another important finding of the study. Overall, results shows that a company’s dividend policy influence its share prices

User Intention towards a Music Streaming Service: A Thailand Case Study

This paper presents a novel acceptance model for an online music streaming scenario of Thailand. The music streaming industry has been gaining in popularity in the recent times.  This research has been conducted in order to measure the user attitude towards the use of this relatively new service using a modified version of the popular Technology Acceptance Model. We try to identify the most popular music-streaming service of Thailand and also the factors that affect the use of such a service. Data has been collected in the form of an online questionnaire survey from more than 300 participants for the purpose of model building and validation. A subsequent regression analysis carried out on the proposed model explains more than 60 percent of the variance of the dependent variable i.e. Behavioral Intention in our case to the predictor variables Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Perceived Enjoyment and Perceived Satisfaction Level. The results show that Perceived Enjoyment and Perceived satisfaction are the two strongest predictors for Behavioral Intention which is quite different from that of the utilitarian type of information systems.Keywords: Music streaming, TAM, hedonic information systems, regressio

Big Data in Smart-Cities: Current Research and Challenges

Smart-cities are an emerging paradigm containing heterogeneous network infrastructure, ubiquitous sensing devices, big-data processing and intelligent control systems. Their primary aim is to improve the quality of life of the citizens by providing intelligent services in a wide variety of aspects like transportation, healthcare, entertainment, environment, and energy. In order to provide such services, the role of big-data and its analysis is extremely important as it enables to obtain valuable insights into the large data generated by the smart-cities.  In this article, we investigate the state-of-art research efforts directed towards big-data analytics in a smart-city context. Specifically, first we present a big-data centric taxonomy for the smart-cities to bring forth a generic overview of the importance of big-data paradigm in a smart-city environment. This is followed by the presentation of a top-level snapshot of the commonly used big-data analytical platforms. Due to the heterogeneity of data being collected by the smart-cities, often with conflicting processing requirements, suitable analytical techniques depending upon the data type are also suggested. In addition to this, a generic four-tier big-data framework comprising of the sensing hub, storage hub, processing hub and application hub is also proposed that can be applied in any smart-city context. This is complemented by providing the common big-data applications in a smart-city and presentation of ten selected case studies of smart-cities across the globe. Finally, the open challenges are highlighted in order to give future research directions

G.1070 Model Extension at Full HD Resolution for VP9/HEVC Codec

HD video streaming, which is gaining in popularity these days requires a large amount of bandwidth. This has resulted in the emergence of newer codecs like H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and VP9 from Google. These codecs are supposed to provide an excellent video compression to quality ratio. ITU-T describes a standardised parametric model called the G.1070 Opinion Model, which estimates the Quality of Experience (QoE) of any multimedia content. The model estimates three parameters viz. the speech quality alone (Sq), the video quality alone (Vq) and the overall multimedia quality (M q) of the input video. However, it needs to be trained separately for different codecs, video formats and certain other parameters, which can be obtained by carrying out suitable subjective tests. Our contribution in this paper is threefold. First, we carry out a subjective test according to the Recommendation P.910 to estimate the video quality for VP9 codec. Second, for the first time we use the results obtained from the subjective test to find out a set of coefficients that enables us to extend the G.1070 model for VP9 codec at Full HD resolution. Third, we provide an answer as to which is the better codec from H.265/HEVC and VP9 by evaluating their performance against scores obtained from different standard objective tests like the G.1070 model, Video Quality Metric (VQM) model and the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) model

B-physics constraints on baryon number violating couplings: grand unification or R-parity violation

We investigate the role that baryon number violating interactions may play in $B$ phenomenology. Present in various grand unified theories, supersymmetric theories with R-parity violation and composite models, a diquark state could be quite light. Using the data on B decays as well as $B - {\bar B}$ mixing, we find strong constraints on the couplings that such a light diquark state may have with the Standard Model quarks.Comment: 19 pages, latex, no figures, 13 tables include

Tumor-induced osteomalacia: experience from three tertiary care centers in India

Tumor-induced osteomalacia (TIO) is a rare paraneoplastic syndrome characterized by recalcitrant hypophosphatemia. Reports from the Indian subcontinent are scarce, with most being single center experiences involving few patients. Herein, we conducted a retrospective analysis of 30 patients of TIO diagnosed at three tertiary care hospitals in India. Patients with persistent hypophosphatemia (despite correction of hypovitaminosis D), normocalcemia, elevated alkaline phosphatase, low TmP/GFR and elevated or ‘inappropriately normal’ FGF23 levels were labeled as having TIO. They were sequentially subjected to functional followed by anatomical imaging. Patients with a well-localized tumor underwent excision; others were put on phosphorous and calcitriol supplementation. The mean age at presentation was 39.6 years with female:male ratio of 3:2. Bone pain (83.3%) and proximal myopathy (70%) were the chief complaints; 40% of cases had fractures. The mean delay in diagnosis was 3.8 years. Tumors were clinically detectable in four patients (13.3%). The mean serum phosphate was 0.50 mmol/L with a median serum FGF23 level of 518 RU/mL. Somatostatin receptor-based scintigraphy was found to be superior to FDG-PET in tumor localization. Lower extremities were the most common site of the tumor (72%). Tumor size was positively correlated with serum FGF23 levels. Twenty-two patients underwent tumor resection and 16 of them had phosphaturic mesenchymal tumors. Surgical excision led to cure in 72.7% of patients whereas disease persistence and disease recurrence were seen in 18.2% and 9.1% of cases, respectively. At the last follow-up, serum phosphate in the surgically treated group was significantly higher than in the medically managed group

A Survey of Standardized Approaches towards the Quality of Experience Evaluation for Video Services: An ITU Perspective

Over the past few years there has been an exponential increase in the amount of multimedia data being streamed over the Internet. At the same time, we are also witnessing a change in the way quality of any particular service is interpreted, with more emphasis being given to the end-users. Thus, silently there has been a paradigm shift from the traditional Quality of Service approach (QoS) towards a Quality of Experience (QoE) model while evaluating the service quality. A lot of work that tries to evaluate the quality of audio, video, and multimedia services over the Internet has been done. At the same time, research is also going on trying to map the two different domains of quality metrics, i.e., the QoS and QoE domain. Apart from the work done by individual researchers, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has been quite active in this area of quality assessment. This is obvious from the large number of ITU standards that are available for different application types. The sheer variety of techniques being employed by ITU as well as other researchers sometimes tends to be too complex and diversified. Although there are survey papers that try to present the current state of the art methodologies for video quality evaluation, none has focused on the ITU perspective. In this work, we try to fill up this void by presenting up-to-date information on the different measurement methods that are currently being employed by ITU for a video streaming scenario. We highlight the outline of each method with sufficient detail and try to analyze the challenges being faced along with the direction of future research

A No-Reference Modular Video Quality Prediction Model for H.265/HEVC and VP9 Codecs on a Mobile Device

We propose a modular no-reference video quality prediction model for videos that are encoded with H.265/HEVC and VP9 codecs and viewed on mobile devices. The impairments which can affect video transmission are classified into two broad types depending upon which layer of the TCP/IP model they originated from. Impairments from the network layer are called the network QoS factors, while those from the application layer are called the application/payload QoS factors. Initially we treat the network and application QoS factors separately and find out the 1 : 1 relationship between the respective QoS factors and the corresponding perceived video quality or QoE. The mapping from the QoS to the QoE domain is based upon a decision variable that gives an optimal performance. Next, across each group we choose multiple QoS factors and find out the QoE for such multifactor impaired videos by using an additive, multiplicative, and regressive approach. We refer to these as the integrated network and application QoE, respectively. At the end, we use a multiple regression approach to combine the network and application QoE for building the final model. We also use an Artificial Neural Network approach for building the model and compare its performance with the regressive approach