A pressão coronária (às vezes) mente. . .

Comment on: Comparative analysis of fractional flow reserve and instantaneous wave-free ratio: Results of a five-year registry. [Rev Port Cardiol. 2018]info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A model of university choice: an exploratory approach

In order to attract the best students, institutions of higher education need to understand how students select colleges and universities (Kotler and Fox, 1995). Understanding the choice process of a university is an instrument with high potential for developing universities marketing strategies (Plank and Chiagouris, 1997). Although many studies have tried to investigate which criteria students use to select a college or university, few have tried to analyse this trough a model that allows the interaction of all these criteria. This study presents a model of university choice, analysed through structural equations modelling using the Partial Least Squares approach.Marketing; student recruitment and selection; high institution development; strategic planning

WAGE DIFFERENTIALS BY FIRM SIZE: THE EFFICIENCY WAGE TEST IN A DEVOLOPING COUNTRY

Using data from the Brazilian Labor Monthly Survey (PME/ IBGE) for the years of 2006 and 2007, the paper investigates if the wage differential by firm size in Brazil can be explained by the predictions of the Efficiency Wage Theory. It is adopted a Switching Regression Model to estimate if large size companies pay a higher wage premium for dispended labor effort, as compared to smaller enterprises. The results proved the EW predictions. Besides the positive relation between effort and wage differentials by firm size, the results also showed that such wage differences favors larger firms, as compared to smaller ones, because they tend to remunerate better more skilled employees with long term contracts.

THE DETERMINANTS of INITIAL STOCK REPURCHASES

We present univariate and multivariate evidence to show that firms which engage in initial stock repurchases have some specific economic and financial attributes when compared to size-and industry-matched firms. We find that initial repurchase firms are younger, have lower leverage and operating risk, and higher payouts, operating cash flows, profitability and market-to-book than matched non-repurchase firms. Compared to secondary or “seasoned” repurchase matched firms, these initial repurchase firms are also younger and have higher cash, profitability, sales growth and market-to-book, as well as lower payouts, leverage and retained earnings. Therefore, we analyze the determinants and motivations that may explain why firms repurchase their own stock for the first time by studying the theoretical hypotheses found in the financial literature that are most important in explaining initial stock repurchases. The results support the free cash flow and risk reduction signaling hypotheses and the flexibility motivation for conducting stock repurchases. We do not find strong support for any other theoretical explanations of stock repurchases, such as undervaluation signaling, timing, tax effects and options and dilution hypotheses.Stock Repurchases, Initial Stock Repurchases; Payout Policy, Theoretical Hypotheses.

THE CAPITAL and CASH FLOW SOURCES and USES of INITIAL STOCK REPURCHASE FIRMS

This study investigates the capital sources and uses of firms that are conducting stock repurchase transactions for the first time, both prior and subsequent to those financial operations. We hypothesize that this capital and cash flow analysis may shed some light about the relative importance of some financial motivations and theoretical hypotheses in explaining initial stock repurchases. In particular, our findings support the risk reduction signaling and the dividends substitution hypotheses as the primary drivers for the initial stock repurchase decision. We also find that the importance of the most theoretical explanations and financial motivations vary according to whether initial repurchase firms are also conducting acquisitions and significant divestitures, distributing cash dividends, relying on external financing and using debt or cash reserves.Stock Repurchases, Initial Stock Repurchases; Sources of Financing; Cash Flow Distribution.

Quasi-One-Dimensional Quantum Ferrimagnets

We present an exact diagonalization study of the half-filled Hubbard model on bipartite quasi-one-dimensional lattices. In particular, we emphasize the dependence of the ferrimagnetic ground state properties, and its associated magnetic excitations, on the Coulomb repulsion U.Comment: 6 pages, 12 figures, to be published in Physica A: special issue in honor of Prof. Bernard Sapova

Using Generic Summarization to Improve Music Information Retrieval Tasks

In order to satisfy processing time constraints, many MIR tasks process only a segment of the whole music signal. This practice may lead to decreasing performance, since the most important information for the tasks may not be in those processed segments. In this paper, we leverage generic summarization algorithms, previously applied to text and speech summarization, to summarize items in music datasets. These algorithms build summaries, that are both concise and diverse, by selecting appropriate segments from the input signal which makes them good candidates to summarize music as well. We evaluate the summarization process on binary and multiclass music genre classification tasks, by comparing the performance obtained using summarized datasets against the performances obtained using continuous segments (which is the traditional method used for addressing the previously mentioned time constraints) and full songs of the same original dataset. We show that GRASSHOPPER, LexRank, LSA, MMR, and a Support Sets-based Centrality model improve classification performance when compared to selected 30-second baselines. We also show that summarized datasets lead to a classification performance whose difference is not statistically significant from using full songs. Furthermore, we make an argument stating the advantages of sharing summarized datasets for future MIR research.Comment: 24 pages, 10 tables; Submitted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processin