A Behavioural Finance Explanation of a Gearing-ß Inverse Association Referencing Weill’s Liquidity Result (in English)

The authors investigated Arnold’s conjecture that Leverage (Financial Gearing) and Operating Gearing should be positively related to the equity ß of the Sharpe/Lintner CAPM. They find for a sample of the S&P 500 firms that have been on that index continuously for more than 15 years, that ß is negatively associated with Leverage and Operating Gearing. Using Weill’s results for transitional economies, the authors suggest that liquidity may provide an explanation for this anomalous ß-Gearing inversion. The implications are: that (1) one should revaluate the positive associations posited for Financial and Operating gearing with ß and (2) consider the possibility of managing liquidity as a way to affect ß.financial gearing; leverage; liquidity; beta

Code Completion with Neural Attention and Pointer Networks

Intelligent code completion has become an essential research task to accelerate modern software development. To facilitate effective code completion for dynamically-typed programming languages, we apply neural language models by learning from large codebases, and develop a tailored attention mechanism for code completion. However, standard neural language models even with attention mechanism cannot correctly predict the out-of-vocabulary (OoV) words that restrict the code completion performance. In this paper, inspired by the prevalence of locally repeated terms in program source code, and the recently proposed pointer copy mechanism, we propose a pointer mixture network for better predicting OoV words in code completion. Based on the context, the pointer mixture network learns to either generate a within-vocabulary word through an RNN component, or regenerate an OoV word from local context through a pointer component. Experiments on two benchmarked datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our attention mechanism and pointer mixture network on the code completion task.Comment: Accepted in IJCAI 201

Probability Based Logic Locking on Integrated Circuits

The demand of integrated circuits (IC)s are increasing and the industry has outsourced the fabrication process to untrusted environments. An adversary at these untrusted facilities can reverse engineer parts of the IC to reveal the original design. IC piracy and overproduction are serious issues that threaten the security and integrity of a system. These ICs can be copied illegally and altered to contain malicious hardware. The pirated ICs can be placed in consumer products which may harm the system or leak sensitive information. Hardware obfuscation is a technique used to protect the original design before it gets fabricated, tested, assembled, and packaged. Hardware obfuscation intends to hide or alter the original design of a circuit to prevent attackers from determining the true design. Logic locking is a type of hardware obfuscation technique where additional key gates are inserted into the circuit. Only the correct key can unlock the functionality of that circuit otherwise the system produces the wrong output. In an effort to hinder these threats on ICs, we have developed a probability-based logic locking technique to protect the design of a circuit. Our proposed technique called ProbLock can be applied to combinational and sequential circuits through a critical selection process. We used a filtering process to select the best location of key gates based on various constraints. The main constraint is based on gate probabilities in the circuit. Each step in the filtering process generates a subset of nodes for each constraint. We also integrated an anti-SAT technique into ProbLock to enhance the security against a specific boolean satisfiability (SAT) attack. We analyzed the correlation between each constraint and adjusted the strength of the constraints before inserting key gates. We adjusted an optimized ProbLock to have a small overhead but high security metric against SAT attacks. We have tested our algorithm on 40 benchmarks from the ISCAS ’85 and ISCAS ’89 suite. ProbLock is evaluated using a SAT attack on the benchmark and measuring how well the attack performs on the locked circuit. Finally, we compared ProbLock to other logic locking techniques and discussed future steps for this project

Very Long Baseline Array Imaging of Type-2 Seyferts with Double-Peaked Narrow Emission Lines: Searches for Sub-kpc Dual AGNs and Jet-Powered Outflows

This paper presents Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) observations of 13 double-peaked [O III] emission-line type-2 Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) at redshifts 0.06 < z < 0.41 (with a median redshift of z~0.15) identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Such double-peaked emission-line objects may result from jets or outflows from the central engine or from a dual AGN. The VLBA provides an angular resolution of <~10 pc at the distance of many of these galaxies, sufficient to resolve the radio emission from extremely close dual AGNs and to contribute to understanding the origin of double-peaked [O III] emission lines. Of the 13 galaxies observed at 3.6 cm (8.4 GHz), we detect six at a 1\sigma\ sensitivity level of ~0.15 mJy/beam, two of which show clear jet structures on scales ranging from a few milliarcseconds to tens of milliarcseconds (corresponding to a few pc to tens of pc at a median redshift of 0.15). We suggest that radio-loud double-peaked emission-line type-2 AGNs may be indicative of jet produced structures, but a larger sample of double-peaked [O III] AGNs with high angular resolution radio observations will be required to confirm this suggestion.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures; ApJ in pres

Removal of nutrients by sorption on activated alumina

The nutrient enrichment of surface, primarily impounded, water and the associated problems of accelerated eutrophication and prolific algal growth have become a nationwide concern. Phosphorus and nitrogen are considered to be the key elements in abating eutrophication and are contributed from many sources, natural and manmade; prominent among these is the discharge of domestic and industrial wastes. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the removal of nutrients, primarily phosphorus and nitrogen, with activated alumina using a continuous-flow pilot plant system. Specific objectives were the: development and construction of appropriate bench and field-scale pilot plant units utilizing the rapid mix-sedimentation and column operational modes; evaluation of the efficiency of nutrient removal from wastewater plant effluent; and investigation of the regeneration characteristics of the spent aluminas --Abstract, page ii