The Value Relevance of Dirty Surplus Accounting Flows in the Netherlands

Recently the Dutch financial reporting standard setters have taken steps to make dirty surplus accounting flows more visible to parties outside firms, either by eliminating their possibility or by requiring comprehensive income type statements. These steps are presumably based on the idea that dirty surplus accounting flows are value relevant to investors and hence have to be visible to them. Whether dirty surplus accounting flows are indeed value relevant is an empirical issue. This paper therefore explores both incremental and relative value relevance of various dirty surplus accounting flows for Dutch listed firms. We find evidence that dirty surplus goodwill write-offs in particular are relevant in explaining returns and that the clean surplus earnings perform better than the reported earnings over 1-year intervals. Taken together, these 1-year interval empirical results indeed imply that the Dutch managers in the period considered wrote-off value relevant information via dirty surplus accounting flows. Over longerterm intervals, dirty surplus items are not or negatively related to returns and reported income becomes more value relevant than clean surplus income.accounting;incomes;value relevance;Netherlands

Protein kinase A (PKA) phosphorylation of Shp2 inhibits its phosphatase activity and modulates ligand specificity.

Pathological cardiac hypertrophy (an increase in cardiac mass resulting from stress-induced cardiac myocyte growth) is a major factor underlying heart failure. Src homology 2 domain-containing phosphatase (Shp2) is critical for cardiac function as mutations resulting in loss of Shp2 catalytic activity are associated with congenital cardiac defects and hypertrophy. We have identified a novel mechanism of Shp2 inhibition that may promote cardiac hypertrophy. We demonstrate that Shp2 is a component of the A-kinase anchoring protein (AKAP)-Lbc complex. AKAP-Lbc facilitates protein kinase A (PKA) phosphorylation of Shp2, which inhibits Shp2 phosphatase activity. We have identified two key amino acids in Shp2 that are phosphorylated by PKA: Thr73 contributes a helix-cap to helix αB within the N-terminal SH2 domain of Shp2, whereas Ser189 occupies an equivalent position within the C-terminal SH2 domain. Utilizing double mutant PKA phospho-deficient (T73A/S189A) and phospho-mimetic (T73D/S189D) constructs, in vitro binding assays, and phosphatase activity assays, we demonstrate that phosphorylation of these residues disrupts Shp2 interaction with tyrosine-phosphorylated ligands and inhibits its protein tyrosine phosphatase activity. Overall, our data indicate that AKAP-Lbc integrates PKA and Shp2 signaling in the heart and that AKAP-Lbc-associated Shp2 activity is reduced in hypertrophic hearts in response to chronic β-adrenergic stimulation and PKA activation. Thus, while induction of cardiac hypertrophy is a multifaceted process, inhibition of Shp2 activity through AKAP-Lbc-anchored PKA is a previously unrecognized mechanism that may promote this compensatory response

A network approach for managing and processing big cancer data in clouds

Translational cancer research requires integrative analysis of multiple levels of big cancer data to identify and treat cancer. In order to address the issues that data is decentralised, growing and continually being updated, and the content living or archiving on different information sources partially overlaps creating redundancies as well as contradictions and inconsistencies, we develop a data network model and technology for constructing and managing big cancer data. To support our data network approach for data process and analysis, we employ a semantic content network approach and adopt the CELAR cloud platform. The prototype implementation shows that the CELAR cloud can satisfy the on-demanding needs of various data resources for management and process of big cancer data

VirtualHome: Simulating Household Activities via Programs

In this paper, we are interested in modeling complex activities that occur in a typical household. We propose to use programs, i.e., sequences of atomic actions and interactions, as a high level representation of complex tasks. Programs are interesting because they provide a non-ambiguous representation of a task, and allow agents to execute them. However, nowadays, there is no database providing this type of information. Towards this goal, we first crowd-source programs for a variety of activities that happen in people's homes, via a game-like interface used for teaching kids how to code. Using the collected dataset, we show how we can learn to extract programs directly from natural language descriptions or from videos. We then implement the most common atomic (inter)actions in the Unity3D game engine, and use our programs to "drive" an artificial agent to execute tasks in a simulated household environment. Our VirtualHome simulator allows us to create a large activity video dataset with rich ground-truth, enabling training and testing of video understanding models. We further showcase examples of our agent performing tasks in our VirtualHome based on language descriptions.Comment: CVPR 2018 (Oral

Neuroepithelial circuit formed by innervation of sensory enteroendocrine cells.

Satiety and other core physiological functions are modulated by sensory signals arising from the surface of the gut. Luminal nutrients and bacteria stimulate epithelial biosensors called enteroendocrine cells. Despite being electrically excitable, enteroendocrine cells are generally thought to communicate indirectly with nerves through hormone secretion and not through direct cell-nerve contact. However, we recently uncovered in intestinal enteroendocrine cells a cytoplasmic process that we named neuropod. Here, we determined that neuropods provide a direct connection between enteroendocrine cells and neurons innervating the small intestine and colon. Using cell-specific transgenic mice to study neural circuits, we found that enteroendocrine cells have the necessary elements for neurotransmission, including expression of genes that encode pre-, post-, and transsynaptic proteins. This neuroepithelial circuit was reconstituted in vitro by coculturing single enteroendocrine cells with sensory neurons. We used a monosynaptic rabies virus to define the circuit's functional connectivity in vivo and determined that delivery of this neurotropic virus into the colon lumen resulted in the infection of mucosal nerves through enteroendocrine cells. This neuroepithelial circuit can serve as both a sensory conduit for food and gut microbes to interact with the nervous system and a portal for viruses to enter the enteric and central nervous systems

Asymmetric interlimb transfer of concurrent adaptation to opposing dynamic forces

Interlimb transfer of a novel dynamic force has been well documented. It has also been shown that unimanual adaptation to opposing novel environments is possible if they are associated with different workspaces. The main aim of this study was to test if adaptation to opposing velocity dependent viscous forces with one arm could improve the initial performance of the other arm. The study also examined whether this interlimb transfer occurred across an extrinsic, spatial, coordinative system or an intrinsic, joint based, coordinative system. Subjects initially adapted to opposing viscous forces separated by target location. Our measure of performance was the correlation between the speed profiles of each movement within a force condition and an ‘average’ trajectory within null force conditions. Adaptation to the opposing forces was seen during initial acquisition with a significantly improved coefficient in epoch eight compared to epoch one. We then tested interlimb transfer from the dominant to non-dominant arm (D → ND) and vice-versa (ND → D) across either an extrinsic or intrinsic coordinative system. Interlimb transfer was only seen from the dominant to the non-dominant limb across an intrinsic coordinative system. These results support previous studies involving adaptation to a single dynamic force but also indicate that interlimb transfer of multiple opposing states is possible. This suggests that the information available at the level of representation allowing interlimb transfer can be more intricate than a general movement goal or a single perceived directional error

A new framework for consensus for discrete-time directed networks of multi-agents with distributed delays

Copyright @ 2012 Taylor & FrancisIn this article, the distributed consensus problem is considered for discrete-time delayed networks of dynamic agents with fixed topologies, where the networks under investigation are directed and the time-delays involved are distributed time delays including a single or multiple time delay(s) as special cases. By using the invariance principle of delay difference systems, a new unified framework is established to deal with the consensus for the discrete-time delayed multi-agent system. It is shown that the addressed discrete-time network with arbitrary distributed time delays reaches consensus provided that it is strongly connected. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the proposed methods.This work was supported in part by City University of Hong Kong under Grant 7008114, the Royal Society of the UK, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 60774073 and 61074129, and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China under Grant BK2010313

The Value Relevance of Dirty Surplus Accounting Flows in the Netherlands

Recently the Dutch financial reporting standard setters have taken steps to make dirty surplus accounting flows more visible to parties outside firms, either by eliminating their possibility or by requiring comprehensive income type statements. These steps are presumably based on the idea that dirty surplus accounting flows are value relevant to investors and hence have to be visible to them. Whether dirty surplus accounting flows are indeed value relevant is an empirical issue. This paper therefore explores both incremental and relative value relevance of various dirty surplus accounting flows for Dutch listed firms. We find evidence that dirty surplus goodwill write-offs in particular are relevant in explaining returns and that the clean surplus earnings perform better than the reported earnings over 1-year intervals. Taken together, these 1-year interval empirical results indeed imply that the Dutch managers in the period considered wrote-off value relevant information via dirty surplus accounting flows. Over longerterm intervals, dirty surplus items are not or negatively related to returns and reported income becomes more value relevant than clean surplus income.

Towards robust unstructured turbomachinery large eddy simulation

This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compfluid.2015.06.017Industrial legacy codes usually have had long pedigrees within companies, and are deeply embedded into design processes. As the affordability and availability of computing power has increased, these codes have found themselves pushed into service as large eddy simulation solvers. The approximate Riemann solver of Roe, which is frequently used as the core method in such legacy codes, is shown to need much user care when adopted as the discretisation scheme for large eddy simulation. A kinetic energy preserving (KEP) scheme—which retains the same advantageous stencil and communications halo as the original Roe scheme—is instead implemented and tested. The adaptations of code required to switch between the two schemes were found to be extremely straightforward. As the KEP scheme intrinsically bounds the growth of the kinetic energy, it is significantly more stable than the classical non-dissipative schemes. This means that the expensive smoothing terms of the Roe scheme are not always necessary. Instead, an explicit subgrid scale turbulence model can be sensibly applied. As such, a range of mixed linear–non-linear turbulence models are tested. The performance of the KEP scheme is then tested against that of the Roe for canonical flows and engine-realistic turbine blade cutback trailing edge cases. The new KEP scheme is found to perform better than the original in all cases. A range of mesh topologies: hexahedral; prismatic; and tetrahedral; are also tested with both schemes, and the KEP scheme is again found to perform significantly better on all mesh types for these flows.This work was supported by an iCASE studentship from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, via Rolls-Royce plc. The funding from both organisations is gratefully acknowledged