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    THE EFFECT OF DILUENT GAS AND RAPID THERMAL ANNEALING ON THE PROPERTIES OF PLASMA-DEPOSITED SILICON-NITRIDE FILMS

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    The effects of diluent gases on the deposition rate, content of hydrogen bonds, etch rate, refractive index and fixed charge density of plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition silicon nitride films have been studied for various reactant gas compositions. Post-rapid thermal annealing (RTA) of as-grown films was also performed in the temperature range 500-1100-degrees-C. From the results of optical emission spectroscopy it is suggested that metastable N2 molecules can contribute to silicon nitride film formation as an extra nitrogen source. Metastable N2 molecules may enhance the dissociation of other feed gases. Lower refractive index, higher deposition rate and higher N-H bond density were obtained for silicon nitride films grown in N2 diluent as compared with films grown in H-2 diluent. As the RTA temperature was increased, the content of hydrogen bonds was reduced and the film density increased. Hence the etch rate of silicon nitride films in buffered HF solution decreased with increasing RTA temperature. A minimum value of fixed charge density was obtained at the RTA temperature of 900-degrees-C for all the films investigated

    Bankruptcy prediction using a discrete-time duration model incorporating temporal and macroeconomic dependencies

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    The purpose of this paper is to build in alternative method of bankruptcy prediction that accounts for some deficiencies in previous approaches that resulted in poor out-of-sample performances. Most of the traditional approaches suffer from restrictive presumptions and structural limitations and fail to reflect the panel properties of financial statements and/or the common macroeconomic influence. Extending the work of Shuinway (2001), we present a duration model with time-varying covariates and a baseline hazard function incorporating macroeconomic dependencies. Using the proposed model, we investigate how the hazard rates of listed companies in the Korea Stock Exchange (KSE) are affected by changes in the macroeconomic environment and by time-varying covariate vectors that show unique financial characteristics of each company. We also investigate out-of-sample forecasting performances of the suggested model and demonstrate improvements produced by allowing temporal and macroeconomic dependencies. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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