471 research outputs found
The impact of shareholder litigation risk on income smoothing
No full textThis paper investigates whether and how shareholder litigation influences income smoothing. Using the ruling of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1999 as an exogenous shock to the threat of litigation, we find that the increasing difficulty of class action lawsuits decreases income smoothing. This finding is robust to different model specifications. We also show that such an effect is stronger for firms that are more likely to face greater pressure from the threat of shareholder litigation risk. Overall, our findings extend the literature on investigating how class action lawsuits can affect the motivation of income smoothing
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Dialoguing with the World: Xue Yiwei and His Traveling with Marco Polo
No full textThis essay introduces the author Xue Yiwei and his Traveling with Marco Polo, a creative collection that dialogues with Invisible Cities by the postmodern Italian writer Italo Calvino. While Calvino imagines a young Marco Polo describing the fantastic sights of fifty-five cities to an aging Kublai Khan, Xue Yiwei joins the conversation and provides a meticulous explication of each one of Calvino’s cities. Furthermore, Traveling with Marco Polo expands the imaginary cityscapes to include oblique commentaries on the past, present, and future of China as well as the profound meditation on the city as a microcosm of our world. The result is a daring literary experiment that is representative of Xue’s oeuvre overall: at once giving a powerful literary representation of modern Chinese history while engaging in dialogue with writers from all over the world
New Insights into Materialism and Conspicuous Consumption in China
No full textThis paper provides insights based on recent literature and findings that relate to materialism and conspicuous consumption among Chinese consumers. There is a specific focus on gender related issues and implications on consumer well-being. Our work is intended to assist in both conceptual and hypothesis development for other interested scholars.Peer reviewe
Exploring Causal Factors Influencing Enterprise Architecture Failure
No full textOrganizations have adopted Enterprise Architecture (EA) for managing their IT-landscape and ensuring coherence among projects and activities. There is much work about approaches, methods, and tools for EA based on the assumption that their use will create business value. However, the failure of many EA efforts results in the need to investigate the factors influencing EA failure in practice. In this paper, we used a literature review to identify ten EA failure factors. Then we employed the grey-DEMATEL method to explore and analyze the influence of the ten EA failure factors based on the input of five EA experts. The result shows that failure factors are not in isolation, and they can be divided into either causal or effect factors. The factors do not have equal importance but differ in the levels of influence. For the causal factors, the ranking from most to least important is the inability to handle complexity, lack of proven EA methodology, lack of EA knowledge, lack of communication, and lack of tools. For the effect factors, the factors are a lack of support, too high effort, lack of motivation, parallel processes, and unused artifacts. We recommend practitioners to pay more attention to the five causal factors in their EA efforts. Further research is needed to generalize the findings, to understand the dependencies among factors, and to take into account situational dependency of EA failure.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Information and Communication Technolog
Site-Specific Ground Motions for Dynamic Analyses in Regions of Lower Seismicity
No full text© 2022 Yiwei HUSite-specific dynamic analyses of structures have many advantages over traditional code spectrum procedures in regions of lower seismicity. The prime reason is that the site-specific response spectra and accelerograms are more realistic representations of earthquake actions for a structure located on a unique construction site. Developing site-specific ground motions requires a comprehensive understanding of regional seismic hazard analyses, soil condition analyses and site response analyses. Guidelines or facilities for performing site-specific dynamic analyses in accordance with the design code are unavailable to engineering practitioners in Australia.
The primary objective of this thesis is to develop a computationally effective method to generate response spectra and accelerograms for site-specific dynamic analysis in intraplate regions of lower seismicity, with a focus on the Southeastern Australia (SEA) region. Based on the proposed method, this thesis provides suites of ground motions in compliance with the Australian standard for direct engineering applications.
The conditional mean spectrum (CMS) methodology was first reviewed and its challenges for application in intraplate regions were overcome by employing a diversity of ground motion prediction expressions (GMPEs) and the uniform seismicity model. Three different schemes using a weighted averaging of candidate GMPEs were adopted, and a comparison of predictions demonstrated only minor differences confirming the robustness of the modelling.
The constructed CMS were targeted for sourcing ground motions to define seismic hazard at the bedrock level. The bedrock motions were amplified through soil column models to simulate site amplification effects. Subsoil information retrieved from multiple borehole records from the same site was sampled to construct soil column models to achieve conservative estimations of soil amplification ratio at the fundamental period of vibration of the structure to account for resonance. The sampling process involves closed-form expressions for determining the shear strain profile in a soil column considering degradation in the shear modulus of the soil in seismic conditions.
The applications of resultant site-specific response spectra and accelerograms, following a ground motion selection scheme proposed by the author, were demonstrated with nonlinear time history analysis for structural design and multiple stripe analysis for risk assessment.
This thesis is concluded with three outcomes: (1) a ground motion database for site-specific seismic design based on twenty sites that typify subsoil profiles in SEA, (2) an online program at https://quakeadvice.org/ for generating ground motions with user-defined borehole information, and (3) suites of ground motions for risk assessment of structures following the multiple stripe analysis method
UGent-T2K at the 2nd DialDoc Shared Task: A Retrieval-Focused Dialog System Grounded in Multiple Documents
No full textThis research received funding from the Flemish Government under the "Onderzoeksprogramma Artificiele Intelligentie (AI) Vlaanderen" programme. The first author was supported by China Scholarship Council (201806020194). We thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to improve our work
Dynamics and folding of single two-stranded coiled-coil peptides studied by fluorescent energy transfer confocal microscopy
No full textWe report single-molecule measurements on the folding and unfolding conformational equilibrium distributions and dynamics of a disulfide crosslinked version of the two-stranded coiled coil from GCN4. The peptide has a fluorescent donor and acceptor at the N termini of its two chains and a Cys disulfide near its C terminus. Thus, folding brings the two N termini of the two chains close together, resulting in an enhancement of fluorescent resonant energy transfer. End-to-end distance distributions have thus been characterized under conditions where the peptide is nearly fully folded (0 M urea), unfolded (7.4 M urea), and in dynamic exchange between folded and unfolded states (3.0 M urea). The distributions have been compared for the peptide freely diffusing in solution and deposited onto aminopropyl silanized glass. As the urea concentration is increased, the mean end-to-end distance shifts to longer distances both in free solution and on the modified surface. The widths of these distributions indicate that the molecules are undergoing millisecond conformational fluctuations. Under all three conditions, these fluctuations gave nonexponential correlations on 1- to 100-ms time scale. A component of the correlation decay that was sensitive to the concentration of urea corresponded to that measured by bulk relaxation kinetics. Thetrajectories provided effective intramolecular diffusion coefficients as a function of the end-to-end distances for the folded and unfolded states. Single-molecule folding studies provide information concerning the distributions of conformational states in the folded, unfolded, and dynamically interconverting states.Author manuscript. Published in final edited form as: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2000 November 21; 97(24): 13021-13026.The final published version of this article is located at: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/97/24/13021NIH GM54616; to William F. DeGradoNIH GM12592; to Robin M. HochstrasserNIH GM48130; to William F. Degrado and Robin M. HochstrasserThis work was supported by GM54616 (to W.F.D.), GM12592 (to R.M.H.) and GM48130 (to W.F.D. and R.M.H.) with instrumentation developed under RR01348. D.S.T. was supported by National Institutes of Health Grant NRSA F32-GM18589.Also available in PubMed Central. PMCID:PMC2717
Performance Enhancement with a Capacitor-Scaling Design for SSHC Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Interfaces
No full textPiezoelectric energy harvesting (PEH) has attracted much attention as an approach to exploit ambient vibrational energy to power self-sustained devices. Among the proposed interface circuits for PEH, Synchronized Switch Harvesting on Capacitor (SSHC) rectifier distinguishes itself since it achieves high power efficiency while requires no inductor. The power SSHC can extract is a function of the voltage flip efficiency. In previous studies the flip efficiency is given only under particular condition, which limits the analysis and design of SSHC circuits. This paper presents the derivation of a generic flip efficiency expression. From the result, a novel capacitor-scaling design is proposed which can reduce the total switched capacitance by up to 50% while achieving the same performance (or to enhance performance while maintaining the total capacitance). This is particularly preferred for a fully integrated design and can validated by simulations implemented in a 0.18 m. CMOS BCD technology.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Electronic Instrumentatio
A Nanopower 95.6% Efficiency Voltage Regulator with Adaptive Supply-Switching for Energy Harvesting Applications
No full textA nanopower highly efficient low-dropout (LDO) regulator for energy harvesting (EH) applications is presented in this paper. The LDO is fully autonomous with a bandgap reference (BGR) featuring a novel bandgap supply-switching (SS) topology, an over-voltage protection (OVP), a under-voltage lockout (UVLO) and control block to obtain stable output and robust cold-start. The system provides configurable voltage supply (1.1 \sim2V) for potential loads, while consuming as low as 66 nW power. The entire system achieves a peak power efficiency of 95.6% at Vout=2V and I-{\iota-{oad}}=100\muA.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Electronic Instrumentatio
Current and expected roles and capabilities of CIOS for the innovation and adoption of new technology
No full textGovernments across the word are under pressure to adopt new technologies and to innovate and transform their processes. Some governments have introduced the role of Chief Information Officer (CIO) to facilitate these innovations though adoption of new technologies. The traditional CIO role of improving operational efficiency is now shifting towards exploring new IT-enabled opportunities required in digital transformation. In this context, CIO capabilities are expanding to be more involved in administrative processes and digital transformation, however, their organizational role seem to lag behind. This paper is aimed at evaluating the current role of CIOs and to provide policy recommendations to strengthen their role. Data was collected during a session in which roles and capabilities of CIOs were discussed. In particular, we found that often the CIO was positioned as having an IT role, whereas a more organizational role was needed. CIOs should develop capabilities to support digital transformation and to develop architecture that is adaptive and agile. The expectations of the CIO and the role of the CIO need to be better aligned.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Information and Communication Technolog
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