Identity Of Owner Research Articles

The song tomb fresco (宋墓壁画) in Panle village of Hancheng City (韩城盘乐村): The medicine-preparation picture (备药图)

A song tomb was discovered in Panle village(盘乐村) of Hancheng city(韩城), Shaanxi Province(陕西省) in 2009. Although it was not of high standard, the tomb contained extremely exquisite frescoes with striking contents. The relation between the identity of the tomb owner and the frescoes had been discussed by scholars, while this paper focused on the social status of doctors in the Song dynasty(宋朝) and the medical scenes reflected in the frescoes, to form different perspectives toward the profession of the tomb owner and the properties of the frescoes.

Identity of large owner, regulation and bank risk in developing countries

This paper examines the impacts of bank owners and national bank regulation on the risk-taking of unlisted and listed banks in developing countries. National bank regulations reduce bank risk in 43 developing countries after controlling the shareholding level of large owners, other bank-level characteristics and country-level factors. Banks with large owners (governments, industrial companies, and foreigners) take less risk than other banks in developing countries when national regulation is considered. However, the marginal effect of regulation on bank risk varies with the identity of the large owner. National regulation and certain large bank owners (industrial companies and financial companies) have positive joint effects on bank risk. Regulations on capital adequacy, activity restriction, external auditing requirement, depositor protection scheme, and information disclosure are efficient in reducing bank risk. National bank regulations improve bank asset quality, boost liquidity and decrease bank sensitivity to market risk whilst they also increase management costs and hamper profitability of banks.

What determines the severity of tunneling in China?

This study contextualizes the agency theory perspective in the Chinese setting to better understand the determinants of tunneling by controlling shareholders, a well-known form of principal-principal (PP) conflicts in corporate governance. Specifically, we examine how owner identity, managerial agency, and subnational institutional environments individually and collectively shape the severity of tunneling in Chinese publicly listed firms from 2005 to 2010. The empirical analysis shows that local governments and private enterprises tunneled more wealth from their respective listed subsidiaries than did central government agencies. Further, the severity of tunneling was greater in companies with higher managerial agency costs, especially those controlled by local governments. Finally, the intensity of tunneling was found to be negatively associated with the institutional quality of the subnational regions in which the listed firms resided, particularly those controlled by private entities. Our study serves to enrich the burgeoning literature on PP conflicts in corporate governance research.

Factors affecting the dominance hierarchy dynamics in a hummingbird assemblage.

Intra and interspecific competition for nectar play an important role in hummingbird communities. Larger sized species usually exclude smaller species from the rich floral resources. However, it has been recently postulated that the competitive advantages of a large body size decline as the evolutionary distance between the contending species increases. In this study, we analyzed dominance hierarchy dynamics in a hummingbird assemblage in central Mexico. By monitoring hummingbird territories established in three plant species through 1 year, we assessed the effects of energy within territories and the territory owners identity in the frequency of inter and intraspecific encounters. We also evaluated if these factors affect the dominance of larger species when they compete against smaller distantly related contenders. Our results show that their frequency of intraspecific encounters was related with the identity of the territory’s owner. On the contrary, the frequency of interspecific encounters was related with both the territory and the identity of the territory’s owner. We did not find a significant difference between the number of encounters dominated by larger and smaller species and their contenders. However, the increase in genetic distance between contenders was positively associated with a higher frequency of encounters dominated by small hummingbirds. Our results showed that the ecological factors and evolutionary relationships among contenders play important roles in the dominance hierarchy dynamics.

Como qualificar os dados pessoais? Uma perspectiva teórica e normativa da União Europeia em face dos gigantes da Internet

Propósito – O presente artigo tem por objetivo debater o conceito de dados pessoais, a partir da legislação europeia, perpassando por temas relativos à proteção e à comercialização.
 Metodologia – Trata-se de pesquisa teórica e jurídica, na qual, a partir do debate do valor dos dados pessoais produzidos pelos usuários na internet, discutem-se suas possíveis características jurídicas. Isso ocorre por meio da análise do fenômeno da monetização dos dados pessoais em contraste com as visões decorrentes das teorias realistas e personalistas. No plano da análise documental, é explorada a legislação da União Europeia (Carta Europeia de Direitos Fundamentais, Regulamento Geral sobre Proteção de Dados – Regulamento (UE) 2016/679, de 27 de abril de 2016 – e a legislação francesa. São analisados, ainda, casos judiciais concretos. 
 Resultados – É analisada e testada uma categorização das teorias jurídicas acerca do conceito de dados pessoais: teorias realistas; e teorias personalistas. As teorias realistas qualificam os dados pessoais como bens ou produtos, que podem ser de propriedade dos usuários, dos operadores ou do coletivo. Já as teorias personalistas cuidam da proteção dos dados e das pessoas que os produzem, bem como de sua privacidade, uma vez que tais dados carregam traços de sua identidade. O artigo testa e concluir positivamente pelo uso dessa categorização teórica.
 Implicações práticas – O trabalho pretende fornecer uma contribuição para refletir sobre os limites e as possibilidades de tratamento dos dados pessoais na era digital. Revela-se que esse tratamento pode ter uma característica mais econômica e patrimonialista, ou proteger a identidade do indivíduo contida nos dados produzidos. O propósito é fortalecer o debate sobre o poder de consentimento ao uso de dados pessoais, tanto em prol do empoderamento técnico e jurídico das pessoas, quanto sobre a possibilidade de controle sobre seus dados individuais e coletivos.
 Originalidade – A originalidade se traduz no fato do artigo evidenciar uma pesquisa sobre um tema crucial do direito, com forte implicação para todos os países. Não existe artigo publicado na língua portuguesa sobre essa temática, com o presente enfoque. Tal pesquisa foi realizada a partir da realidade europeia, listando os principais modos de possíveis de uso dos dados pessoais. Porém, ela evidencia um quadro teórico que é útil para pensar sobre a realidade brasileira e de outros países, também.

A NOVEL DIGITAL VIDEO WATERMARKING TECHNIQUE BASED ON WAVELET, SVD AND CZ-TRANSFORM

Digital Watermarking is a technology of embedding data into digital multimedia content to verify the credibility of the content or to recognize the identity of digital content owner. To identify the ownership of the digital content a new digital video watermarking algorithm is proposed. The proposed algorithm divides frames of a cover video into three colour bands of red, green and blue. Then the accompanying three tasks are performed on every one of three colour bands independently. Initially, each colour band is divided into blocks of small sizes and afterward the entropy of each block is computed. At this step, a threshold is found based on the average entropy of all blocks and following is applied to all blocks associated with lower entropy than the threshold. A wavelet representation of each block is given by applying a discrete wavelet transform. Then Singular value decomposition, orthogonal-triangular decomposition, and a chirp z-transform are used to embed a watermark on the cover video. To check the robustness of the algorithm different signal processing attacks are applied on watermarked video. The Proposed algorithm is compared with singular value decomposition based blind watermarking algorithm. Experimental results shows that proposed algorithm outperforms the singular value decomposition based blind watermarking algorithm quantitatively in term of PSNR.

Defining Ownership: An empirical assessment of the ownership measures

AbstractOwnership is considered to be one of the crucial governance mechanisms; however, there have been no systematic attempts at validating the construct and measures used to operationalize ownership. We review the current understanding of ownership and the measures used by each perspective, namely blockholder/dispersed shareholder perspective, owner identity perspective, and aggregated ownership perspective. We thereafter critique each of these perspectives, offer hypotheses regarding their validity, and empirically assess each ownership measure vis‐à‐vis firm performance outcomes. We utilize a sample of 3,990 US firms to test our hypotheses and find no consistent results for the blockholder measure, or for the owner identity measure. However, the aggregated ownership measure consistently accounts for significant increases in explanation of variance in firm performance. Copyright © 2018 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A hand-based biometric system in visible light for mobile environments

The analysis of the shape and geometry of the human hand has long represented an attractive field of research to address the needs of digital image forensics. Over recent years, it has also turned out to be effective in biometrics, where several innovative research lines are pursued. Given the widespread diffusion of mobile and portable devices, the possibility of checking the owner identity and controlling the access to the device by the hand image looks particularly attractive and less intrusive than other biometric traits. This encourages new research to tacklethe present limitations. The proposed work implements the complete architecture of a mobile hand recognition system, which uses the camera of the mobile device for the acquisition of the hand in visible light spectrum. The segmentation of the hand starts from the detection of the convexities and concavities defined by the fingers, and allows extracting 57 different features from the hand shape. The main contributions of the paper develop along two directions. First, dimensionality reduction methods are investigated, in order to identify subsets of features including only the most discriminating and robust ones. Second, different matching strategies are compared. The proposed method is tested over a dataset of hands from 100 subjects. The best obtained Equal Error Rate is 0.52%. Results demonstrate that discarding features that are more prone to distortions allows lighter processing, but also produces better performance than using the full set of features. This confirms the feasibility of such an approach on mobile devices, and further suggests to adopt it even in more traditional settings.

Dandelion

Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies that provide cryptographic verification of transactions. In recent years, they have transitioned from an academic research topic to a multi-billion dollar industry. Bitcoin is the best-known example of a cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies exhibit two key properties: egalitarianism and transparency. In this context, egalitarianism means that no single party wields disproportionate power over the network's operation. This diffusion of power is achieved by asking other network nodes (e.g., other Bitcoin users) to validate transactions, instead of the traditional method of using a centralized authority for this purpose. Moreover, all transactions and communications are managed over a fully-distributed, peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Cryptocurrencies are transparent in the sense that all transactions are verified and recorded with cryptographic integrity guarantees; this prevents fraudulent activity like double-spending of money. Transparency is achieved through a combination of clever cryptographic protocols and the publication of transactions in a ledger known as a blockchain . This blockchain serves as a public record of every financial transaction in the network. A property that Bitcoin does not provide is anonymity. Each user is identified in the network by a public, cryptographic key. If one were to link such a key to its owner's human identity, the owner's financial history could be partially learned from the public blockchain. In practice, it is possible to link public keys to identities through a number of channels, including the networking protocols on which Bitcoin is built. This is a massive privacy violation, and can be dangerous for deanonymized users.

Legitimating institutional choices in the forest ownership: building acceptability for jointly owned forests

Recent demographic changes in the forest-owner structure are suspected to have led to the increasing number of owners with no specific objectives for their forests. In addition, the continuous fragmentation of the forest holdings has increased the threat of the passiveness related to forest management. To decrease the tendency towards passiveness, new policy tools and initiatives have been suggested. In the Finnish context, the idea of an investor-based jointly owned forest has been introduced as facilitating the effective utilization of the forest resource. However, collective ownership has faced prejudice and scepticism among private forest owners. In order to expand, the forest owners need to see the idea of jointly owned forests as a socially legitimate. Thus, by adopting Van Leeuwen’s framework for analyzing the legitimation of new social practices, we examine how Finnish forest owners legitimate their participation in jointly owned forests. The qualitative data of the study consist of 20 in-depth interviews with private forest owners who have joined a jointly owned forest. Our study contributes to the recent discussion on jointly owned forests. We show how a change in the type of ownership results in moral, authoritative and rational justifications over the decision while simultaneously renewing the identity of the forest owner. Accordingly, we suggest that forest ownership is not only driven by rational prospects, but the moral and emotional nature of ownership should be better taken into account at the policy level and in structural designs when discussing the promotion of new types of forest ownership.

DIFFERENCES IN CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES’ PREFERENCES IN MAKING BID/NO BID DECISIONS

In today’s competitive business environment, bid/no bid decision is crucial for a construction company, as poorly made bidding decisions can have bad consequences. Given the fact that longevity of construction companies partly depends on how they make bidding decisions, determining the key factors for bid/no bid decisions has been the topic of research since mid-1950s. However, there is not much literature on how much value/weight different construction companies put on those factors, and more specifically if there are differences between different companies’ valuation of those factors. The purpose of this study is to investigate how differently the construction companies in the United States (US) value the key factors that are commonly utilized to make bid/no bid decisions. For this purpose, first, 14 key factors were determined based on the literature. Then, a survey instrument was sent to the US construction companies with different demographics such as size, revenue, sector, etc. to gather data to determine the values/weights they assign to those factors. For this, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used. AHP enabled pairwise comparisons to be made between the key factors that affect bidding decisions to deal with the complex relationships among those key factors. As a result of the AHP process, the weights for the key factors for bid/no bid decisions were determined for each company. The AHP results were combined with the demographic data of the construction companies and Kruskal-Wallis test was conducted to identify whether there is a statistically significant difference between the weight of importance of the key factors based on the contractor type, contractor sector and contractor size. The preliminary results showed that there is a statistically significant difference between the general contractors and subcontractors for weighing the importance of the owner identity key factor. Another significant difference was found within the contractor sector in the determination of the weight of importance of the project type key factor.

Value creation by block acquisitions and the importance of block owner identity

We examine stock price reactions to minority block purchases in German target companies. Our results document that the formation of new outside blocks leads to significant value creation for target shareholders, the size of the effect depending on the identity of the block acquirer. As blocks by strategic investors or activist sponsors entail significantly higher returns compared to pure financial block acquirers this result can be ascribed to a differentiated support of the monitoring hypothesis of agency theory. We also find a negative relation between target firms’ growth before the acquisition and the value generation by new block owners.

Found in the Museum: a Callot Soeurs Gown

This report is part of an ongoing long-term project researching three significant private donations to the costume collection at the Turtle Bay Exploration Park Museum in Redding, California. A brief summary provides some background and illustrates the donations’ place within the museum’s overall holdings. The primary focus of this report is a Callot Soeurs gown recently discovered in one of the donated collections, reported to have belonged to the California philanthropist Phoebe Hearst. The gown is compared to similar garments in other collections to correct its dating and style. Finally, the research considers, through historical context, the identity of the original owner.

Shepespuptah Idu According to Evidence from his Rock-Cut Tomb at Abusir South

The article discusses evidence uncovered by the mission of the Czech Institute of Egyptology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague at the necropolis of Abusir near Egypt’s capital Cairo. The tomb of Shepespuptah Idu was one of the four rock-cut tombs in the tomb complex of Princess Sheretnebty in Abusir South. It was uncovered in 2012 and its exploration continued until 2013. The identity of the tomb owner is known from hieratic inscriptions in his tomb chapel, which tell us about his name, nickname and titles. Shepespuptah held administrative titles associated with legal matters and royal offerings and the latter offices connect him with the economy of the royal funerary cults. The burial of Shepespuptah, which was found in his sarcophagus reveals interesting details about his health.

Mass spectrometry for structural analysis and quantification of the Major Urinary Proteins of the house mouse

The Major Urinary Proteins (MUPs) of the house mouse, Mus musculus domesticus, are 18–19kDa beta-barrel lipocalins that are involved in chemical communication between individuals. Many of them are excreted in urine where they play multiple roles, including coding of owner identity and transport, and slow release of bound volatile pheromones. One of them, darcin, is a pheromone in its own right and induces long-term memory for the identity and location of the scent mark owner. We have shown that mass spectrometric analysis of intact proteins, and their ion mobility behaviour, is capable of dissecting subtle structural differences between the members of this class of proteins. Moreover, mass spectrometric analysis of the intact proteins can contribute towards molecular phenotyping of MUPs. However, whilst allowing relative quantification, the ionisation propensity or gas phase properties of the individual MUPs may compromise absolute quantification. To solve the challenge of absolute quantification of MUP expression, we have designed and constructed a QconCAT built from endopeptidase LysC peptides that is capable of quantifying MUPs found in laboratory animal strains and some MUPs from wild caught individuals.

Owners and employees wages: a question of rent appropriability

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to studuy how the owner identity affects the investment in human capital, measured by wage intensity, as well as the moderating effect of firm’s performance.Design/methodology/approach– A balanced panel of 1,266 Spanish firms that respond to the Survey of Business Strategies for a five-years period was used, which represents a total of 6,330 observations. The dynamic models are estimated using the general method of moments.Findings– The state ownership has a positive and significant effect on specific wage intensity. However, when ownership is in private hands – foreign shareholders, other companies-, the effect is significant but negative. In firms with state ownership, greater economic performance has a negative influence on human capital investment. The results also reveal that while privately owned firms – those with foreign shareholders – tend to invest less in human capital, that tendency diminishes when the firm obtains higher economic performance.Practical implications– Different owners may have different objectives and decision-making horizons, which affect the firm’s investment on human capital. The results obtained regarding the owner identity-wage intensity relationship may serve as a reference for the non-listed firms of continental Europe. The influence of ownership structure on the firm’s decision to invest in human capital is conditioned by the firm’s economic performance.Originality/value– The paper reveals the importance of considering each of the firm’s owners, since their influence on wage intensity differs according to the identity of the owner. There are little empirical papers which analyze the impact of ownership structure on wage intensity, depending on the identity of firm’s owners in a civil context. Moreover, a dynamic panel model is needed due to the firm’s wage intensity does not adjust immediately as their wages are often referring to the previous year rather than being fully negotiated. This paper can be considered a step forward in understanding owner identity characteristics in Spanish-European context.

Defining Ownership: An empirical Assessment and Validation of the Ownership Measure

Ownership is considered to be one of the crucial governance mechanisms, however there are no systematic attempts at validating the measures operationalizing the ownership construct. We review the current understanding of ownership and the measures used by each perspective, namely blockholder, owner identity, and aggregated ownership. We thereafter offer hypotheses regarding the validity of each of these ownership measures and empirically assess each ownership measure vis-a-vis firm performance outcomes. We find no consistent results for the blockholder measure, some consistency for the owner identity measure, while the aggregated ownership measure accounts for the highest explanation of variance in performance outcomes.

Does Ownership Identity of Blockholders Matter: An Empirical Analysis of Publicly Listed Companies in New Zealand

Purpose – This study explores the nature of the relationships between ownership concentration, ownership identity, and financial performance in publicly listed companies in New Zealand. This study also investigates whether the ownership-performance nexus changes during the financial crisis period. Design/method/approach –panel data for the publicly listed companies for the period 2003 to 2009 obtained from NZX Deep Archive and the dynamic panel generalized method of moments (GMM)regression analysis was used to test the influence of ownership concentration, ownership identity on financial performance measured by Tobin’s Qandreturn on assets (ROA). Findings –Our findings support the view that ownership concentration affects financial performance. Results show that a higher ownership concentration leads to a lower market-based performance (measured by Tobin’s Q) and higher accounting-based performance (measured by ROA). We also foundevidence of owner identity having an impact on financial performance of the publicly listed companies in New Zealand. More “detached” level owners (institutional investors) have positive effect on market-based performance but negative effect on accounting-based performance. Whereas, more “involved” level owners (corporate investors) have negative effect on market-based performance. Our evidence shows that the effectownership identity have had on the financial performance declined during thefinancial crisis period due to the fact that different types of owners reduced their ownership concentration levels, thus resulting in a reduction in their social influence and expertise powers. Originality/value – Our findings contribute to our understanding regarding the nature of the relationships between ownership concentration, ownershipidentity,andfinancial performance. Our findings support the view that the identity of the shareholder(s) do matter in terms of company financial performance. We also report that corporate holdings are the most common type of investor holding in the New Zealand context.

Ubiquitous irisrecognition by means of mobiledevices

The worldwide diffusion of latest generations mobile devices, namely smartphones and tablets, represents the technological premise to a new wave of applications for which reliable owner identification is becoming a key requirement. This crucial task can be approached by means of biometrics (face, iris or fingerprint) by exploiting high resolution imaging sensors typically built-in on this class of devices, possibly resulting in a ubiquitous platform to verify owner identity during any kind of transaction involving the exchange of sensible data. Among the aforementioned biometrics, iris is known for its inherent invariance and accuracy, though only a few works have explored this topic on mobile devices. In this paper a comprehensive method for iris authentication on mobiles by means of spatial histograms is described. The proposed approach has been tested on the MICHE-I iris dataset, featuring subjects captured indoor and outdoor under controlled and uncontrolled conditions by means of built-in cameras aboard three among the most diffused smartphones/tablets on the market. The experimental results collected, provide an interesting insight about the readiness of mobile technology with regard to iris recognition.

Identification and characteristics of signature whistles in wild bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) from Namibia.

A signature whistle type is a learned, individually distinctive whistle type in a dolphin's acoustic repertoire that broadcasts the identity of the whistle owner. The acquisition and use of signature whistles indicates complex cognitive functioning that requires wider investigation in wild dolphin populations. Here we identify signature whistle types from a population of approximately 100 wild common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) inhabiting Walvis Bay, and describe signature whistle occurrence, acoustic parameters and temporal production. A catalogue of 43 repeatedly emitted whistle types (REWTs) was generated by analysing 79 hrs of acoustic recordings. From this, 28 signature whistle types were identified using a method based on the temporal patterns in whistle sequences. A visual classification task conducted by 5 naïve judges showed high levels of agreement in classification of whistles (Fleiss-Kappa statistic, κ = 0.848, Z = 55.3, P<0.001) and supported our categorisation. Signature whistle structure remained stable over time and location, with most types (82%) recorded in 2 or more years, and 4 identified at Walvis Bay and a second field site approximately 450 km away. Whistle acoustic parameters were consistent with those of signature whistles documented in Sarasota Bay (Florida, USA). We provide evidence of possible two-voice signature whistle production by a common bottlenose dolphin. Although signature whistle types have potential use as a marker for studying individual habitat use, we only identified approximately 28% of those from the Walvis Bay population, despite considerable recording effort. We found that signature whistle type diversity was higher in larger dolphin groups and groups with calves present. This is the first study describing signature whistles in a wild free-ranging T. truncatus population inhabiting African waters and it provides a baseline on which more in depth behavioural studies can be based.