With the large-scale construction and rapid development of underground engineering, a large number of underground engineering construction, such as tunnel and subway emerged. The geological structure of the tunnel is complex and the roc is fragmented. Tunnel seismic image is a new geophysical technique. This method has advantages such as high resolution, high reliability and obvious image chara...

BACKGROUND This paper reports an in-vitro study for evaluating the influence of the femoral tunnel orientation in anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) double-bundle reconstructions. METHODS This work describes the experimental protocol and results obtained for six cadaver knees using the FlashPoint optical system (Image Guided, Boulder, Colorado, USA) and a computer-assisted technique for the ela...

NSIS Quality of Service (QoS) signaling enables applications to perform QoS reservation along a data flow path. When the data flow path contains IP tunnel segments, NSIS QoS signaling has no effect within those tunnel segments. Therefore, the resulting tunnel segments could become the weakest QoS link and invalidate the QoS efforts in the rest of the end-to-end path. The problem with NSIS signa...

Social insects provide good model systems for testing trade-offs in decision-making because of their marked reproductive skew and the dilemma workers face when to reproduce. Attaining reproductive skew requires energy investment in aggression or fertility signaling, creating a trade-off between reproduction and dominance. This may be density-dependent because the cost of achieving dominance may...

excess pore pressure under seismic loadings has always been a main concern in geotechnical engineering practices. the phenomenon in soil can cause an effective stress and hence cause the shear strength of the soil to decrease considerably and large deformations to occur in the area. generally, increases in pore pressure occur in un-drained conditions. if it is formed, its consequences decrease ...

What motivates a company to become politically connected and what impact does political connectedness have on corporate policies? To address this question, we exploit an exogenous Supreme Court decision (Citizens United) that lifted all restrictions on corporate political contributions. We find a significant increase in the cash holdings levels of historically politically connected firms relati...

A common view is that there is little correlation between firm performance and CEO pay. Using a new fifteen-year panel data set of CEOs in the largest, publicly traded U. S. companies, we document a strong relationship between firm performance and CEO compensation. This relationship is generated almost entirely by changes in the value of CEO holdings of stock and stock options. In addition, we ...

An important objective in delivering workers compensation medical benefits is ensuring an appropriate level of care to injured workers. Either excessive or inadequate care may result in poor outcomes. Jurisdictions employ various tools for utilization management such as independent medical exams, utilization review, and treatment guidelines to help ensure the appropriate level of care to achiev...

The paper presents a new, cost effective, volunteer computing based platform. It utilizes volunteers’ web browsers as computational nodes. The computational tasks are delegated to the browsers and executed in the background (independently of any user interface scripts) making use of the HTML5 web workers technology. The capabilities of the platform have been proved by experiments performed in a...

We study the role of underwriter compensation in mitigating conflicts of interest between companies going public and their investment bankers. Making the bank’s compensation more sensitive to the issuer’s valuation should reduce agency conflicts and thus underpricing. Consistent with this prediction, we show that contracting on higher commissions in U.K. IPOs leads to significantly lower underp...