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ABSTRACT In this paper, we examined the impact of ownership concentration in target firms on the returns to shareholders of bidding firms. In this research, we found that shareholders of bidding earn statistically significant positive... more
ABSTRACT In this paper, we examined the impact of ownership concentration in target firms on the returns to shareholders of bidding firms. In this research, we found that shareholders of bidding earn statistically significant positive abnormal returns surrounding takeover announcements. In addition, we found bidder returns of 4% over the event-window [ - 20, +20]. We showed that the degree of ownership concentration in target firms -- measured by the Herfindahl-concentration index -- significantly and positively affects the returns to bidding firms. These findings are consistent with the predictions of Grossman and Hart (1980), Bagnoli and Lipman (1988) and Holmstrom and Nalebuff (1992) takeover models.
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Research Interests: Computer Science, Statistics, Signal Processing, Image segmentation, Computer Simulation, and 15 moreImage Retrieval, Wavelet Transforms, Frequency, Indexing, Feature Extraction, Database indexing, Image Indexing, Encoding, Frequency Bands, DT Signal+generators, Low Complexity, Wavelet packet, Image Generation, Wavelet packets, and Image Texture
ABSTRACT In this empirical study, we present two new models that are corporate ethics based. The first model numerically quantifies the corporate value index (CV-Index) based on a set of predefined parameters and the second model... more
ABSTRACT In this empirical study, we present two new models that are corporate ethics based. The first model numerically quantifies the corporate value index (CV-Index) based on a set of predefined parameters and the second model estimates the market-to-book values of equity in relation to the CV-Index as well as other parameters. These models were applied to Canadian companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). Through our analysis, we found statistically significant evidence that corporate values (CV-Index) positively correlated with firm performance. The results are even more significant for firms with low market-to-book values. Our empirical findings suggest that corporate ethics is vital for management, employees, shareholders, stakeholders, and the community at large. In addition, we have tested and confirmed five hypotheses that are used to illustrate corporate ethics behavior and performance.
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PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the most popular corporate governance rating systems and to scrutinize their usefulness to shareholders and the public at large. It proposes to examine whether the advertised good governance scores... more
PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the most popular corporate governance rating systems and to scrutinize their usefulness to shareholders and the public at large. It proposes to examine whether the advertised good governance scores reflect corporate performance, fraud, lawsuits, and the like.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis focused on the methodology used by rating agencies to rank corporate governance practices of companies. Analysis of the categories and variables used in the rating systems were also scrutinized and critiqued.FindingsThis research shows that there is a weak relationship between corporate performance and corporate governance rating. Ideas and suggestions have been proposes to remedy the shortfalls of existing rating systems.Research limitations/implicationsMany researchers use corporate governance scores in their studies to investigate the relationship between these single scores and corporate performance. Potential vulnerability and risk are demonstrate...
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Binary image compression is desirable for a wide range of applications, such as digital libraries, map archives, fingerprint databases, facsimile, etc. In this paper, we present a new highly efficient algorithm for lossless binary image... more
Binary image compression is desirable for a wide range of applications, such as digital libraries, map archives, fingerprint databases, facsimile, etc. In this paper, we present a new highly efficient algorithm for lossless binary image compression. The proposed algorithm introduces a new method, direct redundancy elimination, to efficiently exploit the two-dimensional redundancy of an image, as well as a novel
Research Interests: Computer Science, Computer Graphics, Image Processing, Redundancy Elimination, Data Compression, and 11 moreAlgorithm, Digital Library, Arithmetic, Efficient Algorithm for ECG Coding, Context Modeling, Arithmetic Coding, Context Model, Application Software, Lossless Compression, Compression Ratio, and Binary Image
Binary image compression is desirable for a wide range of applications, such as digital libraries, map archives, fingerprint databases, facsimile, etc. In this paper, we present a new highly efficient algorithm for lossless binary image... more
Binary image compression is desirable for a wide range of applications, such as digital libraries, map archives, fingerprint databases, facsimile, etc. In this paper, we present a new highly efficient algorithm for lossless binary image compression. The proposed algorithm introduces a new method, direct redundancy elimination, to efficiently exploit the two-dimensional redundancy of an image, as well as a novel
Research Interests: Computer Science, Computer Graphics, Image Processing, Redundancy Elimination, Data Compression, and 11 moreAlgorithm, Digital Library, Arithmetic, Efficient Algorithm for ECG Coding, Context Modeling, Arithmetic Coding, Context Model, Application Software, Lossless Compression, Compression Ratio, and Binary Image
Research Interests: Engineering, Power Systems, Automatic Control, Control Systems, Communication System, and 11 moreCommunication Technology, Automation, Power system distribution, Public Utilities, Electric Utilities, Cost Benefit Analysis, Telephony, Power Industry, Data Transmission, Performance Test, and Power Line
... hand. While on the other hand it is suitable for text images of languages where many characters have dots nuqta on them such as Urdu, Persian, and Arabic with big fonts. The ... region. 283 Page 4. (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h)... more
... hand. While on the other hand it is suitable for text images of languages where many characters have dots nuqta on them such as Urdu, Persian, and Arabic with big fonts. The ... region. 283 Page 4. (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h) Fig. 5 ...
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Exact bi-level image expansion techniques are required for a wide range of applications such as cartography, calligraphy, medical images, remote sensing, and satellite imagery. Among the methods proposed in the literature are (a) pixel... more
Exact bi-level image expansion techniques are required for a wide range of applications such as cartography, calligraphy, medical images, remote sensing, and satellite imagery. Among the methods proposed in the literature are (a) pixel replication; (b) area sizing; (c) interpolation and spline methods; and (d) DCT-based techniques. All these methods generate distortion and noticeable degradation in the quality of images
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The infusion of renewable energy sources into the conventional synchronous generation system decreases the overall system inertia and negatively impacts the stability of its primary frequency response. The lowered inertia is due to the... more
The infusion of renewable energy sources into the conventional synchronous generation system decreases the overall system inertia and negatively impacts the stability of its primary frequency response. The lowered inertia is due to the absence of inertia in some of the renewable energy-based systems. To maintain the stability of the system, we need to keep the frequency in the permissible limits and maintain low rotational inertia. Some authors in the literature have used the virtual synchronous generators (VSG) as a solution to this problem. Although the VSG based distributed recourses (DER) exhibits the characteristics and behavior of synchronous generators (SG) such as inertia, frequency droop functions and damping but it does not optimally solve the question of frequency stability. This paper presents a solution for these problems via an empirical model that sizes the Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) required for the inertia emulation and damping control. The tested system c...
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Research Interests: Computer Science, Image Processing, Signal Processing, Video Compression, Coding, and 13 moreQuality Control, Broadcasting, Video Streaming, Television Broadcasting, Video Quality, Bandwidth Allocation, Real Time, Insertion, Encoding, Dynamic Channel Allocation, Internet, Electrical And Electronic Engineering, and Channel Allocation
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ABSTRACT We presents a fast-start streaming mechanism that eliminates or reduces the initial start-up delay of Internet audio/video streaming applications. The presented method uses a technique that tries to fill-up the jitter... more
ABSTRACT We presents a fast-start streaming mechanism that eliminates or reduces the initial start-up delay of Internet audio/video streaming applications. The presented method uses a technique that tries to fill-up the jitter compensation buffer of a streaming client at the beginning of a presentation and starts the presentation faster, hence improving user experience.
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Modeling human blood components and disorders is a complicated task. Few researchers have attempted to automate the process of detecting anemia in human blood. These attempts have produced satisfactory but not highly accurate results. In... more
Modeling human blood components and disorders is a complicated task. Few researchers have attempted to automate the process of detecting anemia in human blood. These attempts have produced satisfactory but not highly accurate results. In this paper, we present an efficient method to estimate hemoglobin value in human blood and detect anemia using microscopic color image data. We have developed a logit regression model using one thousand (1000) blood samples that were collected from Prince George Hospital laboratory. The output results of our model are compared with the results of the same sample set using CELL-DYN 3200 System in Prince George Hospital laboratory, and found to be near identical. These results exceed those reported in the literature. Moreover, the proposed method can be im-plemented in hardware with minimal circuitry and nominal cost.
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In this paper, we present an online text message author identification model based on information theory measures. We have identified nineteen specific writing features or identifiers from three text categories: characters, words, and... more
In this paper, we present an online text message author identification model based on information theory measures. We have identified nineteen specific writing features or identifiers from three text categories: characters, words, and sentences. These identifiers are employed to create unique user signatures. These signatures are used to recognize authors via relative entropy metrics. We have examined the proposed method on the Enron e-mail data set which contains a large number of e-mails from 150 people. Our results show that the proposed model can be used effectively for monitoring and identifying authorship of such documents as emails, chat conversations, web logs, forum posts, and more so for closed sets of users such as a research facility, an enterprise, or an organization. 1
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... Saif Zahir Dept of Computer Science University of Northern British Columbia Prince George, BC, Canada zahirs@unbc.ca ABSTRACT ... One of the major insufficiencies plaguing Mobility Management is the delay associated with Handover... more
... Saif Zahir Dept of Computer Science University of Northern British Columbia Prince George, BC, Canada zahirs@unbc.ca ABSTRACT ... One of the major insufficiencies plaguing Mobility Management is the delay associated with Handover Management. ...
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In this paper, we present an online text message author identification model based on information theory measures. We have identified nineteen specific writing features or identifiers from three text categories: characters, words, and... more
In this paper, we present an online text message author identification model based on information theory measures. We have identified nineteen specific writing features or identifiers from three text categories: characters, words, and sentences. These identifiers are employed to create unique user signatures. These signatures are used to recognize authors via relative entropy metrics. We have examined the proposed method on the Enron e-mail data set which contains a large number of emails from 150 people. Our results show that the proposed model can be used effectively for monitoring and identifying authorship of such documents as emails, chat conversations, web logs, forum posts, and more so for closed sets of users such as a research facility, an enterprise, or an organization.
We present an exceedingly secure QR guided instant message communication technique for covert communications. This technique uses standard consumes electronics equipment such as smartphones, digital cameras to produce images in which the... more
We present an exceedingly secure QR guided instant message communication technique for covert communications. This technique uses standard consumes electronics equipment such as smartphones, digital cameras to produce images in which the messages are represented. This technique is novel in that it uses the binary values of the QR code that contains the message to steer the process of repositioning of some singular values obtained from the wavelet coefficients of an image to represent the message. We tested our method on 2,761 images and it successfully recovered the message(s) with 100% efficiency.
In this paper, we present a fast lossless compression scheme for digital map images, and chart and graph images in the raster image format. This work contains two main contributions. The first is centered around the creation of a codebook... more
In this paper, we present a fast lossless compression scheme for digital map images, and chart and graph images in the raster image format. This work contains two main contributions. The first is centered around the creation of a codebook that is based on symbol entropy. The second contribution is the introduction of a new row-column reduction coding algorithm. This
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The literature is scarce on content-based copy detection and recall (CBCD). Methods on this categories attempt to exploit one or more feature(s) of images such as shape, color, or texture to recall a query image. The performance of these... more
The literature is scarce on content-based copy detection and recall (CBCD). Methods on this categories attempt to exploit one or more feature(s) of images such as shape, color, or texture to recall a query image. The performance of these methods is satisfactory but not perfect. In this paper, we present three fast image copy recall algorithms from a database with perfect results. These algorithms are specifically developed to overcome the problems of copies of same image with different amounts of illumination intensities; similar images with trifling difference(s); and a limited image flipping cases in databases. The algorithms are based on spatial signatures that uniquely represent the images in the database as well as the query image to be recalled. We tested our algorithms on a set of 23, 443 images from LIVE, PIE databases, ORL Database of Faces (the AT&T laboratories Cambridge Database), Caltech-UCSD Birds database and our miscellany of images. Simulations results show that in ...
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Data compression is based on the abstraction that data comprises two quantities. The first is the information content and the second is the redundant information. The objective of compression is to remove the redundant information and... more
Data compression is based on the abstraction that data comprises two quantities. The first is the information content and the second is the redundant information. The objective of compression is to remove the redundant information and represent the data by the information content portion only, if possible. As for image signals, for example, the significance of image compression (i.e., coding) is emphasized by the enormous amount of data in raster images. For instance, a typical gray-scale image of 512512 pixels, with each pixel represented by 8 bits, adds up to 256 kilobytes of data. Hence, removing redundancies from the image is not only highly desired but also imperative for transmission and storage requirements. Linear prediction is a mathematical process, which estimates future values of a discrete time signal as a linear function of past samples. This book focuses on employing linear prediction theory to image compression for the purpose of information preserving with a special...
... Biographical notes: Sophia Su is a PhD candidate and she holds a Master in International ... sector; and Hewlett Packard (China) and Epson (China), respectively, have 25% and 30% of the ... for decisions (Article 10).60 Similarly, the... more
... Biographical notes: Sophia Su is a PhD candidate and she holds a Master in International ... sector; and Hewlett Packard (China) and Epson (China), respectively, have 25% and 30% of the ... for decisions (Article 10).60 Similarly, the HSR Act provides the waiting period [Section ...
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The increasing complexity of systems-on-a-chip with the accompanied increase in their test data size has made the need for test data reduction imperative. In this paper, we introduce a novel and efficient test-independent compression... more
The increasing complexity of systems-on-a-chip with the accompanied increase in their test data size has made the need for test data reduction imperative. In this paper, we introduce a novel and efficient test-independent compression technique based on geometric shapes. The technique exploits reordering of test vectors to minimize the number of shapes needed to encode the test data. The test
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The entropy analysis of a printed language is vital for a wide range of applications, such as compression, written text recognition, text processing, and encryption. In this paper, we present empirical results on the entropy of written... more
The entropy analysis of a printed language is vital for a wide range of applications, such as compression, written text recognition, text processing, and encryption. In this paper, we present empirical results on the entropy of written Albanian language based on a frequency analysis of letters, digrams, trigrams, and for orthographic words of length one, two and three characters. This
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PurposeThis paper scrutinizes the impact of socioeconomic, political, legal and religious factors on the internal ethical values of human rights organizations (HROs) worldwide. The authors aim to examine the Code of Ethics for 279 HROs in... more
PurposeThis paper scrutinizes the impact of socioeconomic, political, legal and religious factors on the internal ethical values of human rights organizations (HROs) worldwide. The authors aim to examine the Code of Ethics for 279 HROs in 67 countries and the social and legal settings in which they operate.Design/methodology/approachUsing the framework of protect, respect and remedy, the authors look for keywords that represent the human rights lexicon in these three areas. In the protection of human rights, the authors select the terms: peace, transparency, freedom and security. For the respect of humans, the authors use the terms: dignity, equality, respect and rights. Sources of remedies come from justice and ethics. The analysis seeks to determine what political economy settings drive the ethical value choices of the organizations. Those choices are proxied by those keywords they mention in their Code of Ethics.FindingsThe analysis show that the scope of ethical values mentioned...
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Color maps and graphs are widely used in a variety of applications such as mobile computing, intelligent transportation systems, GIS, Internet, and academia. The relatively large size of color maps and graphs has negatively impacted their... more
Color maps and graphs are widely used in a variety of applications such as mobile computing, intelligent transportation systems, GIS, Internet, and academia. The relatively large size of color maps and graphs has negatively impacted their usage in many applications especially in small storage mobile wireless devices. To meet such requirements, the use of efficient compression methods becomes imperative. In this paper, a fast lossless compression scheme for digital map and graph images is introduced. This scheme offers two contributions. The first is the creation of a universal codebook that is based on symbol entropy and the second is our row-column reduction coder. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieved on average a compression of 0.035 bpp for map images and 0.03 bpp for graphs. These results are better than those reported results in the literature.
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ABSTRACT In recent years, an unparalleled volume of textual information was transported over the Internet via email, chatting, blogging, twittering, digital libraries, and information retrieval systems. As the volume of text data has... more
ABSTRACT In recent years, an unparalleled volume of textual information was transported over the Internet via email, chatting, blogging, twittering, digital libraries, and information retrieval systems. As the volume of text data has exceeded 40% of the total volume of traffic on the Internet, compressing textual data becomes imperative. Many algorithms were introduced and employed for this purpose including Huffman encoding, arithmetic encoding, the Ziv-Lempel family, Dynamic Markov Compression, and Burrow-Wheeler Transform. In this paper, a novel algorithm for compressing textual images is presented. The algorithm comprises of two parts: (i) a fixed-to-variable codebook; and (ii) row and column reduction coding scheme, RCRC. Simulation results on a large number of Arabic textual images show that this algorithm has a compression ratio of approximately 87%, which exceeds published results including those of JBIG2.
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In a numerous image applications, image resizing is becoming indispensable as it impacts the bandwidth and storage requirements tremendously. The image resizing process introduces (or eliminates) many pixels to (or from) the original... more
In a numerous image applications, image resizing is becoming indispensable as it impacts the bandwidth and storage requirements tremendously. The image resizing process introduces (or eliminates) many pixels to (or from) the original image. The values of such pixels and their positions must be carefully determined otherwise visible distortion and significant degradation in the quality of the image may occur. Several methods have been employed to resize images including pixel replication; linear interpolation; higher order interpolations, Bezier methods, DCT-based, wavelets and others. We introduce a new perceptually perfect image-resizing scheme that near optimally preserves edges and highly maintains the quality of homogenous regions. In this technique, the image is segmented via an efficient edge detector to produce an edge image and independent homogenous regions. The edge image is resized separately from the homogenous regions via chain coding and elaborate look-ahead-and-back tables technique. Homogenous regions are resized using a merciful adaptive region-based interpolation that exploits the characteristics of each region. At the end, the two parts are summed up to produce the desired resized image. Simulation results of numerous test images show that the proposed technique is subjectively and objectively far better than published results.
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