This paper examines the impact that state ownership has on the financial reporting practices of publicly traded firms. Using a unique sample of listed Chinese firms ultimately controlled by local and/or provincial government entities, we test the proposition that the incentives of the underlying government and the structure of the state’s ownership shape financial reporting practices. We find t...

Information processing and exchange between brain nuclei are made through spike series sent by individual neurons in highly irregular temporal patterns. Synchronization in cell assemblies, proposed as a network language for internal neural representations, still has little experimental support. We use a novel technique to extract pathway-specific local field potentials (LFPs) in the hippocampus...

The scope of the present dissertation is a deep lossy compression of still and moving grayscale pictures while maintaining their fidelity, with a specific goal of creating a working prototype of a software system for use in low bandwidth transmission of still satellite imagery and weather briefings with the best preservation of features considered important by the end user. Among the major resu...

Template matching is a technique widely used for finding patterns in digital images. A good template matching should be able to detect template instances that have undergone geometric transformations. In this paper, we proposed a grayscale template matching algorithm named Ciratefi, invariant to rotation, scale, translation, brightness and contrast and its extension to color images. We introduc...

Texture models are widely in use for image content description. In remote-sensing images textures occur at very different scales, requiring the application of several texture models. This paper presents a scale selection algorithm based on a multi-scale random field model with a dynamic pyramidal structure. The algorithm returns the scales and the regions where texture is present. It is designe...

The morphology of the region of the primary motor cortex in the human brain is variable, and putative asymmetries between the hemispheres have been noted since the beginning of last century. Such variability may confound the results of clinical lesion or functional activation studies. We measured Brodmann area (BA) 4 and the identifiable precentral component of the pyramidal tract (PRPT) in 11 ...