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Fingerprint distances, which measure the similarity of atomic environments, are commonly calculated from atomic environment fingerprint vectors. In this work we present the simplex method which can perform the inverse operation, i.e. calculating fingerprint vectors from fingerprint distances. The fingerprint vectors found in this way point to the corners of a simplex. For a large data set of fingerprints, we can find a particular largest volume simplex, whose dimension gives the effective dimension of the fingerprint vector space. We show that the corners of this simplex correspond to landmark environments that can by used in a fully automatic way to analyse structures. In this way we can for instance detect atoms in grain boundaries or on edges of carbon flakes without any human input about the expected environment. By projecting fingerprints on the largest volume simplex we can also obtain fingerprint vectors that are considerably shorter than the original ones but whose information content is not significantly reduced., Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures

Evaluation of text chunking is revisited. The proposed method tries to analyze the errors made by a chunker and formulates an evaluation strategy that brings out the strength and weakness of a chunker in a better way than the existing precision, recall and F score based methods or their variants do. A tree-matching based algorithm of linear time complexity is designed, analyzed, and illustrated by giving examples. Correctness of the algorithm is checked by using a chunker and a set of test sentences.

The authors examine the legal and business environments, financing channels, and governance mechanisms of various types of firms in India and compare them to those from other countries. Despite its English commonlaw origin, strong legal protection provided by the law, and a democratic government, corruption within India's legal system and government significantly weakens investor protection in practice. External financing of firms has been dominated by nonmarket sources of financing, while the characteristics of listed firms are similar to those from countries with weak investor protection. The evidence, including results based on a survey of small and medium-scale private firms, shows that alternative financing channels provide the most important source of funds. The authors also find that informal governance mechanisms, such as those based on reputation, trust, and relationships are more important than formal mechanisms (such as courts) in resolving disputes, overcoming corruption, and supporting growth.

A very simple and inexpensive tunable semiconductor diode laser controller is designed for stable operation of the diode laser. The diode laser controller is stable within +/−8 μA and +/−10 mK, respectively. The noise spectrum of the current controller is studied by FFT analysis. We have used our home-made diode laser system in a tunable diode laser absorption spectrometer (TDLAS) to probe weak overtone transitions of water vapour molecule. The diode laser wavelength is coarsely tuned by changing the operating temperature to probe (2, 1, 1)←(0, 0, 0) band overtone transitions of water vapour within 818–835 nm. To demonstrate line shape study, seven transitions are scanned by ramping the drive current of the diode laser (at constant operating temperature) under different perturber (laboratory air) pressures within the sample cell. A balanced detector and a lock-in amplifier are used for phase sensitive detection purpose. Small current modulation amplitude, balanced detection and proper adjustment of the lock-in amplifier help to obtain a S/N ratio ranging from ∼100 to ∼7 using a small sample path length of 1.5 m. Experimentally obtained derivative spectrum is numerically integrated to reveal the original line shape and fitted with a nonlinear least squares fitting program to extract air broadening coefficients and line strength parameters. The spectroscopic line parameters are compared with the results from HITRAN database.

Experiments were carried out to investigate the rheological properties of coal–oil–water suspension containing solids of different sizes. Two different coal samples with mean particle sizes of 120 mesh, 175 mesh and 220 mesh were used. The coal concentration was varied from 5% to 25% by weight. Sodium silicate has been used as an additive to study the behavior of the variation of average viscosity of the suspension. A generalized correlation has been developed to predict the average viscosity of suspension in terms of particle diameter of the coal, concentration of coal, viscosity of the suspending medium and the concentration of water. Experimental investigations revealed that coal–oil–water suspensions show an increase in the viscosity with decrease in coal size but with the addition of an additive, the average viscosity tends to decrease initially up to a certain optimum dosages and thereafter it increases with further addition of additives. Two empirical correlations are proposed for average viscosity of the coal–oil–water suspension, μ sL in terms of physical properties of the solid and viscosity of the suspending medium with and without additives.

We report techniques developed to utilize three-dimensional momentum information as feedback in adaptive femtosecond control of molecular dynamics. Velocity map imaging is used to obtain the three-dimensional momentum map of the dissociating ions following interaction with a shaped intense ultrafast laser pulse. In order to recover robust feedback information, however, the two-dimensional momentum projection from the detector must be inverted to reconstruct the full three-dimensional momentum of the photofragments. These methods are typically slow or require manual inputs and are therefore accomplished offline after the images have been obtained. Using an algorithm based upon an “onion-peeling” (also known as “back projection”) method, we are able to invert 1040 × 1054 pixel images in under 1 s. This rapid inversion allows the full photofragment momentum to be used as feedback in a closed-loop adaptive control scheme, in which a genetic algorithm tailors an ultrafast laser pulse to optimize a specific outcome. Examples of three-dimensional velocity map image based control applied to strong-field dissociation of CO and O2 are presented.

In quality-differentiated audit markets with client-firms of unknown types, insider-managers of client firms strategically select auditors who respond to legal liabilities to decide their care level. In this signaling game, uninformed-investors use the audit report and the auditors' identity for firm valuation. The analysis shows that increased legal liability increases the auditor's effort and audit accuracy but reduces the demand for high quality auditing because, apart from the increased audit costs, the adverse selection benefit of the worse type reduces with increased accuracy. Furthermore, alternative legal regimes and damage allocation rules alter informational efficiency of the financial market.

A semiconductor diode laser current controller is described for room temperature operation. A current limiting circuit has been introduced in the controller to avoid the breakdown of the diode laser at high current. The diode current can be modulated for frequency modulation of the source and can be tuned over small wavelength ranges. Using the controller the absorption of the weak overtone band transitions of C2 H2 around 788 nm have been observed using the lock-in detection technique with a path length of only 1.5m.

In most countries, auditors are banned from accepting a report contingent fee from their clients. The main reason for this ban might be that such contingent fees would compromise auditor independence by motivating the auditors to issue an unjust favourable report. In this paper we argue that in addition, in a market characterized by information asymmetry, allowing favourable reports to command higher fees, would compromise the informational efficiency of the market by making separation of firm types more difficult. We arrive at our conclusion through a model where informed managers appoint auditors to signal their true value. We analyse the resulting equilibria of the signalling game and argue that the Differentiated Semi?Separation (DSS) equilibrium is the most intuitive and interesting one. Our main results are presented through three examples.

In most countries, auditors are banned from accepting a report contingent fee from their clients. The main reason for this ban might be that such contingent fees would compromise auditor independence by motivating the auditors to issue an unjust favourable report. In this paper we argue that in addition, in a market characterized by information asymmetry, allowing favourable reports to command higher fees, would compromise the informational efficiency of the market by making separation of firm types more difficult. We arrive at our conclusion through a model where informed managers appoint auditors to signal their true value. We analyse the resulting equilibria of the signalling game and argue that the Differentiated Semi-Separation (DSS) equilibrium is the most intuitive and interesting one. Our main results are presented through three examples.

Using a model as well as extensive empirical tests, the present paper investigates the effects of a large-scale debt relief program on the post-waiver debt repayment behavior of borrowers in a rural credit market where the farmers borrow from banks at a subsidized rate and from informal sources at a substantially higher rate, debt contract enforcement is imperfect, and political interventions in the credit market in the form of debt relief can happen even in normal states of the economy. Our model includes all classes of borrowers: those who receive full debt relief, those who receive partial debt relief, and those who do not benefit at all from the program as they do not have overdue loans. The effects are negative for all groups. Following a debt relief program, the number of days taken to repay debt increases for all borrowers who behave strategically, causing ex post inefficiency in the credit market. Interestingly, the effects are the most negative for the group that do not benefit at all. Expectations about similar debt relief in future coupled with extensions on loan repayment granted by bankers who find debt recovery difficult drive our results. Further, rationally anticipating adverse borrower behavior, the lending institutions ration credit, generating ex ante inefficiency as well. Ironically, access to finance for poor households declines following unconditional debt relief. We confirm the predictions of the model with extensive tests using loan accounts data for a large sample of rural borrowers before and after a nation-wide debt relief program undertaken by the Indian government in 2008, one of the largest such programs in history.

In the existing literature on rural financial markets in India, there has been much discussion on local bilateral contracts and mutual insurance arrangements, which are inadequate to deal with the typically correlated risks that individuals and households face in the rural sector, and on costly and inefficient strategies that they adopt to smooth their income or consumption. The discussions rest on the implicit premise that the financial intermediation system in the rural economy is inefficient in insuring the individual agents against idiosyncratic shocks to their income and consumption. However, the premise itself has remained largely unexamined. Using extensive district-level rainfall and bank credit data, we investigate whether the commercial banks respond effectively to exogenous shocks in credit demand in the rural economy in the wake of droughts. We find that banks increase agricultural credit in drought years compared to non-drought years, but not personal loans or other types of non-agricultural credit, suggesting that the observed increase in outstanding credit represents primarily new loans, and not extension of troubled existing loans. Further, the increase in agricultural credit is driven by an increase in the average loan size per account, rather than an increase in the number of accounts. Overall, our findings offer positive evidence on the role of commercial banks in rural financial markets and, in the process, contribute to several existing literatures. The present paper is also the first systematic study of the relationship between the two primary determinants of farm output in India, namely rainfall and supply of credit.

A rule based Local Word Grouper (LWG) or Chunker has been attempted and applied to Bangla. The Chunker has been evaluated with PARSEVAL method [1]. The paper describes implementation of the Chunker as well as the evaluation method in detail. The evaluation shows a precision value of 95.05%, recall value of 94.33% and f-score value of 94.62 which are up to the standard. The results also show a substantial improvement when comparing with some of the recently published works.

This paper assesses how financial development impacts income inequality using a data set which covers over 150 countries and goes back to before 1960. Using System Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), we find that financial development leads to a reduction in income inequality which is economically significant. A one standard deviation increase in the private credit to GDP for the median country-year observation would reduce the gini co-efficient by 10.0% (from 41.05 to 36.93). We also find that broadening access to financial services (increasing the geographic/demographic penetration of bank branches) may work faster in reducing income inequality than merely deepening the availability of credit. In addition, identifying the specific channels through which financial development impacts inequality via growth is important both for research and policy prescriptions. The existing literature on the subject has not yet attempted this important task in a cross-country setting. In the present study we consider two possible channels: (1) educational attainment, in particular the level of tertiary education; and (2) the labor channel, where we look at the relative wage difference between skilled and unskilled workers. While financial development is weakly associated with a rise in the level of tertiary education, we find that its relationship with the second channel is much stronger. Higher financial development is associated with a tightening of the wage gap between the skilled and the unskilled. Both channels are associated with inequality in an economically meaningful way.

This chapter examines and compares the legal and institutional set-ups in China and India. China differs from most of the countries studied in the law, institutions, finance, and growth literature: Its legal and financial systems as well as institutions are all underdeveloped, but its economy has been growing at a very fast rate. Despite its English common-law origin and British-style judicial system and democratic government, there is enough documented evidence to suggest that the effective level of investor protection and the quality of legal institutions in India are quite weak as well. However, this has evidently not prohibited growth in either country. Small and high growth firms in both countries make extensive use of informal and relationship-based arrangements to finance growth.

This study examines the relationship between diversification patterns of corporations and their long-term performance. It is seen that the standard performance measures suggested in corporate finance literature rate all corporations equally in the long run regardless of their diversification strategies. This is because all corporations tend to earn a normal rate of return, given risk, for their shareholders in generally efficient capital markets. Since finance performance measures are not helpful in analyzing corporate performance, use of other measures is suggested for the purpose.

With extensive cross-country datasets and India firm samples, as well as our own surveys of small and medium firms, we examine the legal and business environments, financing channels, and growth patterns of different types of firms in India. Despite the English common-law origin and a British-style judicial system, Indian firms face weak investor protection in practice and poor institutions characterized by corruption and inefficiency. Alternative finance, including financing from all non-bank, non-market sources, and generally backed by non-legal mechanisms, constitutes the most important form of external finance. Bank loans provide the second most important external financing source. Firms with access to bank or market finance are not associated with higher growth rates. Our results indicate that bank and market finance is not superior to alternative finance in fast-growing economies such as India.

With recent growth rates among large countries second only to China’s, India has experienced nothing short of an economic transformation since the liberalization process began in the early 1990’s. In the last few years, with a soaring stock market, significant foreign portfolio inflows including the largest private equity inflows in Asia, and a rapidly developing derivatives market, the Indian financial system has been witnessing an exciting era of transformation. The banking sector has seen major changes with deregulation of interest rates and the emergence of strong domestic private players as well as foreign banks. At the same time, there is some evidence of credit constraints for India’s SME firms that rely heavily on trade credit. Corporate governance norms in India have strengthened rapidly in the past few years. Family businesses, however, still dominate the landscape and investor protection, while excellent on paper, appears to be less effective owing to an overburdened legal system and corruption. In the last few years microfinance has contributed in a big way to financial inclusion and is now attracting venture capital and for-profit companies – both domestic and foreign.

A novel design for a velocity-map imaging (VMI) spectrometer with high resolution over a wide energy range surpassing a standard VMI design is reported. The main difference to a standard three-electrode VMI is the spatial extension of the applied field using 11 electrodes forming a thick-lens. This permits measurements of charged particles with higher energies while achieving excellent resolving power over a wide range of energies. Using SIMION simulations, the thick-lens VMI is compared to a standard design for up to 360 eV electrons. The simulations also show that the new spectrometer design is suited for charged-particle detection with up to 1 keV using a repeller-electrode voltage of -30 kV. The experimental performance is tested by laser-induced ionization of rare gases producing electrons up to about 70 eV. The thick-lens VMI is useful for a wide variety of studies on atoms, molecules and nanoparticles in intense laser fields and high-photon-energy fields from high-harmonic-generation or free-electron lasers.

In this work we characterize the underlying processes behind the IR-assisted ionization of helium by extreme ultra violet (XUV) attosecond radiation. We show that, if used in the form of an attosecond pulse train, the XUV radiation can have a good spectral resolution as well as good temporal resolution. Our experimental data and associated theoretical calculations show how to use the properties of attosecond XUV radiation to induce a desired excited state of helium, and how to tune the IR laser electric field to control the ionization pathways.