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Risso’s dolphin occurs in tropical and temperate waters worldwide, and is one of the most common cetacean species in Taiwanese waters. This study attempted to reveal its distribution in water-depth ranges and variations in group size and composition (with or without mother-calf pairs). Based on sighting records from experienced whale-watching guides on board whale-watching boats operated in eastern Taiwan, 1630 sightings of Risso’s dolphin were recorded from 3939 touring trips near Hualien County from 1998 to 2014. Comparing the frequency distribution of water depths between ship tracks and dolphin sightings, we found that Risso’s dolphin commonly occurred on the continental shelf and slope, and mainly stayed in waters of 300~1500 m in depth, with a mean of 862.1 ± 12.3 m (standard error). The frequency distribution of water depths showed a significant difference between sites (deeper in the Shirti area than in the Hualien area), but no significant difference was detected among various group sizes. Nevertheless, the spatial distribution significantly varied with group composition, but not with group size. Groups with mother-calf pairs stayed in significantly shallower water, which was proposed to be related to predator avoidance. In addition, the large fluctuation in annual sighting ratios of Risso’s dolphin that ranged 0.1~0.7 sightings per trip during the 17-year period may be related to variations in prey abundances, the confirmation of which requires future investigation.

We find that the acceleration and deceleration patterns of historical prices are predictive of future expected returns in momentum investing in the U.S. equity market from 1962 to 2014. Winners with accelerated historical price increases deliver higher future expected returns and losers with accelerated historical price decreases perform more poorly in the future. Hence, the profit from buying past accelerated winners and shorting past accelerated losers is significantly higher than the momentum profit by 51.47%. Such profit cannot be subsumed by certain characteristics that have been considered to explain momentum. Possible explanations for our results include extrapolative bias and overreaction.

Ascertaining the value of future earnings is one of the major objectives for investors to forecast and thereby determine current stock prices. This paper examines whether predicting future earnings can create risk-adjusted returns. We find that the risk-adjusted returns of portfolios constructed on future E/P ratios are superior to those constructed on past E/P ratios under the four-factor model. The risk-adjusted returns increase monotonically with the number of future quarters used to compute the E/P ratios. Moreover, the risk-adjusted returns for the firms with high E/P ratios are positively related to the changes between past earnings and future earnings. Overall, forecasting future earnings precisely would significantly enhance the risk-adjusted returns of portfolios.

While odontocetes do not have an external pinna that guides sound to the middle ear, they are considered to receive sound through specialized regions of the head and lower jaw. Yet odontocetes differ in the shape of the lower jaw suggesting that hearing pathways may vary between species, potentially influencing hearing directionality and noise impacts. This work measured the audiogram and received sensitivity of a Risso's dolphin (Grampus griseus) in an effort to comparatively examine how this species receives sound. Jaw hearing thresholds were lowest (most sensitive) at two locations along the anterior, midline region of the lower jaw (the lower jaw tip and anterior part of the throat). Responses were similarly low along a more posterior region of the lower mandible, considered the area of best hearing in bottlenose dolphins. Left- and right-side differences were also noted suggesting possible left-right asymmetries in sound reception or differences in ear sensitivities. The results indicate best hearing pathways may vary between the Risso's dolphin and other odontocetes measured. This animal received sound well, supporting a proposed throat pathway. For Risso's dolphins in particular, good ventral hearing would support their acoustic ecology by facilitating echo-detection from their proposed downward oriented echolocation beam.

We used universal primers designed for the cytochrome oxidase I (CO I) sequence of the order Cetacea and the family Phocidae to prove that meat fritters sold in Taiwan contained meat from two seal, six cetacean, and one pig species. The sequence information for CO I obtained in this study was limited and population genetics data for the eight sampled marine mammalian species was insufficient to deduce where these marine mammals were hunted. Regardless of the geographic origins of the marine mammal flesh, sale and consumption of marine mammals in Taiwan violates the Wildlife Conservation Act. This study provides PCR primers that could enable government testing of suspect meats to curtail the illegal trade in marine mammal products.

Risso's dolphin (Grampus griseus) is one of the cetacean species commonly encountered off the eastern coast of Taiwan. The species appears to occur in Taiwanese waters year-round. Many biological and ecological characteristics, including group size, habitat preference, and ages at weaning and sexual maturity, are by-and-large in accord with earlier reports for populations in other geographic regions. Morphological assessments, dietary analyses, and genetic data altogether suggest the dolphins found in Taiwanese and Japanese waters are from the same population, which exhibits high genetic diversity and a sign of recent demographic expansion. The dolphin species is endorsed a “Rare and Valuable Species (Class II)” status and is protected by the Wildlife Conservation Act in Taiwan. However, it is still vulnerable to human activities, in terms of whale-watching tourism and coastal gill-net fisheries, with a growing concern on the level of heavy metal residues found in dolphin tissues. Current knowledge for the species is mostly derived from relatively limited information. Assessments on key biological and ecological features, e.g., population size, residency, social structure, and group composition, shall be prioritised for conservation initiatives.

This paper investigates the effects of intervention by government and financial institutions on the degree of internationalization in Japan and Taiwan, with particular attention to the impact of the main bank system and the system of amakudari (the appointment of retired bureaucrats to the boards of public companies). The empirical results indicate that companies with a higher degree of internationalization have boards with stronger monitoring ability and therefore can fend off intervention by government. On the other hand, a negative relationship is established between the presence of retired bureaucrats on boards (amakudari) and the subsequent degree of internationalization. Similarly, intervention by financial institutions results in a lower subsequent degree of internationalization. Thus, although representatives of government and financial institutions may attempt to use their influence to prompt international expansion, the monitoring ability of the board may be jeopardized, to the detriment of internationalization.

In this paper, an energy-efficient monitor, including three capacitive and two resistive readout circuits with hardware-sharing architecture, is presented for female ovulation. The proposed design is featuring two calibration modules: one decreases the initial offset by capacitor array, and the other reduces P-V-T variations by taking proportion between sensing and ruler results. After implemented in UMC 0.18μm CMOS-MEMS technology, the post-layout simulation results show that our circuit consumes 30μW and 49μW in 0.8ms conversion time under 1.8V supplied voltage for 1-axis and 3-axis. The capacitive resolution is around 0.1fF and the sensing range of die-temperature is 0∼100°C with 0.05°C resolution.

This study examines the interactions between trading strategies based on the nearness to the 52-week high, the nearness to the 52-week low, and past returns. We offer evidence that the nearness to the 52-week low has predictive power for future average returns. Our results also reveal that the nearness to the 52-week high as well as to the 52-week low and past returns each have certain exclusive unpriced information content in the cross-sectional pricing of stocks. Moreover, a trading strategy based on the nearness to the 52-week low provides an excellent hedge for the momentum strategy, thereby nearly doubling the Sharpe ratio of the momentum strategy.

Previous research debates whether investors are smart enough to invest in funds that subsequently outperform. This paper documents a robust smart money effect among top-performing small fund investors, even after controlling for the momentum factor. I further explore the reason for the smart money effect and find that such outperformance comes from the market-timing ability of smart investors. Market-timing ability distinguishes smart investors from investors who naively chase the winners.

This paper examines the relationship between the level of political connection of the board and chief executive officer (CEO) equity-based compensation. Using a sample of Taiwanese firms, the paper provides evidence that politically connected boards grant a lower proportion of equity-based compensation to CEOs. Political intervention can reduce the proportion of equity-based compensation and, thereby, can have negative consequences for the alignment between the interests of CEOs and shareholders in firms. The findings obtained in this paper could be useful to policy-makers in emerging economies, where there is wide scope for political intervention.

In this paper, the authors present a configurable and power efficient multiuser MIMO-OFDMA baseband processor for uplink mobile communications. To solve the carrier frequency offset (CFO) problem in multiuser transmission, an inter-carrier interference-based (ICI-cancellation-based) CFO estimator is implemented based on an iterative search criterion of minimum signal-to-interference-noise (SINR) ratio. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed CFO estimator is more robust to transmission configurations (MIMO and multiuser) and CFO variations. Moreover, the authors propose an efficient architecture that saves 78% of the hardware complexity compared to the direct implemented architecture by employing Taylor series expansion for ICI/multiple-access interference (MAI) cancellation. Meanwhile, a 2-D linear channel estimator is also proposed to assist the CFO estimator and track the time-variant multipath channel. Two kinds of MIMO detector, vertical Bell Laboratory layered space-time (V-BLAST) and V-BLAST with maximum likelihood (V-ML), are adopted to minimize output latency and achieve the best ML bit-error-rate (BER) performance. An ASIC fabricated by 0.13 μm 1P8M CMOS technology is measured with 2.31 Mbps/mW power efficiency and less than 1.5 dB implementation loss. In addition, the whole transceiver is integrated and verified by a system-on-chip (SoC) platform to demonstrate its efficacy.

Previous studies have focused on which stocks are winners or losers but have paid little attention to the formation process of past returns. This paper develops a model showing that past returns and the formation process of past returns have a joint effect on future expected returns. The empirical evidence shows that the zero-investment portfolio, including stocks with specific patterns of historical prices, improves monthly momentum profit by 59%. Overall, the process of how one stock becomes a winner or loser can further distinguish the best and worst stocks in a group of winners or losers.

In deciding how much customer information to disclose, managers face a tradeoff between the benefits of reducing information asymmetry and the losses of revealing proprietary information. This paper investigates which factors affect the level of ambiguous customer identity disclosure and whether such ambiguous disclosure affects the cost of equity capital. The empirical evidence shows that the proprietary cost is a crucial factor in ambiguous customer identity disclosure. Firms with a higher level of ambiguous customer identity disclosure generate a higher cost of equity capital. Moreover, the higher cost of equity capital is concentrated among firms under imperfect market competition.

Information on the species diversity and habitat use of cetaceans can help us to understand the community ecology of marine top predators. Passive acoustic monitoring has been widely applied in the cetacean research in recent years since cetacean vocalizations can be effectively detected through automatic detection methods. However, species identification based on tonal sounds remains challenging due to the high intra-specific variation. In order to examine the seasonal changing pattern of species diversity and species-specific occurrence, we applied an automatic detection and classification algorithm on the acoustic recordings collected from the marine cable hosted observatory (MACHO) off the northeastern Taiwan. The representative frequencies of cetacean tonal sounds within 4.5-48 kHz were detected by the local-max detector. Twelve statistical feature vectors were extracted based on the distribution of representative frequency and were used in the discriminant function analysis to classify four cetacean groups. The correct classification rate was 72.2% based on the field recording collected from onboard surveys. Analysis on one-year MACHO recordings revealed that the species diversity was highest in winter and spring. In addition, different patterns of seasonal occurrence were observed between different cetacean groups. Short finned pilot whales and Risso's dolphins were the most common species, they mainly occurred in winter and summer. False killer whales were mostly detected in winter and spring. On the contrary, smaller delphinids, such as spinner dolphins, spotted dolphins, and Fraser's dolphins were mainly detected in summer. Bottlenose dolphins represent the least common species. The current results show that the seasonal occurrence of multiple cetacean species can be effectively monitored by a marine observatory. In the future, the biodiversity, species-specific habitat use, and inter-specific interaction of cetaceans can be investigated through an underwater acoustic monitoring network.

On-animal suction cups with embedded hydrophones allow examination of how signals on the forehead of echolocating odontocetes relate to the internal anatomical structure and the transmission beampattern. Risso’s dolphin (Grampus griseus) is an interesting species for this investigation due to the presence of a unique vertical groove in the middle of their forehead. In this study, a linear array of six broadband suction cup hydrophones were attached along the forehead groove of an adult female Risso’s dolphin trained to catch freshly thawed dead squid in front of an eight-element far-field hydrophone array. The animal’s movement was simultaneously observed using an underwater video camera. A total of nine successful prey captures were recorded. During each catch, the animal first emitted regular echolocation clicks, which quickly transitioned into buzzes (clicks with distinctively high repetition rate) until prey capture. The amplitude and relative time of arrival of these signals across all channels were ...

Passive acoustic monitoring is effective for examining the temporal variation of cetacean occurrences through continuous recording. However, the interpretation of behavior variability remains difficult. Cetacean tonal sounds are believed to play an important role in communication. Changes in tonal sound usage can be indicative of changes in cetacean behavior. In this study, we applied a generalized tonal sound detector on recordings from the marine cable hosted observatory (MACHO) off Northeastern Taiwan. The tonal sound detector is a modified local-max detector, which examines the prominence of tonality in 2 ms time intervals. Detections were confirmed based on the short-time transient characteristic of tonal sounds. The burst pulse, fundamental frequency, and harmonic were separated during post-processing. The detection results can be used to analyze the frequency distribution and modulation of the tonal sounds. Following individual contour extractions, the tonal sounds were classified to examine the repertoire composition through duration and frequency normalization. An evident nighttime occurrence was identified for both the burst pulse and tonal sound. The mode frequency of tonal sound did not show a significant difference, but the percentage of overlapping tonal sounds, Shannon entropy of frequency distribution, and repertoire complexity varied significantly among diurnal cycles. The current framework of quantification on tonal sound modulation and repertoire complexity provides intuitive parameters for the variability of cetacean behavior, which can be used to examine the temporal variations of cetacean habitat use. The precision in distinguishing different species and behaviors may be increased by comparing the repertoire established through automatic classification.

As a visual mode of analysis is more intuitive to human cognition than algebraic numbers, we propose that the visual pattern of historical prices is a salient signal that attracts attention; thereby inducing overreaction. We construct a long-short portfolio, including the stocks that are more likely to grab attention, and create an illusion through their discernible visual patterns of historical prices. The newly-developed portfolio commands an annual risk-adjusted return of 23.1% and dominates momentum investing. The outperformance holds under various specifications and asset pricing models. We provide support that momentum is induced by visually psychological biases.

This paper investigates the interaction of government and financial institutions in the operation of a company through the relationship of the main bank system and the system of amakudari (appointing retired bureaucrats to the boards of public companies). Consistent with resource dependency theory, the empirical results suggest that governments and financial institutions tend to appoint representatives to the board in order to help troubled companies. However, a negative relationship is established between the presence of such amakudari and subsequent firm performance. Thus, while the system of amakudari may use its influence in an attempt to save troubled companies, it is possible that, contrary to resource dependency theory but consistent with agency theory, the monitoring ability of the board may consequently be jeopardized to the detriment of overall firm performance.

Value strategies purchase stocks that have high fundamental values relative to prices. The interpretation of why value strategies outperform is controversial. Based on the fact that investors may rely too heavily, or “anchor,” on one piece of information when making investment decisions, this study shows that value strategies can yield higher returns by exploiting anchoring bias, and that the risk premium is also tripled. The returns cannot be rationalized with a variety of factor models. Overall, this study confirms the predictability of stock expected returns based on fundamental values relative to prices in the context of investor behavior.

Firms with lower levels of disclosure hold more private information and thereby generate undiversified risk. This paper investigates the effect of discretionary disclosure of customer identities on average stock returns. Using a data set of firms’ principal customers, we find a negative relationship between the disclosure level of customer information and the cross-section of returns, after controlling for size, book-to-market ratio, momentum, and other return determinants. We also observe that individual investors are inclined to buy stocks that report more customer information. Overall, poor information on customer identity has higher costs of capital than do firms with good information quality.

Various theories have been presented to explain momentum and reversals in stock returns. Based on the model of Hong and Stein (1999), this paper creates a hybrid strategy to avoid the losses from the reversal phase. The risk-adjusted returns of the new strategy are significantly higher than those of the traditional momentum strategy. Moreover, the risk-adjusted returns of the new strategy cannot be fully explained by Carhart’s four-factor model. Such a finding is robust in different time periods and size quintiles. Overall, this paper exploits the interaction between heterogeneous investors and generates distinctive applications.

This paper examines the relationship between the level of political connection of the board and CEO equity-based compensation. Using a sample of Taiwanese firms in 2001-2004, the paper provides evidence that the level of political connection of a board is negatively related to the level of CEO total compensation. It is also found that politically connected boards grant a lower proportion of equity-based compensation to CEOs and thereby reduce the alignment between the interests of CEOs and those of shareholders. The findings obtained by analysing the sample of Taiwanese firms could be useful to policy makers in emerging economies, where there is wide scope for political intervention. A government’s reluctance to relinquish control over publicly listed firms can have significantly negative consequences on the alignment between the interests of CEOs and shareholders in the firms.

This paper examines the influence of fund flow on fund performance in US domestic equity funds from 1993 to 2008. We find that fund flow has an asymmetric influence on fund performance. Inflow will significantly push up simultaneous fund performance, whereas outflow does not significantly result in negative risk-adjusted returns. We also find suggestive evidence that the outperformance of funds experiencing inflow comes from flow-driven purchase, which means that funds with inflow may expand existing positions and create positive price pressure in overlapping positions.

Prior research debates focus on whether investors are smart enough to invest in funds that subsequently outperform. This paper documents a robust smart money effect among small fund investors who invest in the top performing funds, even after controlling for the momentum factor argued by Sapp and Tiwari (2004). I further explore the reason for the smart money effect and find that such outperformance comes from the market timing ability of smart investors. Market timing ability distinguishes smart investors from investors who naively chase the winners.

In this paper, an efficient and flexible SoC platform integrated with intellectual property (IP) cores for multiinput multi-output orthogonal frequency division multiple access (MIMO-OFDMA) transceiver of IEEE802.16e-2005 standard is presented. The proposed platform supports uplink/downlink and is integrated with the evaluation system. The hardware and software design have been synthesized and verified. The proposed platform provides a complete system design. It is a flexible prototyping for worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) communication system. Designers could use platform-based design approach as an effective strategy to cope with product complexity and time-to-market at all levels. For the verification stage, designers can use the hardware/software (HW/SW) co-verification strategy to debug hardware component, which will help designers identify more faster. In this proposed platform, which introduces the figure file to be the transmission media. Designers validate their design in bit error rate/signal-to-noise ratio (BER/SNR) waveforms traditionally. In this proposed platform, designer could verify the decoded results in various environment by LCD panel.

This paper investigates the interaction of government and financial institutions in the operation of a company through the relationship of the main bank system and the system of amakudari (appointing retired bureaucrats to the boards of public companies). Consistent with resource dependency theory, the empirical results suggest that governments and financial institutions tend to appoint representatives to the board in order to help troubled companies. However, a negative relationship is established between the presence of such amakudari and subsequent firm performance. Thus, while the system of amakudari may use its influence in an attempt to save troubled companies, it is possible that, contrary to resource dependency theory but consistent with agency theory, the monitoring ability of the board may consequently be jeopardized to the detriment of overall firm performance.

In this paper, an efficient advanced RISC machine (ARM)-based system-on-chip (SoC) testbed for a multi-input multi-output orthogonal frequency division multiple access (MIMO-OFDMA) uplink transceiver is presented. To mitigate carrier frequency offset (CFO) and multipath channel impairments, low complexity architecture of an inter-carrier interference (ICI)-cancellation-based CFO estimator and a 2D channel tracker are proposed in the receiver. The proposed transceiver is integrated into the SoC platform and verified by a video codec. Moreover, the proposed testbed provides a fast and configurable HW/SW co-verification prototyping for single-input single-output (SISO)/MIMO-OFDMA systems.

We study the effect of government transition on firm performance and the board composition of government-linked companies (GLCs) and explore the motivation for board restructuring of GLCs. Specifically, we examine two questions: (1) what the motivation is for board restructuring, and (2) whether the change in board composition affects subsequent firm performance. The empirical results indicate that the policy factor is the key determinant in board re-election of GLCs. The motivation of board restructuring after a powershift is mainly for control purposes rather than performance enhancement, which may explain why the market reacts negatively in the beginning to board restructuring announcements in GLCs. Furthermore, board restructuring after a powershift does not enhance subsequent firm performance.

We study the effect of the government transition on firm performance and board composition of government-linked companies (GLCs) and explore the motivations of board restructuring of GLCs. Specifically, we examine two questions: (1) what is the motivation of board restructuring, and (2) whether the change in the board composition affects the subsequent firm performance. The empirical results indicate that the policy factor is the key determinant in the board re-election of GLCs. The motivation of board restructuring after the powershift is mainly for control and spoils purposes rather than performance enhancement, which may explain why the market reacts negatively to the board restructuring announcement in GLCs. Finally, none of the board restructuring factors can explain the change in firm performance after the powershift, the only significant factor is the policy factor.

Information on the species diversity of cetaceans can help us to understand the community ecology of marine top predators. Passive acoustic monitoring has been widely applied in the cetacean research, however, species identification based on tonal sounds remains challenging. In order to examine the seasonal changing pattern of species diversity, we applied an automatic detection and classification algorithm on acoustic recordings collected from the marine cable hosted observatory off the northeastern Taiwan. Representative frequencies of cetacean tonal sounds were detected. Statistical features were extracted based on the distribution of representative frequency and were used to classify four cetacean groups. The correct classification rate was 72.2% based on the field recordings collected from onboard surveys. Analysis on one-year recordings revealed that the species diversity was highest in winter and spring. Short finned pilot whales and Risso’s dolphins were the most common species, they mainly occurred in winter and summer. False killer whales were mostly detected in winter and spring. Spinner dolphins, spotted dolphins, and Fraser’s dolphins were mainly detected in summer. Bottlenose dolphins represent the least common species. In the future, the biodiversity, species-specific habitat use, and inter-specific interaction of cetaceans can be investigated through an underwater acoustic monitoring network.

The mammalian multi-functional RNA-binding motif 4 (RBM4) protein regulates alterative splicing of precursor mRNAs and thereby affects pancreas and muscle cell differentiation. RBM4 homologs exist in all metazoan lineages. The C-terminal unstructured domain of RBM4 is evolutionarily divergent and contains stretches of low-complexity sequences, including single amino acid and/or dipeptide repeats. Here we examined the splicing activity, phosphorylation potential, and subcellular localization of RBM4 homologs from a wide range of species. The results show that these RBM4 homologs exert different effects on 5′ splice site utilization and exon selection, and exhibit different subnuclear localization patterns. Therefore, the C-terminal domain of RBM4 may contribute to functional divergence between homologs. On the other hand, analysis of chimeric human RBM4 proteins containing heterologous sequences at the C-terminus revealed that the N-terminal RNA binding domain of RBM4 could have a dominant role in determining splicing outcome. Finally, all RBM4 homologs examined could be phosphorylated by an SR protein kinase, suggesting that they are regulated by a conserved mechanism in different species. This study offers a first clue to functional evolution of a splicing factor.