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The strategy of dividend policy implementation in the context of business value growth is the subject of debates in theoretical and empirical research. Dividends and retained earnings are two alternatives that investors have when deciding how to distribute their income. According to the bird-in-the-hand theory, a company’s value is maximized by paying large dividends, because investors consider the payouts less risky than capital gains, regular high dividend payments serve as an information signal to market participations about the current and future financial stability, which attracts new investors and allows attracting more external resources. Instead, according to Miller and Modigliani’s dividend irrelevancy theory, corporate value is influenced not by the division of income into dividends and retained earnings, but by investment policy and income from assets. There is a lack of research in the literature that examines the relationship between dividend payouts and stock prices in developing countries (especially in Nepal) and there is no empirical evidence that profitability can moderate this relationship. The article examines the influence of dividend yield, retention ratio and dividend payout ratio on share price both in general and directly, and indirectly-through return on assets and return on equity. The information base is data for the 2017-2021 financial years on 61 Nepalese microfinance institutions (10 of which were the direct object of the study) registered on the Nepal Stock Exchange (NEPSE), obtained from the official websites of the relevant institutions, ShareSansar and NEPSE statistics. SPSS software (PROCESS v4.3) was used for data analysis. Descriptive statistics, the correlation and regression analysis were used for the analysis. The article analyzes three types of effects: total, direct and indirect. The overall effect of dividend yield on share price is negative, the retention ratio is positive and significant, and the dividend payout ratio is negative and significant. The direct effect of the dividend yield on the stock price is negative, the retention ratio and the dividend payout ratio are positive and insignificant. The indirect effect of dividend yield and retention ratio on share price through return on assets is negative and insignificant, and through return on equity it is positive and significant. The indirect effect of the dividend payout ratio through the return on assets is positive and significant. However, the return on shareholders’ capital has a negative and insignificant effect on the share price.

There has always been controversy among researchers over how dividend policies affect share prices, and this equivocal relationship varies throughout international markets. This study is set to examine the relation between share prices and number of dividend policy and profitability variables. Based on the information from five insurance companies that are listed on Kuwait Stock Exchange (KSE) over the period 2014 and 2022, findings indicates that 55.3% of stock prices could be explained by factors related to profitability and dividend policy. The relationship between stock price, as a dependent variable, and earnings per share (EPS), dividend yield (DY), earning to price ratio (EP), risk premium (RP), and retention ratio (RR), as independent variables, was investigated in this study using OLS regression approach. The results of the regression analysis demonstrated a significant direct relationship between stock price and earnings per share (EPS), suggesting that investors choose highly profitable shares. At the 99% confidence level, the earnings to price ratio (EP) likewise revealed a statistically significant direct relationship with the stock price. At 90% confidence level, risk premium (RP) also shown a substantial direct relationship. The only variable that significantly correlated negatively with share prices was dividend yield (DY), suggesting that investors choose more stable payouts over uncertain future capital gains. Conversely, the retention ratio (RR) demonstrated a negligible direct impact on share prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strategy of dividend policy implementation in the context of business value growth is the subject of debates in theoretical and empirical research. Dividends and retained earnings are two alternatives that investors have when deciding how to distribute their income. According to the bird-in-the-hand theory, a company's value is maximized by paying large dividends, because investors consider the payouts less risky than capital gains, regular high dividend payments serve as an information signal to market participations about the current and future financial stability, which attracts new investors and allows attracting more external resources. Instead, according to Miller and Modigliani's dividend irrelevancy theory, corporate value is influenced not by the division of income into dividends and retained earnings, but by investment policy and income from assets. There is a lack of research in the literature that examines the relationship between dividend payouts and stock prices in developing countries (especially in Nepal) and there is no empirical evidence that profitability can moderate this relationship. The article examines the influence of dividend yield, retention ratio and dividend payout ratio on share price both in general and directly, and indirectly-through return on assets and return on equity. The information base is data for the 2017-2021 financial years on 61 Nepalese microfinance institutions (10 of which were the direct object of the study) registered on the Nepal Stock Exchange (NEPSE), obtained from the official websites of the relevant institutions, ShareSansar and NEPSE statistics. SPSS software (PROCESS v4.3) was used for data analysis. Descriptive statistics, the correlation and regression analysis were used for the analysis. The article analyzes three types of effects: total, direct and indirect. The overall effect of dividend yield on share price is negative, the retention ratio is positive and significant, and the dividend payout ratio is negative and significant. The direct effect of the dividend yield on the stock price is negative, the retention ratio and the dividend payout ratio are positive and insignificant. The indirect effect of dividend yield and retention ratio on share price through return on assets is negative and insignificant, and through return on equity it is positive and significant. The indirect effect of the dividend payout ratio through the return on assets is positive and significant. However, the return on shareholders' capital has a negative and insignificant effect on the share price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The Haihe River, flowing through Tianjin City, grapples with pollution challenges, notably high levels of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) leading to eutrophication and unpleasant odors, particularly aggravated by rainfall. This study used Environmental Fluid Dynamics Code to comprehensively analyze the water environment under three scenarios: low flow year, normal flow year, and high flow year. The investigation delves into N and P concentrations, computes atmospheric deposition fluxes, and evaluates the loads and retention ratios of N and P in the urban river network of Tianjin City. Scenario analysis reveals distinct trends, with high flow years associated with elevated N and hydrodynamics levels, while low flow years exhibit contrasting patterns. Key findings include 1) wet deposition fluxes contributing 21% of NH 4 +-N and 9% of TP river loads, 2) continuous rainfall and runoff resulting in immediate or delayed increases in NH 4 +-N, TN, and TP concentrations in surface water, 3) an increase in average N:P mole ratios downstream along the Haihe River, and 4) N and P mean retention ratios were 48% and 63%, respectively. The study suggests that implementing sponge city construction and sustainable drainage systems may improve water quality by mitigating the direct discharge of rainfall runoff into the river. [Display omitted] • Observing N and P retention ratios ranging from 44% to 52% and 59% to 68%. • High flow year associated with elevated N and hydrodynamic levels. • Wet deposition contributes 18% ∼ 24% and 8% ∼ 12% of river NH 4 +-N and TP loads. • River N:P mole ratios increased as the downstream distance increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic documents contain tremendous amounts of information. A text summary system is needed to save time and rapidly know about the document, because the manual text summary requires time, effort, and costs, which automatically creates a summary from the source document. Hindi is India's most spoken language. A Hindi document summarization system does not exist. The method of summary generation is either extractive or abstractive. The extractive text summary method extracts the most suitable phrases from input documents to be incorporated into the summary whereas the abstractive is the human-like summary method. To select a summary sentence, it must be the highest score. In this paper, we apply different mathematical combinations using nine textual features to score a sentence. We analyzed the results on 2000 documents taken from the Forum of Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE)1 conference using ROUGE evaluation matrices at the retention rate of 40%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Green roofs (GRs) are well known for source control of runoff quantity in sustainable urban stormwater management. By considering the inherent randomness of rainfall characteristics, this study derives the probability distribution of rainfall retention ratio and its statistical moments. The distribution function of can be used to establish a unique relationship between target retention ratio , achievable reliability AR, and substrate depth h for the aleatory-based probabilistic (AP) GR design. However, uncertainties of epistemic nature also exist in the AP GR model that makes AR uncertain. In the paper, the treatment of epistemic uncertainty in the AP GR model is presented and implemented for the uncertainty quantification of AR. It is shown that design without considering epistemic uncertainties by the AP GR model yields about 50% confidence of meeting . A procedure is presented to determine the design substrate depth having the stipulated confidence to satisfy and target achievable reliability . HIGHLIGHTS Derive the probability distribution of the rainfall retention ratio of green roof (GR) and its statistical moments.; Present an aleatory-based probabilistic (AP) model for GR design.; The paper shows that the design without considering epistemic uncertainties by the AP GR model yields about 50% confidence of meeting target retention ratio.; Propose a methodology to treat epistemic uncertainty in the AP model for the uncertainty quantification of achievable reliability.; Demonstrate the analysis procedures via a numerical example to determine GR substrate depth having the stipulated confidence to satisfy target retention ratio and target reliability.;

• The retention of P is more notable than retained N in the cascade reservoirs. • P retention is mainly concentrated in the particulate form due to the deposition of SS. • Runoff-sediment variations and HRT play pivotal factors affecting transport and retention of P. • Setting HRT = 5.3 days is vital for the balance of TP in the cascade reservoirs. Cascade reservoirs construction has modified the nutrients dynamics and biogeochemical cycles, consequently affecting the composition and productivity of river ecosystems. The Jinsha River, as the predominant contributor to runoff, suspended sediment (SS), and nutrients production within the Yangtze River, is a typical cascade reservoir region with unclear transport patterns and retention mechanisms of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus). Furthermore, how to regulate nutrients delivery in the cascade reservoirs region is also an urgent issue for basin water environment study. Therefore, we monitored monthly variations in nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations from November 2021 to October 2022 in the cascade reservoirs of the Jinsha River. The results indicated that the concentrations and fluxes of total phosphorus (TP) and particulate phosphorus (PP) decreased along the cascade of reservoirs, primarily due to PP deposited with SS, while opposing trends for total nitrogen (TN) and dissolved total nitrogen (DTN), which might be the consequences of human inputs and the increase of dissolved inorganic nitrogen discharged from the bottom of the reservoirs. Moreover, the positive average annual retention ratios for TP and PP were 10% and 16%, respectively, in contrast to the negative averages of -8 % for TN and -11% for particulate nitrogen (PN). The variability in runoff-sediment and hydraulic retention time (HRT) of cascade reservoirs played crucial roles in the retention of TP and PP. A regulatory threshold of HRT = 5.3 days in the flood season was obtained for controlling the balance of TP based on the stronger relationship between HRT and TP retention ratio. Consequently, the HRT of these reservoirs could be managed to control nutrients delivery, which was of particular significance for basin government institutions. This study enhances our comprehension of how cascade reservoirs influence the distribution and transport patterns of nutrients, offering a fresh perspective on nutrients delivery regulation. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic text summarization is an exertion of contriving the abridged form of a text document covering salient knowledge. Numerous statistical, linguistic, rule-based, and position-based text summarization approaches have been explored for different rich-resourced languages. For under-resourced languages such as Hindi, automatic text summarization is a challenging task and still an unsolved problem. Another issue with such languages is the unavailability of corpus and the inadequacy of the processing tools. In this paper, we proposed an extractive lexical knowledge-rich topic modeling text summarization approach for Hindi novels and stories in which we implemented four independent variants using different sentence weighting schemes. We prepared a corpus of Hindi Novels and stories since the absence of a corpus. We used a smoothing technique for edifying and variety summaries followed by evaluating the efficacy of generated summaries against three metrics (gist diversity, retention ratio, and ROUGE score). The results manifest that the proposed model produces abridge, articulate and coherent summaries. To investigate the performance of the proposed model, we simulate the experiments on the English dataset as well. Further, we compare our models with the baselines and traditional topic modeling approach, where we show that the proposed model has confessed optimal results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coal blending has been extensively applied in coal-fired power plant. The emission of trace elements was greatly affected by the change of combustion characteristic in the blended coal. Based on thermodynamic calculation and combustion experiments, the distribution of arsenic and selenium in the process of SH bituminous and HLH lignite co-combustion were investigated at a wide temperature range (500–1500 °C). The result of thermodynamic calculation displayed that the main existing forms of arsenic were considered as Ca3(AsO4)2(s), As4O6(g), and As2O3(g). At temperatures below 1000 °C, As4O6 was deemed the dominant gas-phase species of arsenic. Moreover, the form of selenium was predicted to be SeO2(g) which accounted for almost 100% of the selenium species at 500–1100 °C. When the temperature was increased to 1200 °C, gaseous-phase SeO begun to appear. The result of co-combustion experiments suggested that the retention ratio of arsenic and selenium in ash was decreased obviously at 500–900 °C with the increasing of temperature, which was consistent with the result of the calculation. SH coal had more effective arsenic and selenium retention capacity than HLH coal at 500–900 °C. The retention ratio of arsenic in 3SH:1HLH coal was fluctuated between 6.20 and 18.04%, and that of 1SH:3HLH coal was 3.29–7.08%. The retention ratio of selenium in the ash of mixed coals combusted at different temperature was lower than 7%, especially at 800 and 900 °C; nearly all of the selenium species were volatilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Substituted Co 3 O 4 spinels for low-cost energy storage devices. • MnCo 2 O 4 with high specific capacitance ∼1401 F/gm. • Excellent capacity retention after 1000 cycles. • Low internal resistance ∼ 0.15 Ω for CuCo 2 O 4. • Substituted Co 3 O 4 spinels for NTC thermistors. Due to the growing importance of low-cost energy storage devices in smart device applications, finding an appropriate electrode material with the least self-discharging, high power, and energy densities is the need of the hour. In this paper, Cu and Mn-modified Co 3 O 4 spinels in the form of CuCo 2 O 4 and MnCo 2 O 4 are reported as the most promising electrode materials for high-performance electrochemical supercapacitors. Modified Co 3 O 4 spinels were prepared by the co-precipitation technique, and the X-ray diffraction (XRD) studies show a single-phase formation with cubic crystal symmetry. The average crystallite size estimated by considering the highest intensity peak of the diffraction pattern using Scherrer's relation shows the average crystallite size below 30 nm for reported spinels. Scanning electron microscopic (SEM) images stabilize the fact that grains with nanosizes consisting of regular shapes and excellent morphological features. The dc-conductivity measurement establishes the essence of negative temperature coefficient of resistance (NTCR) behavior in nanostructured spinels. The specific capacitance (C s) of CuCo 2 O 4 and MnCo 2 O 4 estimated using cyclic voltammetry (CV) was found to be 616.074 F g−1 and 1401.16 F g−1 for a scan rate of 10 mV s−1 with verified stability up to 1000 cycles. The low internal resistance value in the range of 0.1 Ω for both the spinels verified by the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) graph confirms these spinels as encouraging electrode materials for electrochemical supercapacitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the numerical modeling of invert traps in open channels, earlier investigators used a fixed lid model (assuming closed conduit flow with the top wall as a shear free wall) with a stochastic discrete phase model (DPM). This approximate model was poorly validated with the experimental data. In the present study, experimentation has shown that the free-water surface rises above the central opening (slot) above the invert trap, which cannot be modeled using a fixed lid model. Therefore, in the present study, without making such assumptions, the appropriate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for open-channel flow, i.e., volume of fluid (VOF) model along with stochastic DPM has been used. Two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) analyses show that 2D predicts slightly lower trap efficiencies than 3D, which is theoretically justified because in 3D, more sediment falls into the trap due to their low velocity near the walls, as also observed experimentally, giving higher values of trap efficiency, which is contrary to the presumptions of the earlier investigators that the 3D model will predict lower values than the 2D model. Although, 2D predicts the same qualitative results as the 3D one but quantitatively, the 3D model predicts the best results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two-phase displacements in cavity-featured configurations are ubiquitous phenomena. However, the morphological evolution of the two-phase interface during displacements in cavities is still unclear. Herein, the dynamic evolution of the oil–water interface morphology in three microcavities and transient flow field characteristics is investigated. The influence of the cavity size, channel width, and inlet flow rate on the interface dynamics and the retention ratio of water is parametrically studied. Furthermore, the slippage distance and slip velocity of the interface on cavity walls are comprehensively characterized. A new interface pining mechanism on a small chamfer is proposed. Flow visualization experiments using micro-particle imaging velocimetry and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are conducted to further reveal the transient flow field characteristics. The results provide an in-depth understanding of the background physics of two-phase displacements and provide guidance for the design of cavity-based functional surfaces. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In asymmetrical flow field-flow fractionation (As-FlFFF), only the membrane-covered accumulation wall is permeable to fluid; the opposite channel wall is impermeable. Fluid enters the channel at the inlet and exits partly through the membrane-covered accumulation wall and partly through the channel outlet. This means that not only does the volumetric channel flow rate decrease along the channel length as fluid exits through the membrane but also the cross-channel component to fluid velocity must approach zero at the impermeable wall. This dependence of cross-channel fluid velocity on distance across the channel thickness influences the equilibrium concentration profile for the sample components introduced to the channel. The concentration profile departs from the exponential profile predicted for the ideal model of field-flow fractionation. This influences both the retention ratio and the principal contribution to bandspreading-the nonequilibrium contribution. The derivation of an equation for the nonequilibrium bandspreading parameter χ in As-FlFFF is presented, and its numerical solution graphed. At high retention, it is shown that the solutions for both retention ratio R and χ converge on those for the ideal model, as expected. At lower levels of retention, the departures from the ideal model are significant, particularly for bandspreading. For example, at a level of retention corresponding to a retention parameter λ of 0.05, R is almost 4 % higher than for the ideal model (0.28047 as compared to 0.27000) but the value of χ is almost 60 % higher. The equations presented for both R and χ include a first-order correction for the finite size of the particles-the steric exclusion correction. These corrections are shown to be significant for particle sizes eluting well before steric inversion. For example, particles of half the inversion diameter are predicted to elute 25 % slower and to show almost 40 % higher bandspreading when steric effects are not accounted for. The work presented contributes to the fundamental theory of As-FlFFF and allows quantitative prediction of both retention and bandspreading at all levels of retention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-term retention performance is a common performance indicator for low-impact development practices, such as rain barrels, rain gardens, and green roofs. This paper introduces a numerical approach for the estimation of annual retention ratios of stormwater by bioretention. The annual retention ratio is taken as the ratio of the annual accumulated volume of stormwater retained by bioretention over the total volume of runoff draining into the system. The hydrologic model Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) is used to simulate the relevant flows of a bioretention system with parametric variations of the watershed area ratio and hydraulic conductivity of the soil media. Under these two dominant performance-governing parameters, retention ratios are calculated using the 10-year (2004-2013) rainfall record in Hong Kong at 1-min intervals. This indicator can be readily applied to estimate the long-term retention performance of a bioretention using particular values of watershed area ratio and hydraulic conductivity of soil media under the climate of Hong Kong. The study also analyzes the influence of variation of annual precipitation on the estimated retention performance. Flow data monitored on a pilot-scale physical model of bioretention during a number of rainfall events are used to validate the numerical simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]