Faculty perceptions and readership patterns of finance journals:a global view

Journal rankings are frequently used as a measure of both journal and author research quality. Nonetheless, debates frequently arise because journal rankings do not take into account the underlying diversity of the finance research community. This study examines how factors such as a researcher's geographic origin, research interests, seniority, and journal affiliation influence journal quality perceptions and readership patterns. Based on a worldwide sample of 862 finance academics, we find remarkable consistency in the rankings of top journals. For the remaining journals, perception of journal quality differs depending on the researcher's geographic origin, research interests, seniority, and journal affiliation.

Theme and thematic patterns in Spanish and English history texts

The aim of this research project is to compare published history textbooks written for upper-secondary/tertiary study in the U.S. and Spain using Halliday's (1994) Theme/Rheme construct. The motivation for using the Theme/Rheme construct to analyze professional texts in the two languages is two-fold. First of all, while there exists a multitude of studies at the grammatical and phonological levels between the two languages, very little analysis has been carried out in comparison at the level of text, beyond that of comparing L1/L2 student writing. Secondly, thematic considerations allow the analyst to highlight areas of textual organization in a systematic way for purposes of comparison. The basic hypothesis tested here rests on the premise that similarity in the social function of the texts results in similar Theme choice and thematic patterning across languages, barring certain linguistic constraints. The corpus for this study consists of 20 texts: 10 from various history textbooks published in the U.S. and 10 from various history textbooks published in Spain. The texts chosen represent a variety of authors, in order to control for author style or preference. Three overall areas of analysis were carried out, representing Halliday's (1994) three metafunctions: the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual. The ideational analysis shows similarities across the two corpora in terms of participant roles and circumstances as Theme, with a slight difference in participants involved in material processes, which is shown to reflect a minor difference in the construal of the field of history in the two cultures. The textual analysis shows overall similarities with respect to text organization, and the interpersonal analysis shows overall similarities as regards the downplay of discrepant interpretations of historical events as well as a low frequency of interactive textual features, manifesting the informational focus of the texts. At the same time, differences in results amongst texts within each of the corpora demonstrate possible effect of subject matter, in many cases, and individual author style in others. Overall, the results confirm that similarity in content, but above all in purpose and audience, result in texts which show similarities in textual features, setting aside certain grammatical constraints.

Milk feeding, solid feeding, and obesity risk:a review of the relationships between early life feeding practices and later adiposity

Childhood obesity is a major health issue with associated ill-health consequences during childhood and into later adolescence and adulthood. Given that eating behaviors are formed during early childhood, it is important to evaluate the relationships between early life feeding practices and later child adiposity. This review describes and evaluates recent literature exploring associations between child weight and the mode of milk feeding, the age of introducing solid foods and caregivers’ solid feeding practices. There are many inconsistencies in the literature linking early life feeding to later obesity risk and discrepancies may be related to inconsistent definitions, or a lack of control for confounding variables. This review summarizes the literature in this area and identifies the need for large scale longitudinal studies to effectively explore how early life feeding experiences may interact with each other and with nutritional provision during later childhood to predict obesity risk.

The determination of a basic management system for small construction firms within the Western region with recommendations for education and training patterns

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Losses, dividend reductions, and market reaction associated with past earnings and dividends patterns

This paper examines investors' reactions to dividend reductions or omissions conditional on past earnings and dividend patterns for a sample of eighty-two U.S. firms that incurred an annual loss. We document that the market reaction for firms with long patterns of past earnings and dividend payouts is significantly more negative than for firms with lessestablished past earnings and dividends records. Our results can be explained by the following line of reasoning. First, consistent with DeAngelo, DeAngelo, and Skinner (1992), a loss following a long stream of earnings and dividend payments represents an unreliable indicator of future earnings. Thus, established firms have higher loss reliability than less-established firms. Second, because current earnings and dividend policy are a substitute source of means of forecasting future earnings, lower loss reliability increases the information content of dividend reductions. Therefore, given the presence of a loss, the longer the stream of prior earnings and dividend payments, (1) the lower the loss reliability and (2) the more reliably dividend cuts are perceived as an indication that earnings difficulties will persist in the future.

The effect of past earnings and dividend patterns on the information content of dividends when earnings are reduced

This study pursues two objectives: first, to provide evidence on the information content of dividend policy, conditional on past earnings and dividend patterns prior to an annual earnings decline; second, to examine the effect of the magnitude of low earnings realizations on dividend policy when firms have more-or-less established dividend payouts. The information content of dividend policy for firms that incur earnings reductions following long patterns of positive earnings and dividends has been examined (DeAngelo et al., 1992, 1996; Charitou, 2000). No research has examined the association between the informativeness of dividend policy changes in the event of an earnings drop, relative to varying patterns of past earnings and dividends. Our dataset consists of 4,873 U.S. firm-year observations over the period 1986-2005. Our evidence supports the hypotheses that, among earnings-reducing or loss firms, longer patterns of past earnings and dividends: (a) strengthen the information conveyed by dividends regarding future earnings, and (b) enhance the role of the magnitude of low earnings realizations in explaining dividend policy decisions, in that earnings hold more information content that explains the likelihood of dividend cuts the longer the past earnings and dividend patterns. Both results stem from the stylized facts that managers aim to maintain consistency with respect to historic payout policy, being reluctant to proceed with dividend reductions, and that this reluctance is higher the more established is the historic payout policy. © 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2010 Accounting Foundation, The University of Sydney.

Breast-feeding, maternal feeding practices and mealtime negativity at one year

This paper explores whether breast-feeding, mediated by lower maternal use of controlling strategies, predicts more positive mealtime interactions between mothers and their 1 year old infants. Eighty-seven women completed questionnaires regarding breast-feeding, assessing their control over child feeding and mealtime negativity at 1 year of infant age. Seventy-four of these women were also observed feeding their infants solid food at 1 year. Mediation analyses demonstrated that the experience of breast-feeding, mediated by lower reported maternal control over child feeding, predicted maternal reports of less negative mealtime interactions. The experience of breast-feeding also predicted observations of less conflict at mealtimes, mediated by observations of maternal sensitivity during feeding interactions. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Maternal cognitions, psychopathologic symptoms, and infant temperament as predictors of early infant feeding problems:a longitudinal study

Objective: The current study examined the contribution of prenatal and postnatal maternal core beliefs, self-esteem, psychopathologic symptoms, and postnatal infant temperament to the prediction of infant feeding difficulties. Method: Ninety-nine women completed questionnaires assessing their core beliefs, psychopathology, and self-esteem during pregnancy and at 6 months postpartum. At 6 months, mothers also rated their infant's temperament and feeding, and were observed feeding their infants. Results: Maternal reports of child feeding difficulties were predicted by higher levels of emotional deprivation and entitlement core beliefs and lower levels of self-sacrifice and enmeshment core beliefs during pregnancy. Postnatal social isolation core beliefs, lower maternal self-esteem, and more difficult infant temperament added significantly to the variance explained by prenatal factors. Maternal core beliefs, self-esteem, psychopathology, and infant temperament failed to significantly predict independent observations of child food refusal. Conclusion: Maternal cognitions are implicated in the development of maternal reports of feeding difficulty.

Support vector machines to detect physiological patterns for EEG and EMG-based human-computer interaction:a review

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are widely used classifiers for detecting physiological patterns in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Their success is due to their versatility, robustness and large availability of free dedicated toolboxes. Frequently in the literature, insufficient details about the SVM implementation and/or parameters selection are reported, making it impossible to reproduce study analysis and results. In order to perform an optimized classification and report a proper description of the results, it is necessary to have a comprehensive critical overview of the application of SVM. The aim of this paper is to provide a review of the usage of SVM in the determination of brain and muscle patterns for HCI, by focusing on electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG) techniques. In particular, an overview of the basic principles of SVM theory is outlined, together with a description of several relevant literature implementations. Furthermore, details concerning reviewed papers are listed in tables, and statistics of SVM use in the literature are presented. Suitability of SVM for HCI is discussed and critical comparisons with other classifiers are reported.