Takeover defenses and IPO firm value in the Netherlands

The central question of this study involves the relation between the use of takeover defenses and IPO firm value. We report that management frequently uses takeover defenses before taking the firm public. The use of takeover defenses is primarily motivated by managerial entrenchment. IPO investors anticipate potential conflict of interests with management and reduce the price they pay for the IPO shares if takeover defenses are adopted. Although managers internalize this cost of takeover defenses to the degree they own pre-IPO stock, they are likely to gain through private control benefits. Non-management pre-IPO owners lose. Their shares are worth less, but different from managers, they do not get offsetting private control benefits. We infer that managers use takeover defenses to protect private control benefits at non-management pre-IPO owners' expense.firm valuation;initial public offering;takeover defense

MoNoise: Modeling Noise Using a Modular Normalization System

We propose MoNoise: a normalization model focused on generalizability and efficiency, it aims at being easily reusable and adaptable. Normalization is the task of translating texts from a non- canonical domain to a more canonical domain, in our case: from social media data to standard language. Our proposed model is based on a modular candidate generation in which each module is responsible for a different type of normalization action. The most important generation modules are a spelling correction system and a word embeddings module. Depending on the definition of the normalization task, a static lookup list can be crucial for performance. We train a random forest classifier to rank the candidates, which generalizes well to all different types of normaliza- tion actions. Most features for the ranking originate from the generation modules; besides these features, N-gram features prove to be an important source of information. We show that MoNoise beats the state-of-the-art on different normalization benchmarks for English and Dutch, which all define the task of normalization slightly different.Comment: Source code: https://bitbucket.org/robvanderg/monois

To Normalize, or Not to Normalize: The Impact of Normalization on Part-of-Speech Tagging

Does normalization help Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging accuracy on noisy, non-canonical data? To the best of our knowledge, little is known on the actual impact of normalization in a real-world scenario, where gold error detection is not available. We investigate the effect of automatic normalization on POS tagging of tweets. We also compare normalization to strategies that leverage large amounts of unlabeled data kept in its raw form. Our results show that normalization helps, but does not add consistently beyond just word embedding layer initialization. The latter approach yields a tagging model that is competitive with a Twitter state-of-the-art tagger.Comment: In WNUT 201

Intra- and interspecies transmission of H7N7 highly pathogenic avian influenza virus during the avian influenza epidemic in the Netherlands in 2003

The poultry epidemic of H7N7 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus in the Netherlands in 2003 was probably the result of the introduction of an H7N7 low pathogenic avian influenza (LPAI) virus (by interspecies transmission from wild birds) and the subsequent intraspecies transmission of this virus in poultry. The intraspecies transmission of the ensuing H7N7 HPAI virus was very successful both within and between flocks. Consequently, in the two poultry-dense areas that were affected, the epidemic could only be stopped by eliminating all poultry in the region. According to the spatial models these are the only areas where this was the case in the Netherlands. There was also interspecies transmission to mammals, i.e. to pigs and to humans. For pigs it was shown that possible subsequent intraspecies transmission was negligible (R0 <1). With hindsight the same was probably also true for human

Does web anticipate stocks? Analysis for a subset of systemically important banks

Is web buzz able to lead stock behavior for a set of systemically important banks? Are stock movements sensitive to the geo-tagging of the web buzz? Between Dec. 2013 and April 2014, we scrape about 4000 world media websites retrieving all public information related to 10 systemically important banks. We process web news with a sentiment analysis algorithm in order to detect article mood. We show that web buzz does not seem to lead stock behavior as Granger test fails to support an average association that goes one-way from web to stocks. We nevertheless find a statistically sound anticipation capacity for single banks with gains ranging from 4 to 12%. Hierarchical clustering and Principal Component Analysis suggest that Euro area level decisions/facts do in fact drive stock behaviour, while web news about single banks only episodically make a difference in stock movements. Our analysis confirms that the location of the web source matters. The use of sources with international echo eliminates some of the noise introduced by irrelevant texts at the country level and improves the predictive power of the model up to 27.5%.JRC.G.1-Financial and Economic Analysi

Customizing content to find the right price for online news

Customization of local online news content based upon users' preferences could be a way that newspaper companies would attract more people to their websites. A survey of 384 people done using Amazon M-Turk in May 2015 found that people were more likely to visit and spend more time a customized local news website. However, this did not translate into more people willing to pay more for this customization. About 93 percent of those surveyed said they were paying nothing for online news content. Indeed, research has shown getting people to pay for something they had been getting for free is very difficult. Predictors of who would be willing to pay for a customized news site were whether they were currently subscribing to a paid website and were already heavy customers of news

The role of the inflammasome in cellular responses to toxins and bacterial effectors

Invading pathogens are recognized by mammalian cells through dedicated receptors found either at the cell surface or in the cytoplasm. These receptors, like the trans-membrane Toll-like Receptors (TLR) or the cytosolic Nod-like Receptors (NLR), initiate innate immunity after recognition of molecular patterns found in bacteria or viruses, such as LPS, flagellin, or double-stranded RNA. Recognition of molecules produced only by a specific pathogen, such as a viral envelop protein or a bacterial adhesin does not appear to occur. Bacterial protein toxins, however, might compose an intermediate class. Considering the diversity of toxins in terms of structure, it is unlikely that cells respond to them via specific molecular recognition. It rather appears that different classes of toxins trigger cellular changes that are sensed by the cells as danger signals, such as changes in cellular ion composition after membrane perforation by pore-forming toxins or type III secretion systems. The signaling pathways triggered through toxin-induced cell alterations will likely play a role in modulating host responses to virulent bacteria. We will here describe the few studied cases in which detection of the toxin by the host cell was addressed. The review will include not only toxins but also bacteria effectors secreted by the bacterium in to the host cell cytoplas

Elastic networks of protein particles

This paper describes the formation and properties of protein particle suspensions. The protein particles were prepared by a versatile method based on quenching a phase-separating protein–polysaccharide mixture. Two proteins were selected, gelatin and whey protein. Gelatin forms aggregates by means of reversible physical bonds, and whey protein forms aggregates that can be stabilized by chemical bonds. Rheology and microscopy show that protein particles aggregate into an elastic particle gel for both proteins. Properties similar to model systems of synthetic colloidal particles were obtained using protein particle suspensions. This suggests that the behaviour of the particle suspensions is mainly governed by the mesoscopic properties of the particle networks and to a lesser extent on the molecular properties of the particle

Combining Twitter and Media Reports on Public Health Events in MedISys

We describe the harvesting and subsequent analysis of tweets that are linked to media reports on public health events in order to identify which Internet resources are being referred to in these tweets. The aim was to automatically detect resources that are traditionally not considered mainstream media, but play a role in the discussion of public health events on the Internet. Interestingly, our initial evaluation of the results showed that most references related to public health events lead to traditional news media sites, even though URLs to non-traditional media receive a higher rank. We will briefly describe the Medical Information System (MedISys) and the methodology used to obtain and analyse tweets.JRC.G.2 - Global security and crisis managemen