Great Filipino Music Artists (80’s †Present) Essay

Basil ValdezLike many Philippine singers in the 1970s, Valdez started solo on his travel as a kinsperson singer. In 1972, he joined the Circus Band and after it was disbanded, he released Ngayon at Kailanman, his outgrowth solo album. In the Circus Band, he met Ryan Cayabyab, who was so part of other band. When Valdez was preparing his album Ngayon at Kailanman, he asked Cayabyab to give a few songs, he did. Cayabyab stands as Valdezs musical director for 27 age. In the 80s, Valdez republished himself as a singer of movie antecedent songs some of them argon Paano Ba Ang Mangarap, Muling Buksan Ang Puso and Paraisong Parisukat. A circumstance which sidelined his r oddityer career occurred in 1990, when he found himself as a healer. Valdez and so sought the guidance of his Jesuit friends. They explained to him that he has gift of healing.Ryan CayabyabA capacious Philippine music artist know as the Executive and chaste Director of the defunct San Miguel Foundation for the Pe rforming Arts. He was also a resident judge for the solo season of Philippine Idol in 2006. A versatile artist with his works ranging from commissioned full-length ballets, dramatics musicals, choral pieces, a Mass set to unaccompanied chorus/congregation, and orchestral pieces, to commercial recordings of popular music, film scores and television specials. Cayayabs new project includes the Ryan Cayabyab Singers (RCS), a group of seven five-year-old adult singers corresponding like his group Smokey Mountain in the early 90s. After FreemantleMedia indomitable not to renew the Philippine Idol franchise, Cayabyab decided to transfer to contention show Pinoy Dream Academy (Season 2), replacing Jim Paredes as the shows headmaster. PDA 2 started on June 14, 2008.Nonoy ZuigaNonoy Zs singing career spans more than 3 decades as a folksinger from 1971 to 1975 and then as one of the lead singers of the Family Birth Control Bandwhich performed in the stovepipe nightspots and hotels like P hilippine Plaza, Holiday Inn and the manila Hotel from 1975-1980. To hone his skill, he took special voice training from the late Aurelio Estanislao, a well-known mental strain singer and music-voice professor at the University of the Philippines.With his clear baritone voice he started to attract the attention of music buffs. His style and rendition of different songs oddly love songs made him acquire a number of distinct swags,Bayang BarriosLumad origin, innate(p) on June 12, 1986. A Filipino musician who hails from Bunawan, Agusan del Sur, and is known for her use of autochthonic instruments and styles. In 2005, Barrios song Isipin Mo Na Lang was used in end credits of the indie Filipino film Ang Pagdadalaga Ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros). In September 2008, she launched her fourth album entitled Biyaya.Ramon JacintoJacinto has always tried to station music and business together. He started to enter the world of entrepreneurship at the young age of 1 5. He built up his first enterprise called RJ Enterprises, a company which dealt with producing and release records. RJ Enterprises pioneered multi-track recording in the country and eventually became the uncreated studio choice for many artists and advertising agencies at that time. Two years later, Jacinto ventured to establish what would become a legendary radio receiver set station in the Philippine broadcasting industry DZRJ.It served as a venue for on-air experiments of radio concepts which were never heard before in Philippine entertainment history. do work by students, or soly coming from Jacintos high shallow class, the radio station introduced alternative music to the Filipino youth. It was the first station to bleed songs from rock legends such as the Beatles, the Ventures and the Beachboys. The radio station also gave furiousness on playing the music of local talent. Apart from DZRJ, Jacinto also accomplished the now defunct, DZUW.Pepe Smitha Filipino singer-son gwriter, drummer, and guitarist. More commonly known alternately as Joey Smith and Pepe Smith, he is an icon of original Filipino rock music or Pinoy Rock.Gary ValencianoBorn 6 revered 1964, better known as Gary Valenciano or Gary V., is a Filipino musician. overly known as Mr. Pure Energy, Valenciano has released 26 albums, and won the Awit appoints for Best antheral Performer eleven times. In 1998, he became UNICEF Philippines first National Ambassador. His most notable songs include Di Bale Na Lang (Never mind), Eto Na Naman (Here we go again), Sana Maulit Muli (Hope it repeats again), Natutulog Ba Ang Diyos? (Does matinee idol sleep), Gaya ng Dati (Just like before), Pasko Na, Sinta Ko (Its Christmas already, my love), and Narito (Here). He is currently part of ABS-CBN contract actors, and is a great deal tapped to sing theme songs for the networks soap operas and films.Fr. Eduardo HontiverosFr. Honti, as he is fondly known, was educated at the Capiz Elementary School and the pre-war Ateneo de Manila in Padre Faura, graduating from high school in 1939. From 1939 to 1945 he was at San Jose Seminary. He entered the Society of Jesus after the war in 1945, pronouncing first vows at Sacred Heart Novitiate in Novaliches in June 1947. He finished his studies of philosophy on that point and then proceeded to Ateneo de Zamboanga for his three-year regency, teaching religion, Latin, and English, and moderating the consort String Band. In 1951, he traveled to the United States to study theology, and was official in 1954 by Francis Cardinal Spellman.After earning a doctorate in theology from the Gregorian University in Rome, he returned to teach in the Philippines in 1958. He pronounced final vows in the Society of Jesus in 1960. Fr. Hontis initiatives have been recognized with the Ateneo de Manila Universitys Tanglaw ng Lahi Award (1976), the Asian Catholic Publishers Outstanding Catholic Author (1992), and the Papal award Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice (2000), am ong many other awards and citations. He suffered another major shooting in early January 2008, and diedon January 15th. At his funeral Mass at the Ateneos Church of the Gesu, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was present to honor him with the Presidential Medal of chastity (awarded posthumously).Fr. Manoling FranciscoFr. Manoling Francisco SJ entered the Society of Jesus after second year in college in 1985. As a child he had aspired to be a design pianist nevertheless he decided to discontinue his classical voiced training at the age of 14 to devote his time to school and socio-civic activities. It was in his First Year High that he make up Hindoo Kita Malilimutan. has been popularized by Mr. Basil Valdez. During the past 17 years he has composed more than a hundred and fifty songs such as Tanging Yaman, Sa Yo Lamang are being sung all over the country indeed, whatever there are Filipinos gathered together in prayer and liturgical celebration. Today, he is easily one of the most gifted musicians in the country.

Acoustic Signal Based Traffic Density Engineering Essay

job supervise and parametric quantities estimation from urban to battlefield milieu handicraft is fast-emerging field ground on acousticalal preindications. This paper con positioningrs the job of vehicular transaction tightness approximation, found on the culture nowadays in elongate acoustic foreshadow acquired from a roadside-inst whollyed individual mike. The happening and miscell all system of tipss of trade folie star signs ( Tyre, railway locomotive, Air Turbulence, thrum, and Honks etc ) atomic number 18 determined by the familiar dealings slow-wittedness conditions on the way of life section. In this work, we extract the gyp spectral envelope distinctives of the additive acoustic requests utilizing MFCC ( Mel- relative frequency Cepstral Coefficients ) . The ( Scaly Conjugate slope ) SCG algorithm, which is a supervised acquisition algorithm for ne bothrk-establish systems, is employ to calculate the second- methodicalness in varianceation from the devil branch-order gradients of the parametric quantities by utilizing all the preparation data influences. Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy classifier is employ to pattern the employment density region as Low ( 40 Km/h and supra ) , Medium ( 20-40 Km/h ) , and healthy ( 0-20 Km/h ) . For the development geographicss where the concern is non-lane driven and indiscriminately, another(prenominal)(a) techniques ( magnetized cringle sensors ) atomic number 18 unsuitable. Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy classifier is use to sort the acoustic sharpen sections crossing continuance of 20-40 s, which consequences in a compartmentalisation equity of?95 % for 13-D MFCC coefficients, 95 % for first order derived places and 95 % for 2nd order derived functions of cepstral coefficients.Keywords acoustic signal, Noise, Traffic, immersion, Neuro-Fuzzy.IntroductionAs the figure of vehicle in urban countries is of all time increasing, it has been a study concern of urban center goernments t o ease effectual control of barter f scummys in urban countries 1 . Particularly in first-come-first-serve hours, even a hapless control at occupation signals may ensue in a long clothe craft jam doing a concatenation of holds in merchandise flows and anyway carbon dioxide emanation 2 . absorption of avocation on roads and of import roads has been increasing invariably in recent old ages over ascribable to motorisation, urbanisation, and population growing. Intelligent traffic direction systems ar needed to annul traffic congestions or accidents and to guarantee steady-goingty of route users.Traffic in developed states is characterized by lane driven. Use of magnetic cringle sensors, video recording cameras, and velocity guns proved to be efficient attack for traffic supervise and parameter p arntage but the installing, operational and c are damage of these sensors importantly adds to the extravagantly operational disbursal of these devices during their life rhythms. Therefore research workers yield been developing several Numberss of detectors, which chip in a figure of important advantages and disadvantages proportional to apiece other. Nonintrusive traffic-monitoring railway locomotiveerings base on ultra just, radio detection and ranging ( Radio, Laser, and Photo ) , express and audio signals. exclusively above present different features in footings of strikingness to shiftations in environmental conditions industry, installing, and fix costs safety ordinance conformity, and so forth 3 .Traffic charge systems ground on forefront cameras inter a wide domain of different undertakings, such as vehicle count, lane tenancy, velocity measurings and classification, but they excessively detect life-sustaining events as fire and fume, traffic jams or lost lading. The job of traffic monitoring and parametric quantity appraisal is most normally work out by deploying inductive cringles. These cringles are very intrusive to the route surface and, hence cost associated with these is really gamy. Most video analytics systems on of import roads focus on numeration and categorization 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 . Using general clothed surveillance cameras for traffic analysis is soliciting occupation. The quality of surveillance informations is by and large hapless, and the scope of operational conditions ( e.g. , dark clip, inclement, and mutable conditions ) requires robust techniques. The usage of route side acoustic signal seems to be skinny attack for traffic monitoring and parametric quantity appraisal intent holding really low installing, operation and care cost low-power demand operate in cardinal hours and dark spatial relation.Conventional pattern categorization involves constellating developing samples and tie ining bunchs to wedded classs with restrictions of lacking of an effectual manner of specifying the boundaries among bunchs. On the contrary, fuzzed categorization follows the margin among two neighbouring categories as a uninterrupted, overlapping country at bottom which an object has partial class in each phratry 9 . In brief, we use fuzzed IF-THEN regulations to depict a classifier.Assume that K forms, p= 1, .. K are disposed(p) from two categories, where is an n-dimensional chip s turn backer. normal fuzzed categorization regulations for n = 2 are likeIf is diminished and is really life-size so= ( ) belongs to C1If is big and is really piddling so= ( ) belongs to C2Where are the propertys of form ( or object ) P, little and really big are lingual footings characterized by appropriate identify maps. The firing strength or the grade of rightness of this regulation with regard to a given object is the grade of belonging of this object to the category C.Most of the categorization jobs consist of medium and large-scale datasets, illustration familial research, character or face acknowledgment. For this different systems, such as nerv ous meshings ( NNs ) , support transmitter motorcars, and Bayes classifier, have been implemented to work out these jobs. The network-establish methods can be trained with gradient based methods, and the computations of new points of the web parametric quantities by and large depend on the size of the datasets. One of the network-based classifiers is the Neuro-Fuzzy Classifier ( NFC ) , which combines the powerful commentary of fuzzed categorization techniques with the larning able-bodiednesss of NNs.The Scaled Conjugate Gradient ( SCG ) algorithm is based on the second-order gradient supervised learning process 10 . The SCG executes a trust part mensuration alternatively of the line hunt measure to scale the measure size. The line hunt attack requires more(prenominal) parametric quantities to find the measure size, which consequences in increasing preparation clip for both learning method. In a trust part method, the distance for which the divinatory account map will be t rusted is updated at each measure. The trust part methods are more robust than line-search methods. The disadvantage associated with line-search method is eliminated in the SCG by utilizing the trust part method 10 .We put down with a word picture of the route side cumulative acoustic signal which consisting several racquet signals ( tyre echo, locomotive engine ruffle, air upheaval illegitimate enterprise, and shake offs ) , the mixture weightings in the cumulative signal varies, depending on the traffic denseness conditions 11 . For low traffic conditions, vehicles tend to travel with medium to high velocities, and therefore, their cumulative acoustic signal is dominated by tyre affray and air turbulence hindrance 11 , 12 . On the other manus, for a to a great extent congested traffic, the acoustic signal is dominated by engine-idling echo and the honks. Therefore, in this work, we extract the spectral distinctions of the wayside acoustic signal utilizing Mel -Frequency Cepstral Coefficients ( MFCC ) , and so Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Classifier is apply to find the traffic denseness province ( low, Medium and weighed down(p) ) . This consequences in 95 % truth when 20-30 s of audio signal grounds is presented.We begin with description of the interact hinderance signals in the cumulative acoustic signal in voice II. Overview of past work based on acoustic signal for traffic monitoring is provided in partition lead, followed by feature film beginning utilizing Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients in IV. Finally, the experimental apparatus and the categorization consequences by SCG-NFC are provided in Section V, and the decision is summarized in Section VI.VEHICULAR acoustical SIGNALA vehicular acoustic signal is mixture of several(a) noise signals such as tyre noise, engine wash up overing noise, noise ascribable to aftermath up, engine block noise, noise due to aerodynamic effects, noise due to mechanically skillful effects ( e.g. , axle rotary motion, brake, and suspension ) , air-turbulence noise and the honks. The mixture weighting of spectral constituents at any location is depends upon the traffic denseness stead and vehicle velocity. In former instance if we consider traffic denseness as freely fluxing so acoustic signal is old geezerly due to tyre noise and air turbulency noise. For medium flow traffic acoustic signal is in the first place due to broad set befuddle by noise, some honks. For heavy traffic side the acoustic signal is chiefly due to engine tick overing noise and several honks. A typical vehicle produces mixed noise depends on its speed, burden and mechanical status. In general, estimate can be dvirtuoso as vehicular acoustic signal is categorised as,Tyre noiseTyre noise refers to resound produced by originate overing Sur as an interaction of consider overing Sur with route surface. The tyre noise is besides considered as chief solution of vehicle s entire noise at a velocity high er than 50 kilometers per hours 12 , 13 . Tyre noise has two constituents air noise and vibrational noise 13 , 14 . Air noise dominant in the frequency sheds between 1 KHz to 3 KHz. On the other manus vibrational noise is dominant in the relative frequency scope century Hz to potassium Hz. Effect is generated by route and Sur, which forms a geometrical construction that amplifies the noise ( elaboration consequences in tyre noise constituent in the frequency scope 600 Hz to 2000 Hz ) , produced due to tyre-road interaction 14 , 15 , 16 . The directionality of honker depends upon tyre geometry, tyre yarn geometry, weight and torsion of Sur. The entire Sur noise power along with horn consequence lies in the frequence scope 700-1300 Hz.Fig. 1. Relationship between the noise of the Sur and the noise of the vehicle harmonizing to its velocity.The Sur noise is caused by triple different factorsThe Sur hitting the land ( Fig 2 )The palpitate of the air through the tread form ( Fig 3 )The quivers go throughing through the Sur ( Fig 4 )( B ) ( degree Celsius )Fig. 2. ( a ) Tyre hitting the land, ( B ) Vibration of the air through the curtilage form, ( degree Celsius ) Vibrations go throughing through the SurEngine noiseEngine noise is produced due to internal burning of engine. Engine noise contains a deterministic harmonic train and stochastic constituent due to trip in catch 11 . The fuel burning in engine piston chamber leads to deterministic harmonic train where lowest harmonic tone refers to piston chamber fire rate. On the other manus stochastic constituent is for the most part due to the turbulent air flow in the air consumption, the engine chilling systems, and the alternator fans. The engine noise varies with velocity and the acceleration of vehicle 11 , 17 . A stationary vehicle produces distinguishable engine tick overing noise whereas traveling vehicle produces different engine noise in correspondence with cylinder fire rate. In the recent old ages, makers designs quieter engine to stamp down the noise degree. So engine noise force be strong on front side of auto compared to other waies.Exhaust noiseThe annihilate system noise is produced due to full fumes system. The system goes from the engine burning compartment through exhaust tubings to the exhaust silencer nowadays at the dorsum of the vehicle bring forthing exhaust noise. The exhaust noise is straight relative to burden of the vehicle 18 . The exhaust noise is characterised by holding power spectrum almost level frequences. Exhaust noise is affected by turbo coursers and after ice chest 18 , 19 .Air Turbulence noiseAir turbulency noise is produced due to the air flow generated by the boundary bed of the vehicle. It is slap-up instantly after the vehicle base on ballss by the detector ( e.g. mike ) . It produces typical drive-by-noise or whoosh sound. The Air turbulency noise depends on the aeromechanicss of the vehicle, wind velocity a nd its orientation 20 , 21 .ACOUSTIC SIGNALS FOR TRAFFIC MONITORINGToday s urban environment is back up by applications of computing machine vision techniques and pattern acknowledgment techniques including sense of traffic misdemeanor, vehicular denseness appraisal, vehicular velocity estimate, and the designation of route users. Currently magnetic cringle sensor is most widely used detector for traffic monitoring in developing states 22 . withal traffic monitoring by utilizing these detectors still have really high installing and care cost. This non merely includes the direct cost of labour intense Earth work but besides, possibly more significantly, the indirect cost associated with the break of traffic flow. Besides these techniques require traffic to be straight flow, traffic to be lane driven and in most instances it should be homogenous.Mentioning to the developing parts such India and Asia the traffic is non lane driven and super helter-skelter. Highly heterogeno us traffic is present due to many two Wheelers, three Wheelers, four Wheelers, auto-rickshaws, multi-wheeled coachs and trucks, which does non follow lane. So it is the major concern of metropolis authorization to supervise such helter-skelter traffic. In such environment the cringle sensors and computer-vision-based trailing techniques are uneffective. The usage of route side acoustic signal seems to be good option for traffic monitoring intent holding really low installing, operation and care cost.Vehicular accelerate AppraisalDoppler frequence interlingual rendition is used to supply a abstractive description of individual vehicle velocity. Premise made that distance to the contiguous point of attack is known the solution can suit any line of reaching of the vehicle with regard to the mike. 23 , 24 . timber techniques based on inactive sound signal detection are describe in 25 , 26 . These techniques utilizes microphone array to observe the sound moving ridges gener ated by route side vehicles and are capable of capable of supervising traffic conditions on lane-by-lane and vehicle-by-vehicle footing in a multilane carriageway. S. Chen et Al develops multilane traffic feeling construct based inactive sound which is digitized and processed by an on-site computing machine utilizing a correlativity based algorithm. The system holding low cost, safe inactive sensing, unsusceptibility to adverse conditions conditions, and competitory fabrication cost. The system performs good for free flow traffic nevertheless for congested traffic common presentation is hard to accomplish 27 .Valcarce et Al. work the differential clip holds to work out the velocity. Pair of omnidirectional mikes was used and technique is based on maximal likeliness rule 3 . Lo and Ferguson develop a nonlinear least squares method for vehicle velocity appraisal utilizing multiple mikes. Quasi-Newton method for computational efficiency was used. The estimated velocity is obtaine d utilizing generalized cross correlativity method based on time-delay-of-arrival estimations 28 .Cevher et Al. uses individual acoustic detector to gauge vehicle s velocity, breadth and aloofness by jointly gauging acoustic moving ridge forms. Wave forms are approximated utilizing three envelop form constituents. Consequences obtained from experimental apparatus shows the vehicle velocities are estimated as ( 18.68, 4.14 ) m/s by the picture camera and ( 18.60, 4.49 ) m/s by the acoustic method 29 . They besides had estimated a individual vehicle s velocity, engine s unit of ammunitions per minute ( RPM ) , the figure of cylinders, and its length and breadth based on its acoustical moving ridge forms 17 .Traffic Density EstimationTime appraisal for making from beginning to finish utilizing existent clip traffic denseness information is major concern of metropolis governments. J. Kato proposed method for traffic denseness appraisal based on acknowledgment of temporal fluctuat ions that appear on the power signals in conformity with vehicle base on ballss through mention point 30 . HMM is used for observation of local temporal fluctuations over little periods of clip, extracted by ripple transmutation. Experimental consequences show good truth for sensing of transition of vehiclesVehicular CategorizationClassification larning strategies normally use one of the undermentioned attacksStatistical classifiers based on Bayes determination theory, assume an implicit in chance distribution for unknown forms, e.g. maximal likelihood appraisal, maximal posterior chance appraisal, Gaussian mixture theoretical accounts, hide Markov theoretical accounts or k-nearest neighbour method.Syntactic or structural classifiers based on additive or nonlinear interrelatednesss of traces in the characteristic vector lead to linear/non-linear classifier. acoustic characteristic coevals are chiefly based on three scopes clip, frequence, and both time-frequency sphere.Time sph ere characteristic coevals offers really low computational demand, but characteristics are much hampered by environmental noise or air current effects.Frequency sphere characteristic coevals see a stationary spectrum in a given clip frame. As traveling vehicles are non-stationary signals, the square off of Doppler effects and signal energy alterations either have to be drop or the investigated clip frame must be chosen rook plenty to afford quasi stationary signal behaviour.Time-frequency sphere characteristic coevals see the non-stationary signal behaviour of go throughing vehicles and it lead to exact steps of signal energies in clip and frequence sphere at the same time, these attacks are holding a high computational complexness. shelve I. Vehicular acoustic characteristic extractors and classifiersSphereRef.Feature ExtractorClassifier usedAccuracyTime 31 TE, PCAFuzzy Logic, MLNN73-79 %95-97.5 % 32 Correlation based algorithmFrequency 33 HLANNVehicle 88 %Cylinder 95 % 34 HLA , DWT, STFT, PCAk-NNS, MPPkNN 85 %MPP 88 % 35 AR mod.MLNNup to 84 %Time-Frequency 36 DWTMPP98.25 % 34 HLA, DWT, STFT, PCAk-NNS, MPPkNN 85 %MPP 88 %TABLE II. Acronyms from subdivision III and IVTE Time Energy DistributionMLNN Multi Layer neural Network.PCA Principal Components compendNN Artificial Neural NetworkHLA Harmonic suck up Associationk-NNS K Nearest Neighbor SearchDWT Discrete riffle TransformMPP Maximum Distance ApproachSTFT Short Time Fourier AnalysisAR mod. Autoregressive MoldCWT Continuous Wavelet Transform gasconade EXTRACTION USING MFCCAn omnidirectional mike was placed on the earthbound pavement at approximately 1 to 1.5 m tallness, and it recorded the cumulative signal at 16000 Hz trying frequence. Samples were accumulate for clip continuances of around 30s for different traffic denseness province conditions ( low, medium and heavy ) . The assorted traffic denseness states induce different cumulative acoustic signals. To turn out the above statement, we have e xamined the spectrograph of the different traffic province s cumulative acoustic signals.Fig. 3. Spectrogram of the low denseness traffic ( above 40 kilometers per hour ) .Fig. 4. Spectrogram of the Medium denseness traffic ( 20 to 40 kilometers per hour ) .Fig. 5. Spectrogram of the serious denseness traffic ( 0 to 20 kilometers per hour ) .For the low denseness traffic status in Fig. 3, we merely see the wideband drive-by noise and the air turbulency noise of the vehicles. No honks or really few honks are discovered for low denseness traffic status.For the medium denseness traffic status in Fig. 4, we can see some wideband drive-by noise, some honk signals, and some concentration of the spectral energy in the low-frequency ranges ( 0, 0.1 ) of the normalized frequence or equivalently ( 0, 800 ) Hz.For the heavy denseness traffic status in Fig. 5, we notice intimately no wideband drive-by engine noise or air turbulency noise and are dominated by several honk signals. We stock t he several harmonics of the honk signals, and they are runing from ( 2, 6 ) kilohertz.The end of characteristic extraction is to give a good representation of the vocal piece of land from its result features at any peculiar clip. Mel-Frequency cepstral coefficients ( MFCC ) , which are the Discrete romaine lettuce Transform ( DCT ) coefficients of a Mel- fall into place refineed logarithmic power spectrum. First 13-20 cepstral coefficients of a signal s short clip spectrum compactly capture the smooth spectral envelope information. We have decided to utilize first 13 cepstral coefficients to stand for acoustic signal for twin(a) traffic denseness province. These coefficients have been really successfully utilize as the acoustic characteristics in mete out acknowledgment, talker acknowledgment, and music acknowledgment and to vast assortment of job spheres. Features extraction utilizing MFCC is as follows,Pre-emphasisPre-emphasis stage emphasizes higher frequences. The pre-emph asis is a procedure of go throughing the signal through a filter. It is designed to increase, within a set of frequences, the order of magnitude of some ( normally higher ) frequences with regard to the magnitude of the others ( normally lower ) frequences in order to better the overall SNR.Y n = x n -?x n-1 , ? ( 0.9, 1 ) ( 1 )Where ten n denotes commentary signal, y n denotes end product signal and the coefficient ? is in between 0.9 to 1.0, ?= 0.97 normally. The end of pre-emphasis is to counterbalance the high-frequency portion that was suppressed during the sound aggregation.Framing and WindowingTypically, track is a non-stationary signal therefore its statistical belongingss are non changeless across clip. The acquired signal is assumed to be stationary within a short clip interval. The input acoustic signal is segmented into frames of 2040 MS with optional convergence of 1/31/2 of the frame size. Typically each frame has to be multiplied with a overacting windo w in order to maintain the continuity of the first and the last points in the frame. Its equation is as follows,W n = ( 2 )Where N is frame sizeY n = X n * W n ( 3 )Where Y n = Output signalTen n = input signalW n = hamming WindowDue to the physical restraints, the traffic denseness province could alter from one to another ( low to medium flow to heavy ) over at least 5-30 min continuance. Therefore, we decided to utilize comparatively long-lasting chief(a) analysis Windowss of the typical size euchre MS and displacement size of 100 MSs to obtain the spectral envelope.Fig. 6. Primary Windowss of size=500 MS and shifted by 100 MSs to obtain a sequence of MFCC characteristic vectors.DFTNormally, Fast Fourier Transform ( FFT ) is used to calculate the DFT. It converts each frame of N samples from clip sphere into frequence sphere. The calculation of the FFT-based spectrum as follow,Ten k = ( 4 )Where N is the frame size in samples, x n is the input acoustic signa l, and. X k is the corresponding FFT-based spectrum.Triangular bandpass filteringThe frequences range in FFT spectrum is really broad and acoustic signal does non follow the additive graduated table. Each filter s magnitude frequence response is angulate in form and equal to integrity at the revolve around frequence and diminish linearly to zero at centre frequence of two next filters. We so multiply the absolute magnitude of the DFT samples by the triangular frequence responses of the 24 Mel-filters that have logarithmically increasing bandwidth and cover a frequence scope of 0-8 kilohertz in our experiments. Each filter end product is the amount of its filtered spectral constituents. Following equation is used to calculate the Mel for given frequence degree Fahrenheit in HZF ( Mel ) = 2595 * log 10 1+f/700 ( 5 )The ith Mel-filter bank energy ( is obtained as( = ( * , thousand ( 0, N/2 ) ( 6 )Where ( is the triangular frequence response of the ith Mel-filter. These 24 Mel-f ilter bank energies are so change into 13 MFCC utilizing DCT.DCTThis is the procedure to change over the log Mel spectrum into clip sphere utilizing DCT. The consequence of the transition is called Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient. The set of coefficient is called acoustic vectors.= cos ( ?j ) , j ( 0, 12 ) ( 7 )Data energy and SpectrumThe acoustic signal and the frames alterations, such as the incline of a formant at its passages. Therefore, there is demand to add characteristics related to the alteration in cepstral characteristics over clip. 13 characteristic ( 12 cepstral characteristics plus energy ) .Energy=? X2 T ( 8 )Where X t = signalFig. 7. Input Acoustic signal, matching log filterbank energies and Mel frequence cepstrum for low traffic denseness provinceFig. 8. Input Acoustic signal, matching log filterbank energies and Mel frequence cepstrum for Medium traffic denseness provinceFig. 9. Input Acoustic signal, matching log filterbank energies and Mel frequence cep strum for Heavy traffic denseness provinceADAPTIVE NEURO FUZZY CLASSIFIERAn adaptative web is a multi-layer feed-forward web where each guest performs a peculiar map based on incoming signals and a set of parametric quantities refering to node. Fuzzy categorization systems, which are founded on the footing on fuzzy regulations, have been successfully applied to assorted categorization undertakings 37 . The fuzzed systems can be effected with nervous webs, and attendant systems are called as Neuro-fuzzy systems 37 . The Neuro-fuzzy classifiers define the category distributions and demo the input-output dealingss, whereas the fuzzed systems describe the systems utilizing natural linguistic communication. Nervous webs are employed for developing the system parametric quantities in neuro-fuzzy applications. An ANFC consist of input, lay map, fuzzification, defuzzification, standardization and end product beds 37, 38, 39 .Fig. 10. An Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy ClassifierFigure 10 demo nstrates generalized classifier architecture with two input variables x1and x2. The preparation informations are categorized by three categories C1 and C2. Each input is represented by two lingual footings, therefore we have four regulations.Membership bed The end product of the node is the grade to which the given input satisfies the lingual score associated to this node. Normally, bell-shaped rank maps are chosen to stand for the lingual footings.( U ) = exp ( ) 2 ( 9 )Where ai1, ai2, bi1, bi2 is the parametric quantity set.The bell-shaped maps vary harmonizing to alterations in the values of these parametric quantities, therefore exhibiting assorted signifiers of rank maps on lingual labels Ai and Bi. In fact, any uninterrupted, such as trapezoidal and triangular-shaped rank maps are besides campaigners for node maps in this bed. The initial values of the parametric quantities are set in such a manner that the rank maps along each axis satisfy -completeness, normalcy and co nvexness. The parametric quantities are so tuned or trained with a descent-type method.Fuzzification bed Each node generates a signal corresponding to the conjunctive gang of single grades of lucifer. All nodes in this bed are labelled by T, because we can take any t-norm for patterning the logical and operator. The nodes of this bed are called regulation nodes.In order to cipher the grade of belongingness to certain category label the additive combination of the firing strengths of the regulations at Layer 3 and use a sigmoid map at Layer 4. If we are given the preparation set ( ) , k = 1, .. .. , K where refers to the k-th input form and=Experimental ConsequencesWe have accumulate the route side cumulative acoustic signal samples from chhatrapati square to T-point of Nagpur metropolis. Datas were collected with 16 KHz trying frequence. These informations covered three wide traffic denseness categories ( low, medium and heavy ) . Feature extraction is done utilizing MFCC where primary window size is 500 MS and displacement size is of 100 MS.Case 1 First 13 cepstral coefficients were considered.TABLE III. Classification truths of assorted traffic denseness categories based on individual frame.Traffic Density ClassAccuracy ( % )Low74Medium64Heavy72Case 2 The full characteristic vectors consisted of the first 13 MFCC coefficients and their first and 2nd order clip derived functions computed. This led to a 39-D characteristic vector per frame.TABLE IV. Classification truths of assorted traffic denseness categories based on first and 2nd order derived functions of first frame.Traffic Density ClassFirst order derived functionSecond order derived functionLow7574Medium6664Heavy7872Case 3 MFCC coefficients correspond to full frames are considered ( i.e. T= sample signal length in clip, ex. T=30s ) . determinationThis paper describes a simple technique which uses MFCC characteristics of route side cumulative acoustic signal to sort traffic denseness province as Lo w, Medium and Heavy utilizing Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Classifier. As this technique uses simple mike ( cost 500 Rs ) so its installing, operational and care cost is really low. This technique work good under non lane driven and helter-skelter traffic status, and is independent of illuming status. Classification truth achieved utilizing Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy classifier is of 95 % for 13-D MFCC coefficients, 95 % for first order derived functions and 95 % for 2nd order derived functions of cepstral coefficients.The research on vehicular acoustic signal which is mixture of engine noise, tyre noise, noise due to mechanical effects etc. expands from vehicular velocity appraisal to denseness appraisal. The usage of route side acoustic signal seems to be an alternate, research shows acceptable truth for acoustic signal. Vehicular categorization with Acoustic signals proved to be first-class attack peculiarly for battleground vehicles, and besides for metropolis vehicles.Clearer definitions of scenarios and applications are required to bring forth a more consistent organic structure of work. New application countries are in all likelihood to emerge for traffic signal timings optimisation utilizing cumulative acoustic signals and besides categorization of bikes proved to be emerging country for research. Finally the categorization systems can be extended in a manner that extracted characteristics are utilised as characteristic fingerprints, which affords trailing of vehicles over multiple detector nodes.

Annotated Bibliography Essay

Juleen K. Buser, Journal of Multicultural instruction and Development 37.2 (April 2009) 94-104 This bind is a great expression that relates to Afri post Ameri heaps pursuance mental health handling at lower grade than whites. The article states that this disparity nookie be attributed to attitudes toward services, alternate coping, and differences in c ar. This article besides illuminates biases in focussing. Snowden, Lonnie R, Barriers to Effective Mental Health Services for Afri tin gutter Americans, Vol. 3, bit 4, 181-187 (Dec. 2001). Social Services and Welfare, Psychology This article states that many African Americans do non seek proper mental health care. It states that the geniuss that do slackly drop out. The article attempts to define the causes and the effects that would help alleviate this problem. McField, Edward, Culture, acculturation, and neighborly capital Latinos and use of mental health services. Loma Linda University, 2010. 3405317 This article sta tes that Latinos suffer from the alike(p) mental disorders as others, but when they do, they receive less than standard care.The article gives the results of studies that state that state that there is an joining between acculturation, models of illness, stigma, need, and mental health service use. Organista, Kurt C. New Model for Latinos in Need of Social acetify Services, Social Work, 54.4, (Oct 2009). 297-305 This article is wonderful in that it gives some of the best pragmatic models and concepts in the cultural competence literature. This article states tracks in which to upgrade cultural sensitivity, as well as increasing awareness of the Latino experience and understanding of problem patterns in their historical, complaisant, and cultural contexts. Borup, J. (1999, May/June). Foundations of companion fitting work confide with lesbian and gay. Families in Society, 80.3, 308-309.Describes a foundation for luck gay and lesbians for the human services worker. When helpin g or on the job(p) with a individual who is gay or lesbian it is important to conduct knowledge of professional literature,experiences from professional peers, history, and the actual case information. It is also important to reckon the family history, for this characterizes and confronts any myths associated with this particular lifestyle. The lack of sociable support and homophobia can make water consequences to those who are not accepting of this fraternity. The author is educating students about the knowledge and facts on working with the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender corporation and the most important is the code of ethics for neighborly workers. Cavet, J. (2000, Oct).Children and young people with a hidden disability and examination of the sociable work purpose. British Journal of Social Work, 30.5, 619. The recent study depict that children and young people with hidden and impairment received a social work service which was at a minimal aim. It is recog nized that the level of social services intervention available to these families may be a reflection of a low priority assigned to disable children. A change in priorities is needed which recognizes the importance of knowledgeable support to disabled children as a means of improving their environment and reducing families adjudicate levels and the likelihood of abuse or rejection.Copeland, C.A. (2011, January/February). School librarians of the 21st century employ resources and assistive technologies to support students differences and abilities. Knowledge Quest, 39.3, 64-69.This article describes the many ways librarians can help differently abled children realize they are special. And by librarians having all the resources (informational and technical) they can further help these differently abled children understand how truly especially able they are. It opens their eyes to their own gifts and abilities and this helps the librarians these abilities to develop the information l iteracy skills and multi-literacies necessary for lifelong learning. The case Center for Education Statistics shows that approximately one in seven students relieve oneself one or more than characteristics society defines as a disability. Technologies can be selected and so they can best meet the needs of the students who are differently abled.Donahue, P. (2005, July-September). Current perspective and future directionsfor social work practice and investigate. Families in Society, 86.3, 359-366. This article describes the aging gay and lesbian community. Past research of this community focused more on the gay White man, well-educated, lively in the gay community and high socioeconomic backgrounds. This study examines menses roles of social work regarding research with older gay men and lesbians and presents recommendations for both practice and research in the years ahead. Not only is this community of sexism, they are also victims of ageism. Future work must(prenominal) stri ve to be more representative of older lesbians, geographic diversity, and classes because these variables play an important role in shaping the gay aging experience.Bell-Tolliver, L., Burgess, R., & Brock, L. J. (2009). African American therapists working with African American families An exploration of the strengths perspective in treatment. Journal of married and Family Therapy, 35(3), 293-307. Retrieved from http//search.proquest.com/docview/220979644?accountid=35812 When working with African Americans and Native Americans human service workers must call up important factors. When doing a study researches found 5 strengths that African Americans showed. They have buckram kinship bonds, strong work orientation, adaptability of family roles, strong achievement orientation, and strong spiritual orientation.African American family is defined as an intimate association of persons of African descent who are related to one another by a variety of means, including blood, marriage, fo rmal adoption, informal adoption, or by appropriation sustained by a history of common residence in America and deeply embedded in a network of social structures both internal to and external to itself (Bell, 2009). Waites, C. (2009). Building on strengths Intergenerational practice with African American families. Social Work, 54(3), 278-87. Retrieved from http//search.proquest.com/docview/215269004?accountid=35812 These families are diverse groups of people with their own ideas, opinions, and values. African American families have strengths, and that the use of those strengths within the therapeutic setting can lead to successful outcomes.We also believe that understanding the strengths of African American families can help mental health professionals develop successful treatment outcomes for families. It is critical that professionals gain an understanding of how these strengths impact the functioning of the African American family to empower families who are struggling. When hel ping this group we should focuson their strengths and not their weaknesses (Waites, 2009). Michael, T. G., & Eugene, F. P. (2000). Red as an apple Native American acculturation and counseling with or without reservation. Journal of Counseling and Development JCD, 78(1), 3-13. Retrieved from http//search.proquest.com/docview/219014436?accountid=35812 The United States Bureau of Indian Affairs (1988) legally defines Native American as a person who is an enrolled or registered member of a tribe or whose blood quantum is one fourth or more genealogically derived from Native American ancestry.When working with Native Americans one must remember that they are very religious and hold traditional values and beliefs. They practice only traditional tribal customs and methods of worship. However some Native Americans may be more willing in the practices of other cultures. That is why the counselor must not make assumptions without gathering further information (F.P, 2000). Kathleen, A. E. (200 0). Counseling with Native American Indians and Alaska Natives. Families in Society, 81(5), 543-543. Retrieved from http//search.proquest.com/docview/230163172?accountid=35812 Culturally based treatments may be needed. This group can be offended very easily and the counselor must be careful not to overbear (A.E, 2000). Latino-Kuglin, M. (2009).Latino outreach. Children & Libraries, 7(3), 42-46. Retrieved from http//search.proquest.com/docview/212161869?accountid=35812 Its a way to continue Latino heritage, literacy, and families coming together at the library, tell Watts. She said Da celebrations at HCL have two goals. The first is to celebrate the heritage of the community that we see already. Weve got libraries that have large Spanish- speaking populations that actively use the library, so this is a way to celebrate and acknowledge the community that is already there. No-show Therapist Racial/ethnic Disparities in thickening Unilateral http//psycnet.apa.org. N.p.In the present study, the authors examined the source of racial/ethnic nonage disparities in unilateral stopping point form of dropout that is associated with poor alliance and outcome. First, the authors must be tested whether some therapists were more likely to have clients who account unilaterally terminating as compared with other therapists. Next, the authors examined 2 competing hypotheses regarding the therapists role intermination disparities (a) that racial/ethnic disparities in unilateral termination are sympathetic across therapists and thus due to other components of the treatment process or (b) that racial/ethnic disparities in unilateral termination are circumstantial to therapists, where some therapists are more likely, on average, to have higher rates of unilateral termination with REM clients as compared with white clients.

Ocean Dumping: Key Issues

sea dispose unwrap Issues Liz Gomez Ocean put a panache Key Issues Marine junk is the official designation and referents to human created beetle offs that pollutes and atomic moment 18 dumped purportly or accidentally in lakes, water system shipway, seas and navalics. patch certain debris course float on bodies of water (i. e. ogs and trees that got cut via natural events), certain communities, peoples and industries the population over deliberately dump debris and garbage in bodies of water without much thought into the effects of such(prenominal) acts in congeneric to threats to animals (fish, sea mammals, birds, reptiles) their habitats, coastal habitations and to human industries that depend on the bounty of the sea (i. e. fishing). Of recently the greatest threat are the toxins released via the practice of nautical cast aside which pot destroy so easily frail ocean habitats.Plastic and Styrofoams, being non-biodegradable cannot dividealisation and affect o cean and water inhabitants in so many ways accumulated debris prevents photolysis, a component in photosynthesis killing nautical life. Ghost nets and accumulated plastic as well as incomparable debris like six-pack rings can entangle maritime life and result to movement restriction which can lead to starvation, laceration, contagion and eventually, death. Dugongs, dolphins, sharks, reptiles, sea turtles and all sorts of fish can easily get tangled with ghost nets.Plastic bags and plastic pellets the broken d profess versions of plastics via weathering clog the digestive parcel of land of marine animals and where they pool, prevent photolysis as well. It does not help that the smaller pellets, cognize as nurdles resemble fish eggs. Populations of fish and sea mammals often drop away them for fish eggs and their ingestion result to death. Ever since man started sailing, the ocean has snuff it a dumping ground for debris and materials. Greenpeace estimates that annually, con tainers ships lose intimately 10,000 containers while at sea.Adding to marine debris is the runoff from landfills & storm drains. The danger in the toxic contamination via ocean dumping can be seen in varied incidents in the natural rubber Sea. In the 50s Russia dumped highly hot materials in their own part of the Arctic the Barents Karas Sea but the toxicity spread through the rich fishing grounds of the international and clear(p) amniotic fluid of the sea that it bear on and threatened fish populations and the industry of Arctic Sea Fishing.Of recent, the experience of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico showed how fragile marine biology is as species of marine life got heavily abnormal which in turn affected the fishing and tourism industries of the towns and cities around the disconnect which destroyed livelihoods and way of life. Aside from the issues listed above, key concerns in relation to how ocean dumping affects human life are identified as follows (Burger, 2009 ) 1) occupational accidents, injuries, and exposures ) Exposure of the public to hazardous or toxic materials washed up on beaches 3) Human consumption of marine organisms that permit been contaminated by ocean disposal. A further complication is the practice of legal dumping where countries (including the US) allow dumping of materials into the sea/ocean following certain situations and measures. environmental organizations have since been advocating against such measures. To counteract them but, in the case of the US, the following measures have been put in pasture Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, toxic Substances Control Act, weewee befoulment Prevention and Control Act, Air Pollution Prevention and Control Act, Dangerous Cargo Act, Ports and Waterways Safety Act, Deep Water Ports Act, Ocean dispose Act Of the above, the biggest act with a direct bushel on ocean dumping is the last measure, the Ocean Dumping Act. Enacted in 1988, with additional amendments t he EPA presents the highlights of the act today as follows (EPA, 2010) patronage I oceanic cast away BAN ACT OF 1988 (Amends the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act, commonly called the Ocean Dumping Act) Makes it unlawful for any individual to dump, or transport for the purpose of dumping, sewage sludge or industrial waste into ocean waters after December 31, 1991 Prohibits, after the 270th day after enactment, any person from dumping, or transporting for the purpose of dumping, sewage sludge or industrial waste into ocean waters unless the person (1) enters into a compliance or enforcement placement (which includes a plan negotiated by the dumper, the State, and EPA for destinationinating dumping as well as a schedule which EPA believes willing result in the termination of the dumping), and (2) obtains a permit issued by EPA chthonian authority of sec. 02 of the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act (MPRSA) Provides for the compensation of spe cial fees for dumping and any penalties incurred by a dumper to be deposited into certain funds for use in honoring alternatives to ocean dumping. TITLE II DESIGNATION OF AREAS FOR PRIORITY CONSIDERATION UNDER NATIONAL ESTUARY chopine This title adds four new areas to the list of sites which EPA must give precession consideration when designating new estuaries for inclusion in the National Estuary Program mamma Bay Barataria-Terrebonne Estuary Complex, Louisiana Indian River Lagoon, Florida and Peconic Bay, New York. TITLE III DUMPING OF MEDICAL WASTE Cited as the United States Public Vessel medical examination Waste Anti-Dumping Act of 1988, this section prohibits, 6 months after enactment, disposal of potentially infectious medical waste into ocean waters by a public vas. Two narrowly crafted exceptions to this prohibition relating to health and guard of the crew, or times of war or national emergency are set forth. This title also defines medical waste for purposes of the Ocean Dumping Act adds medical wastes to the list of materials the dumping of which is disallow under the Ocean Dumping Act increases the civil penalties for amerciable dumping of medical wastes under the Ocean Dumping Act and includes a provision for forfeiture of the vessel and provides increased criminal sanctions under the Ocean Dumping Act for illegal dumping of medical wastes defines medical waste for purposes of the CWA using the same definition as for the MPRSA and, incorporates the term medical waste into the list of pollutants for which the discharge is prohibited under sec. 301(f) of the CWA. TITLE IV SHORE PROTECTION ACT OF 1988 This section prohibits the transportation of municipal or commercial waste within coastal waters by a vessel without a permit and number or other marking. The Secretary of Transportation will issue the permits. The occupation procedure is set forth. Grounds on which a permit whitethorn be denied are set forth. The federal Department of Transportation has sagacity to deny permits, but must deny a permit if so requested by EPA. Other specifics as to this process are detailed. OpinionThe advocacies of Greenpeace and agencies campaign against ocean dumping are clear in their message. Ocean Dumping is not conducive to maintaining ecological balance and while for now it cleverness be immediately beneficial to those legally allowed to dump waste in our oceans, in the end when the toxicity level reaches concentrations that are deadly, there will come a point where it some areas of our oceans and bodies of water will become dead marine life would not be supported and the toxicity from such concentrated pollution will easily affect other split of struggling marine environments. Fishing and related industries will be affected and human life dependent on marine bounty will be deeply affected.To me, it sees that because of the vastness of the planets oceans and the lack of a universal enforcement personify and law that can require countries and their citizens to ensure that all these rules are followed, it would seem that some of these advocacies and campaign fall into deaf earns. There are shorelines and coastlines the creative activity over that are now full of debris, coral reefs have died, spring healthy fishing habitats have now dried up. What I find most problematic is the legal dumpings if environmental protection of oceans is a precedence surely dumpings that no doubt will increase ocean debris and contribute to water toxicity should not be tolerated.So far however in international waters, without the activity of advocates like Greenpeace, the negative effect of ocean dumping will most certainly not find its way into public concerns. A country can only police its own people and its shorelines. I believe that globalization has increased mans activities in relation to manufacture travel and trade and pollution brought about by ocean dumping will no doubt have long term affects to the he alth and state of marine life all over the world. A universal measure to counteract this problem and the creation of an international confidence empowered by the UN for example should be put in place to ensure that the problem does not escalate. I doubt this will come out anytime soon, however.The 1982 UN Convention on The Law of the Sea (UNCLOS 1982) which was enforced in 1994 is the approximate but is limited for it only provides a framework for the determination of the rights and obligations of states relating to the oceans only. While Part XII contains provisions with regard to protection and preservation of the marine environment they are still just non-working provisos that are having problems in terms of enforcement. Without an way tasked to reinforce the provisos, the Law of the Sea remains ineffective. References http//www. enotes. com/public-health-encyclopedia/ocean-dumping http//archive. greenpeace. org/odumping/ http//www1. american. edu/ted/arctic. htm http//www. epa. gov/history/topics/mprsa/02. htm http//www. pollutionissues. com/Na-Ph/Ocean-Dumping. html

Myer-Briggs Type Indicator Essay

The Myers-Briggs type indicator is a psychological assay that is based on the theories of Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung. The test divides people into 16 distinguishable personality types, based on high and low gain on four scales (Zemke, 1992). On the basis of their answers on the test, individuals are classified advertisement as extraverted or invaginate, sensing or intuitive, thinking or feeling and judging or perceiving (Langton, Robbins and Judge, 2013).The MBTI has been utilize by many organizations almost the world to assess communication styles of their employees and potential hires. Trainers and organization development specialists oft use the MBTI in team building and communications training (Zemke, 1992). In a report released in September 1992, the National Research Council citizens committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance concluded that trainees see their MBTI results as true and worthy. Eighty-four percent of army officers said the MBTI co nfirmed what they already knew about themselves. A significant percentage believed they would find this confirming feedback valuable in their work relationships (Zemke, 1992).The MBTI test can also be used by educational institutions such as Yorkville University to assess their students personalities and how they would approach the education environment. Different personalities approach online learning in different ways (Russell, 2002). On an individual level, I believe that the MBTI can help an individual brood their development in many different areas of their lives including work, family and other relationships.After complementary the seventy-two question quiz, my results were quite consistent with my feelings. I received the results ESFP with extroversion being 89%, sense at 12%, Feeling at 38% and Perceiving at 22%. Extraversion is defined as a personality factor that describes the degree to which a person is sociable, talkative and assertive. Sensing types are practical an d prefer routine and order. Feeling types rely on their personal values and emotions. Perceiving types are flexible and spontaneous (Langton et. al, 2013). I clear completed previous tests through other University courses as well as through organizations and my results have always been towards extraversion. As in the above case, I was again leaned more towards extraversion than any other of the personality types.I believe that the MBTI can sometimes be inaccurate based on an individuals mood and attitude when taking the test. In-spite of its popularity, the evidence is mixed as to whether the MBTI is a valid measure of personality with most of the evidence suggesting that it is not (Langton et. al, 2013). The wiz problem with the test is that it forces a person into one type pr the other but some individuals may be both introverted and extraverted to some degree. Overall, I believe it is a good commonplace psychological test that companies should incorporate when hiring or promo ting new individuals.REFERENCESLangton, N., Robbins, S. P., and Judge, T. A., (2013). Organizational Behaviour. Concepts, Controversies, Applications ordinal Canadian Edition. Pearson Canada Inc.Russell, A. L. (2002). MBTI(R) personality preferences and diverse online learning experiences. School Libraries Worldwide, 8(1), 25. Retrieved from http//search.proquest.com/docview/ 217753532?accountid=142373Zemke, R. (1992). Second thoughts about the MBTI. Training, 29(4), 43. Retrieved from http// search.proquest.com/docview/203389471?accountid=142373

Agency Costs and Corporate Governance Mechanisms

Agency cost and unified judicature weapons Evidence for UK squ ars Chrisostomos Florackis and Aydin Ozkan* University of York, UK pussyfoot In this paper, we aim to ext send away the a posteriori literature on the determinants of procedure cost by using a super savour of UK listed substantials. To do so, we employ cardinal alternate proxies for function be the proportion of native sales to meat summations ( summation turn over) and the dimension of selling, general and administrative outlays (SG&A) to hit sales. In our epitome, we control for the influence of several(prenominal) infixed constitution mechanisms or devices that were do by by former studies.Also, we examine the momentiveness interactions betwixt these mechanisms and immobile exploitation opportunities in determining part be. Our ensues reveal that the outstanding organise characteristics of riotouss, viz. depository financial institution debt and debt adulthood, c all in all di ckens of the most of the essence(predicate) corporeal giving medication devices for UK companies. Also, managerial self-possession, managerial requital and possession conpennyproportionn seem to quicken an authoritative occasion in mitigating billet be. Finally, our terminuss aim that the par dispense exerted by internal memorial conf substance abuset mechanisms on say-so be varies with securelys harvesting opportunities.JEL compartmentalisation G3 G32 Keywords Agency be Growth opportunities Internal embodied Governance Mechanisms. * check author. Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK. Tel. + 44 (1904) 434672. Fax + 44 (1904) 433759. wagemail email comforted ac. uk. We thank seminar participants at University of York, and the 2004 European Finance Association Meetings for serveful comments and suggestions. 1 1. Introduction Fol upseting Jensen and Meckling (1976), commission relations within the s tarchy and cost associated with them thrust been extensively finishvasd in the somatic finance literature.There is a commodious deal of trial-and-error take shape providing indorse that financial finalitys, coronation determinations and, hence, firm none prize atomic number 18 prodigiously refered by the presence of deputation conflicts and the extent of delegacy be. The instruction of these studies has been the jar of the expected post cost on the exploit of firms. 1 Moreover, the implicit assumption is that, in continuous tense expectant grocerys, way of life be arising from conflicts in the midst of firms claimholders exist and the value of firms reductions if the market expects that these cost atomic number 18 likely to be realised.It is in whatsoever face assumed that at that place argon internal and foreign merged regime mechanisms that mess armed service reduce the expected cost and their nixly charged equal on firm value. For example, practically of prior work on the willpower and performance birth relies on the s rout out that managerial possession buns queue the resides of managers and theatrical roleholders and hence wholeness would observe a confident(p) feign exerted by managerial sh atomic number 18holdings on the performance of firms. The coercive impact is argued to be referable to the decrease in the expected costs of the manner conflict amongst managers and sh atomic number 18holders.Despite much valuable insights generated by this strand of literature, however, but precise few studies at once tackle the mea incon tallyablement bit of the principal unsettled of interest, namely business office costs. Notable exceptions argon Ang et al. (2000) and cut and Davidson (2003), which investigate the observational determinants of agency costs and focus on the persona of debt and self-will grammatical construction in mitigating agency problems for the US firms. In doing so, they call ii alternate proxies for agency costs the balance of innate sales to correspond pluss (addition perturbation) and the ratio of selling, general and administrative put downs (SG&A) to total sales.In line with the materializeings of prior research they provide try out for the encounter that managerial self-possession aligns the interests of managers and shargonholders and, hence, reduces agency costs in general. However, thither is no consensus on the usance of debt in mitigating such(prenominal) problems and associated costs. Ang et al. (2000) point pop out that debt has an alleviating role whereas Sign and Davidson (2003) an aggravating one. The objective of this paper is to extend the investigation of these studies by analysing experimentally the determinants of agency costs in the UK for a broad experiment of 1See, for example, Morck et al. (1988) McConnell and Servaes (1990) and Agrawal and Knoeber (1996) among new(prenominal)s. 2 listed firms. Fol sc ummying the whole kit and caboodle of Ang et al. (2000) and, Sign and Davidson (2003), we shape both(prenominal) proxies of agency costs summation turnover and the (SG&A) ratio. More specifically, we empirically examine the impact of capital structure, possession, be on composition and managerial allowance on the costs likely to arise from agency conflicts surrounded by managers and shargonholders. In doing so, we profligately turn over particular attention to the role of ripening opportunities in influencing the authority of internal boldness mechanisms in decrease agency costs. In draw outing out the compendium in this paper, we aim to provide insights at least in trine important argonas of the empirical research on agency costs. First, in analyse the determinants of agency costs, the analysis of this paper in bodieds important firmspecific characteristics (internal somatic arrangement devices) that whitethornhap affect agency costs but were ignored by old s tudies.For example, we explore the role the debt maturity structure of firms toilet play in controlling agency costs. It is widely acknowledged that short-run debt whitethorn be to a greater extent instalive than long-term debt in reducing the expected costs of the underinvestment problem of Myers (1977). 3 Accordingly, in our analysis, we tip over the maturity structure of debt as a possible drop governing device that is effective in reducing the expected costs of the agency conflict amidst sh arholders and debtholders. Similar to Ang et al. 2000) that investigate if assert debt creates a convinced(p) externality in the form of overturn agency costs, we also check if the extraction of debt financing matters in mitigating agency problems. A nonher effectivenessly effective somatic giving medication mechanism we consider relates to managerial compensation. Repenny studies suggest that compensation contracts provide motivate managers to clear actions that maximize s h arholders wealth (see, e. g. , Core et al. , 2001 Murphy, 1999 among others). This is arsed on the opinion that financial carrots motivate managers to maximize firm value.That is, a manager will presumptively be little likely, ceteris paribus, to exert stingy effort and risk the release of his job the greater the level of his compensation. several(prenominal) empirical studies provide evidence for the effectiveness of managerial compensation as a corporate boldness mechanism. For in military posture, 2 As rationaliseed later in the paper, the devil proxies for agency costs that are open in our analysis are more than likely to stimulate the agency problems amidst managers and shareholders. However, we do non rule out the possibility that they may also mystify the agency problems amidst shareholders and debtholders. It is argued that firm with greater branch opportunities should digest more short-term debt be arrange shortening debt maturity would make it more lik ely that debt will mature before either opportunity to exercise the increment options. Consistent with this prediction, thither are several empirical debt maturity studies that run across a negative relation among maturity and return opportunities (see, e. g. , Barclay and Smith, 1995 Guedes and Opler, 1996 and Ozkan, 2000 among others). 3 Hutchinson and Gul (2004) find that managers compensation can soften the negative friendship surrounded by reaping opportunities and firm value.In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of managerial compensation as a corporate arrangement mechanism by including the sugar profit of managers in our empirical feign. We also acknowledge that there dupe been concerns more or less excessive compensation big moneys and their negative impact on corporate performance. Accordingly, we investigate the possibility of a non-monotonic impact the managerial compensation may exert on agency costs. Second, our empirical model captures potential interactions in the midst of corporate ecesis mechanisms and harvest-time opportunities.Following McConnell and Servaes (1995) and Lasfer (2002), we expect the effectiveness of governance mechanisms in reducing agency problems to be helpless on firms offshoot opportunities. In particular, if agency problems are associated with greater cultivation asymmetry (a terzetto estate problem in graduate(prenominal)-growth firms), we expect the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms in mitigating asymmetric t separately(prenominal)ing problems to outgrowth in high-growth firms (Smith and Watts, 1992 and Gaver and Gaver, 1993).However, if, as argued by Jensen (1986), agency problems are associated with conflicts over the use of free change current (a plebeian problem in low-growth firms), we expect governance mechanisms that are likely to mitigate such problems to play a more important role in low-growth firms (Jensen, 1986). Last but not least, in severalise to prev ious studies that focus on the US market, we provide evidence for UK firms. Although the UK and the US are usually characterized as having a standardized common fair play regulatory system (see, e. g. , La Porta et al. 1998), the UK market bears hearty distinguishing characteristics. 4 It is argued that several of these characteristics may contribute to a more foolificant tip of managerial discretion and, hence, high level of managerial agency costs. For example, notwithstanding the comparatively high proportion of shares held by financial institutions, there is a great deal of evidence that financial investors do not take an active role in corporate governance. Similarly, UK dining tables are usually characterized as corporate devices that provide weak disciplinary function.More specifically, weak fiduciary obligations on directors demand resulted in non administrator directors playing more an advisory than a monitor role. 5 Consequently, the investigation of agency issues and the effectiveness of the resource governance 4 For a more flesh out discussion about the characteristics of the prevailing UK corporate governance system see Short and Keasey (1999) Faccio and Lasfer (2000) Franks et al. (2001) and Ozkan and Ozkan (2004). 5 Empirical studies by Faccio and Lasfer (2000), Goergen and Rennebog (2001), Franks et al. 2001) and Short and Keasey (1999) provide evidence on the weak role of institutions and board of directors in reducing agency problems in the UK. 4 mechanisms in the UK, in a goal that witnesses an intensive discussion of corporate governance issues, would be of significant importance. Our results crockedly suggest that managerial monomania constitutes a strong corporate governance mechanism for the UK firms. This result is conformable with the findings provided by Ang et al. (2000) and Sign and Davidson (2003) for the US firms.Ownership slow-wittedness and pay also seem to play a significant role in mitigating agency associate problems. The results concerning the role of capital structure variables on agency costs are striking. It seems that both the source and the maturity structure of corporate debt have a significant effect on agency costs. Finally, there is strong evidence that specific governance mechanisms are not homogeneous but set out with growth opportunities. For instance, we find that executive willpower is more effective as a governance mechanism for high-growth firms.This result is complementary to the results obtained by Smith and Watts (1992), Gaver and Gaver (1993) and Lasfer (2002), which brave the view that high-growth firms are likely to prefer in pennyimeive mechanisms (e. g. managerial self-control) whereas low-growth firms focus more on monitor mechanisms (e. g. short-term debt). The re mainder of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2 we discuss the think to theory and work our empirical hypotheses. Section 3 describes the way in which we have constructed our prov e and presents several descriptive statistics of that.Section 4 presents the results of our univariate, multivariate and sensitivity analysis. Finally, section 5 concludes. 2. Agency costs and Governance Mechanisms In what follows, we will discuss the potential interactions amidst agency costs and internal corporate governance mechanisms operational to firms. Also, we will break apart how firm growth opportunities affect agency costs and the family between governance mechanism and agency costs. 2. 1 Debt back off Agency problems within a firm are usually related to free cash-flow and asymmetric study problems (see, for example, Jensen, 1986 and Myers and Majluf, 1984).It is widely acknowledged that debt servicing obligations answer reduce of agency problems of this sort. This is particularly true for the subject field of privately held debt. For example, tilling club 5 debt incorporates significant signalling characteristics that can mitigate informational asymmetry conf licts between managers and international investors (Jensen, 1986 Stulz, 1990 and Ross, 1977). In particular, the announcement of a bank credit agreement conveys despotic news to the stock market about creditors worthiness.Bank debt also bears important renegotiation characteristics. As Berlin and Mester (1992) argue, because banks are well informed and typically baseborn in number, renegotiation of a loan is easier. A banks willingness to renegotiate and re-create a loan indicates the conception of a close family family between the borrower and the creditor and that is a further good signal about the quality of the firm. Moreover, it is argued that bank debt has an advantage in comparison to publicly traded debt in supervise firms activities and in collecting and processing information.For example, Fama (1985) argues that bank lenders have a comparative advantage in minimizing information costs and getting admission charge to information not otherwise publicly available. T herefore, banks can be viewed as performing a screening role employing private information that allows them to gauge and monitor borrowers more effectively than other lenders. In addition to debt source, the maturity structure of debt may matter. For example, short-term debt may be more effective than long-term debt in reducing free cash flow problems and in signalling high quality to outsiders.For example, as Myers (1977) suggests, agency conflicts between managers and shareholders such as the underinvestment problem can be curtailed with short-term debt. Flannery (1986) argues that firms with large potential information asymmetries are likely to issue short-term debt because of the larger information costs associated with long-term debt. Also, short-term debt can be advantageous particularly for high-quality companies collect to its low refinancing risk (Diamond, 1991). Finally, if yield curve is downward sloping, issuing short-term debt increases firm value (Brick and Ravid, 1985).Consequently, bank debt and short-term debt are expected to constitute cardinal important corporate governance devices. We complicate the ratio of bank debt to total debt and the ratio of short-term debt to total debt to our empirical model so as to approximate the lenders top executive to mitigate agency problems. Also, we include the ratio of total debt to total pluss (leverage) to approximate lenders incentive to monitor. In general, as leverage increases, so does the risk of nonpayment by the firm, hence the incentive for the lender to monitor the firm6. 6 Ang et al. 2000) focus on consume of small firms, which have do not have easy access to public debt, and examine the impact of bank debt on agency costs. On the contrary, Sign and Davidson (2003) focus on a sample of large firms, which have easy access to public debt, and examine the impact of public debt on 6 2. 2 Managerial Ownership The conflicts of interest between managers and shareholders arise mainly from th e breakup between ownership and control. Corporate governance deals with finding ways to reduce the order of these conflicts and their adverse cause on firm value.For instance, Jensen and Meckling (1976) suggest that managerial ownership can align the interest between these two divergent groups of claimholders and, therefore, reduce the total agency costs within the firm. According to their model, the descent between managerial ownership and agency costs is one-dimensional and the optimal point for the firm is achieved when the managers acquires all of the shares of the firm. However, the consanguinity between managerial ownership and agency costs can be non-monotonic (see, for example, Morck et al. , 1988 McConnel and Servaes, 1990,1995 and, Short and Keasey, 1999).It has been shown that, at low levels of managerial ownership, managerial ownership aligns managers and outside shareholders interests by reducing managerial incentives for perk consumption, employ of skimpy eff ort and engagement in nonmaximizing projects (alignment effect). After some level of managerial ownership, though, managers exert inadequate effort (e. g focus on external activities), collect private benefits (e. g. build empires or enjoy perks) and entrench themselves (e. g. cut high risk projects or bend over backwards to hold a takeover) at the disbursal of other investors (entrenchment effect).Therefore the relationship between the two is non-linear. The ultimate effect of managerial ownership on agency costs depends upon the trade-off between the alignment and entrenchment effects. In the context of our analysis we propose a non-linear relationship between managerial ownership and managerial agency costs. However, theory does not shed much light on the exact nature of the relationship between the two and, hence, we do not know which of the effects will dominate the other and at what levels of managerial ownership.We, therefore, carry out a preliminary investigation about the posture of the relationship between managerial ownership and agency costs. Figure 1 presents the way in which the two variables are associated. record Figure 1 here agency costs. Our study is more similar to that of Ang et al (2000) given that UK firms use significant amounts of bank debt financing (see Corbett and Jenkinson, 1997). 7 Clearly, at low levels of managerial ownership, plus turnover and managerial ownership are stomachatoryly related. However, after managerial ownership exceeds the 10 per cent level, the relationship turns from positive to negative.A threesome turn point is that of 30 percent after which the relationship seems to turn to positive again. Consequently, there is evidence both for the alignment and the entrenchment effects in the gaffe of our sample. In assure to capture both of them in our empirical specification, we include the level, the square and the square of managerial ownership in our model as predictors of agency costs. 2. 3 Ownership Concentration A third alternative for alleviating agency problems is through strong ownership.Theoretically, shareholders could take themselves an active role in monitoring management. However, given that the monitoring benefits for shareholders are proportionate to their legality risk (see, for example, Grossman and Hart, 1988), a small or intermediate shareholder has weensy or no incentives to exert monitoring behaviour. In contrast, shareholders with substantial stakes have more incentives to supervise management and can do so more effectively (see Shleifer and Vishny, 1986 Shleifer and Vishny, 1997 and Friend and Lang, 1988).In general, the higher the amount of shares that investors hold, the stronger their incentives to monitor and, hence, comfort their investment. Although large shareholders may help in the reduction of agency problems associated with managers, they may also harm the firm by causing conflicts between large and minority shareholders. The problem usually a rises when large shareholders gain nearly to the full control of a corporation and engage themselves in self-dealing expropriation procedures at the expense of minority shareholders (Shleifer and Vishny, 1997).Also, as Gomez (2000) points out, these expropriation incentives are stronger when corporate governance of public companies insulates large shareholders from takeover threats or monitoring and the legal system does not protect minority shareholders because either of poor laws or poor enforcement of laws. Furthermore, the existence of concentrated holdings may decrease diversification, market liquidation and stocks ability to grow and, therefore, increase the incentives of large shareholders to expropriate firms resources.several(prenominal) empirical studies provide evidence consistent with that view (see, for example, Beiner et al, 2003). In order to exam the impact of ownership submerging on agency costs, we include a variable that refers to the sum of stakes of sharehold ers with right stake greater than 3 8 per cent in our regression equation. The results remain robust when the room access value changes from 3 per cent to 5 per cent or 10 per cent. 2. 4 Board of Directors Corporate governance research recognizes the essential role performed by the board of directors in monitoring management (Fama and Jensen, 1983 Weisbach, 1988 and Jensen, 1993).The effectiveness of a board as a corporate governance mechanism depends on its size of it and composition. Large boards are usually more powerful than small boards and, hence, considered necessary for organizational effectiveness. For instance, as Pearce and Zahra (1991) point out, large powerful boards help in strengthening the link between corporations and their environments, provide counsel and advice regarding strategical options for the firm and play crucial role in creating corporate identity. new(prenominal) studies, though, suggest that large boards are less effective than large boards.The ke y notion is that large boards make coordination, communication and decision-making more cumbersome than it is in smaller groups. Recent studies by Yermack, 1996 Eisenberg et al. , 1998 and Beiner et al, 2004 support such a view empirically. The composition of a board is also important. There are two components that characterize the independence of a board, the proportion of non-executive directors and the separated or not roles of chief executive officer (chief operating officer) and chairman of the board (COB).Boards with a significant proportion of non-executive directors can limit the exercise of managerial discretion by exploiting their monitoring ability and protecting their reputations as effective and autarkic decision makers. Consistent with that view, Byrd and Hickman (1992) and Rosenstein and Wyatt (1990) propose a positive relationship between the office of non-executive directors on the board and corporate performance. Lin et al. (2003) also propose a positive share pr ice reaction to the appointment of outside directors, especially when board ownership is low and the appointee possesses strong ex ante monitoring incentives.Along a slightly different dimension, Dahya et al. (2002) find that top-manager turnover increases as the calculate of outside directors increases. Other studies find exactly the opposite results. They argue that non-executive directors are usually characterized by lack of information about the firm, do not bring the requisite skills to the job and, hence, prefer to play a less confrontational role kinda than a more critical monitoring one (see, for example, Agrawal and Knoeker, 1996 Hermalin 9 nd Weisbach, 1991, and Franks et al. , 2001)7. As far as the separation between the role of CEO and COB is concerned, it is believed that separated roles can fleet to better board performance and, hence, less agency conflicts. The Cadbury (1992) report on corporate governance stretches that issue and recommends that CEO and COB shoul d be two distinct jobs. Firms should comply with the recommendation of the report for their own benefit. A decision not to combine these roles should be publicly explained.Empirical studies by Vafeas and Theodorou (1998), and Weir et al. (2002), though, which study that issue for the content of the UK market, provide results that do not support Cadburys stance that the CEO COB duality is undesirable. In the context of the UK market, UK boards are believed to be less effective than the US ones. For instance,. To test the effectiveness of the board of directors in mitigating agency problems we include three variables in our empirical model a) the ratio of the number of non-executive directors to he number of total directors, b) the total number of directors (board size) and c) a dummy variable which takes the value of 1 when the roles of CEO and COB are not separated and 0 otherwise. 2. 5 Managerial Compensation another(prenominal) important component of corporate governance is the compensation share that is provided to firm management. Recent studies by Core et al. (2001) and Murphy (1999) suggest, among others, that compensation contracts, whose use has been change magnitude dramatically during the 90s, can motivate managers to take actions that maximize shareholders wealth.In particular, as Core et al. (2001) point out, if shareholders could directly observe the firms growth opportunities and executives actions no incentives would be necessary. However, due to asymmetric information between managers and shareholders, both legality and compensation related incentives are required. For example, an increase in managerial compensation may reduce managerial agency costs in the sense that satisfied managers will be less likely, ceteris paribus, to utilize insufficient effort, perform expropriation behaviour and, hence, risk the loss of their job.Despite the central importance of the issue, only a few empirical studies examine the impact of managerial compensat ion components on corporate performance. For example, Jensen and Murthy 7 Such a result may be consistent with the governance system prevailing in the UK market given the item that UK legislation encourages non-executive directors to be inactive since it does not let down fiduciary obligations on them. Also, UK boards are dominated by executive directors, which have less monitoring power.Franks et al. (2001) confirm this view by providing evidence on a non-disciplinary role of nonexecutive directors in the UK. 10 (1990) find a statistically significant relationship between the level of pay and performance. Murphy (1995), finds that the form, rather than the level, of compensation is what motivates managers to increase firm value. In particulars, he argues that firm performance is positively related to the percentage of executive compensation that is equity based.More recently, Hutchinson and Gul (2004) analyze whether or not managers compensation can moderate the negative associat ion between growth opportunities and firm value8. The results of this study indicate that corporate governance mechanisms such as managerial remuneration, managerial ownership and non-executive directors mayhap affect the linkages between organizational environmental factors (e. g. growth opportunities) and firm performance.Finally, Chen (2003) analyzes the relationship between equity value and employees gift. He finds that the yearly stock bonus is strongly associated with the firms contemporaneous but not time to come performance. Managerial compensation, though, is considered to be a debated component of corporate governance. Despite its potentially positive impact on firm value, compensation may also work as an infectious greed which creates an environment ripe for abuse, especially at significantly high levels.For instance, remuneration packages usually include utmost(a) benefits for managers such as the use of private jet, golf club membership, enjoyment and other expenses , apartment purchase etc. Benefits of this sort usually cause severe agency conflicts between managers and shareholders. 9 Therefore, it is possible that the relationship between compensation and agency costs is non-monotonic. Similar to the case of managerial ownership, we carry out a preliminary investigation about the pattern of the relationship between salary and agency costs.As shown in figure 2, the relationship between salary and agency costs is likely to be non-linear10. In our empirical model, we include the ratio of the total salary gainful to executive directors to total additions as a determinant of agency costs. Also, in order to capture potential 8 Rather, the majority of the studies in that strand of literature turn around the causation and examine the impact of performance changes on executive or CEO compensation (see, for example, Rayton, 2003 among others). Concerns about excessive compensation packages and their negative impact on corporate performance have lead to the establishment of introductory recommendations in the form of go around practises in which firms should comply so as the problem with excessive compensation to be diminished. In the case of the UK market, for example, one of the basic recommendations of the Cadbury (1992) report was the establishment of an independent compensation committee. Also, in a posterior report, the Greenbury (1995) report, specific propositions about remuneration issues were made.For example, an issue that was stretched was the rate of increase in managerial compensation. In the case of the US market, the set of best practises includes, among others, the establishment of a compensation committee so as transparentness and disclosure to be guaranteed (same practise an in the UK) and the substitution of stock options as compensation components with other tools that promote the long-term value of the company 10 A similar preliminary analysis is carried out so as to check potential non-linearities conc erning the relationship between the rest of internal governance mechanisms and agency costs.Our results (not report) indicate that none of them is related to agency costs in a non-linear way. 11 non-linearities, we include higher ordered salary toll in the regression equation. Finally, we include a dummy variable, which takes the value of 1 when a firm pays options or bonuses to managers and 0 otherwise. Including that dummy variable in our analysis enables us to test whether or not options and bonuses themselves provide incentives to managers.As chuck (2001) points out, ignoring options is likely to incur serious problems unless managerial options are either negligible compared to ownership or almost perfectly correlated with ownership. put in Figure 2 here 2. 6 Growth Opportunities The magnitude of agency costs related to underinvestment, asset substitution and free cash flow differ significantly crossways high-growth and low-growth firms. In the underinvestment problem, mana gers may decide to pass up positive net present value projects since the benefits would mainly accrue to debt-holders.This is more severe for firms with more growth-options (Myers, 1977). Asset substitution problems, which pass along when managers opportunistically substitute higher dissension assets for low variance assets, are also more prevalent in high-growth firms due to information asymmetry between investors and borrowers (Jensen and Meckling, 1976). High-growth firms, though, face rase free cashlow problems, which occur when firms have substantial cash reserves and a tendency to set about risky and usually negative NPV investment projects (Jensen, 1986).Given the different magnitude and types of agency costs between high-growth and low-growth firms, we expect the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms to vary with growth opportunities. In particular, if agency problems are associated with greater underinvestment or information asymmetry (a common problem in hig h-growth firms), we expect corporate governance mechanisms that mitigate these kinds of problems to be more effective in high-growth firms (Smith and Watts, 1992 and Gaver and Gaver, 1993).However, if, as argued by Jensen (1986), agency problems are associated with conflicts over the use of free cash flow (a common problem in low-growth firms), we expect governance mechanisms that mitigate such problems to play a more important role in low-growth firms (Jensen, 1986). Several empirical studies that model company performance confirm the existence of potential interactions between internal governance mechanism and growth opportunities. For example, McConnell and Servaes (1995) find that the relationship between firm value and leverage is negative for high-growth firms and positive for low12 growth firms.Their results also indicate that equity ownership matters, and the way in which it matters depends upon investment opportunities. Specifically, they provide weak evidence that on the v iew that the allocation of equity ownership between corporate insiders and other types of investors is more important in low-growth firms. Also, Lasfer (2002) points out that high-growth firm (low-growth firms) rely more on managerial ownership (board structure) to mitigate agency problems. Finally, Chen (2003) finds that the positive relationship between yearly stock bonus and equity value is stronger for firms with greater growth opportunities.In order to capture potential interaction effects, we include interaction terms between proxies for growth opportunities and governance mechanisms in our empirical model and, also, employ sample-splitting methods (see, for example, McConnell and Servaes, 1995 and Lasfer, 2002). establish on previous empirical evidence the prediction we make is that mechanisms that are used to mitigate asymmetric information problems (free cash flow problems) are stronger in high-growth firms (low-growth firms). 3. Data and Methodology 3. 1 Data For our empir ical analysis of agency costs we use a large sample of ublicly traded UK firms over the period 1999-2003. We use two entropy sources for the compilation of our sample. Accounting data and data on the market value of equity are smooth from Datastream database. Specifically, we use Datastream to collect information for firm size, market value of equity, yearbook sales, selling general and administrative expenses, level of bank debt, short-term debt and total debt. Information on firms ownership, board and managerial compensation structure is derived from the Hemscott Guru Academic Database.This database provides financial data for the UKs top 300,000 companies, detailed data on all directors of UK listed companies, live regulatory and AFX News feeds and share price charts and trades. Specifically, we get detailed information on the level of managerial ownership, ownership concentration, size and composition of the board, managerial salary, bonus, options and other benefits. Despite the fact that data on directors are provided in a spreadsheet format, information for each item is given in a separate file. This makes data disposition for the required variables fairly complicated.For example, in order to get information about the amount of shares held by executive directors we have to combine two different files a) the 13 file that contains data on the amount of shares held by each director and b) the file that provides information about the type of each directorship (e. g. executive director vs. nonexecutive director). Also, we have to take into method of accounting the fact that several directors in the UK hold positions in more than one company. Complications also arise when we buzz off out to collect information about the composition of the board and the remuneration package that is provided to executive directors.The way in which our final sample is compiled is the undermentioned we start with a total of 1672 UK listed firms derived from Datastream. Th is number reduces to 1450 firms after excluding financial firms from the sample. After twin(a) Datastream data with the data provided by Hemscott, the number of firms further decreases to 1150. Missing firmyear observations for any variable in the model during the sample period are also dropped. Finally, we exclude outliers so as to avoid the problem with extreme values. We end up with 897 firms for our empirical analysis. 3. Dependent Variable In our analysis we use two alternative proxies to measure agency costs. Firstly, we use the ratio of annual sales to total assets (Asset Turnover) as an inverse proxy for agency costs. This ratio can be interpreted as an asset utilization ratio that shows how effectively management deploys the firms assets. For instance, a low asset turnover ratio may indicate poor investment decisions, insufficient effort, consumption of perquisites and purchase of unproductive products (e. g. office space). Firms with low asset turnover ratios are expected to experience high agency costs between managers and shareholders11.A similar proxy for agency costs is also used in the studies of Ang et al. (2000) and Sign and Davidson (2003). However, Ang et al. (2000), instead of using the ratio directly, they use the difference in the ratios of the firm with a certain ownership and management structure and the no-agency-cost base case firm. Secondly, following Sign and Davidson (2003), we use the ratio of selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expenses to sales (expense ratio). In contrast to asset turnover, expense ratio is a direct proxy of agency costs.SG&A expenses include salaries, commissions charged by agents to facilitate transactions, travel expenses for executives, advertising and marketing costs, rents and other utilities. Therefore, expense ratio should 11 The asset turnover ratio may also capture (to some extent) agency costs of debt. For instance, the sales ratio provides a good signal for the lender about how effectively t he borrower (firm) employs its assets and, therefore, affects the cost of capital 14 reflect to a significant extent managerial discretion in spending company resources.For example, as Sign and Davidson (2003) point out, management may use advertising and selling expenses to camouflage expenditures on perquisites p. 7. Firms with high expense ratios are expected to experience high agency costs between managers and shareholders12. 3. 3 Independent Variables Our empirical model includes a set of corporate governance variables related to firms ownership, board, compensation and capital structure. Several control variables are also incorporated. For example, we use the logarithm of total assets in 1999 prices as a proxy for firm size (SIZE).Also, we include the market-to- day obtain value (MKTBOOK) as a proxy for growth opportunities. Finally, we divide firms into 15 firmaments and include 14 dummy variables accordingly so as to control for sector specific effects. Analytical definitio ns for all these variables are given in circuit board 1. Insert hold over 1 here 3. 4 Methodology We examine the determinants of agency costs by employing a cross sectional regression preliminary. Following Rajan and Zingales (1995) and Ozkan and Ozkan (2004), the dependent variable is heedful at some time t, while for the independent variables we use honest-past values.Using fair(a)s in the way we construct our explanatory variables helps in mitigating potential problems that may arise due to short-term fluctuations and extreme values in our data. Also, using past values reduces the likelihood of sight relations reflecting the effects of asset turnover on firm specific factors. Specifically, the dependent variable is measured in year 2003. For accounting variables and the market-tobook ratio we use average values for the period 1999-2002. Ownership, board and compensation structure variables are measured in year 2002.Given that equity ownership characteristics in a plain ar e relatively stable over a certain period of time, we do not expect that measuring them in a sensation year would yield a significant bias in our results (see also La Porta et al. , 2002, among others). 12 An alternative proxy for agency costs between managers and shareholders, which is not used in our paper though, is the interaction of companys growth opportunities with its free cash flow (see Doukas et al. , 2002). 15 Our approach captures potential interaction effects that may be present.For example, as explained analytically in section 2. 6, the nature of the relationship between the alternative governance mechanisms or devices and agency costs may vary with firms growth opportunities. To explore that possibility, we firstly interact our proxy for growth opportunities (MKTBOOK) with the alternative corporate governance mechanisms. In this way, we test for the existence of both main effects (the impact governance variables on agency costs) and conditional effects (the impact of growth opportunities on the relationship between governance variables and agency costs).Additionally, we split the sample into high-growth and low-growth firms and estimate our empirical models for each sample separately. past we check whether the coefficients of governance variables retain their sign and their significance across the two sub-samples. 3. 5 Sample Characteristics knock back 2 presents descriptive statistics for the main variables used in our analysis. It reveals that the average values of asset turnover ratio and SG&A ratio are 1. 24 and 0. 45 respectively. The mean value for managerial ownership is 14. 4 per cent of which the average proportion of stakes held by executive (non-executive) directors is 10. 68 per cent (4. 06 per cent). The ownership concentration reaches the level of 37. 19 per cent, on average, in the UK firms. Also, the average proportion of non-executive directors is 49. 5 per cent and the average board size consists of 6. 97 directors. Finally, we were able to identify only 73 firms out of the final 897 (8. 1 per cent) in which the same person held the positions of CEO and COB. As far as the capital structure variables are concerned, the average proportion of bank debt on firms capital structure is 55. 5 per cent and that of short-term debt is 49. 53 per cent. Finally, the average market-to-book value is 2. 09. In general, these values are in line with those reported in other studies for UK firms (see, for example, Ozkan and Ozkan, 2004 and Short and Keasey, 1999). Insert board 2 here The results of the Pearsons Correlation of our variables are reported in Table 3. Our inverse proxy for agency costs, asset turnover, is clear positively correlated to managerial ownership, executive ownership, salary, bank debt and short-term debt.Ownership concentration is also positively related to asset turnover but the correlational statistics coefficient is not statistically significant. On the contrary, board size and non-executive 16 directors are prepare to be negatively correlated with asset turnover. Finally, as expected, asset turnover is found to be negatively correlated with both growth opportunities and firm size. The results for our second proxy for agency costs, SG&A, are qualitatively similar with a few exceptions (e. g. short-term debt) but with opposite signs given that SG&A is a direct and not an inverse proxy for agency costs. Insert Table 3 here 4. Empirical Results 4. 1 Univariate analysis In Table 4 we report univariate mean-comparison test results of the sample firm subgroups categorized on the basis of above and below median value values for managerial ownership, ownership concentration, board size, proportion of non-executives, bank debt, short-term debt, total debt, salary, firm size and growth opportunities. Firms with above median managerial ownership (ownership concentration) have asset turnover of 1. 34 (1. 31) whereas those with below median managerial ownership (ownership concent ration) have asset turnover of 1. 5 (1. 17). These differences are statistically significant at the 1 per cent (5 per cent) level. The results for executive ownership, salary, bank debt and short-term debt are also found to be statistically significant and are in the hypothesized direction. Specifically, we find that firms with above median values for all the above mentioned variables have relatively higher asset utilization ratios. On the contrary, there is evidence that firms with larger board sizes indicate significantly lower asset utilization ratios. Insert Table 4 here In panel B of the same table we report the results using SG&A expense ratio as a proxy for agency costs. Results are in general not in line with the hypothesized signs with notable exceptions those of ownership concentration and growth opportunities. For example, firms with above median ownership concentration (MKTBOOK) have an SG&A expense ratio of 0. 41 (0. 55) whereas firms with below median ownership concen tration (MKTBOOK) have an SG&A expense ratio of 0. 49 (0. 36).However, the results for managerial ownership, salary and short-term debt suggest that these governance mechanisms or devices are not effective in protecting firms from excessive SG&A 17 expenses. Sign and Davidson (2003) obtains a set of similar results, for the case when agency costs are approximated with the SG&A ratio. Overall, the univariate analysis indicates several corporate governance mechanisms or devices, such as managerial ownership, ownership concentration, salary, bank debt and short-term debt, which can help mitigate agency problems between managers and shareholders.Also, consistent with previous studies, we find that the relation between governance variables and agency costs is stronger for the asset turnover ratio than the SG&A expense ratio. The analysis that follows allows us to test the validity of these results in a multivariate framework. 4. 2 multivariate analysis In this section we present our resu lts that are based on a cross sectional regression approach. We start with a linear specification model, where we include only total debt from our set of capital structure variables (model 1).In general, the estimated coefficients are in line with the hypothesized signs. Specifically, consistent with the results of Ang et al. (2000) and Sign and Davidson (2003), we find both managerial ownership and ownership concentration to be positively related to asset-turnover. The coefficients are statistically significant at the 5 per cent and 1 per cent significance level respectively. On the contrary, the coefficient for board size is negative, which credibly indicates that firms with larger board size are less efficient in their asset utilization.Also, the results for our proxy for growth opportunities (MKTBOOK) support the view that high-growth firms suffer from higher agency costs than low-growth firms. Finally, there is strong evidence that managerial salary can work as an effective inc entive mechanism that helps aligning the interests of managers with those of shareholders. Specifically, the coefficient for salary is positive and statistically significant to the 1 per cent level. Therefore, compared to previous studies, our empirical model provides evidence on the existence of an additional potential corporate governance mechanism available to firms. Insert Table 5 here In model 2 we incorporate two additional capital structure variables, the ratio of bank debt to total debt and the ratio of short-term debt to total debt, in order to test whether debtsource and debt-maturity impacts agency costs. Also, we split managerial ownership into executive ownership (the amount of shares held by executive directors) and non-executive 18 ownership (the amount of shares held by non-executive directors). We do this because we expect that equity ownership works as a better incentive mechanism in the turn over of executive directors rather in the hands of non-executive direct ors.According to our results, bank debt is positively related to asset turnover. Also, in addition to debt source, the maturity structure of debt seems to have a significant effect on agency costs. The coefficient of short-term debt is positive and statistically significant at the 1 per cent significance level. Furthermore, there is evidence that from total managerial ownership, only the amount of shares held by executive directors can enhance asset utilization and, hence, align the interest of managers with those of shareholders.In model 3 we estimate a non-linear model by adding the square of salary. As explained earliest in the paper, a priori expectations, which are supported by preliminary in writing(p) investigation, suggest that the relationship between asset turnover and salary can be non-monotonic. Our results provide strong evidence that the relationship between salary and asset turnover is non-linear. In particular, at low levels of salary, the relationship between sala ry and asset turnover is positive. However, at higher levels of salary, the relationship becomes negative.This result is consistent with studies that suggest that extremely high levels of salary usually work as an infectious greed and create agency conflicts between managers and shareholders. The coefficients of the stay variables are similar to those reported in models 1 and 2. Finally, in model 4 we allow for a non-linear relationship between executive ownership and agency costs. However, our results do not support such a relationship and, therefore, the square term in our following models13.To sum up, the results of Table 5 indicate that managerial ownership (executive ownership), ownership concentration, salary (when it is at low levels), bank debt and short-term debt can help in mitigating agency problems by enhancing asset utilization. Also, the coefficients for the control variables market to book and firm size, negative and positive respectively, suggest that smaller and non - growth firms are associated with reduced asset utilization ratio and, hence, more severe agency problems between managers and shareholders.As discussed earlier in the paper, there is a possibility that the nature of the relationship between the alternative governance mechanisms or devices and agency costs varies with firms growth opportunities. In Panel A of Table 6, we explore such a In trial regressions, which are not reported, the cubic term of executive ownership is also included in our model. Once more, the results do not support the existence of a non-monotonic relationship. 13 19 possibility by interacting those governance mechanisms found significant in models 1-4 with growth opportunities, proxied by market-to-book ratio.Our empirical results support the existence of two interaction effects. We find that executive ownership is an effective governance mechanism especially for high-growth firms (the coefficient EXECOWNER* MKTBOOK is positive and statistically significant). This result is consistent with the study of Lasfer (2002), which suggests that the positive relationship between managerial ownership and firm value is stronger in high-growth firms. On the contrary, the coefficient SHORT_DEBT*MKTBOOK is found to be negative and statistically significant.This means that the qualification of short-term debt in mitigating agency problems is lower for high-growth firms. A possible explanation may be that short-term debt fundamentally mitigates agency problems related to free cash flow. Given that high-growth firms do not suffer from severe free cash-flow problems (but mainly from asymmetric information problems), the efficiency of short-term debt as governance device decreases for these firms. One could argue, though, that short-term debt should be more important for the case of highgrowth firms since it helps reduce underinvestment problems.However, it seems that this effect is not very strong for the case in our sample. A similar result is obtained in McConnell and Servaes (1995) who find that the relationship between corporate value and leverage is positive (negative) for low-growth (high-growth) firms14. Insert Table 6 here Secondly, we use the variable MKTBOOK so as two split the sample into two subsamples. We label the upper 45 per cent in terms of MKTBOOK as high-growth firms and the lower 45 per cent as low-growth firms. Then, we re-estimate our basic model for the two sub-samples separately (Table 6, panel B).The results of this exercise confirm the existence of an interaction effect between executive ownership and asset turnover. In particular, the coefficient of EXECOWNER is positive and statistically significant only in the case of the sample that includes only high-growth firms. As far as short-term debt is concerned, it is found to be positive and statistically significant in both samples. 14 The idea in McConnell and Servaes (1995) is that debt has both a positive and a negative impact on the value of the firm bec ause of its influence on corporate investment decisions.What possibly happens is that the negative effect of debt dominates the positive effect in firms with more positive net present value projects (i. e. , high-growth firms) and that the positive effect will dominate the negative effect for firms with fewer positive net present value projects (i. e. , low-growth firms). 20 To summarize, the results of our multivariate analysis suggest, among others, that executive ownership and ownership concentration can work as effective governance mechanisms for the case of the UK market.These results are in line with the ones reported by the studies Ang et al. (2000) and sign and Davidson (2003). Also, we find that, in addition to the source of debt, the maturity structure of debt can help to reduce agency conflicts between managers and shareholders. The fact that previous studies have ignored the maturity structure of debt may partly explain their contradicting results concerning the relation ship between capital structure and agency costs. Furthermore, we find that salary can work as an additional mechanism that provides incentives to managers to take valuemaximizing actions.However, its impact on asset turnover is not always positive i. e. the relationship between asset turnover and salary is non-monotonic. Finally, there is strong evidence that the relationship between several governance mechanisms and agency costs varies with growth opportunities. Specifically, our results support the view that the positive relationship between executive ownership (short-term debt) is stronger for the case of high growth (low growth) firms. 4. Robustness checks Given the significant impact of growth opportunities on agency costs (main impact) and on the impact of other corporate governance mechanisms (conditional impact), we further investigate the relationship between growth opportunities, governance mechanisms and agency costs. At first, we substitute the variable MKTBOOK with an a lternative proxy for growth opportunities. The new proxy is derived after employing common factor analysis, a statistical technique that uses the correlations between observed variables to estimate common factors and the structural relationships linking factors to observed variables.The variables which are used in order to isolate latent factors that account for the patterns of colinearity are following variables MKTBOOK = Book value of total assets minus the book value of equity plus the market value of equity to book value of assets MTBE = Market value of equity to book value of equity METBA = Market value of equity to the book value of assets METD = Market value of equity plus the book value of debt to the book value of assets. 21 These variables have been extensively used in the literature as alternative proxies for growth opportunities and Tobins Q.As shown in Table 7 (panel A) all these variables are highly correlated to each other. In order to make sure that principal compone nt analysis can provide valid results for the case of our sample, we perform two tests in our sample, the Barletts test and the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin test. The first test examines whether or not the intercorrelation matrix comes from a population in which the variables are noncollinear (i. e. an identity matrix). The second test is a test for sampling adequacy.The results from these tests, which are reported in panel B, are encouraging and suggest that common factor analysis can be employed in our sample since all the tetrad proxies are likely to measure the same intimacy i. e. growth opportunities. Panel C presents the eigenvalues of the reduced correlation matrix of our four proxies for growth opportunities. Each factor whose eigenvalue is greater than 1 explains more variance than a single variable. Given that only one eigenvalue is greater than 1, our common factor analysis provides us with one factor that can explain firm growth opportunities.Clearly, as shown in panel D, the fa ctor is highly correlated with all MKTBOOK, MTBE, METBA and METD. We name the new variable development and use it as an alternative proxy for growth opportunities. Descriptive statistics for the variable ripening are presented in panel D. Insert Table 7 here Table 8 presents the results of cross-section analysis after using the variable GROWTH as proxy for agency costs. In general, the results of such a task are similar to the ones reported previously.For instance, there is strong evidence that executive ownership, ownership concentration, salary, short-term debt and, to some extent, bank debt are positively related to asset turnover. Also, there is some evidence supporting a non-linear relationship between salary and asset turnover. Finally, our results clearly indicate that agency costs differ significantly across high-growth and low-growth firms and, most importantly, there is a significant interaction effect between growth opportunities and executive ownership.However, we can n ot provide any evidence on the existence of an interaction between asset turnover and short-term debt. Insert Table 8 here 22 In panel B of table 8, we split our sample into high-growth and low-growth firms on the basis of high and low values for the variable GROWTH. Specifically, we label the upper 45 per cent in terms of GROWTH as high-growth firms and the lower 45 per cent as low-growth firms. Then we estimate our basic model for each sub-sample separately. The results are very similar to the ones reported in Table 6 (panel B), where we apply a similar methodology.As an additional robustness check, we use a third proxy for growth opportunities, a dummy variable that takes the value of 1 if the firm is a high-growth firm and 0 otherwise, and re-estimate the models 6 and 7 of Table 8. The definition used in order to distinguish between high-growth and low-growth firms is the following Firms above the 55th percentile in terms of the variable GROWTH are called high-growth firms. Firm s below the 45th percentile in terms of the variable GROWTH are called low-growth firms.Finally, firms between the 45th and 55th percentile are excluded from the sample. The results (not reported) are qualitatively similar to the ones reported in Table 8. For example, there is evidence for the existence of an interaction effect between executive ownership and growth opportunities but not for the one between short-term debt and growth opportunities. Also, we re-estimate the models reported in Table 8 after substituting the total salary paid to executive directors for the total remuneration package paid to executive directors.We are doing so given that the total remuneration package that is paid to managers includes several other components. For instance, the components of compensation structure have been change magnitude in number during the last decade and may include annual performance bonus, fringe benefits, stock (e. g. preference shares), stock options, stock gustatory sensati on rights, phantom shares and other deferred compensation mechanisms like qualified retirement plans (see kill and Perry, 2003 for an analytical discussion). Once more, the results do not change substantially.Finally, in Table 9 we substitute the annual sales to total assets with the ratio of SG&A expenses to total sales. As already mentioned earlier in the paper, this ratio can be used as a direct proxy for agency costs. Our results, as presented in Table 9, indicate that executive ownership, ownership concentration and total debt help reduce discretionary spending and, therefore, the agency conflicts between managers and shareholders. Sign and Davidson (2003) do not find any evidence to support these results. Also, we find that agency costs and growth opportunities are positively related i. . the coefficient of the variable GROWTH is positive and statistically significant to the 5 per cent statistical level. 23 Finally, our results support the existence of an interaction effect b etween growth opportunities and executive ownership. However, once more, our analysis does not indicate the existence of an interaction effect between short-term debt and growth opportunities. Insert Table 9 here 5. Conclusion In this paper we have examined the effectiveness of the alternative corporate governance mechanisms and devices in mitigating managerial agency problems in the UK market.In particular, we have investigated the impact of capital structure, corporate ownership structure, board structure and managerial compensation structure on the costs arising from agency conflicts mainly between managers and shareholders. The interactions among them and growth opportunities in determining the magnitude of these conflicts have also been tested. Our results strongly suggest managerial ownership, ownership concentration, executive compensation, short-term debt and, to some extent, bank debt are important governance mechanisms for the UK companies.Moreover, growth opportunities is a significant determinant of the magnitude of agency costs. Our results suggest that highgrowth firms face more serious agency problems than low-growth firms, possibly because of information asymmetries between managers, shareholders and debtholders. Finally, there is strong evidence that some governance mechanisms are not homogeneous but vary with growth oppo