The College of Saint Rose is a private Catholic college in Albany, New York. It was founded in 1920 by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet as a women's college. It became fully co-educational in 1969. In 1970, the college added laypersons to its board and became an independent college sponsored by the sisters. The college is in the Pine Hills neighborhood of Albany and is a Division II member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
This study examines the effectiveness of the Corporate Governance Sector Index (CGSI) introduced by the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) as an exchange-based governance mechanism in China. Unlike traditional governance indices, the CGSI operates as a market-oriented selection system without explicitly defined governance criteria. Drawing on agency and institutional theories and prior empirical findings, this study evaluates whether CGSI inclusion is associated with improved firm performance and whether it serves as a credible signal to investors (Antwi et al., 2025; Ararat et al., 2021; Dak-Adzaklo et al., 2024). Using regression analysis and event study methodology on Chinese listed firms from 2007 to 2018, the study examines accounting performance, market reactions, and long-term firm valuation associated with CGSI inclusion. The results show that CGSI firms exhibit stronger accounting performance, positive market reactions, and higher long-term market valuation. However, these findings should be interpreted cautiously because corporate governance practices are not directly observable, and the CGSI selection process lacks transparency. Overall, the study contributes to the governance literature by examining a novel exchange-based governance mechanism and its implications for regulators and investors in emerging markets.
Introduction/background Urodynamics (UDS) is associated with high levels of patient anxiety/discomfort. Children are often unable to complete UDS, with anesthesia needed to place catheters. Animal-assisted therapy (AAT) has been used in a variety of settings, but it has not been studied for UDS before. Objective To determine if AAT can increase success of completing UDS testing without anesthesia in children who were previously unable to perform UDS, along with decreasing distress levels. Study design We performed a pilot case series of 7 patients (2 female, 5 male) aged 4-16 (mean 9.7) years who previously were unable to complete UDS awake, with AAT prior to and during the UDS procedure. A visual analog scale (VAS) was used to measure patient stress levels before and after AAT. Results We were able to successfully complete UDS testing with AAT in 6 of the 7 patients (85.7%) without the need for anesthesia. VAS scores decreased from before to after AAT (5.4-3.6, p = 0.020) but with discrepancy when compared to UDS success. Discussion Our study was the first to describe AAT during UDS. Our preliminary data found AAT to be feasible in UDS. Subjective distress may not correlate with procedural success. AAT in UDS may be more beneficial in certain populations, such as anxious children who previously were unable to tolerate UDS, and not in others such as severe neurodevelopmental conditions. Our study was limited by the small sample size, a single provider, single center, single therapy dog, inclusion of a specific population of patients, and no control group due to this being a pilot study. Conclusion AAT for certain children undergoing UDS testing could help improve the ability to complete the testing without anesthesia. Further studies are needed to fully demonstrate its usefulness in UDS.
Species' traits and environmental conditions determine the abundance of tree species across the globe. The extent to which traits of dominant and rare tree species differ remains untested across a broad environmental range, limiting our understanding of how species traits and the environment shape forest functional composition. We use a global dataset of tree composition of >22,000 forest plots and 11 traits of 1663 tree species to ask how locally dominant and rare species differ in their trait values, and how these differences are driven by climatic gradients in temperature and water availability in forest biomes across the globe. We find three consistent trait differences between locally dominant and rare species across all biomes; dominant species are taller, have softer wood and higher loading on the multivariate stem strategy axis (related to narrow tracheids and thick bark). The difference between traits of dominant and rare species is more strongly driven by temperature compared to water availability, as temperature might affect a larger number of traits. Therefore, climate change driven global temperature rise may have a strong effect on trait differences between dominant and rare tree species and may lead to changes in species abundances and therefore strong community reassembly.
PURPOSE:Many state standards for elementary students require them to use complex syntax, and research has documented age-related increases in the production of complex utterances in elementary-aged school children. Speech-language pathologists who provide services for these children, however, need detailed information in order to plan curriculum relevant intervention. The purpose of this study is to examine the production of specific subordinate (i.e., nominal, relative, and adverbial) and coordinate clauses obtained from 50-utterance conversational language samples of children between 5 and 10 years of age. METHOD:The data sample included 200 children with typical language development, who ranged in age from 5;0 (years;months) to 10;11 (female = 103; male = 97). Fifty utterance conversational language samples were examined for children's use of subordinate clauses (nominal, relative, and adverbial) and coordinate clauses. RESULTS:Results indicated no statistically significant increases in the use of nominal clauses (p = .937), relative clauses (p = .09), adverbial clauses (p = .727), or the coordinating conjunction "and" (p = .587). The results indicated statistically significant increases in the use of the coordinating conjunctions "but" (p = .009) and "so" (p = .019). For every 1 month increase in age, the use of "but" increased by 0.9% and the use of "so" increased by 1%. CONCLUSIONS:The results of this study indicated that, as children's age increased, they produced more utterances with the coordinating conjunctions "but" and "so." Furthermore, irrespective of children's age, approximately 30% of complex utterances included a nominal and/or adverbial subordinate clause. These results were obtained from 50-utterance language samples and further support the use of language sampling to develop intervention goals and monitor progress in intervention.
Despite the recent progress on scaling multilingual machine translation (MT) to several under-resourced African languages, accurately measuring this progress remains challenging, since evaluation is often performed on n-gram matching metrics such as BLEU, which typically show a weaker correlation with human judgments. Learned metrics such as COMET have higher correlation; however, the lack of evaluation data with human ratings for under-resourced languages, complexity of annotation guidelines like Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), and limited language coverage of multilingual encoders have hampered their applicability to African languages. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating high-quality human evaluation data with simplified MQM guidelines for error detection and direct assessment (DA) scoring for 13 typologically diverse African languages. Furthermore, we develop AfriCOMET: COMET evaluation metrics for African languages by leveraging DA data from well-resourced languages and an African-centric multilingual encoder (AfroXLM-R) to create the state-of-the-art MT evaluation metrics for African languages with respect to Spearman-rank correlation with human judgments (0.441).
