The child and the letter: Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

This essay engages with the question of childhood in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Despite narrating a conflict concerning child custody, childhood is a subject rarely broached by the critics of the text. Indeed, the only instance of the child being addressed in criticism grants it the power to enclose potentially subversive narrative. This is a function attributed to the framing structure of the novel by other critics. This essay returns the child to Brontë’s text as a disruptive rather than containing force. Through a detailed close analysis of the novel I track such disruptions, and the extent to which these point to wider theoretical or methodological difficulties in critical accounts of childhood and absence in literature. The essay makes interventions into psychoanalysis, childhood studies, and the discourse of ‘framing’ within C19th literature.

‘Scripture its own interpreter’: Mary Martha Sherwood, the Bible and female autobiography

This is a reading of the work of Mary Martha Sherwood, the Victorian Evangelist and Children’s Author (and pupil at the Abbey School, Reading). Based upon research on Sherwood’s private correspondences and diary conducted at UCLA with the aid of a Mitzi Myers (this before my arrival at Reading), the essay offers a radical reinterpretation of her work. Previously understood in terms of a rigid, if self-contradictory and ‘anxious’, Evangelism, the essay reads the diary through Sherwood’s little known Biblical scholarship. Through this I argue that Sherwood grants her own writing the status of Biblical truth precisely because of its contradictions and ‘anxiety’.

Dynamic correlations between REIT sub-sectors and the implications for diversification

The issue of whether Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) should pursue a focused or diversified investment strategy remains an ongoing debate within both the academic and industry communities. This article considers the relationship between REITs focused on different property sectors in a Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity-Dynamic Control Correlation (GARCH-DCC) framework. The daily conditional correlations reveal that since 1990 there has been a marked upward trend in the coefficients between US REIT sub-sectors. The findings imply that REITs are behaving in a far more homogeneous manner than in the past. Furthermore, the argument that REITs should be focused in order that investors can make the diversification decision is reduced.

Color adjectives and radical contextualism

Radical contextualists have observed that the content of what is said by the utterance of a sentence is shaped in far-reaching ways by the context of utterance. And they have argued that the ways in which the content of what is said is shaped by context cannot be explained by semantic theory. A striking number of the examples that radical contextualists use to support their view involve sentences containing color adjectives (“red”, “green”, etc.). In this paper, I show how the most sophisticated analysis of color adjectives within the explanatory framework of compositional truth conditional semantics—recently developed by Kennedy and McNally (Synthese 174(1):79–98 2010)—needs to be modified to handle the full range of contextual variation displayed by color adjectives.

Subjective well-being and relative poverty in rural Bangladesh

This paper revisits the debate over the importance of absolute vs. relative income as a correlate of subjective well-being using data from Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world with high levels of corruption and poor governance. We do so by combining household data with population census and village survey records. Our results show that conditional on own household income, respondents report higher satisfaction levels when they experience an increase in their income over the past years. More importantly, individuals who report their income to be lower than their neighbours in the village also report less satisfaction with life. At the same time, our evidence suggests that relative wealth effect is stronger for the rich. Similarly, in villages with higher inequality, individuals report less satisfaction with life. However, when compared to the effect of absolute income, these effects (i.e. relative income and local inequality) are modest. Amongst other factors, we study the influence of institutional quality. Institutional quality, measured in terms of confidence in police, matters for well-being: it enters with a positive and significant coefficient in the well-being function.

Comment on ``Conditional Exceedance Probabilities''

In a recent paper, Mason et al. propose a reliability test of ensemble forecasts for a continuous, scalar verification. As noted in the paper, the test relies on a very specific interpretation of ensembles, namely, that the ensemble members represent quantiles of some underlying distribution. This quantile interpretation is not the only interpretation of ensembles, another popular one being the Monte Carlo interpretation. Mason et al. suggest estimating the quantiles in this situation; however, this approach is fundamentally flawed. Errors in the quantile estimates are not independent of the exceedance events, and consequently the conditional exceedance probabilities (CEP) curves are not constant, which is a fundamental assumption of the test. The test would reject reliable forecasts with probability much higher than the test size.

Conditional transgenic expression of fibroblast growth factor 9 in the adult mouse heart reduces heart failure mortality after myocardial infarction

BACKGROUND: Fibroblast growth factor 9 (FGF9) is secreted from bone marrow cells, which have been shown to improve systolic function after myocardial infarction (MI) in a clinical trial. FGF9 promotes cardiac vascularization during embryonic development but is only weakly expressed in the adult heart. METHODS AND RESULTS: We used a tetracycline-responsive binary transgene system based on the α-myosin heavy chain promoter to test whether conditional expression of FGF9 in the adult myocardium supports adaptation after MI. In sham-operated mice, transgenic FGF9 stimulated left ventricular hypertrophy with microvessel expansion and preserved systolic and diastolic function. After coronary artery ligation, transgenic FGF9 enhanced hypertrophy of the noninfarcted left ventricular myocardium with increased microvessel density, reduced interstitial fibrosis, attenuated fetal gene expression, and improved systolic function. Heart failure mortality after MI was markedly reduced by transgenic FGF9, whereas rupture rates were not affected. Adenoviral FGF9 gene transfer after MI similarly promoted left ventricular hypertrophy with improved systolic function and reduced heart failure mortality. Mechanistically, FGF9 stimulated proliferation and network formation of endothelial cells but induced no direct hypertrophic effects in neonatal or adult rat cardiomyocytes in vitro. FGF9-stimulated endothelial cell supernatants, however, induced cardiomyocyte hypertrophy via paracrine release of bone morphogenetic protein 6. In accord with this observation, expression of bone morphogenetic protein 6 and phosphorylation of its downstream targets SMAD1/5 were increased in the myocardium of FGF9 transgenic mice. CONCLUSIONS: Conditional expression of FGF9 promotes myocardial vascularization and hypertrophy with enhanced systolic function and reduced heart failure mortality after MI. These observations suggest a previously unrecognized therapeutic potential for FGF9 after MI.

Potential Predictability and AMIP Implications of Midlatitude Climate Variability in Two General Circulation Models

Ensembles of extended Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP) runs from the general circulation models of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (formerly the National Meteorological Center) and the Max-Planck Institute (Hamburg, Germany) are used to estimate the potential predictability (PP) of an index of the Pacific–North America (PNA) mode of climate change. The PP of this pattern in “perfect” prediction experiments is 20%–25% of the index’s variance. The models, particularly that from MPI, capture virtually all of this variance in their hindcasts of the winter PNA for the period 1970–93. The high levels of internally generated model noise in the PNA simulations reconfirm the need for an ensemble averaging approach to climate prediction. This means that the forecasts ought to be expressed in a probabilistic manner. It is shown that the models’ skills are higher by about 50% during strong SST events in the tropical Pacific, so the probabilistic forecasts need to be conditional on the tropical SST. Taken together with earlier studies, the present results suggest that the original set of AMIP integrations (single 10-yr runs) is not adequate to reliably test the participating models’ simulations of interannual climate variability in the midlatitudes.

Macro-economic and financial determinants of comovement across global real estate security markets

This paper models the determinants of integration in the context of global real estate security markets. Using both local and U.S. Dollar denominated returns, we model conditional correlations across listed real estate sectors and also with the global stock market. The empirical results find that financial factors, such as the relationship with the respective equity market, volatility, the relative size of the real estate sector and trading turnover all play an important role in the degree of integration present. Furthermore, the results highlight the importance of macro-economic variables in the degree of integration present. All four of the macro-economic variables modeled provide at least one significant result across the specifications estimated. Factors such as financial and trade openness, monetary independence and the stability of a country’s currency all contribute to the degree of integration reported.

Islamic mutual funds' financial performance and international investment style: evidence from 20 countries

We pursue the first large-scale investigation of a strongly growing mutual fund type: Islamic funds. Based on an unexplored, survivorship bias-adjusted data set, we analyse the financial performance and investment style of 265 Islamic equity funds from 20 countries. As Islamic funds often have diverse investment regions, we develop a (conditional) three-level Carhart model to simultaneously control for exposure to different national, regional and global equity markets and investment styles. Consistent with recent evidence for conventional funds, we find Islamic funds to display superior learning in more developed Islamic financial markets. While Islamic funds from these markets are competitive to international equity benchmarks, funds from especially Western nations with less Islamic assets tend to significantly underperform. Islamic funds’ investment style is somewhat tilted towards growth stocks. Funds from predominantly Muslim economies also show a clear small cap preference. These results are consistent over time and robust to time varying market exposures and capital market restrictions.

Conditional mean functions of non-linear models of US output

We compare a number of models of post War US output growth in terms of the degree and pattern of non-linearity they impart to the conditional mean, where we condition on either the previous period's growth rate, or the previous two periods' growth rates. The conditional means are estimated non-parametrically using a nearest-neighbour technique on data simulated from the models. In this way, we condense the complex, dynamic, responses that may be present in to graphical displays of the implied conditional mean.

Futures trading, spot price volatility and market efficiency: evidence from European real estate securities futures

In 2007 futures contracts were introduced based upon the listed real estate market in Europe. Following their launch they have received increasing attention from property investors, however, few studies have considered the impact their introduction has had. This study considers two key elements. Firstly, a traditional Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model, the approach of Bessembinder & Seguin (1992) and the Gray’s (1996) Markov-switching-GARCH model are used to examine the impact of futures trading on the European real estate securities market. The results show that futures trading did not destabilize the underlying listed market. Importantly, the results also reveal that the introduction of a futures market has improved the speed and quality of information flowing to the spot market. Secondly, we assess the hedging effectiveness of the contracts using two alternative strategies (naïve and Ordinary Least Squares models). The empirical results also show that the contracts are effective hedging instruments, leading to a reduction in risk of 64 %.

Forecasting exchange rate volatility using conditional variance models selected by information criteria

This paper uses appropriately modified information criteria to select models from the GARCH family, which are subsequently used for predicting US dollar exchange rate return volatility. The out of sample forecast accuracy of models chosen in this manner compares favourably on mean absolute error grounds, although less favourably on mean squared error grounds, with those generated by the commonly used GARCH(1, 1) model. An examination of the orders of models selected by the criteria reveals that (1, 1) models are typically selected less than 20% of the time.

Distinguishing the cold conveyor belt and sting jet air streams in an intense extratropical cyclone

Strong winds equatorwards and rearwards of a cyclone core have often been associated with two phenomena, the cold conveyor belt (CCB) jet and sting jets. Here, detailed observations of the mesoscale structure in this region of an intense cyclone are analysed. The {\it in-situ} and dropsonde observations were obtained during two research flights through the cyclone during the DIAMET (DIAbatic influences on Mesoscale structures in ExTratropical storms) field campaign. A numerical weather prediction model is used to link the strong wind regions with three types of ``air streams'', or coherent ensembles of trajectories: two types are identified with the CCB, hooking around the cyclone center, while the third is identified with a sting jet, descending from the cloud head to the west of the cyclone. Chemical tracer observations show for the first time that the CCB and sting jet air streams are distinct air masses even when the associated low-level wind maxima are not spatially distinct. In the model, the CCB experiences slow latent heating through weak resolved ascent and convection, while the sting jet experiences weak cooling associated with microphysics during its subsaturated descent. Diagnosis of mesoscale instabilities in the model shows that the CCB passes through largely stable regions, while the sting jet spends relatively long periods in locations characterized by conditional symmetric instability (CSI). The relation of CSI to the observed mesoscale structure of the bent-back front and its possible role in the cloud banding is discussed.

Governance, agricultural intensification and land sparing in tropical South America

In this paper we address two topical questions: How do the quality of governance and agricultural intensification impact on spatial expansion of agriculture? Which aspects of governance are more likely to ensure that agricultural intensification allows sparing land for nature? Using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, the World Database on Protected Areas, and the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, we estimate a panel data model for six South American countries and quantify the effects of major determinants of agricultural land expansion, including various dimensions of governance, over the period 1970–2006. The results indicate that the effect of agricultural intensification on agricultural expansion is conditional on the quality and type of governance. When considering conventional aspects of governance, agricultural intensification leads to an expansion of agricultural area when governance scores are high. When looking specifically at environmental aspects of governance, intensification leads to a spatial contraction of agriculture when governance scores are high, signaling a sustainable intensification process.