Feasibility of Using Automated Distress Data in the County Need Study, TR-418, 1998

The purpose of this project was to determine the feasibility of using pavement condition data collected for the Iowa Pavement Management Program (IPMP) as input to the Iowa Quadrennial Need Study. The need study, conducted by the Iowa Department of Transportation (Iowa DOT) every four years, currently uses manually collected highway infrastructure condition data (roughness, rutting, cracking, etc.). Because of the Iowa DOT's 10-year data collection cycles, condition data for a given highway segment may be up to 10 years old. In some cases, the need study process has resulted in wide fluctuations in funding allocated to individual Iowa counties from one study to the next. This volatility in funding levels makes it difficult for county engineers to plan and program road maintenance and improvements. One possible remedy is to input more current and less subjective infrastructure condition data. The IPMP was initially developed to satisfy the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) requirement that federal-aid-eligible highways be managed through a pavement management system. Currently all metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in Iowa and 15 of Iowa's 18 RPAs participate in the IPMP. The core of this program is a statewide data base of pavement condition and construction history information. The pavement data are collected by machine in two-year cycles. Using pilot areas, researchers examined the implications of using the automated data collected for the IPMP as input to the need study computer program, HWYNEEDS. The results show that using the IPMP automated data in HWYNEEDS is feasible and beneficial, resulting in less volatility in the level of total need between successive quadrennial need studies. In other words, the more current the data, the smaller the shift in total need.

Velar verbs and verbal classes in catalan

There is in Catalan a set of verbs, the so-called «velar verbs», whose differential characteristic consists in presenting a velar segment between the root and the inflectional suffixes in certain morphosyntactic contexts. This velar segment has traditionally been considered as being part of the root in the contexts where it occurs, and has been made responsible for the typical allomorphic character of velar verbs. Under the assumption that regular verbs are only one-root verbs, velar verbs have been treated as irregular verbs. Nevertheless, neither the phonic character of the velar segment nor the marginal character of velar verbs is clear. The aim of this paper is to present a different account of velar verbs on the basis of the inflectional morphological character of the velar segment. The work is split into two parts. The first one focuses on standard Catalan, and tries to show that in this variety velar verbs are better treated as regular verbs. The second one focuses on other Catalan varieties, and aims to exhibit the incoherence implied in the traditional treatment of velar verbs in the context of the Catalan language as a whole. The discussion is mainly developed on morphological grounds, halfway between theory and description.

Una reflexión sobre la impronta romana del 'beneficio de separación de patrimonios' en el Código Civil catalán

The roman institution of the separatio bonorum is a pretorian remedy that relies on the principle of equity, created as to protect the deceased creditors and/or legatees. It provides them a"benefit" in the case of selling the goods of the heir-deubtor, enabling them to separate and reserve for themselves that whole patrimonium, as to avoid that by the act of selling, the heirs creditors could go to it; and like this they maintain intact their guarantee, which relies on the whole goods and assets left by the deceased. The separation of patrimonies implied the existence of 2 different groups of goods: that of the heirs" and that one of the deceased, which are not the same in legal terms, in spite of having a common owner at this point, the heir. This institution was regulated in the 6th title of the 42nd book of the Digesto, and in the 72th title, 7th book of the Justinean Code, and its interest is really high due to its material complexity and its procedure. The aim of this work is to analyze the institution of the separatio bonorum in Roman Law, and its importance in the same figure, actually regulated in the 4th book of the Catalan civil code.

Deposition and residues of azoxystrobin and imidacloprid on greenhouse lettuce with implications for human consumption

Lettuce greenhouse experiments were carried out from March to June 2011 in order to analyze how pesticides behave from the time of application until their intake via human consumption taking into account the primary distribution of pesticides, field dissipation, and post-harvest processing. In addition, experimental conditions were used to evaluate a new dynamic plant uptake model comparing its results with the experimentally derived residues. One application of imidacloprid and two of azoxystrobin were conducted. For evaluating primary pesticide distribution, two approaches based on leaf area index and vegetation cover were used and results were compared with those obtained from a tracer test. High influence of lettuce density, growth stage and type of sprayer was observed in primary distribution showing that low densities or early growth stages implied high losses of pesticides on soil. Washed and unwashed samples of lettuce were taken and analyzed from application to harvest to evaluate removal of pesticides by food processing. Results show that residues found on the Spanish preharvest interval days were in all cases below officially set maximum residue limits, although it was observed that time between application and harvest is as important for residues as application amounts. An overall reduction of 40–60% of pesticides residues was obtained from washing lettuce. Experimentally derived residues were compared with modeled residues and deviate from 1.2 to 1.4 for imidacloprid and azoxystrobin, respectively, presenting good model predictions. Resulting human intake fractions range from... for imidacloprid to ... for azoxystrobin.

GDP and life expectancy in Italy and Spain over the long-run (1861-2008): insights from a timeseries approach

The article presents and discusses long-run series of per capita GDP and life expectancy for Italy and Spain (1861-2008). After refining the available estimates in order to make them comparable and with the avail of the most up-to-date researches, the main changes in the international economy and in technological and sociobiological regimes are used as analytical frameworks to re-assess the performances of the two countries; then structural breaks are searched for and Granger causality between the two variables is investigated. The long-run convergence notwithstanding, significant cyclical differences between the two countries can be detected: Spain began to modernize later in GDP, with higher volatility in life expectancy until recent decades; by contrast, Italy showed a more stable pattern of life expectancy, following early breaks in per capita GDP, but also a negative GDP break in the last decades. Our series confirm that, whereas at the early stages of development differences in GDP tend to mirror those in life expectancy, this is no longer true at later stages of development, when, if any, there seems to be a negative correlation between GDP and life expectancy: this finding is in line with the thesis of a non-monotonic relation between life expectancy and GDP and is supported by tests of Granger causality.

Uncertainty, electoral incentives and political myopia

We study the determinants of political myopia in a rational model of electoral accountability where the key elements are informational frictions and uncertainty. We build aframework where political ability is ex-ante unknown and policy choices are not perfectlyobservable. On the one hand, elections improve accountability and allow to keep well-performing incumbents. On the other, politicians invest too little in costly policies withfuture returns in an attempt to signal high ability and increase their reelection probability.Contrary to the conventional wisdom, uncertainty reduces political myopia and may, undersome conditions, increase social welfare. We use the model to study how political rewardscan be set so as to maximise social welfare and the desirability of imposing a one-term limitto governments. The predictions of our theory are consistent with a number of stylised factsand with a new empirical observation documented in this paper: aggregate uncertainty, measured by economic volatility, is associated to better fiscal discipline in a panel of 20 OECDcountries.

How Wages and Employment Adjust to Trade Liberalization: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Austria

We study the response of regional employment and nominal wages to trade liberalization, exploiting the natural experiment provided by the opening of Central and Eastern European markets after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990. Using data for Austrian municipalities, we examine di¤erential pre- and post-1990 wage and employment growth rates between regions bordering the formerly communist economies and interior regions. If the 'border regions'are de...ned narrowly, within a band of less than 50 kilometers, we can identify statistically signi...cant liberalization e¤ects on both employment and wages. While wages responded earlier than employment, the employment e¤ect over the entire adjustment period is estimated to be around three times as large as the wage e¤ect. The implied slope of the regional labor supply curve can be replicated in an economic geography model that features obstacles to labor migration due to immobile housing and to heterogeneous locational preferences.

Evaluation of the inhalation technique in asthmatic children visiting a specialised outpatient clinic

Background and objective: Asthma is one of the most frequent chronic diseases affecting children and adolescents. Good compliance is indispensable for effective treatment since a suboptimal use of inhalation devices can result in decreased therapeutic efficacy and increased morbidity. The objective of this work was to evaluate the inhalation technique of paediatric patients visiting a specialized consultation clinic of a university hospital. Design: Observational prospective study during a 3-month period. Setting Specialized consultation clinic of a university hospital. Main outcome measures: This study involved 40 outpatient infants, children and adolescents visiting alone or with their parent(s). Patients' data (age, sex, weight, diagnostic, reason for consulting, previous consultations) and their medicines were compiled using an ad hoc form. Filmed sequences of the inhalation procedure used by each child were reviewed independently by members of an interdisciplinary team consisting in a physician, a pharmacist, a nurse and a physiotherapist. A score of 1 was assigned to each correct step in the procedure, and a score of 0 to an incorrect step. A perfect procedure implied 12 correct steps. Results: Thirty patients were treated with a metered-dose inhaler and an inhalation chamber (Babyhaler or AeroChamber Plus); ten other patients were treated with a dry powder inhaler (Diskus or Turbuhaler). The agreement between the members of the interdisciplinary team was considered satisfactory. Nine patients (22.5%) reached an average score lower than 7, 18 patients (45%) a score between 7 and 10 and 13 (32.5%) a score equal to or better than 10. No patient reached the maximum score of 12. Users of the metered-dose inhalers (average score = 9.2) showed a better technique than users of the dry powder inhalers (average score = 7.4). Disappointingly, the score was not improved during a second consultation or following regular consultations. Conclusions: Video recording is a simple method to evaluate the degree of mastery of an inhalation procedure in paediatric patients. The method allows a convenient and efficient identification of suboptimal procedure steps by the hospital staff, and opens the way to patient-specific teaching. In two-thirds of juvenile patients, their inhalation technique was suboptimal despite initial training. This study shows conclusively that the inhalation technique in paediatric patients must be monitored during each examination, and teaching measures taken to improve it when necessary.

Man-bites-dog business cycles

The newsworthiness of an event is partly determined by how unusual it isand this paper investigates the business cycle implications of this fact. In particular, weanalyze the consequences of information structures in which some types of signals are morelikely to be observed after unusual events. Such signals may increase both uncertainty anddisagreement among agents and when embedded in a simple business cycle model, can helpus understand why we observe (i) occasional large changes in macro economic aggregatevariables without a correspondingly large change in underlying fundamentals (ii) persistentperiods of high macroeconomic volatility and (iii) a positive correlation between absolutechanges in macro variables and the cross-sectional dispersion of expectations as measuredby survey data. These results are consequences of optimal updating by agents when theavailability of some signals is positively correlated with tail-events. The model is estimatedby likelihood based methods using individual survey responses and a quarterly time seriesof total factor productivity along with standard aggregate time series. The estimated modelsuggests that there have been episodes in recent US history when the impact on outputof innovations to productivity of a given magnitude was more than eight times as largecompared to other times.

Essays in equilibrium asset pricing

Introduction This dissertation consists of three essays in equilibrium asset pricing. The first chapter studies the asset pricing implications of a general equilibrium model in which real investment is reversible at a cost. Firms face higher costs in contracting than in expanding their capital stock and decide to invest when their productive capital is scarce relative to the overall capital of the economy. Positive shocks to the capital of the firm increase the size of the firm and reduce the value of growth options. As a result, the firm is burdened with more unproductive capital and its value lowers with respect to the accumulated capital. The optimal consumption policy alters the optimal allocation of resources and affects firm's value, generating mean-reverting dynamics for the M/B ratios. The model (1) captures convergence of price-to-book ratios -negative for growth stocks and positive for value stocks - (firm migration), (2) generates deviations from the classic CAPM in line with the cross-sectional variation in expected stock returns and (3) generates a non-monotone relationship between Tobin's q and conditional volatility consistent with the empirical evidence. The second chapter proposes a standard portfolio-choice problem with transaction costs and mean reversion in expected returns. In the presence of transactions costs, no matter how small, arbitrage activity does not necessarily render equal all riskless rates of return. When two such rates follow stochastic processes, it is not optimal immediately to arbitrage out any discrepancy that arises between them. The reason is that immediate arbitrage would induce a definite expenditure of transactions costs whereas, without arbitrage intervention, there exists some, perhaps sufficient, probability that these two interest rates will come back together without any costs having been incurred. Hence, one can surmise that at equilibrium the financial market will permit the coexistence of two riskless rates that are not equal to each other. For analogous reasons, randomly fluctuating expected rates of return on risky assets will be allowed to differ even after correction for risk, leading to important violations of the Capital Asset Pricing Model. The combination of randomness in expected rates of return and proportional transactions costs is a serious blow to existing frictionless pricing models. Finally, in the last chapter I propose a two-countries two-goods general equilibrium economy with uncertainty about the fundamentals' growth rates to study the joint behavior of equity volatilities and correlation at the business cycle frequency. I assume that dividend growth rates jump from one state to other, while countries' switches are possibly correlated. The model is solved in closed-form and the analytical expressions for stock prices are reported. When calibrated to the empirical data of United States and United Kingdom, the results show that, given the existing degree of synchronization across these business cycles, the model captures quite well the historical patterns of stock return volatilities. Moreover, I can explain the time behavior of the correlation, but exclusively under the assumption of a global business cycle.

Anàlisi del risc del preu dels índex IBEX-35 i DAX-30

En aquest treball es porta a terme l’anàlisi del comportament dels índexs IBEX-35 i DAX-30 en el període comprès entre els anys 2008 – 2012. L’objectiu del treball és analitzar com han evolucionat determinades mesures del risc, com són, la Volatilitat, el VaR i el CVaR en els dos índexs. Aquest anàlisi té la finalitat d’aconseguir evidències del diferent comportament d’aquests índexs en el període analitzat, i així veure el diferent impacte que ha tingut la crisis econòmica actual en l’economia espanyola i alemanya.

The homeostatic psyche: Freudian theory and somatic markers.

After years of reciprocal lack of interest, if not opposition, neuroscience and psychoanalysis are poised for a renewed dialogue. This article discusses some aspects of the Freudian metapsychology and its link with specific biological mechanisms. It highlights in particular how the physiological concept of homeostasis resonates with certain fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. Similarly, the authors underline how the Freud and Damasio theories of brain functioning display remarkable complementarities, especially through their common reference to Meynert and James. Furthermore, the Freudian theory of drives is discussed in the light of current neurobiological evidences of neural plasticity and trace formation and of their relationships with the processes of homeostasis. The ensuing dynamics between traces and homeostasis opens novel avenues to consider inner life in reference to the establishment of fantasies unique to each subject. The lack of determinism, within a context of determinism, implied by plasticity and reconsolidation participates in the emergence of singularity, the creation of uniqueness and the unpredictable future of the subject. There is a gap in determinism inherent to biology itself. Uniqueness and discontinuity: this should today be the focus of the questions raised in neuroscience. Neuroscience needs to establish the new bases of a "discontinuous" biology. Psychoanalysis can offer to neuroscience the possibility to think of discontinuity. Neuroscience and psychoanalysis meet thus in an unexpected way with regard to discontinuity and this is a new point of convergence between them.

Quantification of magmatic and hydrothermal processes in a peralkaline syenite-alkali granite complex based on textures, phase equilibria, and stable and radiogenic isotopes

The Puklen complex of the Mid-Proterozoic Gardar Province, South Greenland, consists of various silica-saturated to quartz-bearing syenites, which are intruded by a peralkaline granite. The primary mafic minerals in the syenites are augite +/- olivine + Fe-Ti oxide + amphibole. Ternary feldspar thermometry and phase equilibria among mafic silicates yield T = 950-750degreesC, a(SiO2) = 0.7-1 and an f(O2) of 1-3 log units below the fayalite-magnetite-quartz (FMQ) buffer at 1 kbar. In the granites, the primary mafic minerals are ilmenite and Li-bearing arfvedsonite, which crystallized at temperatures below 750degreesC and at f(O2) values around the FMQ buffer. In both rock types, a secondary post-magmatic assemblage overprints the primary magmatic phases. In syenites, primary Ca-bearing minerals are replaced by Na-rich minerals such as aegirine-augite and albite, resulting in the release of Ca. Accordingly, secondary minerals include ferro-actinolite, (calcite-siderite)(ss), titanite and andradite in equilibrium with the Na-rich minerals. Phase equilibria indicate that formation of these minerals took place over a long temperature interval from near-magmatic temperatures down to similar to300degreesC. In the course of this cooling, oxygen fugacity rose in most samples. For example, late-stage aegirine in granites formed at the expense of arfvedsonite at temperatures below 300degreesC and at an oxygen fugacity above the haematite-magnetite (HM) buffer. The calculated delta(18)O(melt) value for the syenites (+5.9 to +6.3parts per thousand) implies a mantle origin, whereas the inferred delta(18)O(melt) value of <+5.1parts per thousand for the granitic melts is significantly lower. Thus, the granites require an additional low-delta(18)O contaminant, which was not involved in the genesis of the syenites. Rb/Sr data for minerals of both rock types indicate open-system behaviour for Rb and Sr during post-magmatic metasomatism. Neodymium isotope compositions (epsilonNd(1170 Ma) = -3.8 to -6.4) of primary minerals in syenites are highly variable, and suggest that assimilation of crustal rocks occurred to variable extents. Homogeneous epsilon(Nd) values of -5.9 and -6.0 for magmatic amphibole in the granites lie within the range of the syenites. Because of the very similar neodymium isotopic compositions of magmatic and late- to post-magmatic minerals from the same syenite samples a principally closed-system behaviour during cooling is implied. In contrast, for the granites an externally derived fluid phase is required to explain the extremely low epsilon(Nd) values of about -10 and low delta(18)O between +2.0 and +0.5parts per thousand for late-stage aegirine, indicating an open system in the late-stage history. In this study we show that the combination of phase equilibria constraints with stable and radiogenic isotope data on mineral separates can provide much better constraints on magma evolution during emplacement and crystallization than conventional whole-rock studies.

First-passage and escape problems in the Feller process

The Feller process is an one-dimensional diffusion process with linear drift and state-dependent diffusion coefficient vanishing at the origin. The process is positive definite and it is this property along with its linear character that have made Feller process a convenient candidate for the modeling of a number of phenomena ranging from single-neuron firing to volatility of financial assets. While general properties of the process have long been well known, less known are properties related to level crossing such as the first-passage and the escape problems. In this work we thoroughly address these questions.

Steganalytic methods for the detection of histogram shifting data-hiding schemes

In this paper, some steganalytic techniques designed to detect the existence of hidden messages using histogram shifting methods are presented. Firstly, some techniques to identify specific methods of histogram shifting, based on visible marks on the histogram or abnormal statistical distributions are suggested. Then, we present a general technique capable of detecting all histogram shifting techniques analyzed. This technique is based on the effect of histogram shifting methods on the "volatility" of the histogram of differences and the study of its reduction whenever new data are hidden.