Heterogeneity, convergence, and autocorrelations

This paper is a contribution to the literature on the explanatory power and calibration of heterogeneous asset pricing models. We set out a new stochastic market-fraction asset pricing model of fundamentalists and trend followers under a market maker. Our model explains key features of financial market behaviour such as market dominance, convergence to the fundamental price and under- and over-reaction. We use the dynamics of the underlying deterministic system to characterize these features and statistical properties, including convergence of the limiting distribution and autocorrelation structure. We confirm these properties using Monte Carlo simulations.

The influence of gender in the direction of Spanish cooperative societies on profitability and indebtedness: an empirical analysis

In this paper the claim for the market for a new business management to ensure the presence of women in decision -making to respond to new social needs addressed. Thus, this paper analyzes the influence of gender diversity of the directors on the profitability and the level of debt for a sample of 5,199 Spanish cooperatives. Unlike capitalist societies, these organizations have a number of peculiarities in their government, and that the partners are themselves major time, agents and customers. The study focuses on the Spanish context, where there is an open debate on the importance of women's business management, as in other countries, driven by the proliferation of legislation on gender equality, being, in addition, Spain, the pioneer in having specific legislation on Social Economy. The results show that cooperatives with greater female representation in theirs Boards have higher profitability. On the other hand, those Boards with a higher percentage of women show a lower level of indebtedness.

Heterogeneity in the granulomatous response to mycobacterial infection in patients with defined genetic mutations in the interleukin 12-dependent interferon-gamma production pathway

Granulomatous Diseases Review Heterogeneity in the granulomatous response to mycobacterial infection in patients with defined genetic mutations in the interleukin 12-dependent interferon-gamma production pathway

The Cuban school as a context for a proper development of the environmental perception

Environmental Psychology in Cuba is a new discipline that promotes a historical and cultural vision of mankind. Perception is one of the distinct processes that creates environmental consciousness. Depending on the perception of the environment, individuals interact with it, and vice versa. It means that a good perception of the significant elements of the environment also contributes to the formation of an environmental consciousness, in which perception is one of the main processes. In this transformation the school is one of the most important places for creating knowledge, skills, habits, and good attitudes towards the environment. As a result, the evaluation of the environmental perception development in students allows detecting weaknesses in the environmental education and proposing solutions based on specific problems. This study is based on different researches where the subjects were Cuban students from different educational levels and provides a first approach to the dynamic of the environmental perception development in these individuals. Recent researches have used some dimensions of the environment concept as development indicators: material, relational, intrapersonal, behavioural, cognitive, natural or ecological, and cultural. Generally speaking, different investigations show that school is the right context for environmental education.

Thresholding of noisy shoeprint images based on pixel context

In a typical shoeprint classification and retrieval system, the first step is to segment meaningful basic shapes and patterns in a noisy shoeprint image. This step has significant influence on shape descriptors and shoeprint indexing in the later stages. In this paper, we extend a recently developed denoising technique proposed by Buades, called non-local mean filtering, to give a more general model. In this model, the expected result of an operation on a pixel can be estimated by performing the same operation on all of its reference pixels in the same image. A working pixel’s reference pixels are those pixels whose neighbourhoods are similar to the working pixel’s neighbourhood. Similarity is based on the correlation between the local neighbourhoods of the working pixel and the reference pixel. We incorporate a special instance of this general case into thresholding a very noisy shoeprint image. Visual and quantitative comparisons with two benchmarking techniques, by Otsu and Kittler, are conducted in the last section, giving evidence of the effectiveness of our method for thresholding noisy shoeprint images.

Does social context influence male mating tactics in Drosophila melanogaster?

Social context, such as mate availability and perceived competition, can influence a male’s mating tactics. In Drosophila melanogaster most research has investigated how physical interactions and the perceived levels of sperm competition alter mating behaviour. I wanted to know if males would respond to the perceived social environments without the presence of physical interaction. Using a unique apparatus, I altered focal males’ social context by separating them physically from a social environment using a screen. Focal males were either in: (i) the presence of rival males and mates, (ii) the presence of potential mates only, (iii) isolation, or (iv) the presence of rival males only. I also manipulated the period the focal male was conditioned to a social environment to assess if the timing of cues is important. My findings suggest that the duration of acclimation alters male mating tactics. Regardless of social environment, the duration a male was conditioned influenced copulation latency. Males that were conditioned to their social environment for the duration of the experiment had differing copulation latencies between environments. Males held in isolation took longer to successfully court females, and transferred less sperm during mating then experimental males in the presence of rival males. Additionally, copulation duration correlated with the number of sperm transferred. Overall, my results suggest that the social environment and the perceived competition level affect mating strategies even without physical interactions. Since this apparatus may trick flies into believing they are a part of a social group, while controlling the male mating status, future work could examine behavioural, genetic and physiological phenotype effects of the social environment for both sexes.