Portfolio size, non-trading frequency and portfolio return autocorrelation

In this paper we re-examine the relationship between non-trading frequency and portfolio return autocorrelation. We show that in portfolios where security specific effects have not been completely diversified, portfolio autocorrelation will not increase monotonically with increasing non-trading, as indicated in Lo and MacKinlay (1990). We show that at high levels of non-trading, portfolio autocorrelation will become a decreasing function of non-trading probability and may take negative values. We find that heterogeneity among the means, variances and betas of the component securities in a portfolio can act to increase the induced autocorrelation, particularly in portfolios containing fewer stocks. Security specific effects remain even when the number of securities in the portfolio is far in excess of that considered necessary to diversify security risk. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.

The effects of government disability benefits, accessibility laws and rehabilitation on employment choices by individuals with spinal cord injuries

Greater inclusion of individuals with disabilities into mainstream society is an important goal for society. One of the best ways to include individuals is to actively promote and encourage their participation in the labor force. Of all disabilities, it is feasible to assume that individual with spinal cord injuries can be among the most easily mainstreamed into the labor force. However, less that fifty percent of individuals with spinal cord injuries work. ^ This study focuses on how disability benefit programs, such as Social Security Disability Insurance, and Worker's Compensation, the Americans with Disabilities Act and rehabilitation programs affect employment decisions. The questions were modeled using utility theory with an augmented expenditure function and indifference theory. Statically, Probit, Logit, predicted probability, and linear regressions were used to analyze these questions. Statistical analysis was done on the probability of working, ever attempting to work after injury, and on the number of years after injury that work was first attempted and the number of hours worked per week. The data utilized were from the National Spinal Cord Injury Database and the Spinal Cord Injuries and Labor Database. The Spinal Cord Injuries and Labor Database was created specifically for this study by the author. Receiving disability benefits decreased the probability of working, of ever attempting to work, increased the number of years after injury before the first work attempt was made, and decreased the number of hours worked per week for those individuals working. These results were all statistically significant. The Americans with Disabilities Act decrease the number of years before an individual made a work attempt. The decrease is statistically significant. The amount of rehabilitation had a significant positive effect for male individuals with low paraplegia, and significant negative effect for individuals with high tetraplegia. For women, there were significant negative effects for high tetraplegia and high paraplegia. ^ This study finds that the financial disincentives of receiving benefits are the major determinants of whether an individual with a spinal cord injury returns to the labor force. Policies are recommended that would decrease the disincentive. ^

Medical Curriculum at Selected Colleges: Foundations and Integrated Presentation of Basic Medical Sciences Distribution over Pre-Clerkship Period

Overview and statistics on the medical curriculum at Arizona, Emory, FIU, Rochester, and Vermont.

Integrating Technology in a Statistics Course for a Special Program at Florida International University

A special undergraduate program for selected biology majors was recently inaugurated at Florida International University. The curriculum emphasizes science, mathematics, and statistics. A statistics course was implemented for this program integrating PowerPoint, statistical software (SPSS), and data from biological/biomedical studies. This didactic experience is discussed here.

Fibrations and contact structures

We prove that a closed 3-dimensional manifold is a torus bundle over the circle if and only if it carries a closed nonsingular 1-form which is linearly deformable into contact forms.

Rank and k-nullity of contact manifolds

We prove that the dimension of the 1-nullity distribution N(1) on a closed Sasakian manifold M of rankl is at least equal to 2l−1 provided that M has an isolated closed characteristic. The result is then used to provide some examples of k-contact manifolds which are not Sasakian. On a closed, 2n+1-dimensional Sasakian manifold of positive bisectional curvature, we show that either the dimension of N(1) is less than or equal to n+1 or N(1) is the entire tangent bundle TM. In the latter case, the Sasakian manifold Mis isometric to a quotient of the Euclidean sphere under a finite group of isometries. We also point out some interactions between k-nullity, Weinstein conjecture, and minimal unit vector fields.

Small sample confidence intervals for the mean of a positively skewed distribution

This thesis proposes some confidence intervals for the mean of a positively skewed distribution. The following confidence intervals are considered: Student-t, Johnson-t, median-t, mad-t, bootstrap-t, BCA, T1 , T3 and six new confidence intervals, the median bootstrap-t, mad bootstrap-t, median T1, mad T1 , median T3 and the mad T3. A simulation study has been conducted and average widths, coefficient of variation of widths, and coverage probabilities were recorded and compared across confidence intervals. To compare confidence intervals, the width and coverage probabilities were compared so that smaller widths indicated a better confidence interval when coverage probabilities were the same. Results showed that the median T1 and median T3 outperformed other confidence intervals in terms of coverage probability and the mad bootstrap-t, mad-t, and mad T3 outperformed others in terms of width. Some real life data are considered to illustrate the findings of the thesis.

The effects of government disability benefits, accessibility laws and rehabilitation on employment choices by individuals with spinal cord injuries

Greater inclusion of individuals with disabilities into mainstream society is an important goal for society. One of the best ways to include individuals is to actively promote and encourage their participation in the labor force. Of all disabilities, it is feasible to assume that individual with spinal cord injuries can be among the most easily mainstreamed into the labor force. However, less that fifty percent of individuals with spinal cord injuries work. This study focuses on how disability benefit programs, such as Social Security Disability Insurance, and Worker's Compensation, the Americans with Disabilities Act and rehabilitation programs affect employment decisions. The questions were modeled using utility theory with an augmented expenditure function and indifference theory. Statically, Probit, Logit, predicted probability, and linear regressions were used to analyze these questions. Statistical analysis was done on the probability of working, ever attempting to work after injury, and on the number of years after injury that work was first attempted and the number of hours worked per week. The data utilized were from the National Spinal Cord Injury Database and the Spinal Cord Injuries and Labor Database. The Spinal Cord Injuries and Labor Database was created specifically for this study by the author. Receiving disability benefits decreased the probability of working, of ever attempting to work, increased the number of years after injury before the first work attempt was made, and decreased the number of hours worked per week for those individuals working. These results were all statistically significant. The Americans with Disabilities Act decrease the number of years before an individual made a work attempt. The decrease is statistically significant. The amount of rehabilitation had a significant positive effect for male individuals with low paraplegia, and significant negative effect for individuals with high tetraplegia. For women, there were significant negative effects for high tetraplegia and high paraplegia. This study finds that the financial disincentives of receiving benefits are the major determinants of whether an individual with a spinal cord injury returns to the labor force. Policies are recommended that would decrease the disincentive.

Análise de confiabilidade de um moto-ventilador centrífugo: aplicação no sistema de pressurização de subestação industrial para garantia da segurança operacional na indústria petroquímica

The need of the oil industry to ensure the safety of the facilities, employees and the environment, not to mention the search for maximum efficiency of its facilities, makes it seeks to achieve a high level of excellence in all stages of its production processes in order to obtain the required quality of the final product. Know the reliability of equipment and what it stands for a system is of fundamental importance for ensuring the operational safety. The reliability analysis technique has been increasingly applied in the oil industry as fault prediction tool and undesirable events that can affect business continuity. It is an applied scientific methodology that involves knowledge in engineering and statistics to meet and or analyze the performance of components, equipment and systems in order to ensure that they perform their function without fail, for a period of time and under a specific condition. The results of reliability analyzes help in making decisions about the best maintenance strategy of petrochemical plants. Reliability analysis was applied on equipment (bike-centrifugal fan) between the period 2010-2014 at the Polo Petrobras Guamaré Industrial, situated in rural Guamaré municipality in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, where he collected data field, analyzed historical equipment and observing the behavior of faults and their impacts. The data were processed in commercial software reliability ReliaSoft BlockSim 9. The results were compared with a study conducted by the experts in the field in order to get the best maintenance strategy for the studied system. With the results obtained from the reliability analysis tools was possible to determine the availability of the centrifugal motor-fan and what will be its impact on the security of process units if it will fail. A new maintenance strategy was established to improve the reliability, availability, maintainability and decreased likelihood of Moto-Centrifugal Fan failures, it is a series of actions to promote the increased system reliability and consequent increase in cycle life of the asset. Thus, this strategy sets out preventive measures to reduce the probability of failure and mitigating aimed at minimizing the consequences.

Interactions between Paramoeba perurans, the causative agent of amoebic gill disease, and the blue mussel, Mytilus edulis

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank staff at Marine Scotland Science Patricia White, Rebecca McIntosh, Julia Black and Mark Fordyce for their technical assistance and invaluable feedback on the project. Thanks also go to Alex Douglas at the University of Aberdeen for his advice on data analysis and statistics. For feedback on the manuscript thanks to Lesley McEvoy and Rhiannon Inkster at the NAFC Marine Centre. The study was supported by the Marine Collaborations Forum (MarCRF) which aims to develop cross-disciplinary research between the University of Aberdeen and Marine Scotland Science. Finally, thanks are also due to Scottish Fishermen's Trust for a student support bursary.

Whole body and splanchnic amino acid metabolism in sheep during an acute endotoxin challenge

Acknowledgements The expertise of A. Graham Calder and Susan Anderson for the various stable isotope analyses is gratefully recognised. Ngaire Dennison is also thanked for her surgical expertise with the trans-splanchnic tissue catheter preparations. This study was supported by funds provided to the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Aberdeen and Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland by the Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division of the Scottish Government. S. O. H. was a recipient of a FoRST (NZ) award to study abroad.

Financial media, globalisation, and China’s economic integration: comparing narrative construction of the Economist and Caijing

In June 2015, legal frameworks of the Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank were signed by its 57 founding members. Proposed and initiated by China, this multilateral development bank is considered to be an Asian counterpart to break the monopoly of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In October 2015, China’s Central Bank announced a benchmark interest rate cut to combat the economic slowdown. The easing policy coincides with the European Central Bank’s announcement of doubts over US Fed’s commitment to raise interest rates. Global stock markets responded positively to China’s move, with the exception of the indexes from Wall Street (Bland, 2015; Elliott, 2015). In the meantime, China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (or New Silk Road Economic Belt) became atopic of discourse in relation to its growing global economy, as China pledged $40 billion to trade and infrastructure projects (Bermingham, 2015). The foreign policy aims to reinforce the economic belt from western China through Central Asia towards Europe, as well as to construct maritime trading routes from coastal China through the South China Sea (Summers, 2015). In 2012, The Economist launched a new China section, to reveal the complexity of the‘meteoric rise’ of China. John Micklethwait, who was then the chief editor of the magazine, said that China’s emergence as a global power justified giving it a section of its own(Roush, 2012). In July 2015, Hu Shuli, the former chief editor of Caijing, announced the launch of a think tank and financial data service division called Caixin Insight Group, which encompasses the new Caixin China Purchasing Managers Index (PMI). Incooperation with with Markit Group, a principal global provider of PMI, the index soon became a widely cited economic indicator. One anecdote from November’s Caixin shows how much has changed: in a high-profile dialogue between Hu Shuli and Kevin Rudd, Hu insisted on asking questions in English; interestingly, the former Prime Minister of Australia insisted on replying in Chinese. These recent developments point to one thing: the economic ascent of China and its increasing influence on the power play between economics and politics in world markets. China has begun to take a more active role in rule making and enforcement under neoliberal frameworks. However, due to the country’s size and the scale of its economy in comparison to other countries, China’s version of globalisation has unique characteristics. The ‘Capitalist-socialist’ paradox is vital to China’s market-oriented transformation. In order to comprehend how such unique features are articulated and understood, there are several questions worth investigating in the realms of media and communication studies,such as how China’s neoliberal restructuring is portrayed and perceived by different types of interested parties, and how these portrayals are de-contextualised and re-contextualised in global or Anglo-American narratives. Therefore, based on a combination of the themes of globalisation, financial media and China’s economic integration, this thesis attempts to explore how financial media construct the narratives of China’s economic globalisation through the deployment of comparative and multi-disciplinary approaches. Two outstanding elite financial magazines, Britain’s The Economist, which has a global readership and influence, and Caijing, China’s leading financial magazine, are chosen as case studies to exemplify differing media discourses, representing, respectively, Anglo-American and Chinese socio-economic and political backgrounds, as well as their own journalistic cultures. This thesis tries to answer the questions of how and why China’s neoliberal restructuring is constructed from a globally-oriented perspective. The construction primarily involves people who are influential in business and policymaking. Hence, the analysis falls into the paradigm of elite-elite communication, which is an important but relatively less developed perspective in studying China and its globalisation. The comparing of characteristics of narrative construction are the result of the textual analysis of articles published over a ten-year period (mid-1998 to mid-2008). The corpus of samples come from the two media outlets’ coverage of three selected events:China becoming a member of the World Trade Organization, its outward direct investment, and the listing of stocks of Chinese companies in overseas exchanges, which are mutually exclusive in sample collection and collectively exhaustive in the inclusion of articles regarding China’s economic globalisation. The findings help to understand that, despite language, socio-economic and political differences, elite financial media with globally-oriented readerships share similar methods of and approaches to agenda setting, the evaluation of news prominence, the selection of frame, and the advocacy of deeply rooted neoliberal ideas. The comparison of their distinctive features reflects the different phases of building up the sense of identity in their readers as global elites, as well as the different economic interests that are aligned with the corresponding readerships. However, textual analysis is only relevant in terms of exploring how the narratives are constructed and the elements they include; textual analysis alone prevents us from seeing the obstacles and the constrains of the journalistic practices of construction. Therefore, this thesis provides a brief discussion of interviews with practitioners from the two media, in order to understand how similar or different narratives are manifested and perceived, how the concept of neoliberalism deviates from and is justified in the Chinese context, and how and for what purpose deviations arise from Western to Chinese contexts. The thesis also contributes to defining financial media in the domain of elite communication. The relevant and closely interlocking concepts of globalisation, elitism and neoliberalism are discussed, and are used as a theoretical bedrock in the analysis of texts and contexts. It is important to address the agenda-setting and ideological role of elite financial media, because of its narrative formula of infusing business facts with opinions,which is important in constructing the global elite identity as well as influencing neoliberal policy-making. On the other hand, ‘journalistic professionalism’ has been redefined, in that the elite identity is shared by the content producer, reader and the actors in the news stories emerging from the much-compressed news cycle. The professionalism of elite financial media requires a dual definition, that of being professional in the understanding of business facts and statistics, and that of being professional in the making sense of stories by deploying economic logic.

Risk Consumption: Children and Online Gaming. The Problem of “Responsible Gambling”

Online gambling is a popular activity among adolescents. However, there has been a notable increase in the number of young people who suffer or are on the verge of pathological gambling. We review the impact of online gambling on young people and discuss the desiderability of the concept of “gambling responsibly” in order to alert of their risks and effectively prevent access to minors. The main factors associated with pathological gambling are the age of start, the family environment, the infl uence of advertising, the consumption of stimulants, and the attitudes of the peer group. Both the government and the gaming industry itself should consider these factors and develop comprehensive plans that ensure a safe and controlled model game. In this context, advertising must take into account criteria of consumer protection knowing that even if they are not allowed, children can easily have access to online gambling. All agents involved, including public and social agents, must provide mechanisms for prevention and awareness of a problem that arouses little social consciousness and excessive carelessness.

Mental logic and its difficulties with disjunction

The mental logic theory does not accept the disjunction introduction rule of standard propositional calculus as a natural schema of the human mind. In this way, the problem that I want to show in this paper is that, however, that theory does admit another much more complex schema in which the mentioned rule must be used as a previous step. So, I try to argue that this is a very important problem that the mental logic theory needs to solve, and claim that another rival theory, the mental models theory, does not have these difficulties.

On a first-name basis: Englishization and naming in Flanders

Following and contributing to the ongoing shift from more structuralist, system-oriented to more pragmatic, socio-cultural oriented anglicism research, this paper verifies to what extent the global spread of English affects naming patterns in Flanders. To this end, a diachronic database of first names is constructed, containing the top 75 most popular boy and girl names from 2005 until 2014. In a first step, the etymological background of these names is documented and the evolution in popularity of the English names in the database is tracked. Results reveal no notable surge in the preference for English names. This paper complements these database-driven results with an experimental study, aiming to show how associations through referents are in this case more telling than associations through phonological form (here based on etymology). Focusing on the socio-cultural background of first names in general and of Anglo-American pop culture in particular, the second part of the study specifically reports on results from a survey where participants are asked to name the first three celebrities that leap to mind when hearing a certain first name (e.g. Lana, triggering the response Del Rey). Very clear associations are found between certain first names and specific celebrities from Anglo-American pop culture. Linking back to marketing research and the social turn in onomastics, we will discuss how these celebrities might function as referees, and how social stereotypes surrounding these referees are metonymically attached to their first names. Similar to the country-of-origin-effect in marketing, these metonymical links could very well be the reason why parents select specific “celebrity names”. Although further attitudinal research is needed, this paper supports the importance of including socio-cultural parameters when conducting onomastic research.