How Useful Are Banks' Earnings-At-Risk And Economic Value Of Equity-At-Risk Public Disclosures?

This paper examines the information content and the usefulness of banks' interest rate risk public disclosures. ALM managers use Earnings at Risk ( EAR ) and Economic Value of Equity at Risk ( EVEAR ) as measures of the dollar amount of potential loss to net interest income and common shareholders' equity as a result of unforeseen interest rate changes. These two interest rate risk management metrics are now recognized benchmarks for measuring interest rate risk exposure, and its potential impact on a bank's financial position. At the explicit request of regulators, financial analysts and competitive pressures, more commercial banks are now reporting EAR and EVEAR numbers in their annual financial reports. To examine preliminary evidence on the information content of such public disclosures, we composed a sample of some of North America's largest commercial banks. The Canadian peer group is based on Canada's seven largest banks, and the U.S. peer group is composed of twelve of its largest banks. In particular, we investigate if "ex ante" EAR and EVEAR numbers help regulators, financial analysts and investors to explain the subsequent variability of commercial banks' net interest income and net income over time

Research protocol: investigating the feasibility of a group self-management intervention for stroke (the GUSTO study)

Background: Life after stroke can be an ongoing struggle with over half of all survivors reporting unmet emotional and social needs. In the United Kingdom's (UK) national clinical guidelines for stroke, self-management is suggested as one approach which can support long-term needs. In the UK NHS, self-management interventions are delivered in various ways. Regardless of the delivery mechanism, a tailored approach and ways to integrate peer support are advocated. Group delivery offers a platform for peer support and has the potential to remain individualised. However, before the efficacy of a group self-management intervention can be tested, the feasibility must be explored. This research investigates the feasibility of a GroUp Self-management intervention for sTrOke (GUSTO). Methods: A randomised waitlist control design will be used to investigate the feasibility of a group self-management intervention adapted from an existing one-to-one intervention called Bridges. A mixed methods approach will be used. Qualitative work will capture participant experience, while quantitative work will allow preliminary comparison between the intervention and waitlist groups (between subjects) and pre-post intervention measures (within subjects). Interviews will be conducted with stroke survivors and focus groups with family and friends to assess acceptability of the intervention. Discussion: There is a growing interest in group-based self-management interventions for stroke as a method of supporting stroke survivors' ongoing unmet needs. This is an area with limited research to date. This study will inform design of a fully powered trial which would assess the efficacy of a group self-management intervention following stroke. Trial registration: ISRCTN19867168

Overlay Networks for Edge Management

Experiments presented in this paper were carried out using the Grid'5000 testbed, supported by a scientific interest group hosted by Inria and including CNRS, RENATER and several Universities as well as other organizations (see https://www.grid5000.fr).Edge computing has emerged as a solution to address existing limitations of cloud computing for bandwidth-heavy and time-sensitive applications, by moving (some) computations from bandwidth saturated Cloud infrastructures closer to client devices, where data is effectively produced and consumed. However, existing materializations of the edge computing paradigm take limited advantage of computational and storage power that exists in the edge and between client devices and the cloud. Most of these leverage static hierarchical topologies (e.g., Fog Computing) to pre-process data before sending it to the Cloud, which limits the advantages that can be extracted from the edge computing paradigm. In the past, peer-to-peer systems have sought to tackle the challenges of increasing scalability and availability for very large systems, with a large number of solutions being proposed namely, distributed overlay networks for resource management. In this paper, we argue that the clever adaptation of peer-to-peer solutions can enable novel applications to fully exploit the potential of the edge. In particular, we study the viability of taking advantage of specialized overlay networks in edge environments to enable the management of a large number of computational resources. Contrary to previous proposals, that assume the environment to be composed of mostly homogeneous devices, our proposal embraces existing heterogeneity and exploits the location of computational resources to devise a (partially) self-organizing overlay network that can be exploited both to provide membership information to applications, but also do efficiently disseminate management information across edge devices. We have conducted an experimental evaluation using container-based emulation in an heterogeneous network composed by 100 devices, with results showing that our protocol is able to maximize the bandwidth usage of the system, allowing more data to flow throughout the network, while retaining high robustness to failures.authorsversionpublishe

Research protocol: investigating the feasibility of a group self-management intervention for stroke (the GUSTO study).

BACKGROUND: Life after stroke can be an ongoing struggle with over half of all survivors reporting unmet emotional and social needs. In the United Kingdom's (UK) national clinical guidelines for stroke, self-management is suggested as one approach which can support long-term needs. In the UK NHS, self-management interventions are delivered in various ways. Regardless of the delivery mechanism, a tailored approach and ways to integrate peer support are advocated. Group delivery offers a platform for peer support and has the potential to remain individualised. However, before the efficacy of a group self-management intervention can be tested, the feasibility must be explored. This research investigates the feasibility of a GroUp Self-management intervention for sTrOke (GUSTO). METHODS: A randomised waitlist control design will be used to investigate the feasibility of a group self-management intervention adapted from an existing one-to-one intervention called Bridges. A mixed methods approach will be used. Qualitative work will capture participant experience, while quantitative work will allow preliminary comparison between the intervention and waitlist groups (between subjects) and pre-post intervention measures (within subjects). Interviews will be conducted with stroke survivors and focus groups with family and friends to assess acceptability of the intervention. DISCUSSION: There is a growing interest in group-based self-management interventions for stroke as a method of supporting stroke survivors' ongoing unmet needs. This is an area with limited research to date. This study will inform design of a fully powered trial which would assess the efficacy of a group self-management intervention following stroke. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN19867168

Solving key design issues for massively multiplayer online games on peer-to-peer architectures

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are increasing in both popularity and scale on the Internet and are predominantly implemented by Client/Server architectures. While such a classical approach to distributed system design offers many benefits, it suffers from significant technical and commercial drawbacks, primarily reliability and scalability costs. This realisation has sparked recent research interest in adapting MMOGs to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures. This thesis identifies six key design issues to be addressed by P2P MMOGs, namely interest management, event dissemination, task sharing, state persistency, cheating mitigation, and incentive mechanisms. Design alternatives for each issue are systematically compared, and their interrelationships discussed. How well representative P2P MMOG architectures fulfil the design criteria is also evaluated. It is argued that although P2P MMOG architectures are developing rapidly, their support for task sharing and incentive mechanisms still need to be improved. The design of a novel framework for P2P MMOGs, Mediator, is presented. It employs a self-organising super-peer network over a P2P overlay infrastructure, and addresses the six design issues in an integrated system. The Mediator framework is extensible, as it supports flexible policy plug-ins and can accommodate the introduction of new superpeer roles. Key components of this framework have been implemented and evaluated with a simulated P2P MMOG. As the Mediator framework relies on super-peers for computational and administrative tasks, membership management is crucial, e.g. to allow the system to recover from super-peer failures. A new technology for this, namely Membership-Aware Multicast with Bushiness Optimisation (MAMBO), has been designed, implemented and evaluated. It reuses the communication structure of a tree-based application-level multicast to track group membership efficiently. Evaluation of a demonstration application shows i that MAMBO is able to quickly detect and handle peers joining and leaving. Compared to a conventional supervision architecture, MAMBO is more scalable, and yet incurs less communication overheads. Besides MMOGs, MAMBO is suitable for other P2P applications, such as collaborative computing and multimedia streaming. This thesis also presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel task mapping infrastructure for heterogeneous P2P environments, Deadline-Driven Auctions (DDA). DDA is primarily designed to support NPC host allocation in P2P MMOGs, and specifically in the Mediator framework. However, it can also support the sharing of computational and interactive tasks with various deadlines in general P2P applications. Experimental and analytical results demonstrate that DDA efficiently allocates computing resources for large numbers of real-time NPC tasks in a simulated P2P MMOG with approximately 1000 players. Furthermore, DDA supports gaming interactivity by keeping the communication latency among NPC hosts and ordinary players low. It also supports flexible matchmaking policies, and can motivate application participants to contribute resources to the system

Dynamic Load Balancing for Massively Multiplayer Online Games

In recent years, there has been an important growth of online gaming. Today’s Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) can contain millions of synchronous players scattered across the world and participating with each other within a single shared game. Traditional Client/Server architectures of MMOGs exhibit different problems in scalability, reliability, and latency, as well as the cost of adding new servers when demand is too high. P2P architecture provides considerable support for scalability of MMOGs. It also achieves good response times by supporting direct connections between players. This thesis proposes a novel hybrid Peer-to-Peer architecture for MMOGs and a new dynamic load balancing for massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) based this hybrid Peer-to-Peer architecture. We have divided the game world space into several regions. Each region in the game world space is controlled and managed by using both a super-peer and a clone-super-peer. The region's super-peer is responsible for distributing the game update among the players inside the region, as well as managing the game communications between the players. However, the clone-super-peer is responsible for controlling the players' migration from one region to another, in addition to be the super-peer of the region when the super-peer leaves the game. In this thesis, we have designed and simulated a static and dynamic Area of Interest Management (AoIM) for MMOGs based on both architectures hybrid P2P and client-server with the possibility of players to move from one region to another. In this thesis also, we have designed and evaluated the static and dynamic load balancing for MMOGs based on hybrid P2P architecture. We have used OPNET Modeler 18.0 to simulate and evaluate the proposed system, especially standard applications, custom applications, TDMA and RX Group. Our dynamic load balancer is responsible for distributing the load among the regions in the game world space. The position of the load balancer is located between the game server and the regions. The results, following extensive experiments, show that low delay and higher traffic communication can be achieved using both of hybrid P2P architecture, static and dynamic AoIM, dynamic load balancing for MMOGs based on hybrid P2P system

Group behavior: performance, sick leave and job satisfaction as a function of within-group homogeneity

Group behavior is affected by more than just the sum of individual member competence because some dynamics are involved in group processes. Standard selection procedures, however, have largely ignored this group aspect. One way of improving group behavior is through group composition, particularly based on homogeneity of group members. Thus the present research was conducted to examine the relationship between group behavior and group homogeneity. A sample of 212 firefighters (N of groups = 27) employed by a major city located in the Midwest was used for the study. Group homogeneity was measured by using the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey. Group behavior was assessed through job satisfaction and records of job performance and sick leave. One scale of the Job Descriptive Index, Work scale, was used to measure job satisfaction of firefighters. In addition, the Peer Leadership scale was used to measure interaction variables to explore their mediating role between group behavior and group homogeneity;Group homogeneity of firefighter\u27s interests was analyzed by four indices: item response pattern, shape, level, and variability. An analysis of variance and Pearson product-moment correlations were computed to test the hypotheses. Results indicated that group homogeneity was positively related to job satisfaction but not to job performance and sick leave. In addition to interest similarity, age homogeneity within a group was found to correlate with job satisfaction. Although a mediating role of interaction measures was not found, this result is not conclusive because a proper analysis could not be conducted due to an inadequate sample size (N of groups = 27). Implications of the results for human resource management are discussed

Putting the Professional into Practice-based Learning

Assessment in an undergraduate physics subject was re-designed to challenge and inspire students to develop and apply their disciplinary and non-disciplinary skills in a practice-based, authentic assignment task. The aims of the re-design were to expose students to workplace practice and increase their engagement in the subject. Traditionally, as a response to its emphasis on disciplinary theory, science is assessed by way of content focussed class tests and examinations, activities not reflected in workplace practice. These summative assessment types measure student attainment of knowledge rather than enable deeper understanding and learning. However, introducing students to ‘real-world’ practice-oriented assessment tasks can enhance student engagement and promote learning. To achieve these aims, the assignment was carefully scaffolded to give students the opportunity to improve their scientific writing skills, develop an approach to systematic research, build a greater understanding of the peer-review process and acquire skills in self and team management. The task required students to work in groups to research and write a research paper based on a meta-study model. Their papers were then compiled and published in a student peerreviewed research journal. The impact of this intervention was evaluated through a focus group discussion, with the majority of the students commenting positively on their learning and engagement in the subject. This reflective article discusses the effectiveness of the assignment design, its scaffolding, the peer-review process and the authenticity of the workplace-setting. Suggestions are made as to how to further improve this type of assignment design. This workplace-focused intervention may be of interest to educators in other disciplines

Soil management protocols and projects for greenhouse gas offsets in Canada

Non-Peer ReviewedAgricultural activities contribute to sources, sinks, and reductions of greenhouse gases (GHG) in Canada. There is considerable producer interest in generating and selling carbon or offset credits through GHG sinks and reductions. During the development of a potential Canadian offset system by Environment Canada from 2003 to 2006, a number of technical working groups were established to generate standardized protocols. These protocols were intended to streamline project development by providing specific guidance for quantification, monitoring, and verification of GHG reductions or removals for specific activities. In 2005/06 the Soil Management Technical Working Group (SMTWG) developed protocols and guidelines involving no tillage, nitrogen fertilizer reduction, and other soil carbon and nutrient management related practices. Considerable effort was required to develop scientifically based solutions for policy driven challenges such as baselines and maintenance of soil carbon through a liability period. Other important aspects of protocol development included assessing quantification methodologies (eg. coefficients versus soil carbon measurements), developing appropriate activity definitions and regional stratification for coefficient based approaches, and evaluating various options for monitoring and verification of specific soil management practices to ensure GHG assertions at reasonable cost. While the applicability of these protocols may be uncertain during the current policy vacuum (2006/07), they should prove valuable as a base from which to refine or develop new protocols at a time when GHG offset program and policy issues are resolved