The financialization of food?

Commodity-equity and cross-commodity return co-movements rose dramatically after the 2008 financial crisis. This development took place following what has been dubbed the 'financialization' of commodity markets. We first document changes since 2000 in the intensity of speculative activity in grain and livestock futures. We then use a structural VAR model to establish the role of speculative activity in explaining the strength of co-movements between grain, livestock and equity returns. We find that speculative intensity does not in itself affect the extent to which grain markets move in sync with the stock market. Rather, pre-crisis, financial speculators' futures positions facilitated the transmission of macroeconomic shocks into grain markets. Strikingly, in the post-crisis period, this transmission channel weakened to the point of statistical insignificance. The role of speculative activity is less evident in livestock markets, where only macroeconomic conditions have a statistically significant impact on return co-movements with equities

Correlates of loneliness among university students

Background The purpose of this study was to investigate level of loneliness, essential needs during university education, and relationships between loneliness, essential needs, and characteristics of university students. A sample comprising 721 students participated in the study. The mean age was 21.58 (SD = 1.73) with a range from 18 to 25. The majority of the students were female (70.6%) and were living in students' dormitory (67.5%) with low (87.8%) income, away from their parents. Methods The UCLA-R loneliness scale and sociodemographic questionnaire which includes an open-ended question on essential needs during university education were administered. Pearson-Product-Moment correlations were used to explore the relationships between participants' loneliness, needs, and characteristics. Results It was found that 60.2% of the participants experienced loneliness. Economical support (81.6%), social interaction (46.9%) and psychosocial support (35%) were the essential needs during university education reported by the participants. The study findings indicate that there were significant relationships between the needs of economical support, social interaction, and loneliness level of university students. Results also show that there were significant relationships among romantic relationship, parents' status and loneliness. Participants' loneliness levels were relatively higher who had not any romantic relationship and were not from married families. Conclusion The findings of this study provided essential information, about Turkish university students, concerning: level of loneliness and relationships that exist among loneliness, needs and sociodemographic characteristics. The findings also suggest implications for psychosocial practice. Because of the mean of loneliness were found to be high (45.49 ± 10.07), for this study, professionals need to pay attention to Turkish university students' psychosocial state, and need to empower them in establishing social relations

Oil and the Macroeconomy in a Changing World: A Conference Summary

Analysis of oil-price movements is once again an important feature of economic policy discussions. To provide some background for this analysis, this paper summarizes a conference on the oil market held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in June 2010. Four cross-cutting themes emerged from this symposium, which included scientific experts, market participants, business leaders, academics, and policymakers. First, the decline in real oil prices that followed the 1970s' oil shocks is unlikely to be repeated today, because there are fewer ways in which oil-importing countries can reduce oil demand or expand domestic supplies in response to higher prices. The second lesson of the conference, however, is that any prediction about oil markets is highly uncertain, a fact illustrated by the wide confidence intervals that result when futures-market data are used to quantify forecast uncertainty. Third, there is little consensus on whether new financial investment in commodity index funds has increased the volatility of oil prices. Finally, changes in oil prices still have large effects on the economy. Some research suggests that the rapid run-up in oil prices in 2007-08 may have significantly weakened the U.S. economy in the early stages of the Great Recession

Smart Videocapsule for Early Diagnosis of Colorectal Cancer: Toward Embedded Image Analysis

International audienceFor the last 20 years, wireless videocapsule technology has triggered alot of interest in the gastroenterologist community for the non-invasive early detectionof various gastrointestinal pathologies (ulcers, Chrones disease, polyp detection,etc.). Nevertheless, in most of the European countries videocapsules are notyet considered as a systematic valid alternative to classic endoscopies and colonoscopies.Main reasons are in the existing technological limitations of videocapsulesthat are of two kinds: (i) A limited battery life-time (8 hours usually ensured bythe manufacturer) that does not allow a complete imaging of the gastro intestinaltract, and (ii) the limited performance of the device in terms of detection rate of particularstructures like polyps for instance which degenerations are at the origin ofcolorectal cancer. To overpass these limitations, main idea of our work is to developa generation of smart videocapsules that takes advantage of the constant progress inelectronics and most precisely in embedded signal processing tasks. In this Chapter,we give first a detailed overview of the most recent state-of-the-art related tovideocapsules from the technological perspective in order to clearly positioned ourwork among the existing products and on going projects. In a second time, we proposea synthetic recall of the Cyclope project in the framework of which we arestudying different strategies to improve the performance of current videocapsules inthe particular context of the early diagnosis of colorectal cancer (polyp detection).We then propose a particular focus on the design optimization of the proposed algorithms from an electronic perspective. Most precisely, we give concrete elementsand quantitative estimation (time processing, embedding performance, etc.) to showthat embedding of the signal processing IP inside the videocapsule is feasible consideringthe most recent FPGA-platform performance, and that such an integrationcan bring a positive balance in terms of energy consumption by drastically reducingthe amount of transmitted data