The Law and Economics of Subprime Lending

The collapse of the subprime mortgage market has led to calls for greater regulation to protect homeowners from unwittingly trapping themselves in high-cost loans that lead to foreclosure, bankruptcy, or other financial problems. Weighed against the losses of the widespread foreclosure crisis are the benefits of financial modernization that have accrued to many American families who have been able to become homeowners who otherwise would not have access to mortgage credit. The bust of the subprime mortgage market has resulted in high levels of foreclosures and unparalleled problems on Wall Street. However, the boom generated unprecedented levels of homeownership, especially among young, low-income, and minority borrowers, putting them on a road to economic comfort and stability. Sensible regulation of subprime lending should seek to curb abusive practices while preserving these benefits. This Article reviews the theories and evidence regarding the causes of the turmoil in the subprime market. It then turns to the question of the rising number of foreclosures in the subprime market in order to understand the causes of rising foreclosures. In particular, it examines the competing models of home foreclosures that have been developed in the economics literature-the distress model and the option model. Establishing a correct model of the causes of foreclosure in the subprime market is necessary for sensible and effective policy responses to the problem. The focus in this Article is on the consumer protection side of the equation. As this Article goes to press, the federal government has authorized a massive bailout of the banking industry, raising issues which largely lie outside the scope of this Article. New regulations and other interventions into the consumer side of the market have been modest

Physiologic studies in normal and uremic sheep: I. The experimental model

Physiologic studies in normal and uremic sheep: I. The experimental model. A model of chronic renal failure was created in nine adult sheep by two-stage, subtotal nephrectomy. Carotid-jugular cannulas provided clot-free access for 72 to 274 days without exit-site infections. All sheep became uremic and anemic. Median survival, while uremic, was 145 days (72 to 327 days), although three were sacrificed. Five required dialysis within the first week of uremia, and median survival on dialysis was 70 days (41 to 177 days). Sheep that maintained adequate nutrition survived the longest on dialysis. Mean creatinine and BUN levels in the stable uremic and dialyzed sheep were 4.8/95 and 7.8/59 mg/dl, respectively. The other serum chemistries remained unchanged (mean values) from normal, although one sheep died of hypercalcemia (17.8 mg/dl). Renal blood flow correlated to GFR in both normal and uremic states. GFR fell more than serum creatinine rose, suggesting extrarenal excretion of creatinine.Etudes physiologiques chez le mouton normal et urémique: I. Le modèle expérimental. Un modèle d'insuffisance rénale chronique a été créé chez neuf moutons adultes par néphrectomie subtotale en deux étapes. Des canules carotido-jugulaires ont permis un accès sans coagulation pendant 72 à 274 jours sans qu'il y ait d'infection aux lieux de pénétration. Tous les moutons sont devenus urémiques et anémiques. La survie médiane, au cours de l'urémie, a été de 145 jours (72 à 327 jours) bien que trois d'entre eux aient été sacrifiés. Cinq ont dû être dialysés dès la première semaine de l'urémie et la survie médiane en dialyse a été de 70 jours (41 à 177 jours). Les animaux qui ont eu une alimentation adéquate ont eu la survie la plus longue en dialyse. Les concentrations moyennes de créatinine et d'azote uréique dans l'urémie stable et chez les moutons dialysés étaient de 4,8/95 et 7,8/59 mg/dl, respectivement. Les autres valeurs plasmatiques moyennes n'étaient pas différentes de la normale bien qu'un mouton soit mort d'hypercalcémie (17,8 mg/dl). Le débit sanguin rénal était corrélé au débit de filtration glomérulaire dans ces situations normales et urémiques. Le débit de filtration glomérulaire a diminué plus que la créatininémie n'a augmenté, ce qui suggère une excrétion extra-rénale de créatinine

Boston Hospitality Review: Fall 2016

The Heart of Successful Hotels: Going Beyond the Monopoly Game Strategy By Joseph Khairallah and Andrea Foster -- Fragments of the Past By Peter Szende and Annie Holcombe -- Hospitality Branding in the Age of the Millennial By Allen Adamson and Chekitan S. Dev -- In 2017 What Will a Restaurant Actually Be? A New Taxonomy By Christopher Muller -- The Unreal Thing: Faux Heritage at Disney By Bradford Hudson -- An Insider’s Look at the 2016 Philadelphia Democratic National Convention: Hospitality and Inclusion at Work By Erin Tucker, Leora Halpern Lanz, and Juan Lesme

Assessing the feasibility of mobile phones for follow-up of acutely unwell children presenting to village clinics in rural northern Malawi.

BACKGROUND: Patient follow-up is a routine component of clinical practice and valuable for evaluating the effectiveness of interventions, but because of the broad dispersion of health facilities and lack of standardised medical reporting in Malawi, collecting patient outcome data can be challenging. Increasing accessibility and affordability of mobile technology in resource-poor settings may facilitate patient follow-up in the community. The objective of this study was to evaluate the potential utility of mobile phones for collecting follow-up clinical data from parents or caregivers of acutely unwell under-5 children, for intervention evaluation purposes. METHODS: Parents' or caregivers' mobile phone numbers were obtained by health surveillance assistants (HSAs) during study enrollment. Guardians who provided a telephone number were contacted by the study team to establish re-consultations or hospitalisations of their child(ren) within 14 days of recruitment. Health records at village clinics and higher-level health facilities were hand-searched to identify or confirm presentations and abstract clinical data. RESULTS: 87 out of 149 (58.4%) guardians provided a mobile telephone number, of whom the study team could contact 44 (29.5%). Seven guardians stated they took their child for further treatment: three of these returned to village clinics and four presented to secondary care facilities; attendance could only be confirmed from health records for one child. CONCLUSIONS: With continued expansion of cellular network coverage and mobile ownership in Malawi, mobile phones may facilitate collection of patient outcomes for intervention evaluation purposes. Future consideration should also be given to integrating mobile technologies into HSA clinical practice

O/IR Polarimetry for the 2010 Decade (GAN): Science at the Edge, Sharp Tools for All

Science opportunities and recommendations concerning optical/infrared polarimetry for the upcoming decade in the field of Galactic science. Community-based White Paper to Astro2010 in response to the call for such papers.Comment: White Paper to the Galactic Neighborhood (GAN) Science Frontiers Panel of the Astro2010 Decadal Surve

Brain extraction using the watershed transform from markers

Isolation of the brain from other tissue types in magnetic resonance (MR) images is an important step in many types of neuro-imaging research using both humans and animal subjects. The importance of brain extraction is well appreciated—numerous approaches have been published and the benefits of good extraction methods to subsequent processing are well known. We describe a tool—the marker based watershed scalper (MBWSS)—for isolating the brain in T1-weighted MR images built using filtering and segmentation components from the Insight Toolkit (ITK) framework. The key elements of MBWSS—the watershed transform from markers and aggressive filtering with large kernels—are techniques that have rarely been used in neuroimaging segmentation applications. MBWSS is able to reliably isolate the brain without expensive preprocessing steps, such as registration to an atlas, and is therefore useful as the first stage of processing pipelines. It is an informative example of the level of accuracy achievable without using priors in the form of atlases, shape models or libraries of examples. We validate the MBWSS using a publicly available dataset, a paediatric cohort, an adolescent cohort, intra-surgical scans and demonstrate flexibility of the approach by modifying the method to extract macaque brains