Moral Hazard and Guarantee Arrangements: A Case Study of Lloyd’s

State guarantees to insurance policy-holders remove the need for counterparty credit risk assessment and create a moral hazard that may result in excessive risk-exposure and underpricing in the insurance industry. The arrangements at Lloyd’s guaranteeing payment on policies written by individual Lloyd’s syndicates can be expected to have similar effects. An analysis of the behaviour of Lloyd’s in the 1970s and 1980s provides a case study that demonstrates some of the practical consequences of this moral hazard: insurers with insufficient capital resources, excessive exposure to high-volatility catastrophe reinsurance business, and underpricing of risks.

Factors influencing the resistance of potato cultivars to the gangrene pathogen, Phoma exigua Desm. var. foveata (Foister) Boerema

This study was concerned with factors affecting the development of potato gangrene caused by Phoma exigua var. foveata, with particular reference to the assessment of cultivar resistance to the disease. The factors considered were isolate pathogenicity, tuber inoculum level, tuber damage, method of inoculation and assess­ment, incubation temperature and tuber tissue and damage resistance. In addition the influence of isolate and cultivar on the transmission of inoculum from seed to progeny tubers was assessed.The importance of using isolates of high pathogenicity to detect differences in resistance among cultivars was emphasised. Variation in pathogenicity among isolates was associated with isolate source and history, but there was no evidence of consistent cultivar x isolate inter­actions of an order to suggest physiological specialisa­tion in this pathogen. In considering the relative contribution of isolate and cultivar to variation in disease development the contribution of isolate was much less than that of cultivar. The relative resistances of cultivars depended to some extent on inoculation technique and assessment method. This indicated the existence of two major components of tuber resistance, namely damage and tissue resistance. There was also evidence that the relative susceptibilities of cultivars could differ for the tuber cortex and medulla: thus some cultivars mayhave lesions with a small surface area but an appreciable depth of penetration whereas others show wide, shallow rots. The actual level of gangrene depended upon the interaction between cultivar, tuber damage and tuber inoculum density. High inoculum doses coupled with inoculation techniques which allowed the expression of cultivar damage resistance were the most useful in discriminating among cultivars. However, with some assessment methods cultivar differences were obscured at high inoculum densities. Incubation temperature also influenced the course of disease development. At higher incubation temperatures (lO°C) lesions were arrested in all cultivars tested whereas at lower temperatures (4°C) cultivars showed differences in tissue resistance reflected in the degree of lesion retardation but rot development continued in all cultivars. In attempts to gain further evidence of tissue resistance factors gamma irradiation studies were carried out. Irradiation of tubers reduced their resistance to gangrene to an extent dependent upon the irradiation dose and the delay, after irradiation, between wounding and inoculation. There was evidence that wound periderm formation was of minor importance in tissue resistance and that irradiation—induced susceptibility 3.was not associated with tuber cell death. Transmission of P. exigua var. foveata from seed to daughter tubers was shown to be affected by isolate and cultivar but further work is required in this area

LEGISLATION-MICHIGAN VETERANS\u27 RE-EMPLOYMENT ACT

A recent Michigan statute provides for the re-employment of former employees of the state or the subdivisions thereof who left their positions, voluntarily or involuntarily, for service in the armed forces of the United States and have been honorably discharged. No opinion as to the interpretation or effect of the statute has been rendered by the Michigan courts or by any official state agency, but an examination of the very similar federal statute, and the litigation which it has fostered, indicates that a number of problems may arise. An insight into some typical problems and their possible solutions may be obtained from an examination of the federal decisions

The impact of the lung environment on macrophage development, activation and function:diversity in the face of adversity

The last decade has been somewhat of a renaissance period for the field of macrophage biology. This renewed interest, combined with the advent of new technologies and development of novel model systems to assess different facets of macrophage biology, has led to major advances in our understanding of the diverse roles macrophages play in health, inflammation, infection and repair, and the dominance of tissue environments in influencing all of these areas. Here, we discuss recent developments in our understanding of lung macrophage heterogeneity, ontogeny, metabolism and function in the context of health and disease, and highlight core conceptual advances and key unanswered questions that we believe should be focus of work in the coming years

Deployable Solar Array Structure: G1:3

This design project is in response to an AIAA RFP (Request-For-Proposal) to build a compact, durable, non-hinged solar array to be deployed from a spacecraft on its way from the Earth to Mars. The solar array structures are used to provide the continual supply of power to operate onboard equipment. A large array will be required but must fit within the fairing of the launch vehicle. Origami principles will be utilized to fit the given constrained stored volume of 10 cm3 while satisfying the power requirements and avoiding structural complications due to tight folds

OxfordVGG Submission to the EGO4D AV Transcription Challenge

This report presents the technical details of our submission on the EGO4D Audio-Visual (AV) Automatic Speech Recognition Challenge 2023 from the OxfordVGG team. We present WhisperX, a system for efficient speech transcription of long-form audio with word-level time alignment, along with two text normalisers which are publicly available. Our final submission obtained 56.0% of the Word Error Rate (WER) on the challenge test set, ranked 1st on the leaderboard. All baseline codes and models are available on https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX.Comment: Technical Repor