Web-Based Information Systems in the Stock Market Financial Information Domain

The information domain is a recognised sphere for the influence, ownership, and control of information and it's specifications, format, exploitation and explanation (Thompson, 1967). The article presents a description of the financial information domain issues related to the organisation and operation of a stock market. We review the strategic, institutional and standards dimensions of the stock market information domain in relation to the current semantic web knowledge and how and whether this could be used in modern web based stock market information systems to provide the quality of information that their stakeholders want. The analysis is based on the FINE model (Blanas, 2003). The analysis leads to a number of research questions for future research

Towards Exascale Scientific Metadata Management

Advances in technology and computing hardware are enabling scientists from all areas of science to produce massive amounts of data using large-scale simulations or observational facilities. In this era of data deluge, effective coordination between the data production and the analysis phases hinges on the availability of metadata that describe the scientific datasets. Existing workflow engines have been capturing a limited form of metadata to provide provenance information about the identity and lineage of the data. However, much of the data produced by simulations, experiments, and analyses still need to be annotated manually in an ad hoc manner by domain scientists. Systematic and transparent acquisition of rich metadata becomes a crucial prerequisite to sustain and accelerate the pace of scientific innovation. Yet, ubiquitous and domain-agnostic metadata management infrastructure that can meet the demands of extreme-scale science is notable by its absence. To address this gap in scientific data management research and practice, we present our vision for an integrated approach that (1) automatically captures and manipulates information-rich metadata while the data is being produced or analyzed and (2) stores metadata within each dataset to permeate metadata-oblivious processes and to query metadata through established and standardized data access interfaces. We motivate the need for the proposed integrated approach using applications from plasma physics, climate modeling and neuroscience, and then discuss research challenges and possible solutions

Using the e-Class Open Platform for e-Learning Support at the TEI of Larissa, Greece

In the current paper we firstly give a short introduction on e-learning platforms and review the case of the e-class open e-learning platform being used by the Greek tertiary education sector. Our analysis includes strategic selection issues and outcomes in general and operational and adoption issues in the case of the Technological Educational Institute (TEI) of Larissa, Greece. The methodology is being based on qualitative analysis of interviews with key actors using the platform, and statistical analysis of quantitative data related to adoption and usage in the relevant populations. The author has been a key actor in all stages and describes his insights as an early adopter, diffuser and innovative user. We try to explain the issues under consideration using existing past research outcomes and we also arrive to some conclusions and points for further research

Determinants of Intra-Firm Trade:Evidence from Foreign Affliates in Sub-Saharan Africa

By exploiting a unique sample of foreign affliates in Sub-Saharan Africa, we study previously examined and unexamined firm-level determinants of intra-firm trade. We document that foreign affliates engaging in intra-firm trade are relatively few and that the majority of these also engage in trade at arm's length, which accounts for an important fraction of their total trade. The identified firm-level determinants of intra-firm trade are consistent with property rights and intangible assets theories of the multinational firm, with international production hierarchies theories, as well as with theories of different FDI types and of multinational activity under credit constraints

Κριτκές προσεγγίσεις παρεμβάσεων στη μορφή και τη λειτουργία ορεινών πόλεων. Η περίπτωση της Φλώρινας

Εθνικό Μετσόβιο Πολυτεχνείο--Μεταπτυχιακή Εργασία. Διεπιστημονικό-Διατμηματικό Πρόγραμμα Μεταπτυχιακών Σπουδών (Δ.Π.Μ.Σ.) “Περιβάλλον και Ανάπτυξη” 2η Κατεύθυνση Σπουδών "Περιβάλλον και Ανάπτυξη των Ορεινών Περιοχών

An empirical assessment of different risk measures for stocks traded on the ase

This paper examines three different measures of risk, the standard deviation, the correlation coefficient and the beta coefficient. The measures are compared with each other in relation to the way with which they estimate the risk, using the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. The results show that the risk is valued differently in every case. The same rank correlation coefficient is being used to form portfolios with relative stable beta coefficients in order to minimize the variation of the associated risk. The results showed that a relationship exists to beta coefficients between stocks that can give useful information about the portfolio diversification, as it is possible for portfolios with relative constant coefficients and higher returns in relation to risk they undertake to be formed

ArrayBridge: Interweaving declarative array processing with high-performance computing

Scientists are increasingly turning to datacenter-scale computers to produce and analyze massive arrays. Despite decades of database research that extols the virtues of declarative query processing, scientists still write, debug and parallelize imperative HPC kernels even for the most mundane queries. This impedance mismatch has been partly attributed to the cumbersome data loading process; in response, the database community has proposed in situ mechanisms to access data in scientific file formats. Scientists, however, desire more than a passive access method that reads arrays from files. This paper describes ArrayBridge, a bi-directional array view mechanism for scientific file formats, that aims to make declarative array manipulations interoperable with imperative file-centric analyses. Our prototype implementation of ArrayBridge uses HDF5 as the underlying array storage library and seamlessly integrates into the SciDB open-source array database system. In addition to fast querying over external array objects, ArrayBridge produces arrays in the HDF5 file format just as easily as it can read from it. ArrayBridge also supports time travel queries from imperative kernels through the unmodified HDF5 API, and automatically deduplicates between array versions for space efficiency. Our extensive performance evaluation in NERSC, a large-scale scientific computing facility, shows that ArrayBridge exhibits statistically indistinguishable performance and I/O scalability to the native SciDB storage engine.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figure