Could Packers Manipulate Cash Markets by Linking Contract and Futures Prices?

Marketing,

Monitoring urban heat island through google earth engine. Potentialities and difficulties in different cities of the United States

The aim of this work is to exploit the large-scale analysis capabilities of the innovative Google Earth Engine platform in order to investigate the temporal variations of the Urban Heat Island phenomenon as a whole. A intuitive methodology implementing a large-scale correlation analysis between the Land Surface Temperature and Land Cover alterations was thus developed. The results obtained for the Phoenix MA are promising and show how the urbanization heavily affects the magnitude of the UHI effects with significant increases in LST. The proposed methodology is therefore able to efficiently monitor the UHI phenomenon

Linking behavior in the physics education research coauthorship network

Citation: Anderson, K. A., Crespi, M., & Sayre, E. C. (2017). Linking behavior in the physics education research coauthorship network. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 13(1), 10. doi:10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.13.010121There is considerable long-term interest in understanding the dynamics of collaboration networks, and how these networks form and evolve over time. Most of the work done on the dynamics of social networks focuses on well-established communities. Work examining emerging social networks is rarer, simply because data are difficult to obtain in real time. In this paper, we use thirty years of data from an emerging scientific community to look at that crucial early stage in the development of a social network. We show that when the field was very young, islands of individual researchers labored in relative isolation, and the coauthorship network was disconnected. Thirty years later, rather than a cluster of individuals, we find a true collaborative community, bound together by a robust collaboration network. However, this change did not take place gradually-the network remained a loose assortment of isolated individuals until the mid 2000s, when those smaller parts suddenly knit themselves together into a single whole. In the rest of this paper, we consider the role of three factors in these observed structural changes: growth, changes in social norms, and the introduction of institutions such as field-specific conferences and journals. We have data from the very earliest years of the field, a period which includes the introduction of two different institutions: the first field-specific conference, and the first field-specific journals. We also identify two relevant behavioral shifts: a discrete increase in coauthorship coincident with the first conference, and a shift among established authors away from collaborating with outsiders, towards collaborating with each other. The interaction of these factors gives us insight into the formation of collaboration networks more broadly

Health of Philippine Emigrants Study (HoPES): study design and rationale.

BackgroundImmigrants to the United States are usually healthier than their U.S.-born counterparts, yet the health of immigrants declines with duration of stay in the U.S. This pattern is often seen for numerous health problems such as obesity, and is usually attributed to acculturation (the adoption of "American" behaviors and norms). However, an alternative explanation is secular trends, given that rates of obesity have been rising globally. Few studies of immigrants are designed to distinguish the effects of acculturation versus secular trends, in part because most studies of immigrants are cross-sectional, lack baseline data prior to migration, and do not have a comparison group of non-migrants in the country of origin. This paper describes the Health of Philippine Emigrants Study (HoPES), a study designed to address many of these limitations.MethodsHoPES is a dual-cohort, longitudinal, transnational study. The first cohort consisted of Filipinos migrating to the United States (n = 832). The second cohort consisted of non-migrant Filipinos who planned to remain in the Philippines (n = 805). Baseline data were collected from both cohorts in 2017 in the Philippines, with follow-up data collection planned over 3 years in either the U.S. for the migrant cohort or the Philippines for the non-migrant cohort. At baseline, interviewers administered semi-structured questionnaires that assessed demographic characteristics, diet, physical activity, stress, and immigration experiences. Interviewers also measured weight, height, waist and hip circumferences, blood pressure, and collected dried blood spot samples.DiscussionMigrants enrolled in the study appear to be representative of recent Filipino migrants to the U.S. Additionally, migrant and non-migrant study participants are comparable on several characteristics that we attempted to balance at baseline, including age, gender, and education. HoPES is a unique study that approximates a natural experiment from which to study the effects of immigration on obesity and other health problems. A number of innovative methodological strategies were pursued to expand the boundaries of current immigrant health research. Key to accomplishing this research was investment in building collaborative relationships with stakeholders across the U.S. and the Philippines with shared interest in the health of migrants

Variability of orographic enhancement of precipitation in the Alpine region

Climate change impacts are non uniformly distributed over the globe. Mountains have a peculiar response to large scale variations, documented by elevation gradients of surface temperature increase observed over many mountain ranges in the last decades. Significant changes of precipitation are expected in the changing climate and orographic effects are important in determining the amount of rainfall at a given location. It thus becomes particularly important to understand how orographic precipitation responds to global warming and to anthropogenic forcing. Here, using a large rain gauge dataset over the European Alpine region, we show that the distribution of annual precipitation among the lowlands and the mountains has varied over time, with an increase of the precipitation at the high elevations compared to the low elevations starting in the mid 20 century and peaking in the 1980s. The simultaneous increase and peak of anthropogenic aerosol load is discussed as a possible source for this interdecadal change. These results provide new insights to further our understanding and improve predictions of anthropic effects on mountain precipitations, which are fundamental for water security and management

Exploitation of dynamic simulation to investigate the effectiveness of the Smart Readiness Indicator: application to the Energy Center building of Turin

To achieve the energy and emissions reduction goals for the building sector, actions are needed to improve energy efficiency and occupants’ wellbeing. To increase the uptake of smart technologies and the awareness upon their benefits, in line with the smart building revolution that is starting, the EPBD recast introduced the Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI) as a tool to evaluate the capability of buildings to easily adapt to both energy systems and occupants’ needs. However, there is a growing interest in studying the SRI features in terms of performance assessment, and, thus, dynamic simulation models can be exploited to better analyze its points of strength and weakness. The Energy Center building of Turin was chosen as case study. By means of EnergyPlus modeling, the current situation was simulated, as well as different scenarios of energy management and control, evaluating to what extent these actions can influence the overall SRI assessment. The analysis allowed to deepen and comment on the effectiveness of the SRI of being a real tool of building behavior assessment, able to link the indicator itself with the energy needs of the building and to understand if and how the indicator is sensible to energy needs variations

A model of plate motion

The wide use of space geodesy techniques devoted to geophysical and geodynamical purposes has recently evidenced some limitations due to the intrinsic Terrestrial Reference Frame (TRF) definition. Current TRFs are defined under hypotheses suited to overcome the rank deficiency of the observations with respect to the parameters that have to be estimated, i.e. coordinates and velocities (Dermanis, 2001; Dermanis, 2002). From a geodetic point of view, one possibility implies the application of the no-net-rotation condition (NNR). One of the main geophysical consequences due to the application of this condition is that it allows only accurate estimations of relative motions, whilst other motions of geodynamical interest, for instance with respect to the inner layers of the Earth body, are not determinable. The main purpose of this paper is to propose a unified way to describe plate motions, overcoming the problems introduced by the NNR condition, in order to establish a new reference frame useful for geodynamical applications too. Since we believe relevant the role played by global tectonics inferences, we introduce the concept of the main tectonic sinusoid to propose an analytical description of the plate motions flow, which is polarized to the “west” in the hotspot reference frame

Childhood maltreatment, psychological resources, and depressive symptoms in women with breast cancer.

Childhood maltreatment is associated with elevated risk for depression across the human lifespan. Identifying the pathways through which childhood maltreatment relates to depressive symptoms may elucidate intervention targets that have the potential to reduce the lifelong negative health sequelae of maltreatment exposure. In this cross-sectional study, 271 women with early-stage breast cancer were assessed after their diagnosis but before the start of adjuvant treatment (chemotherapy, radiation, endocrine therapy). Participants completed measures of childhood maltreatment exposure, psychological resources (optimism, mastery, self-esteem, mindfulness), and depressive symptoms. Using multiple mediation analyses, we examined which psychological resources uniquely mediated the relationship between childhood maltreatment and depressive symptoms. Exposure to maltreatment during childhood was robustly associated with lower psychological resources and elevated depressive symptoms. Further, lower optimism and mindfulness mediated the association between childhood maltreatment and elevated depressive symptoms. These results support existing theory that childhood maltreatment is associated with lower psychological resources, which partially explains elevated depressive symptoms in a sample of women facing breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. These findings warrant replication in populations facing other major life events and highlight the need for additional studies examining childhood maltreatment as a moderator of treatment outcomes

High‐resolution monthly precipitation climatologies over Norway (1981–2010): Joining numerical model data sets and in situ observations

The 1981-2010 monthly precipitation climatologies for Norway at 1 km resolution are presented. They are computed by an interpolation procedure (HCLIM+RK) combining the output from a numerical model with the in situ observations. Specifically, the regional climate model data set HCLIM-AROME, based on the dynamical downscaling of the global ERA-Interim reanalysis onto 2.5 km resolution, is considered together with 2009 rain-gauges located within the model domain. The precipitation climatologies are defined by superimposing the grid of 1981-2010 monthly normals from the numerical model and the kriging interpolation of station residuals. The combined approach aims at improving the quality of gridded climatologies and at providing reliable precipitation gradients also over those remote Norwegian regions not covered by observations, especially over the northernmost mountainous areas. The integration of rain-gauge data greatly reduces the original HCLIM-AROME biases. The HCLIM+RK errors obtained from the leave-one-out station validation turn out to be lower than those provided by two considered interpolation schemes based on observations only: a multi-linear local regression kriging (MLRK) and a local weighted linear regression (LWLR). As average over all months, the mean absolute (percentage) error is 10.0 mm (11%) for HCLIM+RK, and 11.4 (12%) and 11.6 mm (12%) for MLRK and LWLR, respectively. In addition, by comparing the results at both station and grid cell level, the accuracy of MLRK and LWLR is more sensitive to the spatial variability of station distribution over the domain and their interpolated fields are more affected by discontinuities and outliers, especially over those areas not covered by the rain-gauge network. The obtained HCLIM+RK climatologies clearly depict the main west-to-east gradient occurring from the orographic precipitation regime of the coast to the more continental climate of the inland and it allows to point out the features of the climatic subzones of Norway