Greco-Roman lessons for public debt management and debt market development

Greece and Italy initiated efforts to improve public debt management and develop their domestic debt markets respectively in the late 1970s and mid-1980s. At that time, both countries suffered from large and rapidly growing public debt, excessive reliance on short-term bills held by commercial banks, a strong preference of households to save in bank deposits, and a weak presence of institutional investors (pension funds, insurance companies, and mutual funds). Continuing large fiscal deficits, high levels of interest rates and inflation, and serious policy credibility problems impeded the use of long-term instruments. The authors provide a detailed analysis of the characteristics of the instruments that were used in these two countries, their pace of issuance, and their impact on the composition of public debt. The authors note that the main Greco-Roman lesson for developing and transition countries concerns the transition from an excessive reliance on short-term Treasury bills, held by captive banks, to a liquid market with long-term instruments held, and actively traded, by long-term institutional investors. The transition required moving gradually to medium-term instruments, experimenting with innovation, and targeting households and foreign investors, while taking steps to establish policy credibility by lowering fiscal deficits and inflation. When reliance on captive sources of finance was substantially reduced and policy credibility was established, both countries focused on developing active money markets and liquid secondary markets with benchmark issues of fixed-rate long-term securities. They ultimately succeeded in developing active professional markets, using modern practices, targeting well-established European institutional investors, and integrating into the highly sophisticated euro markets. However, integration into the euro markets was the culmination of a prolonged effort of modernization and adaptation and was greatly facilitated by their strong political commitment to achieve economic convergence and join the euro zone.Public Sector Economics&Finance,Strategic Debt Management,Banks&Banking Reform,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Strategic Debt Management,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research

La escritura como reconocimiento y apropiación : Una experiencia literaria en el barrio El Carmen con alumnos del Plan Fines 2

Fil: Campanaro, Gisela. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación; Argentina

Socio-ecological coevolution: an ecological analysis of the historical development of international systems in the circumpolar Arctic

The goal of this thesis is to analyse the impact of Arctic ecology on the development of international systems in the circumpolar world. It is a goal pursued in two steps: (i) by developing an analytical approach capable of tracing the mutual constitution of international and ecological systems in world history; and (ii) by using the resulting toolkit to establish a baseline understanding of the international systems of the polar basin. Part One adapts the analytical approach pioneered by Barry Buzan and Richard Little to study international systems in world history, adding a contextual axis to their analytical matrix in order to escape the anthropocentric cul-de-sac that has heretofore limited IR’s ability to consider ecology’s role in the constitution of international units, processes, and structures. The resulting approach – defined in terms of SocioEcological Coevolution – describes this relationship in terms of three sources of explanation: coevolutionary process, ecological capacity and biogeographical structure. Part Two uses the toolkit to analyse the past four hundred years of Arctic history, charting the impact of ecological systems on the principles of membership and behaviour that define international systems in circumpolar world. Through discussions of socio-ecological coevolution, ecological capacity and biogeographical structure, the project identifies the Arctic as a region defined by competing sets of Westphalian and imperial principles. The balance between the Arctic’s anarchic states system and its hierarchic imperial systems has its fulcrum on a socio-ecological ecotone – a transitional gradient that divides its neo-European and non-European biomes and marks a shift from Westphalian to imperial social principles. Though designed to answer specific questions about the constitution of international systems in the circumpolar North, Coevolution proves itself to be a promising tool for ecological analysis in IR with potential applicability to regions outside of the Arctic Basin

Streamlined sim-to-real transfer for deep-reinforcement learning in robotics locomotion

Legged robots possess superior mobility compared to other machines, yet designing controllers for them can be challenging. Classic control methods require engineers to distill their knowledge into controllers, which is time-consuming and limiting when approaching dynamic tasks in unknown environments. Conversely, learning- based methods that gather knowledge from data can potentially unlock the versatility of legged systems. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach called CPG-Actor, which incor- porates feedback into a fully differentiable Central Pattern Generator (CPG) formulation using neural networks and Deep-Reinforcement Learning (RL). This approach achieves approximately twenty times better training performance compared to previous methods and provides insights into the impact of training on the distribution of parameters in both the CPGs and MLP feedback network. Adopting Deep-RL to design controllers comes at the expense of gathering extensive data, typically done in simulation to reduce time. However, controllers trained with data collected in simulation often lose performance when deployed in the real world, referred to as the sim-to-real gap. To address this, we propose a new method called Extended Random Force Injection (ERFI), which randomizes only two parameters to allow for sim-to-real transfer of locomotion controllers. ERFI demonstrated high robustness when varying masses of the base, or attaching a manipulator arm to the robot during testing, and achieved competitive performance comparable to standard randomization techniques. Furthermore, we propose a new method called Roll-Drop to enhance the robustness of Deep-RL policies to observation noise. Roll-Drop introduces dropout during rollout, achieving an 80% success rate when tested with up to 25% noise injected in the observations. Finally, we adopted model-free controllers to enable omni-directional bipedal lo- comotion on point feet with a quadruped robot without any hardware modification or external support. Despite the limitations posed by the quadruped’s hardware, the study considers this a perfect benchmark task to assess the shortcomings of sim- to-real techniques and unlock future avenues for the legged robotics community. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the potential of learning-based methods to design dynamic and robust controllers for legged robots while limiting the effort needed for sim-to-real transfer

Insight into TaWRKYs transcription factors role during wheat growth and Septoria defense.

Triticum aestivum is the major food source in many parts of the world, providing approximately 20% of calories consumed by humans. The pathogen Zymoseptoria tritici that causes Septoria Tritici Blotch (STB), is currently the main threat to wheat production, with an average yield loss of 20%. Therefore, understanding the molecular mechanisms that underpin the Septoria-wheat interaction will be crucial for generating new control strategies against STB. WRKY transcription factors are important components of signaling in plants, regulating many molecular mechanisms in response to abiotic and biotic stresses. Published data demonstrate that there are at least 3 wheat WRKYs (TaWRKY) that show altered expression upon Septoria infection. The hormone jasmonic acid (JA) plays key role in biotic stress response, but also in a diverse array of plant processes including development, reproduction, and response to abiotic stress. Most of our understanding of the JA signaling pathway derives from the dicot model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, while corresponding knowledge in wheat is somewhat limited. Via bioinformatics analysis we identified TaWRKY10 and TaWRKY13 genes in wheat and validated the role of two of them during Septoria infection response. Moreover we have been able to demonstrate that TaWRKY10 is a key component of the JA signalling pathway. We specifically identified its role and downstream targets, as well as 6 putative regulators of its transcription. TaWRKY10 acting at the JA perception level couples growth and immunity. As growth and immunity are inversely correlated, investigating the molecular basis of their correlation could lead to the discovery of novel breeding tools

Illumination matters. Revisiting the Roman house in a new light

Interpreting the social complexity of the Roman house requires a careful evaluation of existing evidence. With this in mind, recent work in the field has proposed a variety of different approaches, focusing each time on a specific type of source (architecture and décor, ancient texts, material evidence from excavated houses), each in turn recursively deemed more adequate for the purpose or more fruitful and less biased. This opposition of approaches and critiques between scholars has yielded an extraordinarily rich picture that, however, leaves some of the social dynamics of domestic space out of our reach. This dissertation, focusing on the case study of the House of the Greek Epigrams in the northern part of Insula V 1 in Pompeii, suggests a further level of understanding that combines the aforementioned types of sources with simulations and digital analyses to support archaeological interpretation. Everything visible in the house, including its architecture and its decorations, actively participated in the construction of the social identity of the owner of the house and the Romanitas of his family. However, everything visible is so by virtue of light, which is not a mere medium, but actively partakes in social dynamics and can be manipulated to meet certain demands. In this dissertation, light is considered in its dual aspect as a physical and as a visual and sensory phenomenon. Starting from the assumption that light is a powerful social agent, the study investigates, through historically grounded and physically accurate lighting simulations and analyses, the intertwined spatial and social circulation patterns in order to derive new insights into the social dynamics of the Roman house. In particular, this study argues that the social space of the Roman house was characterized by a greater complexity than that conveyed by ancient sources. It suggests a more nuanced picture, one of light and shadow but also of activity at different times of the day and year, and richer in people both in the foreground and in the background

Leading the Sales Team: Using Greenleaf\u27s Servant Leadership Paradigm to Facilitate Team Building

According to Peter Drucker, Robert K. Greenleaf is known as the grandfather of the modern empowerment movement in business leadership. Greenleaf fervently believed that true leaders are those who lead by serving others. He was also a strong proponent of ethics and integrity in the ranks of managers/leaders. A research study in the Journal of Marketing Management, Spring/Summer 1997, reported that the personal factor found to have the greatest influence in the performance of sales managers was training. This paper applies the Servant Leader Model to the demands of the sales leadership role. Traditional sales training concentrates on the mechanics of the sales manager role: How to set quotas, distribute territories, learn the sales reporting tools, etc. By adopting the model proposed in this paper the new sales manager will have a set of tools to deal with the people side of equation. This paper looks at the Five Ways of Being presented by James A. Autry in his book The Servant Leader and develops a model that new sales managers can use to develop a mutually successful relationship with their sales team. The five ways, Be Authentic, Be Vulnerable, Be Accepting, Be Present and Be Useful, offer the new sales leader a template for action. A step by step guide that will allow them to forge a highly responsive relationship with their sales team based on the theory of one to one marketing. In the highly charged sales environment one size never fits all and new sales leaders will excel only if they are able to gain the trust and support of the people on their team. This model will give them the tools to inspire the people they serve to achieve outstanding results

Taxonomy of anaerobic digestion microbiome reveals biases associated with the applied high throughput sequencing strategies

In the past few years, many studies investigated the anaerobic digestion microbiome by means of 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing. Results obtained from these studies were compared to each other without taking into consideration the followed procedure for amplicons preparation and data analysis. This negligence was mainly due to the lack of knowledge regarding the biases influencing specific steps of the microbiome investigation process. In the present study, the main technical aspects of the 16S rRNA analysis were checked giving special attention to the approach used for high throughput sequencing. More specifically, the microbial compositions of three laboratory scale biogas reactors were analyzed before and after addition of sodium oleate by sequencing the microbiome with three different approaches: 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, shotgun DNA and shotgun RNA. This comparative analysis revealed that, in amplicon sequencing, abundance of some taxa (Euryarchaeota and Spirochaetes) was biased by the inefficiency of universal primers to hybridize all the templates. Reliability of the results obtained was also influenced by the number of hypervariable regions under investigation. Finally, amplicon sequencing and shotgun DNA underestimated the Methanoculleus genus, probably due to the low 16S rRNA gene copy number encoded in this taxon

Graded lessons for use of study teams; grade four.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Genome comparison and physiological characterization of eight Streptococcus thermophilus strains isolated from Italian dairy products

Eight Streptococcus thermophilus strains of dairy origin isolated in Italy were chosen to investigate autochthonous bacterial diversity in this important technological species. In the present study a comparative analysis of all the 17 S. thermophilus genomes publicly available was performed to identify the core and the variable genes, which vary among strains from 196 to 265. Additionally, correlation between the isolation site and the genetic distance was investigated at genomic level. Results highlight that the phylogenetic reconstruction differs from the geographical strain distribution. Moreover, strain M17PTZA496 has a genome of 2.15 Mbp, notably larger than that of the others, determined by lateral gene transfer (including phage-mediated incorporation) and duplication events. Important technological characters, such as growth kinetics, bacteriocin production, acidification kinetics and surface adhesion capability were studied in all the Italian strains. Results indicate a wide range of variability in adhesion properties that significantly clustered strains into four groups. Genomic differences among strains in relation to these characters were identified but a clear correlation between genotype and phenotype was not always found since most of the genomic modifications arise from single nucleotide polymorphisms. This research represents a step forward in the identification of strains-specific functions in Streptococcus thermophilus and it has also the potential to provide valuable information to predict strain specific behaviors in industrial processes