Risks and resolutions: the ‘day after’ for financial institutions - a conference summary

The Chicago Fed’s Supervision and Regulation Department, in conjunction with DePaul University’s Center for Financial Services, sponsored its second annual Financial Institutions Risk Management Conference on April 14–15, 2009. The conference focused on risk management, headline issues, and recent financial innovations.Financial institutions ; Risk

Searching for the new normal: the rebuilding process for risk management - a conference summary

The Chicago Fed’s Supervision and Regulation Department, in conjunction with DePaul University’s Center for Financial Services, sponsored its third annual Financial Institution Risk Management Conference on April 6–7, 2010. The conference concentrated on comprehensive risk management, lessons learned, and headline issues.Risk ; Risk management

The Grizzly, October 18, 1985

Limerick: The Main Objective - Calm • Typesetting Equipment Offers New Experience • Letters: Ex-Rover Responds; Some Housing Needs Help; Reply for Sluggo • Financial Aid Striving to the Top • Search of Success Finds Bravo • Look Out for the Candid Cameras • Sorority Pledging Sees Light Through Tunnel • Field Hockey Battles Tough Competition • Booters Find Easier Times • Ultimate Frisbee is Here • Doleniak: Flying Higher Through the Sky • Grizzlies are Defeated • Campus Security Noteshttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1148/thumbnail.jp

Thermodynamic Basis for the Emergence of Genomes during Prebiotic Evolution

The RNA world hypothesis views modern organisms as descendants of RNA molecules. The earliest RNA molecules must have been random sequences, from which the first genomes that coded for polymerase ribozymes emerged. The quasispecies theory by Eigen predicts the existence of an error threshold limiting genomic stability during such transitions, but does not address the spontaneity of changes. Following a recent theoretical approach, we applied the quasispecies theory combined with kinetic/thermodynamic descriptions of RNA replication to analyze the collective behavior of RNA replicators based on known experimental kinetics data. We find that, with increasing fidelity (relative rate of base-extension for Watson-Crick versus mismatched base pairs), replications without enzymes, with ribozymes, and with protein-based polymerases are above, near, and below a critical point, respectively. The prebiotic evolution therefore must have crossed this critical region. Over large regions of the phase diagram, fitness increases with increasing fidelity, biasing random drifts in sequence space toward ‘crystallization.’ This region encloses the experimental nonenzymatic fidelity value, favoring evolutions toward polymerase sequences with ever higher fidelity, despite error rates above the error catastrophe threshold. Our work shows that experimentally characterized kinetics and thermodynamics of RNA replication allow us to determine the physicochemical conditions required for the spontaneous crystallization of biological information. Our findings also suggest that among many potential oligomers capable of templated replication, RNAs may have evolved to form prebiotic genomes due to the value of their nonenzymatic fidelity

A Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman Approach to High Angular Resolution Diffusion Tractography

©2005 Springer. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11566465_23DOI: 10.1007/11566465_23This paper describes a new framework for white matter tractography in high angular resolution diffusion data. A direction-dependent local cost is defined based on the diffusion data for every direction on the unit sphere. Minimum cost curves are determined by solving the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman using an efficient algorithm. Classical costs based on the diffusion tensor field can be seen as a special case. While the minimum cost (or equivalently the travel time of a particle moving along the curve) and the anisotropic front propagation frameworks are related, front speed is related to particle speed through a Legendre transformation which can severely impact anisotropy information for front propagation techniques. Implementation details and results on high angular diffusion data show that this method can successfully take advantage of the increased angular resolution in high b-value diffusion weighted data despite lower signal to noise ratio

An Assessment of Scales Measuring Constructs in Tests of Criminological Theory Based on National Youth Survey Data

Researchers have utilized the National Youth Survey (NYS) data to test a variety of theoretical explanations of criminal behavior. Here, the authors offer an assessment of scales used in tests of criminological theory based on NYS data. The authors conducted this assessment to provide results informing future tests of theory. Their analyses focus on understanding the extent to which scales representative of different theories are actually based on the same item content. They test for two distinct processes that may explain this phenomenon. In the first process, scales measuring a given construct are attributed to different theories. In the second process, scales measuring different constructs are based on the same items. Results show that both of the processes described above contribute to the use of the same NYS items in scales that are attributed to different theories. To inform future tests of theory, the authors identify the sections of the NYS where each of these processes are most prevalent, in effect identifying the areas of the NYS that future tests of theory should treat with the greatest care. Based on the implications of each process identified above, the authors also offer some suggestions to strengthen future tests of theory using NYS data