Exploring Barriers to Effective Risk Management Through a Proposed Risk Governance Framework

As harmful as the financial crisis of 2007-2009 was, some organizations professed some benefits as a result; “we know our risks better,” “we can better manage risks.” Many of the organizations that hailed such positives undoubtedly had what would generally be considered sound risk management systems/practices (RMS). So, what happened? What prevented organizations RMS from perhaps better mitigating risk during the recent financial crisis than was the case? Said another way, “what are barriers to effective risk management?” This study proposes a risk governance framework (RGF) that helps distinguish phases of RMS, and is grounded in Risk principles versus a controls based foundation that many view as part of the current problem with RMS. Based on our survey of 41 Risk Managers (RM) and 96 Regulators (REG), we obtained perspectives on barriers to effective risk management including barriers to effective risk management leading up to the financial crisis of 2007-2009, the importance of Risk principles, and suggestions to improve the effectiveness of RMS. We also obtained RM and REG perspectives of the impacts to RMS from our banking environment providing a type of “insurance,” impacts to RMS due to perceptions of the state of the financial/economic environment, how complete must phases of RMS be, compensation practices and its impacts to RMS, and the notion of quantitative/qualitative methods in current RMS. Leading up to the financial crisis of 2007-2009, identified barriers to effective risk management include a lack of risk culture and under estimating risks. Some suggestions to improve RMS include improving the risk function and developing more dynamic, forwarding looking and preemptive risk management tools and techniques that blend quantitative and qualitative methods. The proposed RGF and the rich context on barriers to effective risk management obtained from our study may help practitioners and academia alike in considering ways to analyze and improve RMS

Intangible Property Can Satisfy the Debtor Eligibility Requirement Under Section 109(a)

(Excerpt) Section 109(a) of title 11 of the United States Code (the “Bankruptcy Code”) states that “only a person that resides or has a domicile, a place of business, or property in the United States … may be a debtor under this title.” While a “foreign entity or individual domiciled abroad but owning property or doing business in the United States is eligible to be a debtor under 11 U.S.C. § 109,” the requirement can be difficult if the foreign entity or individual domiciled abroad has no commercial connection to the US. Consequently, the property component of Section 109(a) has become an important means to satisfy the debtor eligibility requirement. The ability to satisfy the Section 109(a) has been aided by the court’s broad interpretation of the term ‘property,’ highlighted by the use of intangible property to satisfy the requirement. Intangible property is property that lacks a physical existence. Intangible property has no intrinsic value but instead its value exists in the rights conveyed to the property. Examples of intangible property include bank accounts, stocks, bonds, and contractual rights. Part I of this memorandum discusses the evolution of the property requirement under Section 109(a) for foreign debtors. Part II of this memorandum focuses on the development of intangible property as a means to satisfy Section 109(a)

Yttrium-90 Selective Internal Radiation Therapy with Glass Microspheres for Hepatocellular Carcinoma: Current and Updated Literature Review.

Hepatocellular carcinoma is the most common primary liver cancer and it represents the majority of cancer-related deaths in the world. More than 70% of patients present at an advanced stage, beyond potentially curative options. Ytrrium-90 selective internal radiation therapy (Y90-SIRT) with glass microspheres is rapidly gaining acceptance as a potential therapy for intermediate and advanced stage primary hepatocellular carcinoma and liver metastases. The technique involves delivery of Y90 infused glass microspheres via the hepatic arterial blood flow to the appropriate tumor. The liver tumor receives a highly concentrated radiation dose while sparing the healthy liver parenchyma due to its preferential blood supply from portal venous blood. There are two commercially available devices: TheraSphere® and SIR-Spheres®. Although, Y90-SIRT with glass microspheres improves median survival in patients with intermediate and advanced hepatocellular carcinoma and has the potential to downstage hepatocellular carcinoma so that the selected candidates meet the transplantable criteria, it has not gained widespread acceptance due to the lack of large randomized controlled trials. Currently, there are various clinical trials investigating the use of Y90-SIRT with glass microspheres for treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma and the outcomes of these trials may result in the incorporation of Y90-SIRT with glass microspheres into the treatment guidelines as a standard therapy option for patients with intermediate and advanced stage hepatocellular carcinoma

Measuring Interactions among Agricultural Productivity, Trade Openness, Agricultural GDP, and Income in Korea (1972- 2007)

Agricultural and Food Policy,

Multi-PRI Signal Processing for the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar. Part I: Clutter Filtering

Multiple pulse repetition interval (multi-PRI) transmission is part of an adaptive signal transmission and processing algorithm being developed to aggressively combat range–velocity ambiguity in weather radars. In the past, operational use of multi-PRI pulse trains has been hampered due to the difficulty in clutter filtering. This paper presents finite impulse response clutter filter designs for multi-PRI signals with excellent magnitude and phase responses. These filters provide strong suppression for use on low-elevation scans and yield low biases of velocity estimates so that accurate velocity dealiasing is possible. Specifically, the filters are designed for use in the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) and are shown to meet base data bias requirements equivalent to the Federal Aviation Administration’s specifications for the current TDWR clutter filters. Also an adaptive filter selection algorithm is proposed that bases its decision on clutter power estimated during an initial long-PRI surveillance scan. Simulations show that this adaptive algorithm yields satisfactory biases for reflectivity, velocity, and spectral width. Implementation of such a scheme would enable automatic elimination of anomalous propagation signals and constant adjustment to evolving ground clutter conditions, an improvement over the current TDWR clutter filtering system.United States. Federal Aviation Administration (contract F19628-00-C-0002

Assessing the Spatial and Temporal Variation of Output-Input Elasticities of Agricultural Production in Turkey

Turkey, Agricultural Reform and Implementation Project, geographically weighted regression, Agricultural and Food Policy, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Q18, C3,

An asymptotic analysis of composite beams with kinematically corrected end effects

AbstractA finite element-based beam analysis for anisotropic beams with arbitrary-shaped cross-sections is developed with the aid of a formal asymptotic expansion method. From the equilibrium equations of the linear three-dimensional (3D) elasticity, a set of the microscopic 2D and macroscopic 1D equations are systematically derived by introducing the virtual work concept. Displacements at each order are split into two parts, such as fundamental and warping solutions. First we seek the warping solutions via the microscopic 2D cross-sectional analyses that will be smeared into the macroscopic 1D beam equations. The variations of fundamental solutions enable us to formulate the macroscopic 1D beam problems. By introducing the orthogonality of asymptotic displacements to six beam fundamental solutions, the end effects of a clamped boundary are kinematically corrected without applying the sophisticated decay analysis method. The boundary conditions obtained herein are applied to composite beams with solid and thin-walled cross-sections in order to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the formal asymptotic method-based beam analysis (FAMBA) presented in this paper. The numerical results are compared to those reported in literature as well as 3D FEM solutions

Neural Latent Aligner: Cross-trial Alignment for Learning Representations of Complex, Naturalistic Neural Data

Understanding the neural implementation of complex human behaviors is one of the major goals in neuroscience. To this end, it is crucial to find a true representation of the neural data, which is challenging due to the high complexity of behaviors and the low signal-to-ratio (SNR) of the signals. Here, we propose a novel unsupervised learning framework, Neural Latent Aligner (NLA), to find well-constrained, behaviorally relevant neural representations of complex behaviors. The key idea is to align representations across repeated trials to learn cross-trial consistent information. Furthermore, we propose a novel, fully differentiable time warping model (TWM) to resolve the temporal misalignment of trials. When applied to intracranial electrocorticography (ECoG) of natural speaking, our model learns better representations for decoding behaviors than the baseline models, especially in lower dimensional space. The TWM is empirically validated by measuring behavioral coherence between aligned trials. The proposed framework learns more cross-trial consistent representations than the baselines, and when visualized, the manifold reveals shared neural trajectories across trials.Comment: Accepted at ICML 202