Remittances, Inflation and Exchange Rate Regimes in Small Open Economies

Remittances are private monetary transfers across borders and thus, often, involve different currencies. Yet the rapidly growing literature on the subject often ignores the role that exchange rate regimes play in determining the effect foreign-currency remittances have on a recipient economy. This paper uses a theoretical model and panel vector autoregression techniques to understand the effect of remittances on GDP, inflation, real exchange rate and money supply, depending on the exchange rate regimes. Furthermore, it allows a more detailed description of the short-run dynamics as it considers yearly but also quarterly data for 21 emerging countries. Our theoretical model predicts that remittances should temporarily increase inflation, GDP, the domestic money supply and appreciate the real exchange rate under a fixed regime, but temporarily decrease inflation, increase GDP, appreciate the real exchange rate and generate no change in the money supply under a flexible regime. These differences are largely borne out in the data. This adds to our understanding of the true effect of remittances on economies by showing that exchange rate regimes matter for the effects of remittances, especially in the short run for monetary conditions in an economy, and suggests that other results in the literature that do not control for regimes may be biased

Remittances, Inflation and Exchange Rate Regimes in Small Open Economies

Remittances are private monetary transfers across borders and thus, often, involve different currencies. Yet the rapidly growing literature on the subject often ignores the role that exchange rate regimes play in determining the effect foreign-currency remittances have on a recipient economy. This paper uses a theoretical model and panel vector autoregression techniques to understand the effect of remittances on GDP, inflation, real exchange rate and money supply, depending on the exchange rate regimes. Furthermore, it allows a more detailed description of the short-run dynamics as it considers yearly but also quarterly data for 21 emerging countries. Our theoretical model predicts that remittances should temporarily increase inflation, GDP, the domestic money supply and appreciate the real exchange rate under a fixed regime, but temporarily decrease inflation, increase GDP, appreciate the real exchange rate and generate no change in the money supply under a flexible regime. These differences are largely borne out in the data. This adds to our understanding of the true effect of remittances on economies by showing that exchange rate regimes matter for the effects of remittances, especially in the short run for monetary conditions in an economy, and suggests that other results in the literature that do not control for regimes may be biased

Round weighting problem and gathering in radio networks with symmetrical interference

International audienceIn this article we consider the problem of gathering information in a gateway in a radio mesh access network. Due to interferences, calls (transmissions) cannot be performed simultaneously. This leads us to define a round as a set of non-interfering calls. Following the work of Klasing, Morales and Pérennes, we model the problem as a Round Weighting Problem (RWP) in which the objective is to minimize the overall period of non-interfering calls activations (total number of rounds) providing enough capacity to satisfy the throughput demand of the nodes.We develop tools to obtain lower and upper bounds for general graphs. Then, more precise results are obtained considering a symmetric interference model based on distance of graphs, called the distance-d interference model (the particular case d= 1 corresponds to the primary node model).We apply the presented tools to get lower bounds for grids with thegateway either in the middle or in the corner. We obtain upper boundswhich in most of the cases match the lower bounds, using strategiesthat either route the demand of a single node or route simultaneously flow from several source nodes. Therefore, weobtain exact and constructive results for grids, in particularfor the case of uniform demands answering a problem asked by Klasing, Morales and Pérennes

Predicting survival from colorectal cancer histology slides using deep learning: A retrospective multicenter study

BACKGROUND: For virtually every patient with colorectal cancer (CRC), hematoxylin-eosin (HE)-stained tissue slides are available. These images contain quantitative information, which is not routinely used to objectively extract prognostic biomarkers. In the present study, we investigated whether deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can extract prognosticators directly from these widely available images. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We hand-delineated single-tissue regions in 86 CRC tissue slides, yielding more than 100,000 HE image patches, and used these to train a CNN by transfer learning, reaching a nine-class accuracy of >94% in an independent data set of 7,180 images from 25 CRC patients. With this tool, we performed automated tissue decomposition of representative multitissue HE images from 862 HE slides in 500 stage I-IV CRC patients in the The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohort, a large international multicenter collection of CRC tissue. Based on the output neuron activations in the CNN, we calculated a "deep stroma score," which was an independent prognostic factor for overall survival (OS) in a multivariable Cox proportional hazard model (hazard ratio [HR] with 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.99 [1.27-3.12], p = 0.0028), while in the same cohort, manual quantification of stromal areas and a gene expression signature of cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) were only prognostic in specific tumor stages. We validated these findings in an independent cohort of 409 stage I-IV CRC patients from the "Darmkrebs: Chancen der Verhütung durch Screening" (DACHS) study who were recruited between 2003 and 2007 in multiple institutions in Germany. Again, the score was an independent prognostic factor for OS (HR 1.63 [1.14-2.33], p = 0.008), CRC-specific OS (HR 2.29 [1.5-3.48], p = 0.0004), and relapse-free survival (RFS; HR 1.92 [1.34-2.76], p = 0.0004). A prospective validation is required before this biomarker can be implemented in clinical workflows. CONCLUSIONS: In our retrospective study, we show that a CNN can assess the human tumor microenvironment and predict prognosis directly from histopathological images

Remittances, Inflation and Exchange Rate Regimes in Small Open Economies

Remittances are private monetary transfers. Yet the rapidly growing literature on the subject often ignores the role that exchange rate regimes play in determining the effect remittances have on a recipient economy. This paper uses a theoretical model and panel vector autoregression techniques to explore the role exchange rate regimes play in understanding the effect of remittances. The analysis considers yearly and quarterly data for seven Latin American countries. Our theoretical model predicts that remittances should temporarily increase inflation and generate an increase in the domestic money supply under a fixed regime, but temporarily decrease inflation and generate no change in the money supply under a flexible regime. These differences are borne out in the data. This adds to our understanding of the true effect of remittances on economies and suggests that other results in the literature that do not control for regimes may be biased

Gathering radio messages in the path

International audienceIn this paper, we address the problem of gathering information in one node (sink) of a radio network where interference constraints are present: when a node transmits, it produces interference in an area bigger than the area in which its message can actually be received. The network is modeled by a graph; a node is able to transmit one unit of information to the set of vertices at distance at most dT in the graph, but when doing so it generates interferences that do not allow nodes at distance up to dI (dI ≥ dT ) to listen to other transmissions. We are interested in finding a gathering protocol, that is an ordered sequence of rounds (each round consists of noninterfering simultaneous transmissions) such that w(u) messages are transmitted from any node u to a fixed node called the sink. Our aim is to find a gathering protocol with the minimum number of rounds (called gathering time). In this article, we focus on the specific case where the network is a path with the sink at an end vertex of the path and where the traffic is unitary (w(u) = 1 for all u); indeed this simple case appears to be already very difficult. We first give a new lower bound and a protocol with a gathering time that differ only by a constant independent of the length of the path. Then we present a method to construct incremental protocols. An incremental protocol for the path on n + 1 vertices is obtained from a protocol for n vertices by adding new rounds and new calls to some rounds but without changing the calls of the original rounds. We show that some of these incremental protocols are optimal for many values of dT and dI (in particular when dT is prime). We conjecture that this incremental construction always gives optimal protocols. Finally, we derive an approximation algorithm when the sink is placed in an arbitrary vertex in the path

Contouring variation affects estimates of normal tissue complication probability for breast fibrosis after radiotherapy

Breast cancer; Fibrosis; Late effectsCàncer de mama; Fibrosi; Efectes tardansCáncer de mama; Fibrosis; Efectos tardíosBackground Normal tissue complication probability (NTCP) models can be useful to estimate the risk of fibrosis after breast-conserving surgery (BCS) and radiotherapy (RT) to the breast. However, they are subject to uncertainties. We present the impact of contouring variation on the prediction of fibrosis. Materials and methods 280 breast cancer patients treated BCS-RT were included. Nine Clinical Target Volume (CTV) contours were created for each patient: i) CTV_crop (reference), cropped 5 mm from the skin and ii) CTV_skin, uncropped and including the skin, iii) segmenting the 95% isodose (Iso95%) and iv) 3 different auto-contouring atlases generating uncropped and cropped contours (Atlas_skin/Atlas_crop). To illustrate the impact of contour variation on NTCP estimates, we applied two equations predicting fibrosis grade 2 at 5 years, based on Lyman-Kutcher-Burman (LKB) and Relative Seriality (RS) models, respectively, to each contour. Differences were evaluated using repeated-measures ANOVA. For completeness, the association between observed fibrosis events and NTCP estimates was also evaluated using logistic regression. Results There were minimal differences between contours when the same contouring approach was followed (cropped and uncropped). CTV_skin and Atlas_skin contours had lower NTCP estimates (−3.92%, IQR 4.00, p < 0.05) compared to CTV_crop. No significant difference was observed for Atlas_crop and Iso95% contours compared to CTV_crop. For the whole cohort, NTCP estimates varied between 5.3% and 49.5% (LKB) or 2.2% and 49.6% (RS) depending on the choice of contours. NTCP estimates for individual patients varied by up to a factor of 4. Estimates from “skin” contours showed higher agreement with observed events. Conclusion Contour variations can lead to significantly different NTCP estimates for breast fibrosis, highlighting the importance of standardising breast contours before developing and/or applying NTCP models.REQUITE received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development, and demonstration under grant agreement no. 601826. We thank all patients who participated in the REQUITE study and all study personnel involved in the REQUITE project. Marianne Aznar acknowledges the support of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (Grant number EP/T028017/1) This work was supported by Cancer Research UK RadNet Manchester [C1994/A28701] and the NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre (NIHR203308). The researchers at DKFZ also thank Anusha Müller, Irmgard Helmbold, Thomas Heger, Sabine Behrens, Juan Camilo Rosas. Petra Seibold was supported by ERA PerMed 2018 funding (BMBF #01KU1912) and BfS funding (#3619S42261). S. Gutiérrez-Enríquez is supported by the Government of Catalonia 2021SGR01112. The VHIO authors acknowledge the Cellex Foundation for providing research equipment and facilities and thank CERCA Program/Generalitat de Catalunya for institutional support

Enhancing Employability for Autistic Graduates: Using TRIZ Theory to Design Virtual Reality Solutions for Fostering Inclusive Communications in Workplace Environments

The underemployment of post-secondary graduates with autism AP-PSD is a critical concern This issue often stems from difficulties in workplace integration and communication This research explores the potential of virtual reality VR systems to alleviate these challenges by simulating work environments The methodology rooted in the TRIZ Theory a problem-solving algorithm refines the use of VR systems for enhanced adaptability and efficiency The primary objectives include enhancing employers understanding of AP-PSD-related issues and identifying significant workplace challenges faced by AP-PSDs Through literature reviews surveys and focus groups the study investigates the factors impacting AP-PSDs and identifies key components to develop a more effective VR system to support their workplace integration The research also scrutinizes existing technological adaptations that could improve situation recognition communication and understanding in the workplace Additionally the potential role of human supervision in conjunction with VR technology support for AP-PSD employees is considered The results suggest that regardless of company size supporting AP-PSDs in the workplace is a feasible goal that can enhance their wellbeing Crucially the AP-PSD s active participation in their own integration process which encompasses training human support and environmental adaptations along with the specific involvement of the human resources manager has proven vital With the right accommodations AP-PSDs can demonstrate up to 30 greater productivity than neurotypical employees offsetting accommodation costs This research emphasizes the need to blend human-centered approaches with technological innovations to boost AP-PSDs employability Though industry-specific integration details are beyond the scope of this study the results underline the potential for tailored solutions aligned with each company s unique culture The paper presents a prototype for further co-design phase