Statistics and society: a study on the burden experienced by caregivers of patients with Alzheimer

The cost of caring for people with Alzheimer-type diseases is enormous. Caregivers experience emotional, physical and financial stress, and their demands are central to decisions on patient institutionalization. We hereby investigate the burden experienced by caregivers of Alzheimer patients in Cyprus. We explore whether burden is related to variables such as patient psychopathology, caregiver gender, income and level of education. Moreover, we examine if there is a significant difference in the level of burden, depression, or reaction to memory and behavior problems when patients live in the community or in institutions and if the level of burden is associated with the use of different coping strategies by caregivers. Various statistical techniques are implemented for the analysis and all the conclusions are discussed. This work was partially funded by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation

Agriculture, settlement and landscape in Ottoman Cyprus

No abstract available

A Cypriot Story about Love and Hatred

The Middle Ages have their great love stories. We owe one of them to Peter I Lusignan, King of Cyprus. Married to Eleanor of Aragon, who bore him a son and a successor, he had a mistress pregnant with his child. The queen decided to eliminate this rival by inducing a premature delivery. The incident was recorded by Leontios Makhairas, a Cypriot chronicler, who described the cruelty of Eleanor and mourned the fate of the baby. But it is not his account which keeps this tragedy alive in Cyprus even today. There is a folk song about beautiful Arodaphnousa, who suffered because of the bad queen. The song is deprived of historical context, but it is a historical source nevertheless. Its remote counterpart is the Catalan story of Eleanor, who was expelled from Cyprus and lived in Aragon for a long time. This story creates an image of a benign, calm lady who was venerated after death by her subjects. The clash between these images makes one think about the black and white PR created in every epoch. But this is not the point of this story. The point is the fate of an innocent child, both the flower and the victim of love. This is a rare motif in medieval literature; children are seldom present on the pages of its manuscripts. The emotion connected with this story deserves the reader’s attention

Nucleon form factors and moments of parton distributions in twisted mass lattice QCD

We present results on the electroweak form factors and on the lower moments of parton distributions of the nucleon, within lattice QCD using two dynamical flavors of degenerate twisted mass fermions. Results are obtained on lattices with three different values of the lattice spacings, namely a=0.089 fm, a=0.070 fm and a=0.056 fm, allowing the investigation of cut-off effects. The volume dependence is examined by comparing results on two lattices of spatial length L=2.1 fm and L=2.8 fm. The simulations span pion masses in the range of 260-470 MeV. Our results are renormalized non-perturbatively and the values are given in the MS-scheme at a scale mu=2 GeV.Comment: Talk presented in the XXIst International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics, 21-27 July 2011, Grenoble, Rhones Alpes Franc

A feasibility study for the provision of electronic healthcare tools and services in areas of Greece, Cyprus and Italy

Background: Through this paper, we present the initial steps for the creation of an integrated platform for the provision of a series of eHealth tools and services to both citizens and travelers in isolated areas of thesoutheast Mediterranean, and on board ships travelling across it. The platform was created through an INTERREG IIIB ARCHIMED project called INTERMED. Methods: The support of primary healthcare, home care and the continuous education of physicians are the three major issues that the proposed platform is trying to facilitate. The proposed system is based on state-of-the-art telemedicine systems and is able to provide the following healthcare services: i) Telecollaboration and teleconsultation services between remotely located healthcare providers, ii) telemedicine services in emergencies, iii) home telecare services for "at risk" citizens such as the elderly and patients with chronic diseases, and iv) eLearning services for the continuous training through seminars of both healthcare personnel (physicians, nurses etc) and persons supporting "at risk" citizens. These systems support data transmission over simple phone lines, internet connections, integrated services digital network/digital subscriber lines, satellite links, mobile networks (GPRS/3G), and wireless local area networks. The data corresponds, among others, to voice, vital biosignals, still medical images, video, and data used by eLearning applications. The proposed platform comprises several systems, each supporting different services. These were integrated using a common data storage and exchange scheme in order to achieve system interoperability in terms of software, language and national characteristics. Results: The platform has been installed and evaluated in different rural and urban sites in Greece, Cyprus and Italy. The evaluation was mainly related to technical issues and user satisfaction. The selected sites are, among others, rural health centers, ambulances, homes of "at-risk" citizens, and a ferry. Conclusions: The results proved the functionality and utilization of the platform in various rural places in Greece, Cyprus and Italy. However, further actions are needed to enable the local healthcare systems and the different population groups to be familiarized with, and use in their everyday lives, mature technological solutions for the provision of healthcare services

Common Stochastic Trends among the Cyprus Stock Exchange and the ASE, LSE and NYSE

Common stochastic trends among major international stock price indices has been a very intensively analyzed issue mainly as a result of the 1987 stock market crash and the need for policy coordination in financial markets. This paper investigates the existence of common stochastic trends among an emerging equity market, the Cyprus Stock Exchange and three mature equity markets namely ASE, LSE and NYSE. The main finding of our analysis is that there is evidence of one long-run relationship among the four equity markets and therefore three common stochastic trends. We use the Gonzalo and Granger (1995) methodology to identify, estimate and test for the number of common trends that leads to permanent changes among the four stock markets. Furthermore, we identify as driving forces of the system the ASE, LSE and NYSE equity markets while the emerging stock market of Cyprus does not enter significantly the common trends. Finally, we show that although cointegration exists there are small long-run benefits from international portfolio diversification since the stock prices adjust very slowly to these common trends.cointegration, common trends, identification, international stock markets,

Parton Distributions from Lattice QCD with Momentum Smearing

In this work we continue our effort to explore a recent proposal, which allows light-cone distributions to be extracted from purely spatial correlations, being thus accessible to lattice methods. In order to test the feasibility of this method, we present our latest results from a twisted mass lattice calculation of the flavor non-singlet momentum, helicity and transversity distributions of the nucleon. Furthermore, we apply a newly proposed momentum improved smearing, which has the potential to reach higher nucleon momenta as required for a safe matching procedure to the physical distribution functions.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, talk given at the 34th annual International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, 24-30 July 2016, University of Southampton, UK. Revision: Added further references and moved acknowledgements to the bac

Cointegration, causality and domestic portfolio diversification in the Cyprus Stock Exchange

In this paper we provide an investigation on the potential benefits that may exist for portfolio managers, private and institutional investors from domestic portfolio diversification. We employ daily data for the period 1996-2002 from the Cyprus Stock Exchange, recently established emerging market. Cointegration as well as linear and nonlinear causality analysis is used in order to reveal whether there are benefits from domestic portfolio diversification. The cointegration analysis leads to the conclusion that we are unable to reject the null hypothesis of no cointegration in most bivariate cases of the 56 pairs of sectoral indices and this finding is taken to imply that the are benefits from portfolio diversification, when domestic investors construct portfolios which include stocks from the sectors which are not cointegrated. Furthermore, the application of linear and nonlinear Granger causality leads to a pattern of causality between these pairs of sectoral indices which is almost identical and therefore the linearity hypothesis is rejected. Furthermore, based on our causality analysis we provide evidence that traders and investors in the CSE set up short-run investment strategies. Moreover, this implies that the Cypriot investors do not adopt contrarian and momentum investment strategies. Therefore, we argue that the investors in the Cyprus stock market exhibit myopic investment behaviour.cointegration, Granger causality, nonlinear causality, domestic portfolio