European bank loan loss provisioning and efficient technological innovative progress

This paper presents an analysis of Loan Loss Provisioning (LLP) behavior of European banks across 26-member states to determine how bad management and Technological Innovative Progress (TIP) has affected bank risk management. Technological improvements in banking have seen advances in both back and front office operations with respect to lending. This is created through increased disembodied technological change capturing improvements in both non-financial and risk management technologies. We find, using a new dynamic LLP model that European banks employed bad management practices in relation to their lending and monitoring practices, leading to higher losses on loans (through increased LLPs). However, the relationship between TIP and LLPs indicates that those banks which increased their technological efficiency with respect to costs had a greater ability to recognize bad loans, and were therefore able to subsequently increase LLPs. That is, improving technology mitigated the impact of bad management practices in European banks

Intrabiliary rupture of liver hydatid cyst: a case report and review of the literature

Herein, we report a 66 year old woman who was diagnosed to have intrabiliary rupture of liver hydatid cyst with demonstrative computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography findings, with a review of the literature

Design, architecture and implementation of a resource discovery, reservation and provisioning framework for testbeds

Experimental platforms (testbeds) play a significant role in the evaluation of new and existing technologies. Their popularity has been raised lately as more and more researchers prefer experimentation over simulation as a way for acquiring more accurate results. This imposes significant challenges in testbed operators since an efficient mechanism is needed to manage the testbed's resources and provision them according to the users' needs. In this paper we describe such a framework which was implemented for the management of networking testbeds. We present the design requirements and the implementation details, along with the challenges we encountered during its operation in the NITOS testbed. Significant results were extracted through the experiences of the every day operation of the testbed's management. © 2015 IFIP

Formalin-induced experimental sclerosing cholangitis in the rat

The few reported cases of sclerosing cholangitis following removal of an echinococcus cyst are thought to be a consequence of the chemical action of formalin used for sterilization of the residual cavity. The aim of this study was to assess this hypothesis. We injected 0.15ml of 2% buffered formalin solution into the central hepatic lobe of five rats, after a midline laparotomy. At 6, 12, 18 and 24 weeks after formalin injection al1 rats were reoperated upon and a sample of hepatic parenchyma from both the central and the left hepatic lobe was obtained for microscopic evaluation. Our findings, dilatation of portal tracts and bile canaliculi, thickening of the pericanalicular cytoplasm, portal and periportal inflammatory cell infiltration and fibrosis and enlargement of the perisinusoidal space of Disse, suggest that 2% formalin solution leads to the development of essential phenomena of cholestasis and sclerosing cholangitis in the rat, so thus it should be avoided in liver hydatid disease surgery

Federation of internet of things testbeds for the realization of a semantically-enabled multi-domain data marketplace

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept has attracted a lot of attention from the research and innovation community for a number of years already. One of the key drivers for this hype towards the IoT is its applicability to a plethora of different application domains. However, infrastructures enabling experimental assessment of IoT solutions are scarce. Being able to test and assess the behavior and the performance of any piece of technology (i.e., protocol, algorithm, application, service, etc.) under real-world circumstances is of utmost importance to increase the acceptance and reduce the time to market of these innovative developments. This paper describes the federation of eleven IoT deployments from heterogeneous application domains (e.g., smart cities, maritime, smart building, crowd-sensing, smart grid, etc.) with over 10,000 IoT devices overall which produce hundreds of thousands of observations per day. The paper summarizes the resources that are made available through a cloud-based platform. The main contributions from this paper are twofold. In the one hand, the insightful summary of the federated data resources are relevant to the experimenters that might be seeking for an experimental infrastructure to assess their innovations. On the other hand, the identification of the challenges met during the testbed integration process, as well as the mitigation strategies that have been implemented to face them, are of interest for testbed providers that can be considering to join the federation. © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Federation of internet of things testbeds for the realization of a semantically-enabled multi-domain data marketplace

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept has attracted a lot of attention from the research and innovation community for a number of years already. One of the key drivers for this hype towards the IoT is its applicability to a plethora of different application domains. However, infrastructures enabling experimental assessment of IoT solutions are scarce. Being able to test and assess the behavior and the performance of any piece of technology (i.e., protocol, algorithm, application, service, etc.) under real-world circumstances is of utmost importance to increase the acceptance and reduce the time to market of these innovative developments. This paper describes the federation of eleven IoT deployments from heterogeneous application domains (e.g., smart cities, maritime, smart building, crowd-sensing, smart grid, etc.) with over 10,000 IoT devices overall which produce hundreds of thousands of observations per day. The paper summarizes the resources that are made available through a cloud-based platform. The main contributions from this paper are twofold. In the one hand, the insightful summary of the federated data resources are relevant to the experimenters that might be seeking for an experimental infrastructure to assess their innovations. On the other hand, the identification of the challenges met during the testbed integration process, as well as the mitigation strategies that have been implemented to face them, are of interest for testbed providers that can be considering to join the federation