The rise and fall of subprime mortgages

After booming the first half of this decade, U.S. housing activity has retrenched sharply. Single-family building permits have plunged 52 percent and existing-home sales have declined 30 percent since their September 2005 peaks. ; A rise in mortgage interest rates that began in the summer of 2005 contributed to the housing market's initial weakness. By late 2006, though, some signs pointed to renewed stability. They proved short-lived as loan-quality problems sparked a tightening of credit standards on mortgages, particularly for newer and riskier products. As lenders cut back, housing activity began to falter again in spring 2007, accompanied by additional rises in delinquencies and foreclosures. Late-summer financial-market turmoil prompted further toughening of mortgage credit standards. ; The recent boom-to-bust housing cycle raises important questions. Why did it occur, and what role did subprime lending play? How is the retrenchment in lending activity affecting housing markets, and will it end soon? Is the housing slowdown spilling over into the broader economy?Housing - Finance ; Mortgages ; Mortgage loans

Assembly of objects with not fully predefined shapes

An assembly problem in a non-deterministic environment, i.e., where parts to be assembled have unknown shape, size and location, is described. The only knowledge used by the robot to perform the assembly operation is given by a connectivity rule and geometrical constraints concerning parts. Once a set of geometrical features of parts has been extracted by a vision system, applying such a rule allows the dtermination of the composition sequence. A suitable sensory apparatus allows the control the whole operation

From complacency to crisis: financial risk taking in the early 21st century

During the first half of this decade, the belief that new financial products would adequately shield investors from risk encouraged financial flows to less creditworthy households and businesses. By late 2006, U.S. financial markets were flashing warning signals of a potential financial crisis. ; In a sign that investors had become too complacent, risk premiums had all but vanished in junk bond and emerging-market interest rate spreads. Then, conditions changed abruptly. In the important and usually stable market for asset-backed commercial paper, premiums on three-month paper over Treasury bills jumped from 0.17 percentage point in February 2007 to 2.15 points in August. Meanwhile, rising subprime mortgage defaults led investors to abandon their sanguine beliefs about the risk of many mortgage and nonmortgage products. ; The backdrop for these events was a period of macroeconomic stability that fed complacency about risk. This relatively benign economic environment, when combined with the new, structured financial products, increased financial flows to nonprime mortgage and business borrowers. The result was an overeager acceptance of risk taking that began correcting itself only after mounting subprime mortgage defaults reverberated through the broader financial markets.Risk ; Financial markets

The Effects of Fish Oil on Post-Exercise Inflammation

Please view abstract in the attached PDF fil

Phosphate Decrement in Repeated Sprint Ability

DiMartino, V., Schmidt, G. (FACSM), Carpenter, T., Campo, G., William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ Introduction: The purpose of this study was to analyze phosphate fatiguing and decrement (PD) patterns in university students completing a repeated sprint ability (RSA) test. Methods: Subjects were comprised of 7 women and 7 men (N=14) whose ages ranged from 23 to 41 years with a mean age of 25.7 ± 4.7 years. The average height of men was 1.79 ± 0.01 m and women was 1.59 ± 0.1 m. The average weight of men was 92.5 ± 14.7 kg, and women was 59.0 ± 8.9 kg. Subjects ran 8 trials of 20 meters with 30 second rest periods. Results: Men had faster times (3.62 ± 0.16 sec) than women (4.71 ± 0.82 sec) with an overall average of 4.17 ± 0.18 sec. An Independent t-test revealed no significant difference between genders (P = ns). Average phosphate decrement (PD) between men and women was 7.49 ± 4.35 % for men and 3.57 ± 4.64% for women. Discussion: RSA times for all participants suggest a high demand on physiological adaptations. Being that the RSA replicated high intensity interval training (HIIT), the physiological responses were different for all the participants based on their current conditioning levels. PD was correlated with the exertion of each subject and the consistency of the times of each trial. Conclusion: This study concluded that the RSA showed a PD among all participants. A larger PD would indicate more reliability on the lactic anaerobic system for energy

Combining Flexible Queries and Knowledge Anchors to facilitate the exploration of Knowledge Graphs

Semantic web and information extraction technologies are enabling the creation of vast information and knowledge repositories, particularly in the form of knowledge graphs comprising entities and the relationships between them. Users are often unfamiliar with the complex structure and vast content of such graphs. Hence, users need to be assisted by tools that support interactive exploration and flexible querying. In this paper we draw on recent work in flexible querying for graph-structured data and identifying good anchors for knowledge graph exploration in order to demonstrate how users can be supported in incrementally querying, exploring and learning from large complex knowledge graphs. We demonstrate our techniques through a case study in the domain of lifelong learning and career guidance

Combining flexible queries and knowledge anchors to facilitate the exploration of knowledge graphs

Semantic web and information extraction technologies are enabling the creation of vast information and knowledge repositories, particularly in the form of knowledge graphs comprising entities and the relationships between them. Users are often unfamiliar with the complex structure and vast content of such graphs. Hence, users need to be assisted by tools that support interactive exploration and flexible querying. In this paper we draw on recent work in flexible querying for graph-structured data and identifying good anchors for knowledge graph exploration in order to demonstrate how users can be supported in incrementally querying, exploring and learning from large complex knowledge graphs. We demonstrate our techniques through a case study in the domain of lifelong learning and career guidance

Predicting Crystallization of Amorphous Drugs with Terahertz Spectroscopy.

There is a controversy about the extent to which the primary and secondary dielectric relaxations influence the crystallization of amorphous organic compounds below the glass transition temperature. Recent studies also point to the importance of fast molecular dynamics on picosecond-to-nanosecond time scales with respect to the glass stability. In the present study we provide terahertz spectroscopy evidence on the crystallization of amorphous naproxen well below its glass transition temperature and confirm the direct role of Johari-Goldstein (JG) secondary relaxation as a facilitator of the crystallization. We determine the onset temperature Tβ above which the JG relaxation contributes to the fast molecular dynamics and analytically quantify the level of this contribution. We then show there is a strong correlation between the increase in the fast molecular dynamics and onset of crystallization in several chosen amorphous drugs. We believe that this technique has immediate applications to quantify the stability of amorphous drug materials.JS and JAZ would like to acknowledge the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for funding (EP/J007803/1).This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from ACS at http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.5b0033