CREDIT RATING AGENCIES AND THEIR POTENTIAL IMPACT ON DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Credit rating agencies (CRAs) play a key role in financial markets by helping to reduce the informative asymmetry between lenders and investors, on one side, and issuers on the other side, about the creditworthiness of companies or countries. CRAs´ role has expanded with financial globalization and has received an additional boost from Basel II which incorporates the ratings of CRAs into the rules for setting weights for credit risk. Ratings tend to be sticky, lagging markets, and overreact when they do change. This overreaction may have aggravated financial crises in the recent past, contributing to financial instability and cross-country contagion. The recent bankruptcies of Enron, WorldCom, and Parmalat have prompted legislative scrutiny of the agencies. Criticism has been especially directed towards the high degree of concentration of the industry. Promotion of competition may require policy action at national and international level to encourage the establishment of new agencies and to channel business generated by new regulatory requirements in their direction.

A Time-Varying Parameter Model of A Monetary Policy Rule for Switzerland. The Case of the Lucas and Friedman Hypothesis.

This paper is an empirical research of a monetary policy rule for a small open economy model, taking Switzerland as a case-study. A time-varying parameter model of a monetary policy reaction function is proposed to integrate various trade-offs to be made about various macroeconomic variables -- inflation, the output gap and the real exchange rate gap. The Kalman filter estimations of the time-varying parameters shows how rational economic agents combine past and new information to make new expectations about the state variables. The uncertainty created by the time-varying parameter model, and estimated by the conditional forecast error and conditional variance, is decomposed into two components, the uncertainty related to the time-varying parameters and the uncertainty related to the purely monetary shock. Most of the monetary shock uncertainty comes from the time-varying parameters and not from the pure monetary shock. The Lucas and Friedman hypotheses about the impact of uncertainty on output are revisited, using a conditional variance to test them. Both hypothesis are confirmed, using the one-step ahead conditional variance of the monetary shock. An inverse relation between the magnitude of the response on output to the nominal shock and the variance of this shock is found, as Lucas had predicted. Moreover, there is a direct negative impact of uncertainty which reduces output in the long-term.time-varying parameter model; Taylor rule; Kalman Filter.

Impact of a Parent Education Program on Parents of Children with Complex Congenital Heart Disease Prior to Discharge Home

Abstract Background and Purpose: Children with complex medical needs, such as children with complex congenital heart disease, are at risk for hospital readmission, morbidity, and mortality related to disease complications. Parents must be adequately prepared to care for their children following hospital discharge to prevent hospital readmission and complications. This study seeks to evaluate the impact of an education intervention on parental knowledge and stress related to caring for their child with complex medical needs. Methods: The study design is a quasi-experimental, nonequivalent control pre-test/post-test design. The pre-test was administered prior to the educational intervention, with the post-test administered one week following the intervention. The data was analyzed using IBM SPSS software version 28. Parental knowledge was analyzed using Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The impact of the intervention on parental stress and perceived parental benefit were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results: A total of three parents participated in the study. There was no statistically significant difference in the results of the pre and post-test. The study noted a qualitative impact on perceived parental stress and parental benefit. Conclusions: Assessment of parental knowledge in the complex congenital heart disease population is challenging, but crucial to complete prior to patient discharge. The impacts of a parent education program in this population may be beneficial based on impacts on parental stress and parent verbalization of benefits. Future studies should focus on long-term effects of parent education programs with a larger sample size to accurately determine impact

Arabic stemmers and their effectiveness on the information retrieval system

Arabic is a semitic language that has a complex morphology. Therefore, using a stemmer algorithm in an information retrieval system is almost always beneficial; An Arabic stemmer has been implemented and included in the information retrieval system developed at the Information Science Research Institute at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The Arabic stemmer is written in the Ruby Language and removes affixes then matches the remaining word against patterns of the same length. The retrieval experiment uses the TREC collection which consists of over a million documents. We will test the effectiveness of the Arabic stemmer using recall/precision measurement and compare the result to other stemmers

Preventative Health Care Shortage

The primary care shortage is major problem that impacts people in rural and often low income communities. Our project seeks to address the primary care workforce shortage affecting the Vermont and Connecticut communities by better understanding current medical school student perspectives on primary care as a career of interest. Attractors and deterrents of primary care were highlighted through a survey distributed to all medical students at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1829/thumbnail.jp

Laboratory observations of permeability enhancement by fluid pressure oscillation of in situ fractured rock

We report on laboratory experiments designed to investigate the influence of pore pressure oscillations on the effective permeability of fractured rock. Berea sandstone samples were fractured in situ under triaxial stresses of tens of megapascals, and deionized water was forced through the incipient fracture under conditions of steady and oscillating pore pressure. We find that short-term pore pressure oscillations induce long-term transient increases in effective permeability of the fractured samples. The magnitude of the effective permeability enhancements scales with the amplitude of pore pressure oscillations, and changes persist well after the stress perturbation. The maximum value of effective permeability enhancement is 5 × 10^(−16) m^2 with a background permeability of 1 × 10^(−15) m^2; that is, the maximum enhanced permeability is 1.5 × 10^(−15) m^2. We evaluate poroelastic effects and show that hydraulic storage release does not explain our observations. Effective permeability recovery following dynamic oscillations occurs as the inverse square root of time. The recovery indicates that a reversible mechanism, such as clogging/unclogging of fractures, as opposed to an irreversible one, like microfracturing, is responsible for the transient effective permeability increase. Our work suggests the feasibility of dynamically controlling the effective permeability of fractured systems. The result has consequences for models of earthquake triggering and permeability enhancement in fault zones due to dynamic shaking from near and distant earthquakes

Assessments that foster belonging in the science classroom

In this presentation, we explore the findings of a scoping review on alternative ways of assessing students in the science classroom. Assessment plays a crucial role in teaching and learning, especially in promoting students\u27 sense of belonging. Well-designed assessments can support students\u27 sense of belonging by valuing their lived experiences, offering choice and flexibility, and promoting meaningful interactions and compassionate practices. The question arises: what does an assessment that nurtures belonging look like in practice? In this presentation, we showcase different types of assessments used by science educators and identified in our literature review, that can foster belonging among students. These assessments include personal learning network (a learning network usually built through social media), project-based assessment, authentic assessments (assessment that focus on future relevance and the ways students will apply the knowledge learned in the future), and many more. This presentation is relevant not only to science educators looking to enhance belonging through their assessments but also to educational developers working with science educators

Downscaling of fracture energy during brittle creep experiments

We present mode 1 brittle creep fracture experiments along fracture surfaces that contain strength heterogeneities. Our observations provide a link between smooth macroscopic time-dependent failure and intermittent microscopic stress-dependent processes. We find the large-scale response of slow-propagating subcritical cracks to be well described by an Arrhenius law that relates the fracture speed to the energy release rate. At the microscopic scale, high-resolution optical imaging of the transparent material used (PMMA) allows detailed description of the fracture front. This reveals a local competition between subcritical and critical propagation (pseudo stick-slip front advances) independently of loading rates. Moreover, we show that the local geometry of the crack front is self-affine and the local crack front velocity is power law distributed. We estimate the local fracture energy distribution by combining high-resolution measurements of the crack front geometry and an elastic line fracture model. We show that the average local fracture energy is significantly larger than the value derived from a macroscopic energy balance. This suggests that homogenization of the fracture energy is not straightforward and should be taken cautiously. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results in the context of fault mechanics

Interplay of seismic and aseismic deformations during earthquake swarms: An experimental approach

Observations of earthquake swarms and slow propagating ruptures on related faults suggest a close relation between the two phenomena. Earthquakes are the signature of fast unstable ruptures initiated on localized asperities while slow aseismic deformations are experienced on large stable segments of the fault plane. The spatial proximity and the temporal coincidence of both fault mechanical responses highlight the variability of fault rheology. However, the mechanism relating earthquakes and aseismic processes is still elusive due to the difficulty of imaging these phenomena of large spatiotemporal variability at depth. Here we present laboratory experiments that explore, in great detail, the deformation processes of heterogeneous interfaces in the brittle-creep regime. We track the evolution of an interfacial crack over 7 orders of magnitude in time and 5 orders of magnitude in space using optical and acoustic sensors. We explore the response of the system to slow transient loads and show that slow deformation episodes are systematically accompanied by acoustic emissions due to local fracture energy disorder. Features of acoustic emission activities and deformation rate distributions of our experimental system are similar to those in natural faults. On the basis of an activation energy model, we link our results to the Rate and State friction model and suggest an active role of local creep deformation in driving the seismic activity of earthquake swarms

Graphics Performance Benchmarks: Summary Report

Report on study of seven different benchmark software systems viewing the parameters and configurations of graphics systems