Happiness Maintenance and Asset Prices

This paper explores the implications of investors’ everyday mild feelings for aggregate asset returns. To this end, it introduces a novel class of state dependent preferences - happiness maintenance preferences - into the standard Mehra and Prescott (1985) economy by allowing investors’ coefficient of relative risk aversion to depend partly on their current feelings, which, in turn, are a function of the current state of the economy. Consistent with recent evidence from experimental psychology (see for example Isen (1999)), good times bring about a positive mood for investors and a heightened pain from any potential loss. In an attempt to maintain their good mood, investors become less willing to bear any portfolio risk, i.e. they become more risk averse. Extremely mild procyclical changes (a standard deviation of about one percentage point) in investors’ risk aversion are sufficient to bring the implications of a simple dynamic model of asset pricing in line with the historically observed stylized features of asset returns, without relying on unreasonable values of the behavioral parameters. With a realistic consumption process, the model is capable of accounting for a sizable equity premium in line with the one observed in the US data. It also performs well with respect to other financial statistics, such as the average risk-free rate, the volatility and predictability of stock returns and the Sharpe ratio. Being able to match the equity premium, it implies that aggregate fluctuations have important welfare costs.consumption-based asset pricing behavioral finance state- dependent risk aversion equity premium puzzle affect and decision making

Representation of Atypical Resources in the Discovery Layer: Metadata and Cataloging Aspects

The discovery layer is commonly used in libraries to provide a more “Google-like” experience that offers one-stop searching. The original selling point of the discovery layer was that journal articles could be retrieved as well as monographs. But as libraries have acquired many other formats, particularly non-print, the discovery layer has struggled to provide results that include these “atypical” resources. Metadata is crucial to the discovery layer because it is what is used for the search. The higher the quality of metadata, the better the retrieval results will be. NISO has provided a list of elements to be considered best practices when creating metadata for the discovery layer. Not everything a library has available can be found through the discovery layer. This is a particular problem for those items who have their metadata stored only in an institutional repository. These repositories are often not loaded into the discovery layer. Solving discovery layer retrieval problems will take all parties working together on solutions. Then all relevant results can be delivered, and fulfill the goal of “one-stop” searching

Water footprint of Ischia Island: preliminary evaluation

Mestrado Vinifera Euromaster - Instituto Superior de Agronomia - ULWe are witnessing in recent years to a climate change due to a number of operations carried out by man. In this sense, agriculture is a strategic sector if we want to tackle this situation, more and more unsustainable as modern agriculture, also called "intensive", is causing more of a problem is the surface layer of the earth's crust, that the biosphere. The following work is part of a larger project, called VA.RIVI, applied on the island of Ischia, and is designed to specifically consider the components that form the basis for the calculation of the Water Footprint, which indicates the environmental impact of a product, a process or an entire company working on water resources. The WF is a relatively new tool, whose standard (ISO14046) was published not more than three months ago, on November 2014, so this does not always work considers the water footprint, but often refers to other indicators of the environmental impact, such as the Carbon Footprint, Ecological Footprint, or the Life Cycle Assessment. Will be analyzed the guidelines of the new ISO 14046, also reporting a sample calculation made possible thanks to the publications present in the bibliography, and will be compared to the production of organic wine. The work is complemented by a number of best practices to reduce the water footprint, but also to reduce the environmental impact of a company or a business process through small and large measures to be implemented at all levels.N/

Prognostic factors in breast cancer with a focus on the role of tumour proliferation

Ki67 is the most commonly used marker of proliferation in breast cancer. The general aim of the thesis was to investigate the prognostic role of Ki67 and its interplay with other prognostic factors in breast cancer cohorts. In Paper I, the prognostic value of Ki67 as analysed in metastasis biopsies (mKi67) and the change in Ki67 from primary tumour (pKi67) to corresponding first site of relapse was studied in patients diagnosed and treated for metastatic breast cancer (MBC) at Karolinska University Hospital (Stockholm, Sweden). A significantly longer median post-relapse overall survival (OS) was demonstrated for low-mKi67 ( ≤20%) compared with high-mKi67 (>20%) group (25 vs.17 months, p 0.01 by log-rank test). mKi67 was associated with OS regardless of pKi67. Ki67 varied from primary tumour to metastasis in a significant number of patients (p 0.01 by McNemar's test) and the change from high to low was correlated to better OS in comparison with stable Ki67 levels. In paper II, the prognostic value in terms of post-relapse OS of breast cancer subtypes and genomic signatures as assessed in primary tumour tissue was investigated, beyond classical clinical and pathological prognostic determinants, in patients diagnosed and treated for MBC at Karolinska University Hospital. Immunohistochemistry-(IHC) and PAM50-based intrinsic subtypes showed a significant but not independent prognostic value after distant relapse. Moreover, low and medium-risk categories according to PAM50 risk of relapse score (ROR-S) were independently associated with longer post-relapse OS in comparison with the high-risk category. In contrast, the 21-gene Recurrence Score and the 70-gene signature were not independently prognostic of post-relapse survival. The PAM50-derived proliferation score also independently correlated with survival and the additional clinical information deriving from combining ROR-P (ROR-S weighted for the proliferation score) with the other prognosticators was also highly significant (p < 0.001). In paper III, the additional prognostic information deriving from the combination of genomic signatures and IHC markers, namely Ki67 alone or added to oestrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR) and human epidermal growth factor 2 receptor (HER2) to generate IHC subtypes, compared with either classifier alone was investigated in two cohorts. Cohort 1 included patients with diagnosis of primary breast cancer from the Stockholm Breast Cancer Registry (SBCR) while cohort 2 was composed of women diagnosed with primary tumour in Uppsala county (Sweden). In cohort 1, 21-gene Recurrence Score and PAM50 added relevant prognostic information beyond Ki67/IHC subtypes. All the investigated genomic signatures provided additional prognostic information when combined with Ki67/IHC subtypes in the group of ER-positive/lymph node positive tumours while no signature reached the statistical significance when ER-negative tumours were studied. IHC subtypes, but not Ki67 alone, showed additional prognostic ability when combined with all genomic signatures except PAM50, in the overall cohort 1 and ER-negative subgroup, but not in ER-positive/lymph node negative and ER-positive/lymph node positive tumours. In cohort 2, the findings were substantially comparable but the statistical significance reduced likely due to the smaller sample size. In Paper IV, the change in survival after local and loco-regional relapse of breast cancer over 34 years (1980-2014) was studied in a cohort of patients from the SBCR. Survival was compared between three cohorts according to years of relapse diagnosis: 1980-1989; 1990-1999; 2000-2014. In total, 1922 women were diagnosed with local and 776 with loco-regional relapse. In the group of the local recurrence, median postrelapse event-free survival (EFS) and OS significantly improved over time, regardless of age. Conversely, age-related trends in survival were demonstrated in the group of women who experienced a loco-regional relapse. Relative survival was consistent with the observed EFS and OS. In addition, a decrease in mortality over time was demonstrated only in younger patients diagnosed with a loco-regional relapse in 2000- 2014 (EMR 0.48; 95% CIs 0.42-0.72), regardless of other prognostic factors. The outcome was unchanged when the analysis was restricted to the years 1980 through 2009

Contour Extraction of Inertial Confinement Fusion Images By Data Augmentation

X-Ray radiographs are one of the primary results from inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments. Issues such as scarcity of experimental data, high levels of noise in the data, lack of ground truth data, and low resolution of data limit the use of machine/deep learning for automated analysis of radiographs. In this work we combat these roadblocks to the use of machine learning by creating a synthetic radiograph dataset resembling experimental radiographs. Accompanying each synthetic radiograph are corresponding contours of each capsule shell shape, which enables neural networks to train on the synthetic data for contour extraction and be applied to the experimental images. Thus, we train an instance of the convolutional neural network U-Net to segment the shape of the outer shell capsule using the synthetic dataset, and we apply this instance of U-Net to a set of radiographs taken at the National Ignition Facility. We show that the network extracted the outer shell shape of a small number of capsules as an initial demonstration of deep learning for automatic contour extraction of ICF images. Future work may include extracting outer shells from all of the dataset, applying different kinds of neural networks, and extraction of inner shell contours as well.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figure

Clinical implications of the intrinsic molecular subtypes in hormone receptor-positive and HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer

Traditionally, the classification of breast cancer relies on the expression of immunohistochemical (IHC) biomarkers readily available in clinical practice. Using highly standardized and reproducible assays across patient cohorts, intrinsic molecular subtypes of breast cancer - also called 'intrinsic subtypes' (IS) - have been identified based on the expression of 50 genes. Although IHC-based subgroups and IS moderately correlate to each other, they are not superimposable. In fact, non-luminal biology has been detected in a substantial proportion (5-20%) of hormone receptor-positive (HoR+) tumors, has prognostic value, and identifies reduced and increased sensitivity to endocrine therapy and chemotherapy, respectively. During tumor progression, a shift toward a non-luminal estrogen-independent and more aggressive phenotype has been demonstrated. Intrinsic genomic instability and cell plasticity, alone or combined with external constraints deriving from treatment selective pressure or interplay with the tumor microenvironment, may represent the determinants of such biological diversity between primary and metastatic disease, and during metastatic tumor evolution. In this review, we describe the distribution and the clinical behavior of IS as the disease progresses, focusing on HoR+/HER2-negative advanced breast cancer. In addition, we provide an overview of the ongoing clinical trials aiming to validate the predictive and prognostic value of IS towards their incorporation into routine care

Halted-Pendulum Relaxation: Application to White Dwarf Binary Initial Data

Studying compact star binaries and their mergers is integral to modern astrophysics. In particular, binary white dwarfs are associated with Type Ia supernovae, used as standard candles to measure the expansion of the Universe. Today, compact-star mergers are typically studied via state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics codes. One such numerical techniques, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), is frequently chosen for its excellent mass, energy, and momentum conservation. Furthermore, the natural treatment of vacuum and the ability to represent highly irregular morphologies make SPH an excellent tool for the numerical study of compact-star binaries and mergers. However, for many scenarios, including binary systems, the outcome simulations are only as accurate as the initial conditions. For SPH, it is essential to ensure that particles are distributed semi-regularly, correctly representing the initial density profile. Additionally, particle noise in the form of high-frequency local motion and low-frequency global dynamics must be damped out. Damping the latter can be as computationally intensive as the actual simulation. Here, we discuss a new and straightforward relaxation method, Halted-Pendulum Relaxation (HPR), to remove the global oscillation modes of SPH particle configurations. In combination with effective external potentials representing gravitational and orbital forces, we show that HPR has an excellent performance in efficiently relaxing SPH particles to the desired density distribution and removing global oscillation modes. We compare the method to frequently used relaxation approaches such as gravitational glass, increased artificial viscosity, and Weighted Voronoi Tesselations, and test it on a white dwarf binary model at its Roche lobe overflow limit

Modeling Solids in Nuclear Astrophysics with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is a frequently applied tool in computational astrophysics to solve the fluid dynamics equations governing the systems under study. For some problems, for example when involving asteroids and asteroid impacts, the additional inclusion of material strength is necessary in order to accurately describe the dynamics. In compact stars, that is white dwarfs and neutron stars, solid components are also present. Neutron stars have a solid crust which is the strongest material known in nature. However, their dynamical evolution, when modeled via SPH or other computational fluid dynamics codes, is usually described as a purely fluid dynamics problem. Here, we present the first 3D simulations of neutron-star crustal toroidal oscillations including material strength with the Los Alamos National Laboratory SPH code FleCSPH. In the first half of the paper, we present the numerical implementation of solid material modeling together with standard tests. The second half is on the simulation of crustal oscillations in the fundamental toroidal mode. Here, we dedicate a large fraction of the paper to approaches which can suppress numerical noise in the solid. If not minimized, the latter can dominate the crustal motion in the simulations.Comment: 24 pages, 29 figure

Short stump and high anastomosis pull-through (SHiP) procedure for delayed coloanal anastomosis with no protective stoma for low rectal cancer

Despite advances in coloanal anastomosis techniques, satisfactory procedures completed without complications remain lacking. We investigated the effectiveness of our recently developed 'Short stump and High anastomosis Pull-through' (SHiP) procedure for delayed coloanal anastomosis without a stoma. In this retrospective study, we analysed functional outcomes, morbidity, and mortality rates and local recurrence of 37 patients treated using SHiP procedure, out of the 282 patients affected by rectal cancer treated in our institution between 2012 and 2020. The inclusion criterion was that the rectal cancer be located within 4 cm from the anal margin. One patient died of local and pulmonary recurrence after 6 years, one developed lung and liver metastases after 2 years, and one experienced local recurrence 2.5 years after surgery. No major leak, retraction, or ischaemia of the colonic stump occurred; the perioperative mortality rate was zero. Five patients (13.51%) had early complications. Stenosis of the anastomosis, which occurred in nine patients (24.3%), was the only long-term complication; only three (8.1%) were symptomatic and were treated with endoscopic dilation. The mean Wexner scores at 24 and 36 months were 8.3 and 8.1 points, respectively. At the 36-month check-up, six patients (24%) had major LARS, ten (40%) had minor LARS, and nine (36%) had no LARS. The functional results in terms of LARS were similar to those previously reported after immediate coloanal anastomosis with protective stoma. The SHiP procedure resulted in a drastic reduction in major complications, and none of the patients had a stom