"Anything can happen" : narrative ambiguity and musical intertextuality in THE HOLIDAY

Romantic comedies are not renowned for intricate storytelling and have rarely been deemed worthy of the sustained scholarly attention of analytic ‘close readings’. What applies to the genre as a whole applies no less to its music, which has yet to be discovered by film musicology as a field of enquiry. But genre films such as romcoms can be highly self-conscious and self-reflexive, and can show a playfulness in their use of cinematic techniques that may be as much fun for the analyst as for the audience

Novelty detection in video surveillance using hierarchical neural networks

Abstract. A hierarchical self-organising neural network is described for the detection of unusual pedestrian behaviour in video-based surveillance systems. The system is trained on a normal data set, with no prior information about the scene under surveillance, thereby requiring minimal user input. Nodes use a trace activation rule and feedforward connections, modified so that higher layer nodes are sensitive to trajectory segments traced across the previous layer. Top layer nodes have binary lateral connections and corresponding “novelty accumulator” nodes. Lateral connections are set between co-occurring nodes, generating a signal to prevent accumulation of the novelty measure along normal sequences. In abnormal sequences the novelty accumulator nodes are allowed to increase their activity, generating an alarm state

An examination of the benefits of factor investing in U.K. stock returns

This study uses the Bayesian approach of Wang (1998) to examine the benefits of factor investing in U.K. stock returns in the presence of market frictions. My study finds that factor investing provides significant performance benefits when the benchmark investment universe is the market index, even in the presence of market frictions such as portfolio constraints and trading costs. However when the benchmark investment universe includes industry portfolios, market frictions, such as no short selling constraints and trading costs, tends to eliminate the benefits of factor investing. Imposing less restrictive portfolio constraints, factor investing can generate significant performance for investors with higher risk aversion levels

Exploring the benefits of using stock characteristics in optimal portfolio strategies

I examine the benefits of using stock characteristics to model optimal portfolio weights in stock selection strategies using the characteristic portfolio approach of Brandt, Santa-Clara and Valkanov [2009. “Parametric Portfolio Policies: Exploiting Characteristics in the Cross-section of Equity Returns.” Review of Financial Studies 22: 3411–3447]. I find that there are significant out-of-sample performance benefits in using characteristics in stock selection strategies even after adjusting for trading costs, when investors can invest in the largest 350 U.K. stocks. Imposing short selling restrictions on the characteristic portfolio strategy leads to more consistent performance. The performance benefits are concentrated in the earlier part of the sample period and have disappeared in recent years. I find that there no performance benefits in using stock characteristics when using random subsets of the largest 350 stocks

Bayesian tests of global factor models

I use the Bayesian approach of Barillas and Shanken(2018) to examine the mean-variance efficiency of nine global factor models in global stock returns and to conduct multiple model comparison tests. The mean-variance efficiency of each factor model is strongly rejected. In the multiple model comparison tests, the three-factor model of Asness, Moskowitz and Pedersen(2013) has the best performance at higher prior maximum Sharpe(1966) ratio multiples and significantly outperforms all the other factor models. However, in out-of-sample tests, the AMP model significantly underperforms the best performing models that can be formed among the set of all factors used by the global factor models

An examination of the benefits of dynamic trading strategies in U.K. closed-end funds

We examine the after-cost out-of-sample performance of the unconditional mean-variance (UMV) strategy in the presence of conditioning information (Ferson and Siegel(2001)) using portfolios of U.K. equity closed-end funds. We find that the performance of the UMV strategy significantly improves when using lagged information variables with the highest persistence (first-order autocorrelation) levels and reduces turnover. This strategy is able to outperform alternative dynamic trading strategies and performs well across different subperiods. At low levels of trading costs, the UMV strategy is able to deliver significant value added to investors

PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ UNDERSTANDING OF SELECTED CONCEPTS OF FRACTIONS

The case study investigated prospective teachers’ understanding of concepts of fractions following the IOE’s chief examiners’ reports that have raised concerns about the persistent abysmal performance of the pre-service teachers on items on fractions in mathematics examinations in the colleges of education in Ghana. The case study was conducted in one college of education in the Central Region of Ghana with a sample of 26 pre-service teachers using a mixed method of sequential explanatory design approach. The participants took an achievement test followed by interview with the view to gaining insights into their understanding of specific concepts of fractions. The results indicated that although almost all of the prospective teachers demonstrated high levels of computational competence, none of them was able to demonstrate an understanding of why the algorithm for the division of a fraction by a fraction works. With regard to their Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) of fractions, almost half of the participants could not generate any approach of teaching division of fractions to demonstrate an effective PCK. It was recommended that a new approach of teaching fractions in which connections are made between topics related to fractions be adopted by mathematics tutors in the colleges of education to guide prospective teachers to acquire a deeper conceptual understanding of fractions and their applications.  Article visualizations

Evaporation of particle-stabilised emulsion sunscreen films

We recently showed (Binks et al., ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces, 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acsami.6b02696) how evaporation of sunscreen films consisting of solutions of molecular UV filters leads to loss of UV light absorption and derived sun protection factor (SPF). In the present work, we investigate evaporation-induced effects for sunscreen films consisting of particle-stabilized emulsions containing a dissolved UV filter. The emulsions contained either droplets of propylene glycol (PG) in squalane (SQ), droplets of SQ in PG or droplets of decane in PG. In these different emulsion types, the SQ is involatile and shows no evaporation, the PG is volatile and evaporates relatively slowly, whereas the decane is relatively very volatile and evaporates quickly. We have measured the film mass and area, optical micrographs of the film structure, and the UV absorbance spectra during evaporation. For emulsion films containing the involatile SQ, evaporation of the PG causes collapse of the emulsion structure with some loss of specular UV absorbance due to light scattering. However, for these emulsions with droplets much larger than the wavelength of light, the light is scattered only at small forward angles so does not contribute to the diffuse absorbance and the film SPF. The UV filter remains soluble throughout the evaporation and thus the UV absorption by the filter and the SPF remain approximately constant. Both PG-in-SQ and SQ-in-PG films behave similarly and do not show area shrinkage by dewetting. In contrast, the decane-in-PG film shows rapid evaporative loss of the decane, followed by slower loss of the PG resulting in precipitation of the UV filter and film area shrinkage by dewetting which cause the UV absorbance and derived SPF to decrease. Measured UV spectra during evaporation are in reasonable agreement with spectra calculated using models discussed here