The Performance of Canadian Pooled Equity Funds

In this paper, we evaluate and rank the performance of 65 Canadian Equity Pooled Funds. We adopt traditional performance measures to evaluate pooled fund managers’ performances from January 1999 to December 2008. We employ the geometric mean as a reward measure, standard deviation and beta coefficient as risk measures, and Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) risk-adjusted measures that include Jensen’s (1968) alpha, the Treynor (1965) ratio, the Sharpe (1966) ratio, and Modigliani and Modigliani’s (1997) M-Squared. Treynor-Mazuy (1966) and Henriksson-Merton (1981) are used to measure market-timing. According to our results, thirty-five percent of 65 Canadian Equity Pooled Funds managers have abnormal returns in terms of Jensen’s (1968) alpha. Only eight pooled fund managers have market-timing ability. None of 65 pooled fund managers has both selectivity and market-timing ability at the same time

Marriage and divorce in Utah and the United States: convergence or continued divergence?

Book ChapterThe social context for marriage and divorce in the United States has changed dramatically over the last 50 years. Since the 1950s, Americans have been waiting longer to marry. Women's median age at first marriage rose from 20 in the 1960s to 25 in 2000; for men, the increase was from 22 to 27 (Clarke 1995; Fields and Casper 2001)

Introducing the Dark Energy Universe Simulation Series (DEUSS)

In this "Invisible Universe" proceedings, we introduce the Dark Energy Universe Simulation Series (DEUSS) which aim at investigating the imprints of realistic dark energy models on cosmic structure formation. It represents the largest dynamical dark energy simulation suite to date in term of spatial dynamics. We first present the 3 realistic dark energy models (calibrated on latest SNIa and CMB data): LambdaCDM, quintessence with Ratra-Peebles potential, and quintessence with Sugra potential. We then isolate various contributions for non-linear matter power spectra from a series of pre-DEUSS high-resolution simulations (130 million particles). Finally, we introduce DEUSS which consist in 9 Grand Challenge runs with 1 billion particles each thus probing scales from 4 Gpc down to 3 kpc at z=0. Our goal is to make these simulations available to the community through the "Dark Energy Universe Virtual Observatory" (DEUVO), and the "Dark Energy Universe Simulations" (DEUS) consortium.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the AIP proceedings of the 'Invisible Universe International Conference', UNESCO-Paris, June 29-July 3, 200

Scaling laws for learning high-dimensional Markov forest distributions

The problem of learning forest-structured discrete graphical models from i.i.d. samples is considered. An algorithm based on pruning of the Chow-Liu tree through adaptive thresholding is proposed. It is shown that this algorithm is structurally consistent and the error probability of structure learning decays faster than any polynomial in the number of samples under fixed model size. For the high-dimensional scenario where the size of the model d and the number of edges k scale with the number of samples n, sufficient conditions on (n, d, k) are given for the algorithm to be structurally consistent. In addition, the extremal structures for learning are identified; we prove that the independent (resp. tree) model is the hardest (resp. easiest) to learn using the proposed algorithm in terms of error rates for structure learning.United States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Grant FA9559-08-1- 1080)United States. Army Research Office. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (Grant W911NF-06-1-0076)United States. Army Research Office. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (Grant FA9550-06-1-0324)Singapore. Agency for Science, Technology and Researc