Financial Statements Insurance

The largest corporate bankruptcy filed in the U.S., that of Enron in 2001, was preceded by a string of disclosures about errors in and corrections to their financial statements. The presence of such errors creates uncertainty about the quality of the financial statements, can lead to pricing distortions, and inefficient market allocations. Several causes have been suggested for the current state of affairs. Most important, perhaps, are managers' tendency to inflate stock prices for personal gain through deceit, "cooking the Books" - misrepresentations in financial reporting - and other unethical behavioral practices, and auditors' failure to fulfill their role as independent gatekeepers. Currently, the incentives driving auditors' behavior may not elicit unbiased reports. Auditors are paid by the companies they audit which creates an inherent conflict of interest that is endemic to the relation between the firm (the principal) and the auditor (the agent). Unfortunately, remedying these problems is not simple. Prosecution and punishment may not adequately deter wrongdoing, as intentional misrepresentation is difficult to discover or prove. Overhauling the regulatory structure and adding layers of supervision and monitoring by the government would be inefficient and socially wasteful. In addition, little can be done in the short run to cultivate ethical personalities. Rather, the solution lies in market mechanisms that eliminate the perverse incentives of gatekeepers, most notably the auditors. We present a financial statement insurance institutional mechanism that eliminates the conflict of interest auditors face and properly aligns their incentives with those of shareholders. We show analytically that the introduction of financial statement insurance can significantly mitigate market inefficiencies arising from uncertainty regarding the quality of financial statements. The basic structure of Financial Statement Insurance (FSI) can be described as follows. Instead of appointing and paying auditors, companies would purchase financial statement insurance that provides coverage to investors against losses suffered as a result of misrepresentation in financial reports. The insurance coverage that the companies are able to obtain is publicized, as are the premiums paid for that coverage. The insurance carriers would then appoint and pay the auditors who attest to the accuracy of the financial statements of the prospective insurance clients. Those firms announcing higher limits of coverage and smaller premiums would distinguish themselves in the eyes of the investors as companies with higher quality financial statements. In contrast, those with smaller or no coverage or higher premiums will reveal themselves as those with lower quality financial statements. Every company will be eager to get higher coverage and pay smaller premiums lest it be identified as the latter. A sort of Gresham's law in reverse would be set in operation, resulting in a flight to quality

Feasibility of an Automatic Truck Warning System

DTFH61-91-R-00069One of the identified truck accident types that occur on curved exit ramps at interchanges is truck rollover. A truck will overturn or rollover if the lateral acceleration imposed upon it as it travels around a curve of a certain radius and superelevation is greater than allowable given its loading condition. Also, there is a speed at which rollover will occur. This report deals with an automatic warning system to prevent truck rollover. Within the study, three different options were identified and evaluated for feasibility. Of the three, the option selected for further definition and cost-effectiveness analyses was an inroad detection/warning system. The system consists of two detection stations upstream of the curve with the combined ability to detect a truck speed, weight, and height threshold. The warning system is a combination of a static warning sign and a fiber-optic warning message sign, which would be activated if the controller determined that the truck would be operating at the rollover threshold speed or faster by the time it reached the point of curvature. This report provides the details of the design, its costs, and its cost-effectiveness. Also, design plans and specifications were prepared for three installations on the Capital Beltway in Maryland and Virginia

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Optimization framework for patient-specific modeling under uncertainty

Estimating a patient-specific computational model's parameters relies on data that is often unreliable and ill-suited for a deterministic approach. We develop an optimization-based uncertainty quantification framework for probabilistic model tuning that discovers model inputs distributions that generate target output distributions. Probabilistic sampling is performed using a surrogate model for computational efficiency, and a general distribution parameterization is used to describe each input. The approach is tested on seven patient-specific modeling examples using CircAdapt, a cardiovascular circulatory model. Six examples are synthetic, aiming to match the output distributions generated using known reference input data distributions, while the seventh example uses real-world patient data for the output distributions. Our results demonstrate the accurate reproduction of the target output distributions, with a correct recreation of the reference inputs for the six synthetic examples. Our proposed approach is suitable for determining the parameter distributions of patient-specific models with uncertain data and can be used to gain insights into the sensitivity of the model parameters to the measured data.This article is published as Mineroff, Joshua, Balaji Sesha Sarath Pokuri, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, and Adarsh Krishnamurthy. "Optimization Framework for Patient‐Specific Modeling Under Uncertainty." International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering 39, no. 2 (2023): e3665. DOI: 10.1002/cnm.3665. Copyright 2022 The Authors. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). Posted with permission

Study designs for passing sight distance requirements. Final report.

Federal Highway Administration, Office of Safety and Traffic Operations Research and Development, McLean, Va.Mode of access: Internet.Author corporate affiliation: Bellomo-McGee, Inc., Vienna, Va.Report covers the period Oct 1990-Sept 1991Subject code: CCJSubject code: CGDSubject code: GHESubject code: RCBDLSubject code: WOB*CSubject code: YE

Influence of Impaired Diffusing Capacity and Sleep-disordered Breathing on Nocturnal Hypoxemia and Health Outcomes in Men with and without HIV

RATIONALENocturnal hypoxemia is common in sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) and is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Although impaired diffusing capacity of the lungs for carbon monoxide (DLCO) is associated with daytime hypoxemia, its influence on SDB-related nocturnal hypoxemia is not known.OBJECTIVETo characterize the effects of DLCO impairment on SDB-related nocturnal hypoxemia and associated health outcomes.METHODSData from a multi-center cohort of men with and without HIV, with concomitant measures of DLCO and home-based polysomnography (N=544), were analyzed. Multivariable quantile regression models characterized associations between DLCO and several measures of SDB-related hypoxemia (e.g., total sleep time with oxygen saturation [SpO2]<90% [T90]). Structural equation models assessed associations between impaired DLCO and SDB-related hypoxemia measures with prevalent hypertension and type 2 diabetes.RESULTSDLCO impairment (<80% predicted) was associated with sleep-related hypoxemia. Participants with severe SDB (apnea-hypopnea index≥30 events/hr) and impaired DLCO had a higher T90 (median difference: 15.0%; [95% CI: 10.3,19.7]) and average SDB-related desaturation (median difference: 1.0; [0.5, 1.5]), and lower nadir SpO2 (median difference: -8.2%; [-11.4, -4.9]) and average SpO2 during sleep (median difference: -1.1%; [-2.1, -0.01]), than those with severe SDB and preserved DLCO. A higher T90 was associated with higher adjusted odds of prevalent hypertension (OR 1.39; [1.14,1.70]) and type 2 diabetes (OR 1.25; [1.07,1.46]).CONCLUSIONSDLCO impairment in severe SDB was associated with sleep-related hypoxemia, prevalent hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Assessment of SDB should be considered in those with impaired DLCO to guide testing and risk-stratification strategies