What Effect Do Rumors Have on Publicly Traded Sports Teams?

This paper explores the effects of rumors on stock prices. It targets publicly traded soccer teams to see what impact rumors of players transferring, in and out of teams, has on their respective stock returns. A total of 56 rumors are being used in the analysis. An event study is conducted around the dates of each transfer rumor in order to examine what types of abnormalities exist in the returns of the stock. To further investigate this study, a cross sectional analysis is being performed to see whether player reputation, player status, and future validity of the rumors had more of an effect on the stock’s returns. My statistical analysis indicates that abnormal market returns occur with strong statistical significance between 3 and 1 day before the publication of the transfer rumors in the sample. Univariate tests show no statistical significance in any of the cross sectional analyses performed. A regression controlling for each factor, in addition to the team’s ranking, also showed no statistical significance. Market value, used as a control variable for a player’s popularity in the regression analysis, was found to have a statistically significant relationship with abnormal returns

Broadband network traffic modeling, management and fast simulation based on Ã-stable self-similar processes

grantor: University of TorontoWe propose a new model for network heavy-traffic approximation) based on Ã-Stable self-similar processes, namely the skewed Linear Fractional Stable Noise. The model is long-range dependent and demonstrates more flexibility than existing models in fitting different levels of burstiness and dependence in the data. Nonetheless, it is parsimonious in the number of parameters, which have a direct physical meaning. The marginal distribution of the model is Ã-Stable, and therefore the Generalized Central Limit Theorem can be applied to provide a physical interpretation on how aggregate effects in traffic appear as a superposition of traffic from independent sources. We present an algorithm for the estimation of the model parameters, which is based on properties of the Totally Skewed Ã-Stable distribution. We investigate the implications of our proposed modeling on the estimation of bandwidth allocation and admission control of bursty, long-range dependent sources. Analytic formulas for the overflow probability bounds of a constant service rate buffer are derived, and they are used to provide bounds of the required bandwidth allocation of Ã-Stable self-similar sources, for which the general theory of effective bandwidths does not apply. Extensive simulations are presented, where the new model is fitted to bursty Ethernet and variable-bit-rate video data. Furthermore, new measurements of aggregate web and web-casting traffic are introduced along with traffic generated by the fitted new model. Queueing simulations with real traffic support our analytical results for the overflow probability. The expression of the upper bandwidth allocation bound is simple and allows quick computation of admissible regions for multiplexed homogeneous or heterogeneous sources entering the network. Our analytical results for the equivalent rate bounds are verified with extended simulation studies with real and model generated traffic. In the context of predicting rare events, such as cell losses in networks, more efficiently, we present a new method for fast simulation of rare events which follow an Ã-Stable distribution. The proposed method provides considerable reduction in the number of samples required for accurate estimation, compared to a Monte-Carlo simulation. Furthermore, the variance of the estimator can be three orders of magnitude smaller than the traditional Mean-Translation method in the Importance Sampling framework.Ph.D

A Filter Design Technique For Steerable Pyramid Image Transforms

We describe a novel recursive filter design technique for multi-scale "pyramid" transforms. The recursion in the design technique follows that of the pyramid construction, and allows us to solve a reduced design problem at each step. We demonstrate the use of this technique by designing filters of various orientation bandwidths for use in a "steerable pyramid" image transform

Automotive product development Component suppliers

URN 96/937Available from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:GPE/0053 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Structural health monitoring of smart structures

10.1088/0964-1726/11/4/314Smart Materials and Structures114581-589SMST