Common business and housing market cycles in the Euro area from a multivariate decomposition.

The 2007 sub-prime crisis in the United States, prolonged by a severe economic recession spread over many countries around the world, has led many economic researchers to focus on the recent fluctuations in housing prices and their relationships with macroeconomics and monetary policies. The existence of common housing cycles among the countries of the euro zone could lead the European Central Bank to integrate more specifically the evolution of such asset prices in its assessment. In this paper, we implement a multivariate unobserved component model on housing market variables in order to assess the common euro area housing cycle and to evaluate its relationship with the economic cycle. Among the general class of multivariate unobserved component models, we implement the band-pass filter based on the trend plus cycle decomposition model and we allow the existence of two cycles of different periods. The dataset consists of gross domestic product and real house prices series for four main euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). Empirical results show a strong relationship for business cycles in France, Italy and Spain. Moreover, French and Spanish house prices cycles appear to be strongly related, while the German one possesses its own dynamics. Finally, we find that GDP and house prices cycles are related in the medium-term for fluctuations between 4 and 8 years, while the housing market contributes to the long-term economic growth only in Spain and Germany.House prices, Business cycles, Euro area, Unobserved components model.

A Critical Review of "Automatic Patch Generation Learned from Human-Written Patches": Essay on the Problem Statement and the Evaluation of Automatic Software Repair

At ICSE'2013, there was the first session ever dedicated to automatic program repair. In this session, Kim et al. presented PAR, a novel template-based approach for fixing Java bugs. We strongly disagree with key points of this paper. Our critical review has two goals. First, we aim at explaining why we disagree with Kim and colleagues and why the reasons behind this disagreement are important for research on automatic software repair in general. Second, we aim at contributing to the field with a clarification of the essential ideas behind automatic software repair. In particular we discuss the main evaluation criteria of automatic software repair: understandability, correctness and completeness. We show that depending on how one sets up the repair scenario, the evaluation goals may be contradictory. Eventually, we discuss the nature of fix acceptability and its relation to the notion of software correctness.Comment: ICSE 2014, India (2014

An Implementation Process for Complementary Therapy Pain Interventions in a Transitional Care Setting

Background: A Minnesota Metro Area transitional care facility reported higher-than-average moderate-to-severe pain scores. Objective: This interprofessional, evidence-based project purpose was to develop a sustainable implementation process for patient pain management using complementary therapy interventions. Methods: The National Implementation Research Network (NIRN) implementation drivers guided the three-phase project: 1) a stakeholder analysis, 2) staff and leader education and 3) initial implementation. Results: Stakeholder analysis data were triangulated to identify themes about staff and leader perspectives on implementation. The staff education module, using findings from the stakeholder analysis, demonstrated a significant (z = 82, p = 0.009, n = 22) change in staff and leader pre-post knowledge scores. The project created multiple products to support initial implementation and sustainability of the complementary therapy pain interventions. Conclusions: A stakeholder analysis is an essential implementation process for positive change. Knowledge increased following an educational intervention developed from themes emerging from the stakeholder analysis. The NIRN framework served as the foundation for initial implementation and sustainability of the complementary therapy interventions. Nursing Implications: Using the NIRN framework promoted positive nurse-led change. Engaging all stakeholders, along with leadership support, is essential in the process and sustainability of practice change