Vulnerabilities and surveillance of the international financial system.

The International Banking and Finance Institute (IBFI) organised its fifth international monetary seminar from 12 to 16 May 2003 on the topic “Vulnerabilities and surveillance of the international financial system”. This seminar brought together 43 participants from the central banks of industrialised and emerging countries as well as from international institutions (BIS, IMF, OECD, FSF, etc.), and around 30 speakers from various central banks, international bodies and the private sector. The first two days were devoted to: – providing an overview of developments in the international environment, markets and the financial system including the insurance sector, which gave rise to a speech by a director at the French Insurance Association; – analysing the vulnerabilities of the banking and financial system, in particular those stemming from changes in market techniques and market participants’ behaviour; – analysing accounting and prudential issues arising from the implementation of the future interna tional solvency ratio and the introduction of the new international financial reporting standards; – examining current ideas on resolving international financial crises, with particular focus on the approach proposed by the Banque de France with a view to fostering a “Code of conduct” for the voluntary renegotiation between sovereign issuers and creditors, as well as the IMF’s point of view on the restructuring of sovereign debt, put forward by Anne Krueger, deputy managing director of the IMF, in a video-conference transmitted live from Washington 1. In the two days that followed, there ensued lively debate between the participants, who formed two workshops: one on the interactions between financial markets and monetary policy, and the other on the provisions of the New Basel Accord and the financial reporting standards and their impact on economic cycles 2. The first workshop was mainly organised around three topics: – central bank communication, in the areas of monetary policy, foreign exchange and financial stability; – methods of identifying vulnerabilities in financial systems; – links between price stability and financial stability. The second workshop focused on three issues: – the new financial reporting standards put forward by the International Accounting Standard Board and their implications for credit institutions, in particular with respect to the principle of prudence and the need to avoid introducing artificial volatility into accounts; – the future solvency ratio applicable to credit institutions as defined in the New Basel Capital Accord; – the convergence or divergence between financial reporting and prudential standards. Although focusing on seemingly different issues, the rich and fruitful discussions that were held throughout the workshops revealed a broad community of views on financial stability issues underlying the two topics examined. Moreover, a dinner-discussion was organised by Pr Avinash Persaud, holder of the Chair in Commerce at Gresham College, on the risks of financial instability arising from the standardisation of asset allocation approaches, herd behaviours and the blind use of portfolio risk management techniques. Discussions ended with a round table debate, introduced by Governor Trichet and chaired by Mr Marc-Olivier Strauss-Kahn, Director General – Directorate General Economics and International Relations. Five speakers discussed the topic of “transparency and market discipline”: – Mr Flemming Larsen, Director of the IMF’s European Offices; – Mr William Witherell, Director of Financial, Fiscal and Enterprise Affairs, OECD; – Mr Michel Prada, former chairman of the COB and of the International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) 3; – Mr Jan Brockmeijer, Deputy Executive Director for Supervision, Nederlandsche Bank; – and Mr Svein Andresen, Secretary General of the FSF, who summed up the discussions. Mr Flemming Larsen discussed the issue of transparency in emerging economies in the light of the international financial crises that marked the past decade. In this respect, he stressed the benefits attached to the adoption and the effective implementation by these economies of the international codes and standards promoted by the IMF and the World Bank. These codes and standards cover twelve key areas that would benefit from the application of the principles and standards developed by international bodies in the area of economic governance and financial regulation, and transparency and corporate governance. The IMF reports on the implementation of these codes and standards provide a good means to enhance transparency, market discipline and multilateral surveillance, while helping national authorities to identify priority actions for improving the resilience of their economy. Mr William Witherell discussed the role of corporate governance rules and financial transparency as a means to guaranteeing the integrity and smooth functioning of financial markets. The challenge that now lies ahead for regulators and government authorities is to develop a legal and regulatory framework that fully integrates these requirements in order to rebuild investor confidence and to ensure the effective use of market discipline. As regards the scope of these requirements, he recalled the set of general principles defined in this context by the OECD. These principles are now embodied in the international standards, whose application is recommended by the FSF for industrialised and emerging economies alike. He also stressed the great importance of the rules of governance and internal control in financial institutions given their role in allocating resources, their responsibilities to investors, and their particular exposure to the risks of conflicts of interest owing to the nature of their activities. Mr Michel Prada 4 first recalled the main areas in which regulators were currently working to restore market foundations and improve the functioning of the market: introducing international financial reporting standards, implementing corporate governance principles, organising and supervising auditors, and lastly defining professional standards for the players in charge of interpreting financial information and transmitting it to investors, analysts and rating agencies. He then discussed the challenges arising from the globalisation and increasingly broad scope of markets, underscoring the implications of the risk transfer techniques currently used by intermediaries and the factors underlying the recent excess volatility of asset prices. These developments call for, above and beyond the close co-ordination between the prudential regulation of intermediaries and market regulation, the stepping up of international cooperation between regulators and a better understanding of market mechanisms in order to counter factors of financial instability. Lastly, Mr Jan Brockmeijer discussed Pillar III (market discipline) in the framework of the new capital adequacy regime for banks defined by the Basel Committee. Going hand in hand with the other two Pillars of the New Basel Capital Accord, Pillar III provides for a number of disclosure requirements that enable market participants and prudential authorities to obtain all the necessary parameters to assess risk profiles and the creditworthiness of credit institutions.

A simple quantum gate with atom chips

We present a simple scheme for implementing an atomic phase gate using two degrees of freedom for each atom and discuss its realization with cold rubidium atoms on atom chips. We investigate the performance of this collisional phase gate and show that gate operations with high fidelity can be realized in magnetic traps that are currently available on atom chips.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures. One missing reference added in v2. To appear in European Physical Journal

Rocket ozone sounding network data

During the period December 1976 through February 1977, three regular monthly ozone profiles were measured at Wallops Flight Center, two special soundings were taken at Antigua, West Indies, and at the Churchill Research Range, monthly activities were initiated to establish stratospheric ozone climatology. This report presents the data results and flight profiles for the period covered

Sensation Seeking and Perceived Need for Structure Moderate Soldiers’ Well-Being Before and After Operational Deployment

This study examined associations between sensation seeking and perceived need for structure, and changes in reported well-being among deployed soldiers. Participants (n = 167) were assessed before and after a six-month deployment to south Afghanistan. Results indicated that although well-being declined in the soldier sample as a whole following deployment, the degree of decrease was significantly different among soldiers with different personality profiles. Differences were moderated by soldiers’ level of sensation seeking and perceived need for structure. Results are discussed in terms of a person-environment fit theory in the context of preparation and rehabilitation of deployed military personnel

Correlations in Bipartite Collaboration Networks

Collaboration networks are studied as an example of growing bipartite networks. These have been previously observed to have structure such as positive correlations between nearest-neighbour degrees. However, a detailed understanding of the origin of this phenomenon and the growth dynamics is lacking. Both of these are analyzed empirically and simulated using various models. A new one is presented, incorporating empirically necessary ingredients such as bipartiteness and sublinear preferential attachment. This, and a recently proposed model of team assembly both agree roughly with some empirical observations and fail in several others.Comment: 13 pages, 17 figures, 2 table, submitted to JSTAT; manuscript reorganized, figures and a table adde

A Memory Bandwidth-Efficient Hybrid Radix Sort on GPUs

Sorting is at the core of many database operations, such as index creation, sort-merge joins, and user-requested output sorting. As GPUs are emerging as a promising platform to accelerate various operations, sorting on GPUs becomes a viable endeavour. Over the past few years, several improvements have been proposed for sorting on GPUs, leading to the first radix sort implementations that achieve a sorting rate of over one billion 32-bit keys per second. Yet, state-of-the-art approaches are heavily memory bandwidth-bound, as they require substantially more memory transfers than their CPU-based counterparts. Our work proposes a novel approach that almost halves the amount of memory transfers and, therefore, considerably lifts the memory bandwidth limitation. Being able to sort two gigabytes of eight-byte records in as little as 50 milliseconds, our approach achieves a 2.32-fold improvement over the state-of-the-art GPU-based radix sort for uniform distributions, sustaining a minimum speed-up of no less than a factor of 1.66 for skewed distributions. To address inputs that either do not reside on the GPU or exceed the available device memory, we build on our efficient GPU sorting approach with a pipelined heterogeneous sorting algorithm that mitigates the overhead associated with PCIe data transfers. Comparing the end-to-end sorting performance to the state-of-the-art CPU-based radix sort running 16 threads, our heterogeneous approach achieves a 2.06-fold and a 1.53-fold improvement for sorting 64 GB key-value pairs with a skewed and a uniform distribution, respectively.Comment: 16 pages, accepted at SIGMOD 201

Assessment and diagnosis of Developmental Language Disorder: The experiences of speech and language therapists

© The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).Background: For many years research and practice have noted the impact of the heterogeneous nature of Developmental Language Disorder (also known as language impairment or specific language impairment) on diagnosis and assessment. Recent research suggests the disorder is not restricted to the language domain and against this background, the challenge for the practitioner is to provide accurate assessment and effective therapy. The language practitioner aims to support the child and their carers to achieve the best outcomes. However, little is known about the experiences of the language practitioner in the assessment process, in contrast to other childhood disorders, yet their expertise is central in the assessment and diagnosis of children with language disorder. Aims: This study aimed to provide a detailed qualitative description of the experiences of speech and language therapists involved in the assessment and diagnosis of children with Developmental Language Disorder. Methods & Procedures: The qualitative study included three focus groups to provide a credible and rich description of the experiences of speech and language therapists involved in the assessment of Developmental Language Disorder. The speech and language therapists who participated in the study were recruited from three NHS Trusts across the UK and all were directly involved in the assessment and diagnosis procedures. The lengths of practitioner experience ranged from 2 years to 38 years. The data was analysed using a thematic analysis in accordance with the principles set out by Braun & Clarke (2006). Outcomes & Results: The data showed a number of key themes concerning the experiences of speech and language therapists in assessing children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). These themes ranged from the participants’ experiences of the barriers to early referral, challenges for assessment and the concerns over continued future support. Conclusions & Implications: This study provides first-hand evidence from speech and language therapists in the assessment of children with Developmental Language Disorder, drawing together experiences from language practitioners from different regions. The findings provide insight to the barriers to referral, the potential variations in the assessment process, the role of practitioner expertise and the challenges faced them. The importance of early intervention, useful assessment tools and future support were expressed. Taken together, the results relate to some issues to be addressed on a practical level and a continuing need for initiatives to raise awareness of DLD in the public domain.Peer reviewe