Survey and scoping of wildcat priority areas

This report summarises the findings of three complementary projects commissioned by SNH to inform the selection of Priority Areas for wildcat conservation; as proposed in the Scottish Wildcat Conservation Action Plan 2013. The scoping projects combined field surveys, taxonomic and genetic assessments, population modelling and a questionnaire survey of public attitudes to wildcat conservation measures. The report makes a recommendations for six wildcat Priority Areas from the nine areas pre-selected by SNH for survey. The sites recommended as Priority Areas all had evidence of cats that were classified as wildcats based on their appearance. However, domestic cats or hybrids (between domestic cats and wildcats) were also found, highlighting the need for conservation actions to reduce the risks they pose to wildcats from hybridisation and disease

Collateral Quality and Loan Default Risk: The Case of Vietnam

In the transition economy of Vietnam, financial market is dominated by banking sector but commercial banks heavily rely on collateral-based lending. While the relationship between collateral and implied credit risk is still in debate, this paper provides additional empirical evidence regarding the heterogeneous effects and transmission channels of collateral characteristics on loan delinquency. Applying instrumental variable probit analysis on a unique dataset of 2295 internal loan accounts in Vietnam, we find the significantly negative impact of collateral quality on the probability of default of consumer loans, supporting the dominance of borrower selection and risk-shifting over lender selection effects. The finding implies that high-quality collateral not only signals more credible borrower but also fosters good behavior in using loan, enabling bank to mitigate adverse selection and moral hazard problems

Two-Way Quantum Time Transfer: A Method for Daytime Space-Earth Links

Remote clock synchronization is crucial for many classical and quantum network applications. Current state-of-the-art remote clock synchronization techniques achieve femtosecond-scale clock stability utilizing frequency combs, which are supplementary to quantum-networking hardware. Demonstrating an alternative, we synchronize two remote clocks across our freespace testbed using a method called two-way quantum time transfer (QTT). In one second we reach picosecond-scale timing precision under very lossy and noisy channel conditions representative of daytime space-Earth links with commercial off-the-shelf quantum-photon sources and detection equipment. This work demonstrates how QTT is potentially relevant for daytime space-Earth quantum networking and/or providing high-precision secure timing in GPS-denied environments.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2211.0073