Welfare Costs, Long Run Consumption Risk, and a Production Economy.

The main goal of this paper is to measure the welfare costs of business cycles in a production economy in which the representative agent has low risk aversion and - at the same time - the equity premium and the co-movements of aggregate quantities and market returns are comparable to what observed in historical data. In order to do so, I consider a production economy in which the representative agent has Epstein-Zin-Weil(1989) preferences, productivity has a Long Run Risk component and there are capital adjustment costs. In this way, I try to bridge the gap between the current Long Run Risk asset pricing literature, in which quantities are taken as exogenous, and the standard macroeconomic business cycle models. Preliminary results from a benchmark exchange economy suggest that when there is a Long Run Consumption Risk and the representative agent prefers early resolution of uncertainty, the implied total welfare costs of the consumption uncertainty range from 12\% to 20\%. (JEL classification: E20, E32, G12, D81)Production Economy, Long-Run Risk, Asset Pricing,

Systematic numerical investigation of the role of hierarchy in heterogeneous bio-inspired materials

It is well known that hierarchical structure is an important feature in biological materials to optimise various properties, including mechanical ones. It is however still unclear how these hierarchical architectures can improve material characteristics, for example strength. Also, the transposition of these structures from natural to artificial bioinspired materials remains to be perfected. In this paper, we introduce a numerical method to evaluate the strength of fibre-based heterogeneous biological materials and systematically investigate the role of hierarchy. Results show that hierarchy indeed plays an important role and that it is possible to “tune” the strength of bio-inspired materials in a wide range of values, in some cases improving the strength of non-hierarchical structures considerably

Ontology-based explanation of classifiers

The rise of data mining and machine learning use in many applications has brought new challenges related to classification. Here, we deal with the following challenge: how to interpret and understand the reason behind a classifier's prediction. Indeed, understanding the behaviour of a classifier is widely recognized as a very important task for wide and safe adoption of machine learning and data mining technologies, especially in high-risk domains, and in dealing with bias.We present a preliminary work on a proposal of using the Ontology-Based Data Management paradigm for explaining the behavior of a classifier in terms of the concepts and the relations that are meaningful in the domain that is relevant for the classifier

Optimum Placement of Post-1PN GW Chirp Templates Made Simple at any Match Level via Tanaka-Tagoshi Coordinates

A simple recipe is given for constructing a maximally sparse regular lattice of spin-free post-1PN gravitational wave chirp templates subject to a given minimal match constraint, using Tanaka-Tagoshi coordinates.Comment: submitted to Phys. Rev.

Tanaka-Tagoshi Parametrization of post-1PN Spin-Free Gravitational Wave Chirps: Equispaced and Cardinal Interpolated Lattices For First Generation Interferometric Antennas

The spin-free binary-inspiral parameter-space introduced by Tanaka and Tagoshi to construct a uniformly-spaced lattice of templates at (and possibly beyond) $2.5PN$ order is shown to work for all first generation interferometric gravitational wave antennas. This allows to extend the minimum-redundant cardinal interpolation techniques of the correlator bank developed by the Authors to the highest available order PN templates. The total number of 2PN templates to be computed for a minimal match $\Gamma=0.97$ is reduced by a factor 4, as in the 1PN case.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Investor Information, Long-Run Risk, and the Term Structure of Equity

We study the role of information in asset pricing models with long-run cash flow risk. When investors can distinguish short- from long-run consumption risks (full information), the model generates a sizable equity risk premium only if the equity term structure slopes up, contrary to the data. In general, the short- and long-run components are unidentified. We propose a sparsity-based bounded rationality model of long-run risk that is both parsimonious and fully identified from historical data. In contrast to full information, the model generates a sizable market risk premium simultaneously with a downward sloping equity term structure, as in the data.

Robust Gravitational Wave Burst Detection and Source Localization in a Network of Interferometers Using Cross Wigner Spectra

We discuss a fast cross-Wigner transform based technique for detecting gravitational wave bursts, and estimating the direction of arrival, using a network of (three) non co-located interferometric detectors. The performances of the detector as a function of signal strength and source location, and the accuracy of the direction of arrival estimation are investigated by numerical simulations.Comment: accepted in Class. Quantum Gravit

Rejection Properties of Stochastic-Resonance-Based Detectors of Weak Harmonic Signals

In (V. Galdi et al., Phys. Rev. E57, 6470, 1998) a thorough characterization in terms of receiver operating characteristics (ROCs) of stochastic-resonance (SR) detectors of weak harmonic signals of known frequency in additive gaussian noise was given. It was shown that strobed sign-counting based strategies can be used to achieve a nice trade-off between performance and cost, by comparison with non-coherent correlators. Here we discuss the more realistic case where besides the sought signal (whose frequency is assumed known) further unwanted spectrally nearby signals with comparable amplitude are present. Rejection properties are discussed in terms of suitably defined false-alarm and false-dismissal probabilities for various values of interfering signal(s) strength and spectral separation.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. Misprints corrected. PACS numbers added. RevTeX

Heat Transfer Correlations for compressible flow in Micro Heat Exchangers

The paper discusses the definition of dimensionless parameters useful to define a local correlation for convective heat transfer in compressible, micro scale gaseous flows. A combination of static and stagnation temperatures is chosen, as it allows to weight the temperature change related to the heat transfer and that induced by conversion of internal energy into kinetic one. The correlation offers a purely convective local Nusselt number, i.e. correlating the heat flow rate with the local flow parameters and wall surface temperature. The correlation is validated through a series of numerical computations in both counter-current and co-current micro heat exchanger configurations. The numerical computations take into account rarefaction and conjugate heat transfer effects

Validating a method for the estimate of gait spatio-temporal parameters with IMUs data on healthy and impaired people from two clinical centers

Instrumented gait analysis offers objective clinical outcome assessment. To this purpose, inertial measurement units (IMUs) represent nowadays a very effective solution due to their limited cost, ease of use and improved wearability. The aim of this study was to apply a well-documented IMU-based method to measure gait spatio-temporal parameters in a large number of healthy and gait-impaired subjects, and evaluate its robustness and validity across two clinical centers. Overall, the results of this work represent a robust and reliable foundation for the clinical use of the proposed IMU based method for gait parameters estimation