Long-Range Dependence in Daily Interest Rate

We employ a number of parametric and non-parametric techniques to establish the existence of long-range dependence in daily interbank o er rates for four countries. We test for long memory using classical R=S analysis, variance-time plots and Lo's (1991) modi ed R=S statistic. In addition we estimate the fractional di erencing parameter using Whittle's (1951) maximum likelihood estimator and we shu e the data to destroy long and short memory in turn, and we repeat our non-parametric tests. From our non-parametric tests we And strong evidence of the presence of long memory in all four series independently of the chosen statistic. We nd evidence that supports the assertion of Willinger et al (1999) that Lo's statistic is biased towards non-rejection of the null hypothesis of no long-range dependence. The parametric estimation concurs with these results. Our results suggest that conventional tests for capital market integration and other similar hypotheses involving nominal interest rates should be treated with cautio

Most UK scientists who publish extremely highly-cited papers do not secure funding from major public and charity funders: A descriptive analysis

The UK is one of the largest funders of health research in the world, but little is known about how health funding is spent. Our study explores whether major UK public and charitable health research funders support the research of UK-based scientists producing the most highly-cited research. To address this question, we searched for UK-based authors of peer-reviewed papers that were published between January 2006 and February 2018 and received over 1000 citations in Scopus. We explored whether these authors have held a grant from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Wellcome Trust and compared the results with UK-based researchers who serve currently on the boards of these bodies. From the 1,370 papers relevant to medical, biomedical, life and health sciences with more than 1000 citations in the period examined, we identified 223 individuals from a UK institution at the time of publication who were either first/last or single authors. Of those, 164 are still in UK academic institutions, while 59 are not currently in UK academia (have left the country, are retired, or work in other sectors). Of the 164 individuals, only 59 (36%; 95% CI: 29-43%) currently hold an active grant from one of the three funders. Only 79 (48%; 95% CI: 41-56%) have held an active grant from any of the three funders between 2006-2017. Conversely, 457 of the 664 board members of MRC, Wellcome Trust, and NIHR (69%; 95% CI: 65-72%) have held an active grant in the same period by any of these funders. Only 7 out of 655 board members (1.1%) were first, last or single authors of an extremely highly-cited paper. There are many reasons why the majority of the most influential UK authors do not hold a grant from the country’s major public and charitable funding bodies. Nevertheless, the results are worrisome and subscribe to similar patterns shown in the US. We discuss possible implications and suggest ways forward

Functional Quality Assurance- A Cx Method for Innovative Systems

Cover Sheet and PowerPointLately accomplished operation analysis in many buildings revealed an energy saving potential of 5 to 20 percent. Not only buildings that are in operation for many years are affected, also just recently completed buildings do not always meet the design requirements. HVAC systems are often not well dimensioned or lag behind a better possible performance because of insufficient adjustment and calibration. Due to changes in needs and use during occupancy the performance loss may continually proceed. Like in other fields of engineering also in building services a quality assurance is the key to success. Because of its primal reference to the function of involved systems the presented approach is called Functional Quality Assurance (FQA). The FQA method is widely based on the Cx process. But FQA not only projects and adapts the commissioning idea onto German circumstances, it also consequently extends its influence on the design and the operation of a building. For the common German project schedule FQA is described as a new integrative task across all building trades. FQA is put into practice by the FQA manager – a new role in the project with special focus on functional aspects. FQA expands to all project phases from early design start to construction and finally to building operation. The FQA process is enhanced by the integration of simulation software and newly developed visualization tools for graphic operation patterns and BMS data. During design FQA acts as an operation prognostic method that serves to dimension systems properly and to formulate functional and other specific requirements in tender documents for involving building services contractors into a complete FQA context. During construction FQA attends the testing and balancing phase (TAB) and applies the cognitions of operation prognostics in a first step of diagnostics for the verification and evaluation of system performance with functionality specs in the regular acceptance phase. To achieve the best performance output and sustainability in complex and innovative systems an additional FQA TAB phase starting with occupancy is introduced. Due to dynamic performance tests the parameter settings and system efficiency are optimized for matching the climatic conditions of a whole year and real occupancy load conditions. The FQA TAB is the second step of operation diagnostic process and leads to the final FQA acceptance for selected building services. FQA does not end with occupancy or system acceptance. It is transferred into the ongoing building operation by applying proactive and periodic FQA activities. This will contribute to a sustainable preservation of an optimum of technical equipment performance in terms of better occupants comfort, energy efficiency and higher plant availability with less technical failures and lower operation costs. FQA was developed and described in 2007/2008 as part of the German R&D project OASE II performed by Ebert-Ingenieure and Makon. OASE and OASE II were funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. OASE was also participating in the Annex 40 and 47, both covered by the International Energy Agency (IEA). The presentation shows the methodology of FQA and comments on the schedule, tasks, applied tools and benefits

Pattern-driven security, privacy, dependability and interoperability management of iot environments

Achieving Security, Privacy, Dependability and Interoperability (SPDI) is of paramount importance for the ubiquitous deployment and impact maximization of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Nevertheless, said requirements are not only difficult to achieve at system initialization, but also hard to prove and maintain at run-time. This paper highlights an approach to tackling the above challenges, through the definition of pattern language and a framework that can guarantee SPDI in IoT orchestrations. By integrating pattern reasoning engines at the various layers of the IoT infrastructure, and a machine-processable representation of said pattern through Drools rules, the proposed framework can provide ways to fulfill SPDI requirements at design time, and also provide the means to guarantee those SPDI properties and manage the orchestrations accordingly. Moreover, an application example of the framework is presented in an Industrial IoT monitoring environment

Kepler-210: An active star with at least two planets

We report the detection and characterization of two short-period, Neptune-sized planets around the active host star Kepler-210. The host star's parameters derived from those planets are (a) mutually inconsistent and (b) do not conform to the expected host star parameters. We furthermore report the detection of transit timing variations (TTVs) in the O-C diagrams for both planets. We explore various scenarios that explain and resolve those discrepancies. A simple scenario consistent with all data appears to be one that attributes substantial eccentricities to the inner short-period planets and that interprets the TTVs as due to the action of another, somewhat longer period planet. To substantiate our suggestions, we present the results of N-body simulations that modeled the TTVs and that checked the stability of the Kepler-210 system.Comment: 8 pages, 8 Encapsulated Postscript figure

Sampling-Based Query Re-Optimization

Despite of decades of work, query optimizers still make mistakes on "difficult" queries because of bad cardinality estimates, often due to the interaction of multiple predicates and correlations in the data. In this paper, we propose a low-cost post-processing step that can take a plan produced by the optimizer, detect when it is likely to have made such a mistake, and take steps to fix it. Specifically, our solution is a sampling-based iterative procedure that requires almost no changes to the original query optimizer or query evaluation mechanism of the system. We show that this indeed imposes low overhead and catches cases where three widely used optimizers (PostgreSQL and two commercial systems) make large errors.Comment: This is the extended version of a paper with the same title and authors that appears in the Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2016

Notes on the Implementation of a Remote Fork Mechanism

We describe a method for implementing a remote fork, a primitive with the semantics of a UNIX fork() call which begins the execution of the child process on a remote machine. We begin by examining the subject of process migration, and conclude that most of the relevant process state can be captured and transferred to a remote system without operating system support. We then show how our implementation is easily optimized to achieve a performance improvement of greater than 10 times when measuring execution time. We conclude with some comments on limitations and applications of the remote fork mechanism

Design and Implementation of Virtual Private Services

Large scale distributed applications such as electronic commerce and online marketplaces combine network access with multiple storage and computational elements. The distributed responsibility for resource control creates new security and privacy issues, which are exacerbated by the complexity of the operating environment. In order to handle policies at multiple locations, the usual tools available (firewalls and compartmented file storage) get to be used in ways that are clumsy and prone to failure. We propose a new approach, virtual private services. Our approach relies on two functional divisions. First, we split policy specification and policy enforcement, providing local autonomy within the constraints of the global security policy. Second, we create virtual security domains, each with its own security policy. Every domain has an associated set of privileges and permissions restricting it to the resources it needs to use and the services it must perform. Virtual private services ensure security and privacy policies are adhered to through coordinated policy enforcement points. We describe our architecture and a prototype implementation, and present a preliminary performance evaluation confirming that our overhead of policy enforcement using is small

Sub-Operating Systems: A New Approach to Application Security

In the current highly interconnected computing environments, users regularly use insecure software. Many popular applications, such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Word, are targeted by hostile applets or malicious documents, and might therefore compromise the integrity of the system. Current operating systems are unable to protect their users from these kinds of attacks, since the hostile software is running with the user\u27s privileges and permissions. We introduce the notion of the SubOS, a process-specific protection mechanism. Under SubOS, any application that might deal with incoming, possibly malicious objects, behaves like an operating system. It views those objects the same way an operating system views users - it assigns sub-user id\u27s - and restricts their accesses to the system resources