Depositors as a Source of Market Discipline

The failure of many savings and loan institutions in the 1980s bankrupted the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), forcing the FSLIC to rely on massive federal subsidies. A similar crisis subsequently struck the banking system, and it now appears that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) will also go bankrupt and require taxpayer subsidies. The vast expense of these bailouts has focused the attention of policymakers and the public on reducing the risk exposure of the federal deposit insurance system. In response to this crisis, the U.S. Treasury issued a report in 1991 in which it made specific proposals for reforming deposit insurance. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 (FDICIA) incorporated some of the Treasury Department\u27s proposals. One controversial element of the FDICIA is a plan for reforming the deposit insurance system by shifting some of the risk of bank failures from the federal insurance fund to depositors themselves. This proposal rests on the premise that depositors who bear some of the risk of bank failure are likely to discipline weak institutions by threatening to withdraw their deposits. In this Article, Professor Mantripragada discusses the costs and benefits of depositor discipline and assesses the Treasury proposals and FDICIA provisions that are designed to promote depositor discipline. The author suggests that a maturity-based coverage limit would be preferable to the dollar-based limit retained by the Act

SpACNN-LDVAE: Spatial Attention Convolutional Latent Dirichlet Variational Autoencoder for Hyperspectral Pixel Unmixing

The Hyperspectral Unxming problem is to find the pure spectral signal of the underlying materials (endmembers) and their proportions (abundances). The proposed method builds upon the recently proposed method, Latent Dirichlet Variational Autoencoder (LDVAE). It assumes that abundances can be encoded as Dirichlet Distributions while mixed pixels and endmembers are represented by Multivariate Normal Distributions. However, LDVAE does not leverage spatial information present in an HSI; we propose an Isotropic CNN encoder with spatial attention to solve the hyperspectral unmixing problem. We evaluated our model on Samson, Hydice Urban, Cuprite, and OnTech-HSI-Syn-21 datasets. Our model also leverages the transfer learning paradigm for Cuprite Dataset, where we train the model on synthetic data and evaluate it on real-world data. We are able to observe the improvement in the results for the endmember extraction and abundance estimation by incorporating the spatial information. Code can be found at https://github.com/faisalqureshi/cnn-ldva

A computer vision system for biological specimen image analysis.

Dept. of Mechanical, Automotive, and Materials Engineering. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis1988 .M358. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 40-07, page: . Thesis (M.A.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1988

Interaction of membrane-spanning proteins with peripheral and lipid-anchored membrane proteins: perspectives from protein- lipid interactions (Review)

Studies of lipid-protein interactions in double-reconstituted systems involving both integral and peripheral or lipid- anchored proteins are reviewed. Membranes of climyristoyl phosphatidylglycerol containing either myelin proteolipid protein or cytochrome c oxidase were studied. The partner peripheral proteins bound to these membranes were myelin basic protein or cytochrome c, respectively. In addition, the interactions between the myelin proteolipid protein and avidin that was membrane-anchored by binding to N-biotinyl phosphatidylethanolamine were studied in dimyristoyl phosphatidylcholine membranes. Steric exclusion plays a significant role when sizes of the peripheral protein and transmembrane domain of the integral protein are comparable. Even so, the effects on avidin-linked lipids are different from those induced by myelin basic protein on freely diffusible lipids, both interacting with the myelin proteolipid protein. Both the former and the cytochrome c/cytochrome oxidase couple evidence a propagation of lipid perturbation out from the intramembrane protein interface that could be a basis for formation of microdomains

Simultaneous Quantification of Paracetamol and Meloxicam in Tablets by High Performance Liquid Chromatography

Purpose: To develop and validate a simple, rapid and inexpensive RP-HPLC method for the simultaneous estimation of paracetamol and meloxicam in tablets.Methods: For the analysis of the drugs, chromatographic analysis was performed on XTerra symmetry C18 column (100 × 4.6 mm, 5 μ particle size) with mobile phase consisting of methanol and phosphate buffer (pH 9.2) in the ratio of 50:50 v/v, at a flow rate of 0.8 mL/min and eluents monitored at 244 nm. The method was validated for linearity, accuracy, precision, robustness and application for assay as per International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) guidelines.Results: The retention times of paracetamol and meloxicam were 2.467 and 4.971 min, respectively. The calibration curves of peak area versus concentration, which was linear from 5 - 60 μg/mL for paracetamol and 1 - 12 μg/mL for meloxicam, had regression coefficient (r2) greater than 0.999. The method had the requisite accuracy, precision, and robustness for simultaneous determination of paracetamol and meloxicam in tablets.Conclusion: The proposed method is simple, low-cost, accurate, precise and can be successfully employed in routine quality control for the simultaneous analysis of paracetamol and meloxicam in tablets.Keywords: Paracetamol, Meloxicam, RP-HPLC, Simultaneous analysis, Tablet

AcTExplore: Active Tactile Exploration on Unknown Objects

Tactile exploration plays a crucial role in understanding object structures for fundamental robotics tasks such as grasping and manipulation. However, efficiently exploring such objects using tactile sensors is challenging, primarily due to the large-scale unknown environments and limited sensing coverage of these sensors. To this end, we present AcTExplore, an active tactile exploration method driven by reinforcement learning for object reconstruction at scales that automatically explores the object surfaces in a limited number of steps. Through sufficient exploration, our algorithm incrementally collects tactile data and reconstructs 3D shapes of the objects as well, which can serve as a representation for higher-level downstream tasks. Our method achieves an average of 95.97% IoU coverage on unseen YCB objects while just being trained on primitive shapes. Project Webpage: https://prg.cs.umd$.$edu/AcTExploreComment: 8 pages, 6 figure

STUDY OF IN VIVO PHARMACOKINETIC DRUG INTERACTIONS OF CURCUMIN ON TACRINE

Objective: Tacrine is a potent acetylcholine esterase inhibitor (AChEI), and curcumin has been recently proven to possess AChEI, amyloid β aggregation inhibitory activity in addition to its diverse pharmacodynamic nature. Tacrine undergoes biological transformation by cytochrome P450 (CYP 1A2) to a hydroxy metabolite, which is hepatotoxic. Curcumin is known for its inhibitory nature for various metabolic enzymes along with CYP1A2. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the influence of curcumin on the disposition kinetics of tacrine and to assess its impact on dosage regimen.Methods: It was hypothesized that the simultaneous administration of curcumin and tacrine can minimize the toxicity along with increased absorption of tacrine and curcumin into the biological system during the treatment of Alzheimer's patients.Results and Discussion: Hence, an attempt was made to develop a simple, precise, accurate, and cost-effective reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography method for simultaneous determination of curcumin and tacrine and also to estimate the effect of curcumin on absorption of tacrine, in rat plasma.Conclusion: Concomitant administration of curcumin with tacrine improved the parameters such as Cmax and AUC, which indicates that the curcumin would improve the absorption of tacrine

THE EFFECT OF DEPTH ON THE DRAG FORCE DURING UNDERWATER GLIDING: A CFD APPROACH

Swimming events are the sum of a gliding part and a swimming part. The gliding is used after the start and turns, and this phase typically corresponds to 10-25% of the total event time (Chatard et al., 1990). Taking this into account, one can notice that gliding is very important in swimming events and, therefore, its biomechanical study in order to make it more efficient is also very relevant. The gliding can be studied experimentally, by using voluntary subjects gliding in a controlled manner in a swimming pool (using video or velocimetry, for instance), or by using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Although the experimental method gives “real” values it also presents some drawbacks, like usually imposing a heavy setup and also the fact that it is difficult to control all variables, like depth, attitude or intersegment positions of the swimmer. The CFD method does not have these limitations and its results are comparable to those obtained by the experimental method (Bixler & Riewald, 2002; Silva et al., 2005; Bixler et al., 2007; Vilas Boas et al., 2010). This work aims to study the effects of the depth and velocity on the drag force experienced by a swimmer during gliding using the CFD method