The Day-of-the-Week Effect in the Australian Stock Market: An Empirical Note

Abstract This note examines the day-of-the-week effect in Australian daily stock returns at the market and industry levels and for small capitalization stocks from Monday 9 September 1996 to Friday 10 November 2006. A regression-based approach is employed. The results indicate that while the Australian market overall provides no evidence of daily seasonality, there is evidence of a small cap day-of-the-week effect with systematically higher returns on Thursdays and Fridays. The analysis of the sub-market returns is also partly supportive of day-of-the-week effects in the banking, diversified financial, energy, healthcare, insurance, materials and retail industries. However, these rarely coincide with the lower Monday or lower Tuesday returns typified in earlier work

High-resolution CBV-fMRI allows mapping of laminar activity and connectivity of cortical input and output in human M1

Layer-dependent fMRI allows measurements of information flow in cortical circuits, as afferent and efferent connections terminate in different cortical layers. However, it is unknown to what level human fMRI is specific and sensitive enough to reveal directional functional activity across layers. To answer this question, we developed acquisition and analysis methods for blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) and cerebral-blood-volume (CBV)-based laminar fMRI and used these to discriminate four different tasks in the human motor cortex (M1). In agreement with anatomical data from animal studies, we found evidence for somatosensory and premotor input in superficial layers of M1 and for cortico-spinal motor output in deep layers. Laminar resting-state fMRI showed directional functional connectivity of M1 with somatosensory and premotor areas. Our findings demonstrate that CBV-fMRI can be used to investigate cortical activity in humans with unprecedented detail, allowing investigations of information flow between brain regions and outperforming conventional BOLD results that are often buried under vascular biases

Use of prasugrel vs clopidogrel and outcomes in patients with acute coronary syndrome undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention in contemporary clinical practice: Results from the PROMETHEUS study

Background and objectivesWe sought to determine the frequency of use and association between prasugrel and outcomes in acute coronary syndrome patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in clinical practice

A design for cancer case–control studies using only incident cases: experience with the GEM study of melanoma

BACKGROUND: The population-based case-control study is not suited to the evaluation of rare genetic (or environmental) factors. The use of a novel case-control design in which cases have second primaries and controls are cancer survivors has been proposed for this purpose. METHODS: We report results from an international study of melanoma that involved population-based ascertainment of incident cases of second or subsequent primary melanoma as the 'case' group and incident cases of first primary melanoma as the 'control' group. We evaluate the validity of the study design by comparing the results obtained for phenotypic factors that have been shown consistently to be associated with melanoma in previous conventional studies with the results from a conventional case-control study conducted in Connecticut and from literature reviews. RESULTS: All but one of the known risk factors for melanoma were shown to be significantly associated with melanoma in our study, though the individual odds ratios appear to be somewhat attenuated relative to the magnitudes typically observed in the literature. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with a second or subsequent primary cancer of a single type represent a potentially valuable and under-utilized resource for the study of cancer aetiology

Anelastic strain recovery reveals extension across SW Japan subduction zone

Sediment dominated convergent margins typically record substantial horizontal shortening often associated with great earthquakes. The convergent margin south of Japan is arguably one of the most extensively investigated margins and previous studies have documented extensive evidence for accretion and horizontal shortening. Here, we show results from anelastic strains recovered from three partially lithified sediment samples (40~ porosities) across the southwest Japan accretionary prism and propose that the margin is dominated by horizontal extension rather than compression. The anelastic strain results are also consistent with stress directions interpreted from two independent techniques - bore hole breakout orientations and core-scale fault data. We interpret this unexpected result to reflect geologically recent underthrusting of a thick sediment package and concomitant weakening of the decollement

MC1R genotype may modify the effect of sun exposure on melanoma risk in the GEM study

We investigated whether MC1R genotype modifies the effect of sun exposure on melanoma risk in 1,018 cases with multiple melanomas (MPM) and 1,875 controls with one melanoma (SPM). There was some suggestion that MC1R genotype modified the effect of beach and water activities on MPM risk: ORs were 1.94 (95% CI 1.40–2.70) for any activities for no R variants and 1.39 (95% CI 1.05–1.84) with R variants (R151C, R160W, D294H, D84E) (p for interaction 0.08). MC1R modification of sun exposure effects appeared most evident for MPM of the head and neck: for early life ambient UV the OR was 4.23 (95% CI 1.76–10.20) with no R and 1.04 (95% CI 0.40–2.68) with R (p for interaction=0.01; p for three-way interaction=0.01). Phenotype modified the effect of sun exposure and MPM in a similar manner. We conclude that MC1R and pigmentary phenotype may modify the effects of sun exposure on melanoma risk on more continuously sun-exposed skin. Possible explanations include that risk may saturate with higher sun sensitivity for melanomas on continuously sun-exposed sites but continue to increase as sun exposure increases with lower sun sensitivity, or that sun sensitive people adapt their behaviour by increasing sun protection when exposed