What are borders made of? An analysis of barriers to European banking integration

Linguistic and cultural differences, different legal and supervisory frameworks, relationship lending have been repeatedly mentioned as barriers to European retail banking integration. We investigate whether these barriers have affected integration within national boundaries, using an index of localism of regional banking systems as a measure of market integration. If local banks are established and flourish because asymmetric information makes entry difficult for non-incumbents (DellÂ’Ariccia, 2001) or regulatory and governance rules prevent entry from outside (Berger et al., 1995), we should find a significant relationship between indicators of these barriers and measures of the localism of banking systems. Our results show that this is indeed the case for asymmetric information, while findings are more blurred for supervisory practices.banking integration, barriers, asymmetric information

Context-based task ontologies for clinical guidelines

Evidence-based medicine relies on the execution of clinical practice guidelines and protocols. A great deal of of effort has been invested in the development of various tools which automate the representation and execution of the recommendations contained within such guidelines and protocols by creating Computer Interpretable Guideline Models (CIGMs). Context-based task ontologies (CTOs), based on standard terminology systems like UMLS, form one of the core components of such a model. We have created DAML+OIL-based CTOs for the tasks mentioned in the WHO guideline for hypertension management, drawing comparisons also with other related guidelines. The advantages of CTOs include: contextualization of ontologies, providing ontologies tailored to specific aspects of the phenomena of interest, dividing the complexity involved in creating ontologies into different levels, providing a methodology by means of which the task recommendations contained within guidelines can be integrated into the clinical practices of a health care set-up

Laser-pulse-shape control of seeded QED cascades

QED cascades are complex avalanche processes of hard photon emission and electron-positron pair creation driven by ultra-strong electromagnetic fields. They play a fundamental role in astrophysical environments such as a pulsars' magnetosphere, rendering an earth-based implementation with intense lasers attractive. In the literature, QED cascades were also predicted to limit the attainable intensity in a set-up of colliding laser beams in a tenuous gas such as the residual gas of a vacuum chamber, therefore severely hindering experiments at extreme field intensities. Here, we demonstrate that the onset of QED cascades may be either prevented even at intensities around 10^{26}\text{ W/cm^{2}} with tightly focused laser pulses and low-$Z$ gases, or facilitated at intensities below 10^{24}\text{ W/cm^{2}} with enlarged laser focal areas or high-$Z$ gases. These findings pave the way for the control of novel experiments such as the generation of pure electron-positron-photon plasmas from laser energy, and for probing QED in the extreme-intensity regime where the quantum vacuum becomes unstable.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

From the conception to the definition of a new service: the case of the European GeoPKDD project”

La tesi affronta il processo che parte dalla generazione di un nuovo servizio di tipo technology push ed arriva fino alla sua definizione, attraverso l’analisi del lavoro svolto per WIND Telecomunicazioni s.p.a. nell’ambito del progetto Europeo GeoPKDD. Dopo un inquadramento teorico sulle metodologie di sviluppo di nuovi servizi e sulle peculiarità di uno sviluppo technology push rispetto al caso market pull, il lavoro si concentra sul processo che, partendo dalla generazione di nuove idee basate sulla tecnologia GeoPKDD, si è concluso con la definizione delle specifiche finali da implementare nel servizio finale

Implementing clinical guidelines in an organizational setup

Outcomes research in healthcare has been a topic much addressed in recent years. Efforts in this direction have been supplemented by work in the areas of guidelines for clinical practice and computer-interpretable workflow and careflow models.In what follows we present the outlines of a framework for understanding the relations between organizations, guidelines, individual patients and patient-related functions. The derived framework provides a means to extract the knowledge contained in the guideline text at different granularities, in ways that can help us to assign tasks within the healthcare organization and to assess clinical performance in realizing the guideline. It does this in a way that preserves the flexibility of the organization in the adoption of the guidelines

High Frequency Piezoelectric Resonant Nanochannel for Bio-Sensing Applications in Liquid Environment

This paper reports on the first demonstration of a 457 MHz AlN Piezolectric Resonant Nanochannel (PRN) for biosensing applications in liquid environment. A novel process consisting of 7 lithographic steps was developed to fabricate the PRN. The new resonant device shows an unchanged value of the electromechanical coupling, kt 2 (about 0.8 %), whether the channel is filled with air or water and a quality factor, Q, in liquid of approximately 170. The value of kt 2 and Q are respectively about 2.7 and 2 times the ones recorded for conventional laterally vibrating AlN Contour Mode Resonant Sensors (CMR-Ss) submerged in water. Overall, these results translate in a ~ 5 fold enhancement in the figure of merit (kt 2 - Q product) of the resonant device when operated in liquid and simultaneously permit the efficient delivery of ultra-low concentrations of fluid samples directly on the surface of the sensor

Power Handling and Related Frequency Scaling Advantages in Piezoelectric AlN Contour-Mode MEMS Resonators

This paper reports on the analytical modeling and experimental verification of the mechanically-limited power handling and nonlinearity in piezoelectric aluminum nitride (AlN) contour-mode resonators (CMR) having different electrode configurations (thickness field excitation, lateral field excitation, one-port and two-port configurations) and operating at different frequencies (177-3047 MHz). Despite its simplicity, the one-dimensional analytical model fits the experimental behavior of AlN CMRs in terms of power handling capabilities. The model and experiment also confirm the advantage of scaling (i.e. miniaturizing) the AlN CMRs to higher frequencies at which higher critical power density can be more easily attained up to values in excess of 10 μW/μm3

Ultra-Thin-Film AlN Contour-Mode Resonators for Sensing Applications

This paper reports on the design and experimental verification of a new class of ultra-thin-film (250 nm) aluminum nitride (AlN) microelectromechanical system (MEMS) contour mode resonators (CMRs) suitable for the fabrication of ultra-sensitive gravimetric sensors. The device thickness was opportunely scaled in order to increase the mass sensitivity, while keeping a constant frequency of operation. In this first demonstration the resonance frequency of the device was set to 178 MHz and a mass sensitivity as high as 38.96 KHz⋅μm2/fg was attained. This device demonstrates the unique capability of the CMR-S technology to decouple resonance frequency from mass sensitivity

Non-contractive logics, paradoxes, and multiplicative quantifiers

The paper investigates from a proof-theoretic perspective various non-contractive logical systems, which circumvent logical and semantic paradoxes. Until recently, such systems only displayed additive quantifiers (Grišin and Cantini). Systems with multiplicative quantifiers were proposed in the 2010s (Zardini), but they turned out to be inconsistent with the naive rules for truth or comprehension. We start by presenting a first-order system for disquotational truth with additive quantifiers and compare it with Grišin set theory. We then analyze the reasons behind the inconsistency phenomenon affecting multiplicative quantifiers. After interpreting the exponentials in affine logic as vacuous quantifiers, we show how such a logic can be simulated within a truth-free fragment of a system with multiplicative quantifiers. Finally, we establish that the logic for these multiplicative quantifiers (but without disquotational truth) is consistent, by proving that an infinitary version of the cut rule can be eliminated. This paves the way to a syntactic approach to the proof theory of infinitary logic with infinite sequents