438 research outputs found
Commercial Bank Small Business Lending Pre and Post Crisis
We analyze small business lending at U.S. commercial banks, how it has changed over time and how it differs by bank size. Specifically, we examine the impact of government policy intervention on small business lending in the aftermath of the financial crisis. We find several important results. First, we find that the Troubled-Asset Relief Program’s (TARP) $200 billion Capital Purchase Program (CPP) had little impact on the banks that received capital injections’ small business lending. Second, the Small Business Loan Fund (SBLF) lending program appears to have been a success as banks participating in the loan fund increased their lending to small businesses. Finally, we find that financial turmoil had a substantial negative impact on lending to small businesses at community banks but not their large bank counterparts. This result suggests that the larger banks may have behaved in a manner consistent with too big to fail. Collectively, these results provide important insights for policy makers as they continue to deal with the credit access issues of small firms
The globular cluster system of NGC 1316. II - The extraordinary object SH2
SH2 has been described as an isolated HII-region, located about 6.5 arcmin
south of the nucleus of NGC 1316 (Fornax A), a merger remnant in the the
outskirts of the Fornax cluster of galaxies. We give a first, preliminary
description of the stellar content and environment of this remarkable object.
We used photometric data in the Washington system and HST photometry from the
Hubble Legacy Archive for a morphological description and preliminary aperture
photometry. Low-resolution spectroscopy provides radial velocities of the
brightest star cluster in SH2 and a nearby intermediate-age cluster. SH2 is not
a normal HII-region, ionized by very young stars. It contains a multitude of
star clusters with ages of approximately 0.1 Gyr. A ring-like morphology is
striking. SH2 seems to be connected to an intermediate-age massive globular
cluster with a similar radial velocity, which itself is the main object of a
group of fainter clusters. Metallicity estimates from emission lines remain
ambiguous. The present data do not yet allow firm conclusions about the nature
or origin of SH2. It might be a dwarf galaxy that has experienced a burst of
extremely clustered star formation. We may witness how globular clusters are
donated to a parent galaxy.Comment: 5 pages, to appear in A&A, format slightly different from the printed
versio
Is there plagiarism in the most influential publications in the field of andrology?
Plagiarism is a common form of academic misconduct that extensively jeopardises
the quality of scientific publication. The purpose of this study is to determine the
extent of plagiarism in the most influential andrology articles. A total of 77 highly
cited andrology articles were analysed for their similarity index using iThenticate and
Turnitin. The articles were categorised based on the year (before and on/after 2000)
and type of publication (review and research articles), and the similarity indices were
compared. Furthermore, the analysed articles were categorised based on the level of
similarity using an arbitrary similarity index range (low: ≤10, moderate: 11–20, high:
21–50 and very high: >50) and average incidence rate (%) was determined. Our analysis
revealed a higher percentage of the similarity indices for reviews than research
articles. We noticed a higher similarity index for articles published on/after 2000
than those published before. The majority of the influential articles in the field of andrology
showed a low similarity index, while some articles exhibited moderate to high
levels of similarity. These findings support the need for the development of similarity
index guidelines as a major pre‐requisite for establishing a more transparent and efficient
system to address plagiarism in scientific publications
Could Only Fermions Be Elementary?
In standard Poincare and anti de Sitter SO(2,3) invariant theories,
antiparticles are related to negative energy solutions of covariant equations
while independent positive energy unitary irreducible representations (UIRs) of
the symmetry group are used for describing both a particle and its
antiparticle. Such an approach cannot be applied in de Sitter SO(1,4) invariant
theory. We argue that it would be more natural to require that (*) one UIR
should describe a particle and its antiparticle simultaneously. This would
automatically explain the existence of antiparticles and show that a particle
and its antiparticle are different states of the same object. If (*) is adopted
then among the above groups only the SO(1,4) one can be a candidate for
constructing elementary particle theory. It is shown that UIRs of the SO(1,4)
group can be interpreted in the framework of (*) and cannot be interpreted in
the standard way. By quantizing such UIRs and requiring that the energy should
be positive in the Poincare approximation, we conclude that i) elementary
particles can be only fermions. It is also shown that ii) C invariance is not
exact even in the free massive theory and iii) elementary particles cannot be
neutral. This gives a natural explanation of the fact that all observed neutral
states are bosons.Comment: The paper is considerably revised and the following results are
added: in the SO(1,4) invariant theory i) the C invariance is not exact even
for free massive particles; ii) neutral particles cannot be elementar
The globular cluster system of NGC1316. I. Wide-field photometry in the Washington system
NGC 1316 (Fornax A) is a prominent merger remnant in the outskirts of the
Fornax cluster. The cluster system has not yet been studied in its entirety. We
therefore present a wide-field study of the globular cluster system of NGC
1316, investigating its properties in relation to the global morphology of NGC
1316. We used the MOSAIC II camera at the 4-m Blanco telescope at CTIO in the
filters Washington C and Harris R. We identify globular cluster candidates and
study their color distribution and the structural properties of the system. In
an appendix, we also make morphological remarks, present color maps, and
present new models for the brightness and color profiles of the galaxy. The
cluster system is well confined to the optically visible outer contours of NGC
1316. The color distribution of the entire sample is unimodal, but the color
distribution of bright subsamples in the bulge shows two peaks that, by
comparison with theoretical Washington colors with solar metallicity,
correspond to ages of about 2 Gyr and 0.8 Gyr, respectively. We also find a
significant population of clusters in the color range 0.8 < C-R < 1.1 which
must be populated by clusters younger than 0.8 Gyr, unless they are very
metal-poor. The color interval 1.3 < C-R < 1.6 hosts the bulk of
intermediate-age clusters which show a surface density profile with a sharp
decline at about 4 arcmin. The outer cluster population shows an unimodal color
distribution with a peak at C-R=1.1, indicating a larger contribution of old,
metal-poor clusters. Their luminosity function does not show the expected
turn-over, so the fraction of younger clusters is still significant. Cluster
formation in NGC 1316 has continued after an initial burst, presumably related
to the main merger. A toy model with two bursts of ages 2 Gyr and 0.8 Gyr is
consistent with photometric properties and dynamical M/L-values.Comment: 19 pages, to appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics, abstract abridged,
format slightly different from the printed versio
On the problem of interactions in quantum theory
The structure of representations describing systems of free particles in the
theory with the invariance group SO(1,4) is investigated. The property of the
particles to be free means as usual that the representation describing a
many-particle system is the tensor product of the corresponding single-particle
representations (i.e. no interaction is introduced). It is shown that the mass
operator contains only continuous spectrum in the interval
and such representations are unitarily equivalent to ones describing
interactions (gravitational, electromagnetic etc.). This means that there are
no bound states in the theory and the Hilbert space of the many-particle system
contains a subspace of states with the following property: the action of free
representation operators on these states is manifested in the form of different
interactions. Possible consequences of the results are discussed.Comment: 35 pages, Late
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