Protecting mobile money customer funds in civil law jurisdictions

The provision of financial services through mobile phones is a powerful tool to foster financial inclusion, and thus economic growth, in developing countries. However, it raises important regulatory issues. Given the vulnerability of most potential customers of these services, the protection of customer funds is important. In common law countries, trust accounts are an effective response to these concerns. In civil law jurisdictions however, in the absence of trusts, protection of customer funds is more difficult. This paper identifies the theoretical and practical problems that regulators in civil law jurisdictions might face when trying to protect customer funds and explores how fiduciary contracts, mandate contracts and direct regulation might be used to achieve this goal. It offers a series of practical recommendations for policymakers in developing countries that provide a range of regulatory options that combine private law and regulation

Complete genome sequence of an astrovirus identified in a domestic rabbit (\u3cem\u3eOryctolagus cuniculus\u3c/em\u3e) with gastroenteritis

A colony of domestic rabbits in Tennessee, USA, experienced a high-mortality (~90%) outbreak of enterocolitis. The clinical characteristics were one to six days of lethargy, bloating, and diarrhea, followed by death. Heavy intestinal coccidial load was a consistent finding as was mucoid enteropathy with cecal impaction. Preliminary analysis by electron microscopy revealed the presence of virus-like particles in the stool of one of the affected rabbits. Analysis using the Virochip, a viral detection microarray, suggested the presence of an astrovirus, and follow-up PCR and sequence determination revealed a previously uncharacterized member of that family. Metagenomic sequencing enabled the recovery of the complete viral genome, which contains the characteristic attributes of astrovirus genomes. Attempts to propagate the virus in tissue culture have yet to succeed. Although astroviruses cause gastroenteric disease in other mammals, the pathogenicity of this virus and the relationship to this outbreak remains to be determined. This study therefore defines a viral species and a potential rabbit pathogen

Dominant cognitive frames and the innovative power of social networks

In this paper, we illustrate the link between social network structures, dominant cognitive frames on network purpose and the innovative power of a network, through a mixed-method comparative analysis of two Knowledge Translation Networks (KTNs)in the English National Health Service (NHS). Our findings illustrate several challenges for networked forms of organization linked to different manifestations of social networks (centralized/decentralized) and dominant cognitive frames (polarizing/loosely clustered). Our paper contributes a better understanding of how dominant frames on network purpose emerge alongside the development of network structure itself, and explores how this interplay between dominant frames and social networks impacts upon the collaborative work that supports the networks’ innovative power

On the Schoenberg Transformations in Data Analysis: Theory and Illustrations

The class of Schoenberg transformations, embedding Euclidean distances into higher dimensional Euclidean spaces, is presented, and derived from theorems on positive definite and conditionally negative definite matrices. Original results on the arc lengths, angles and curvature of the transformations are proposed, and visualized on artificial data sets by classical multidimensional scaling. A simple distance-based discriminant algorithm illustrates the theory, intimately connected to the Gaussian kernels of Machine Learning

Does designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site influence tourist evaluation of a local destination?

The purpose of this study is to explore whether the UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) designation affects tourists’ evaluation of the local destination hosting the site, building on a large sample of about 0.8 million tourists who visited Italy over the period 1997-2015. We find that the inscription onto the UNESCO World Heritage List exerts surprisingly a negative effect on the overall evaluation of the destination and also on the evaluation of its artistic assets though the magnitude of the latter is lower. The effect is heterogeneous across visitors, depending on evaluation levels, as well as origin/destinations and demographics. Nonetheless, the presence of multiple WHSs in the same destination tends to increase evaluation suggesting that destination stakeholders with previous experience in dealing with WHS designations are better equipped to manage the complicated relationship between tourism and preservation. Managerial and policy-making implications are discussed

Fuzzy min-max neural networks for categorical data: application to missing data imputation

The fuzzy min–max neural network classifier is a supervised learning method. This classifier takes the hybrid neural networks and fuzzy systems approach. All input variables in the network are required to correspond to continuously valued variables, and this can be a significant constraint in many real-world situations where there are not only quantitative but also categorical data. The usual way of dealing with this type of variables is to replace the categorical by numerical values and treat them as if they were continuously valued. But this method, implicitly defines a possibly unsuitable metric for the categories. A number of different procedures have been proposed to tackle the problem. In this article, we present a new method. The procedure extends the fuzzy min–max neural network input to categorical variables by introducing new fuzzy sets, a new operation, and a new architecture. This provides for greater flexibility and wider application. The proposed method is then applied to missing data imputation in voting intention polls. The micro data—the set of the respondents’ individual answers to the questions—of this type of poll are especially suited for evaluating the method since they include a large number of numerical and categorical attributes