Prudent Intesting? The Credit Crisis of August 2007 Mainsail II Siv-Lite, and the State Cash Investment Pool

This paper reviews the period leading up to and including the credit disruption of August 2007 and then examines one failed structured finance issue and one investor in that issue. The investor was a financially conservative U.S. state treasury and the issue, Mainsail II, a little-known esoteric structure known as a SIV-Lite. The pairing of these two entities is part of the story of the financial crisis and tells us much about the excesses of the markets at that time and the lack of investment discipline. The paper explains the structure of a SIVLite as well as a collateralized debt obligation (CDO), a structured investment vehicle (SIV), and an asset-backed commercial paper conduit. It explores the role of the broker and rating agencies in the investment decision.financial crisis, SIV-Lite, asset-backed commercial paper, investment decision, cash investment pool

Appointment scheduling with unscheduled arrivals and reprioritization

Inspired by the real life problem of a radiology department in a Dutch hospital, we study the problem of scheduling appointments, taking into account unscheduled arrivals and reprioritization. The radiology department offers CT diagnostics to both scheduled and unscheduled patients. Of these unscheduled patients, some must be seen immediately, while others may wait for some time. Herein a trade-off is sought between acceptable waiting times for appointment patients and unscheduled patients’ lateness. In this paper we use a discrete event simulation model to determine the performance of a given appointment schedule in terms of waiting time and lateness. Also we propose a constructive and local search heuristic that embeds this model and optimizes the schedule. For smaller instances, we verify the simulation model as well as compare our search heuristics’ performance with optimal schedules obtained using a Markov reward process. In addition we present computational results from the case study in the Dutch hospital. These results show that a considerable decrease of waiting time is possible for scheduled patients, while still treating unscheduled patients on time

iSchools and archival studies

Whispers and rumors about the iSchool movement lead some to fear that this represents yet another shift away from the valued traditions of library schools, threatening something far different than what library science pioneers ever envisioned. Predating the iSchool movement, however, were other programmatic shifts such as those that led to the formalization of graduate archival education. This essay argues that such evolution is essential to our future, as iSchools tackle the increasingly complex issues confronting a digital society. We consider the mission and history of iSchools and of archival studies, the basic elements and concepts of archival studies that are critical to iSchools, and the relationship between iSchools and the changing nature of personal and institutional archives. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V

Evaluating Digital Libraries for Teaching and Learning in Undergraduate Education: A Case Study of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT)

published or submitted for publicatio

Using the Price-to-Earnings Harmonic Mean to Improve Firm Valuation Estimates

This paper reviews some well-known options to estimate the portfolio average of the price-earnings (P/E) multiple, emphasizing the logic and calculation of the harmonic mean. The harmonic mean is a useful but oftentimes unfamiliar calculation to many students and professionals. The simple arithmetic mean when applied to non-price normalized ratios such as the P/E is biased upwards and cannot be numerically justified, since it is based on equalized earnings. The paper advocates the use of the classic harmonic mean when the need is for an equal-dollar-weighted average and the weighted-average harmonic mean when the need is for an index style market-weighted average. An algorithm that deploys this process has been implemented in the Returnfinder App, which produces Total Return charts that include dividends, and at the aggregated portfolio level