Failure Is an Option: Impediments to Short Selling and Options Prices

Regulations allow market makers to short sell without borrowing stock, and the transactions of a major options market maker show that in most hard-to-borrow situations, it chooses not to borrow and instead fails to deliver stock to its buyers. A part of the value of failing passes through to options prices: when failing is cheaper than borrowing, the relation between borrowing costs and options prices is significantly weaker. The remaining value is profit to the market maker, and its ability to profit despite competition between market makers appears to result from the cost advantage of larger market makers

Factors Influencing the Implementation of Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) by Healthcare Workers at Public Health centers & Dispensaries in Mwanza, Tanzania.

\ud Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) was developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations International Children's Fund (UNICEF) and aims at reducing childhood morbidity and mortality in resource-limited settings including Tanzania. It was introduced in 1996 and has been scaled up in all districts in the country. The purpose of this study was to identify factors influencing the implementation of IMCI in the health facilities in Mwanza, Tanzania since reports indicates that the guidelines are not full adhered to by the healthcare workers. A cross-sectional study design was used and a sample size of 95 healthcare workers drawn from health centers and dispensaries within Mwanza city were interviewed using self-administered questionnaires. Structured interview was also used to get views from the city IMCI focal person and the 2 facilitators. Data were analyzed using SPSS and presented using figures and tables. Only 51% of healthcare workers interviewed had been trained. 69% of trained Healthcare workers expressed understanding of the IMCI approach. Most of the respondents (77%) had a positive attitude that IMCI approach was a better approach in managing common childhood illnesses especially with the reality of resource constraint in the health facilities. The main challenges identified in the implementation of IMCI are low initial training coverage among health care workers, lack of essential drugs and supplies, lack of onsite mentoring and lack of refresher courses and regular supportive supervision. Supporting the healthcare workers through training, onsite mentoring, supportive supervision and strengthening the healthcare system through increasing access to essential medicines, vaccines, strengthening supply chain management, increasing healthcare financing, improving leadership & management were the major interventions that could assist in IMCI implementation. The healthcare workers can implement better IMCI through the collaboration of supervisors, IMCI focal person, Council Health Management Teams (CHMT) and other stakeholders interested in child health. However, significant barriers impede a sustainable IMCI implementation. Recommendations have been made related to supportive supervision and HealthCare system strengthening among others.\u

The Governance of Core Competencies for Public Health: A Rapid Review of the Literature

Core competencies for public health (CCPH) define the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required of a public health workforce. Although numerous sets of CCPH have been established, few studies have systematically examined the governance of competency development, review, and monitoring, which is critical to their implementation and impact. This rapid review included 42 articles. The findings identified examples of collaboration and community engagement in governing activities (e.g., using the Delphi method to develop CCPH) and different ways of approaching CCPH review and revision (e.g., every 3 years). Insights on monitoring and resource management were scarce. Preliminary lessons emerging from the findings point towards the need for systems, structures, and processes that support ongoing reviews, revisions, and monitoring of CCPH

A multi-criteria recommender system exploiting aspect-based sentiment analysis of users' reviews

In this paper we propose a multi-criteria recommender system based on collaborative filtering (CF) techniques, which exploits the information conveyed by users' reviews to provide a multi-faceted representation of users' interests. To this end, we exploited a framework for opinion mining and sentiment analysis, which automatically extracts relevant aspects and sentiment scores from users' reviews. As an example, in a restaurant recommendation scenario, the aspects may regard food quality, service, position, athmosphere of the place and so on. Such a multi-faceted representation of the user is used to feed a multicriteria CF algorithm which predicts user interest in a particular item and provides her with recommendations. In the experimental session we evaluated the performance of the algorithm against several state-of-the-art baselines; Results confirmed the insight behind this work, since our approach was able to overcome both single-criteria recommendation algorithms as well as more sophisticated techniques based on matrix factorization