The Future of Securities Exchanges

The future is not only out there, it is also what we make of it. This paper presents a range of predictions about securities exchanges. It seeks both to extrapolate logical conclusions from current trends, and to provide a virtual bully pulpit to ensure that all is for the best in the best of all possible futures. Four broad themes are discussed. They concern, respectively, information, industry, governance, and politics. Predictions are made about each of these themes, and comments are provided on why the predictions will come to pass, and on some of their commercial and regulatory implications.

Combining internal and external inputs for sustainable intensification

Farmers and local development organizations around the world use and promote a variety of technologies to increase food production. But the high cost of inorganic fertilizers and other agrochemicals often drives farmers to rely on locally available resources instead of purchased, externally produced inputs. So-called low external input agriculture (LEIA) has spread rapidly to different parts of the globe as a challenging alternative to—or, more frequently, a complement to— Green Revolution technologies...The goal of policy, research, and extension should be to help LEIA farmers achieve "sustainable intensification", which refers to the simultaneous increase in returns to land and labor (in the short run) and the maintenance of soil nutrient balances (in the long run).Soil fertility. ,Food production. ,Technological innovations. ,Fertilizers. ,Agricultural research. ,

Streamlining governmental processes by putting citizens in control of their personal data

Governments typically store large amounts of personal information on their citizens, such as a home address, marital status, and occupation, to offer public services. Because governments consist of various governmental agencies, multiple copies of this data often exist. This raises concerns regarding data consistency, privacy, and access control, especially under recent legal frameworks such as GDPR. To solve these problems, and to give citizens true control over their data, we explore an approach using the decentralised Solid ecosystem, which enables citizens to maintain their data in personal data pods. We have applied this approach to two high-impact use cases, where citizen information is stored in personal data pods, and both public and private organisations are selectively granted access. Our findings indicate that Solid allows reshaping the relationship between citizens, their personal data, and the applications they use in the public and private sector. We strongly believe that the insights from this Flemish Solid Pilot can speed up the process for public administrations and private organisations that want to put the users in control of their data

Stateless Puzzles for Real Time Online Fraud Preemption

The profitability of fraud in online systems such as app markets and social networks marks the failure of existing defense mechanisms. In this paper, we propose FraudSys, a real-time fraud preemption approach that imposes Bitcoin-inspired computational puzzles on the devices that post online system activities, such as reviews and likes. We introduce and leverage several novel concepts that include (i) stateless, verifiable computational puzzles, that impose minimal performance overhead, but enable the efficient verification of their authenticity, (ii) a real-time, graph-based solution to assign fraud scores to user activities, and (iii) mechanisms to dynamically adjust puzzle difficulty levels based on fraud scores and the computational capabilities of devices. FraudSys does not alter the experience of users in online systems, but delays fraudulent actions and consumes significant computational resources of the fraudsters. Using real datasets from Google Play and Facebook, we demonstrate the feasibility of FraudSys by showing that the devices of honest users are minimally impacted, while fraudster controlled devices receive daily computational penalties of up to 3,079 hours. In addition, we show that with FraudSys, fraud does not pay off, as a user equipped with mining hardware (e.g., AntMiner S7) will earn less than half through fraud than from honest Bitcoin mining

Improving Object Detection with Deep Convolutional Networks via Bayesian Optimization and Structured Prediction

Object detection systems based on the deep convolutional neural network (CNN) have recently made ground- breaking advances on several object detection benchmarks. While the features learned by these high-capacity neural networks are discriminative for categorization, inaccurate localization is still a major source of error for detection. Building upon high-capacity CNN architectures, we address the localization problem by 1) using a search algorithm based on Bayesian optimization that sequentially proposes candidate regions for an object bounding box, and 2) training the CNN with a structured loss that explicitly penalizes the localization inaccuracy. In experiments, we demonstrated that each of the proposed methods improves the detection performance over the baseline method on PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 datasets. Furthermore, two methods are complementary and significantly outperform the previous state-of-the-art when combined.Comment: CVPR 201

Politics and the Creation of a European SEC: The Optimal UK Strategy - Constructive Inconsistency

This paper analyses the factors influencing whether a European Securities and Exchange Commission (ESEC) will be created and confirms the primary role that politics will play in its establishment. In the face of growing support for an ESEC, the paper recommends a strategy the UK should adopt towards the creation of such an institution. It is proposed that the UK adopt a three-pronged approach. First, the UK must, as it currently does, support the Lamfalussy Process in the hope that it works. Second, the UK must determine what criteria need to be assessed in order to evaluate whether the Lamfalussy Process together with the Financial Services Action Plan are in fact harming UK interests, and then make such an evaluation. Finally, if political support for an ESEC becomes unstoppable, the UK should negotiate for the creation of an appropriately structured ESEC , even though its backing for the Lamfalussy Process should logically preclude its support for any type of ESEC. A key attribute of the recommended strategy is thus that it is inconsistent. This is not, however, thought a problem. On the contrary, given that the creation of an ESEC is the stuff of politics and thus that a political response is called for, and given that other key participants' policies on the creation of an ESEC are themselves inconsistent, the strategy proposed is argued as being not only constructive, but indeed rational.Regulatory Reform

Proton-pump inhibitor use is associated with a broad spectrum of neurological adverse events including impaired hearing, vision, and memory.

Proton-pump inhibitors, PPIs, are considered effective therapy for stomach acid suppression due to their irreversible inhibition of the hydrogen/potassium pump in the gastric parietal cells. They are widely prescribed and are considered safe for over-the-counter use. Recent studies have shown an association between PPI use and Alzheimer dementia, while others have disputed that connection. We analyzed over ten million United States Food and Drug Administration Adverse Event Reporting System reports, including over forty thousand reports containing PPIs, and provided evidence of increased propensity for memory impairment among PPI reports when compared to histamine-2 receptor antagonist control group. Furthermore, we found significant associations of PPI use with a wide range of neurological adverse reactions including, migraine, several peripheral neuropathies, and visual and auditory neurosensory abnormalities