Scotland as an Optimal Currency Area

Since the Scottish independence movement has reached the point that there will be a referendum on Scottish independence this September, the issue of whether the Scotland is optimal currency areas is very topical.In this paper we review the microeconomic foundations of an optimal currency area. We test these microeconomic foundations. We find that the UK, Scotland and the UK without Scotland meet the microeconomic criteria for a common currency area. While adopting a common currency is ultimately a political decision, these results imply that the broadest of these areas, the UK, is the optimal currency area in the sense of minimizing transactions costs.We do find differences in the UK less Scotland and Scotland economies in loan data. We further find that neither the euro bloc nor the euro bloc including Scotland meet the microeconomic criteria for a common currency area. In the event of a “yes” vote for Scottish independence, the immediate problem facing the Scottish government is to decide on an exchange rate regime that is seen as credible by the financial markets to avoid a flight of capital. How policymakers chooses between alternative exchange rate regimes is currently a topic for hot debate in central banking circles and the process of a monetary union breaking up is a fascinating area worthy of future research

Quality of care in University Hospitals in Saudi Arabia: systematic review

Objectives: To identify the key issues, problems, barriers and challenges particularly in relation to the quality of care in university hospitals in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), and to provide recommendations for improvement. Methods: A systematic search was carried out using five electronic databases, for articles published between January 2004 and January 2015. We included studies conducted in university hospitals in KSA that focused on the quality of healthcare. Three independent reviewers verified that the studies met the inclusion criteria, assessed the quality of the studies and extracted their relevant characteristics. All studies were assessed using the Institute of Medicine indicators of quality of care. Results: Of the 1430 references identified in the initial search, eight studies were identified that met the inclusion criteria. The included studies clearly highlight a need to improve the quality of healthcare delivery, specifically in areas of patient safety, clinical effectiveness and patient-centredness, at university hospitals in KSA. Problems with quality of care could be due to failures of leadership, a requirement for better management and a need to establish a culture of safety alongside leadership reform in university hospitals. Lack of instructions given to patients and language communication were key factors impeding optimum delivery of patient-centred care. Decisionmakers in KSA university hospitals should consider programmes and assessment tools to reveal problems and issues related to language as a barrier to quality of care. Conclusions: This review exemplifies the need for further improvement in the quality of healthcare in university hospitals in KSA. Many of the problems identified in this review could be addressed by establishing an independent body in KSA, which could monitor healthcare services and push for improvements in efficiency and quality of care

Discovering Class-Specific Pixels for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

We propose an approach to discover class-specific pixels for the weakly-supervised semantic segmentation task. We show that properly combining saliency and attention maps allows us to obtain reliable cues capable of significantly boosting the performance. First, we propose a simple yet powerful hierarchical approach to discover the class-agnostic salient regions, obtained using a salient object detector, which otherwise would be ignored. Second, we use fully convolutional attention maps to reliably localize the class-specific regions in a given image. We combine these two cues to discover class-specific pixels which are then used as an approximate ground truth for training a CNN. While solving the weakly supervised semantic segmentation task, we ensure that the image-level classification task is also solved in order to enforce the CNN to assign at least one pixel to each object present in the image. Experimentally, on the PASCAL VOC12 val and test sets, we obtain the mIoU of 60.8% and 61.9%, achieving the performance gains of 5.1% and 5.2% compared to the published state-of-the-art results. The code is made publicly available

A Novel 6G Conversational Orchestration Framework for Enhancing Performance and Resource Utilization in Autonomous Vehicle Networks

A vision of 6G aims to automate versatile services by eliminating the complexity of human effort for Industry 5.0 applications. This results in an intelligent environment with cognitive and collaborative capabilities of AI conversational orchestration that enable a variety of applications across smart Autonomous Vehicle (AV) networks. In this article, an innovative framework for AI conversational orchestration is proposed by enabling on-the-fly virtual infrastructure service orchestration for Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) to automate a network service paradigm. The proposed framework will potentially contribute to the growth of 6G conversational orchestration by enabling on-the-fly automation of cloud and network services. The orchestration aspect of the 6G vision is not limited to cognitive collaborative communications, but also extends to context-aware personalized infrastructure for 6G automation. The experimental results of the implemented proof-of-concept framework are presented. These experiments not only affirm the technical capabilities of this framework, but also push into several Industry 5.0 applications

Lipolysis generates platelet dysfunction after in vivo heparin administration

Heparin, when administered to patients undergoing operations using cardiopulmonary bypass, induces plasma changes that gradually impair platelet macroaggregation, but heparinization of whole blood in vitro does not have this effect. The plasma changes induced by heparin in vivo continue to progress in whole blood ex vivo. Heparin releases several endothelial proteins, including lipoprotein lipase, hepatic lipase, platelet factor-4 and superoxide dismutase. These enzymes, which remain active in plasma ex vivo, may impair platelet macroaggregation after in vivo heparinization and during cardiopulmonary bypass

Harnessing autophagy to overcome mitogen‐activated protein kinase kinase inhibitor‐induced resistance in metastatic melanoma

Background Patients with malignant melanoma often relapse after treatment with BRAF and/or mitogen‐activated protein kinase kinase (MEK) inhibitors (MEKi) owing to development of drug resistance. Objectives To establish the temporal pattern of CD271 regulation during development of resistance by melanoma to trametinib, and determine the association between development of resistance to trametinib and induction of prosurvival autophagy. Methods Immunohistochemistry for CD271 and p62 was performed on human naevi and primary malignant melanoma tumours. Western blotting was used to analyse expression of CD271, p62 and LC3 in melanoma subpopulations. Flow cytometry and immunofluorescence microscopy was used to evaluate trametinib‐induced cell death and CD271 expression. MTS viability assays and zebrafish xenografts were used to evaluate the effect of CD271 and autophagy modulation on trametinib‐resistant melanoma cell survival and invasion, respectively. Results CD271 and autophagic signalling are increased in stage III primary melanomas vs. benign naevi. In vitro studies demonstrate MEKi of BRAF‐mutant melanoma induced cytotoxic autophagy, followed by the emergence of CD271‐expressing subpopulations. Trametinib‐induced CD271 reduced autophagic flux, leading to activation of prosurvival autophagy and development of MEKi resistance. Treatment of CD271‐expressing melanoma subpopulations with RNA interference and small‐molecule inhibitors to CD271 reduced the development of MEKi resistance, while clinically applicable autophagy modulatory agents – including Δ9‐tetrahydrocannabinol and Vps34 – reduced survival of MEKi‐resistant melanoma cells. Combined MEK/autophagy inhibition also reduced the invasive and metastatic potential of MEKi‐resistant cells in an in vivo zebrafish xenograft. Conclusions These results highlight a novel mechanism of MEKi‐induced drug resistance and suggest that targeting autophagy may be a translatable approach to resensitize drug‐resistant melanoma cells to the cytotoxic effects of MEKi