405 research outputs found
Currency and financial crises - lessons from the Asian crises for China?
The Asian crises also led to a discussion about what China can learn from the destabilising developments observed in the neighbouring countries. The main intention of this paper is to focus on the probability whether China will also face a severe, financial and/or currency crisis. Two main conclusions evolve from the current economic conditions in China. First of all the danger of a currency crisis is not given for China as - apart from the still existing capital controls which avoided massive short-term capital inflows - the interest rate differential to the anchor currency (US$) will not cause excessive short-term capital inflows and thus will not cause a destabilising volume of portfolio investments. Nonetheless a depreciation of the RMB Yuan is discussed in detail. In addition China should continue reforming its financial system by a deeper institutional foundation and solving the problem of bad loans the commercial banks are still struggling with. Reforms should start soon as further capital account liberalisation will raise foreign pressure and the costs of financing the higher debt caused by restructuring banks and enterprises. --China, Asian crises,currency crisis,financial crisis,financial system reform,currency depreciation,capital account liberalisation
Closing the Digital Divide
The Family Resource Collective is a program under Community Bridges. Serving approximately 5,800 clients per year, the FRC helps the senior community of Santa Cruz County access resources.
There is a huge digital divide within the senior community. The Capstone Project titled âClosing the Digital Divideâ will directly address the issue that is now a national crisis. This project will focus on creating several pieces of educational material to aid older individuals in their journey to becoming more technologically savvy. The project teams expect to be able to have materials readily available for all those in need.
In the future, the best steps to take to address this problem would be better tracking of those in need of technology assistance. Following up with clients that expressed concern with using technology will aid the team in making sure clients are getting the help they need
Deutsches PrÀpositionalattribut und ungarisches Lokalkasus- und Postpositionalattribut
FĂŒr das PrĂ€positionalattribut des Deutschen existieren bei einer Ăbertragung ins Ungarische vielfĂ€ltige Ăbersetzungsvarianten. Die den deutschen PrĂ€positionalphrasen entsprechenden Postpositionalphrasen und kasussuffigierten Nominalphrasen gehen in Attributsfunktion dem Kopf der Nominalphrase in der Regel voran und sind dann in partizipiale oder adjektivische Strukturen einzubetten. Die der deutschen Konstruktion entsprechende Postponierung dieser Attribute gewinnt allerdings in der modernen Standardsprache immer mehr an Raum. Gleichfalls lĂ€sst sich in einigen Textsorten eine Ausbreitung des sog. postpositionalen Adjektivs konstatieren. Lassen sich beide PhĂ€nomene gegebenenfalls als Symptome eines Nominalstils im Ungarischen werten
Defect topologies in chiral liquid crystals confined to mesoscopic channels
This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. This article appeared in J. Chem. Phys. 142, 194704 (2015) and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4920979.We present Monte Carlo simulations in the grand canonical and canonical ensembles of a chiral liquid crystal confined to mesochannels of variable sizes and geometries. The mesochannels are taken to be quasi-infinite in one dimension but finite in the two other directions. Under thermodynamic conditions chosen and for a selected value of the chirality coupling constant, the bulk liquid crystal exhibits structural characteristics of a blue phase II. This is established through the tetrahedral symmetry of disclination lines and the characteristic simple-cubic arrangement of double-twist helices formed by the liquid-crystal molecules along all three axes of a Cartesian coordinate system. If the blue phase II is then exposed to confinement, the interplay between its helical structure, various anchoring conditions at the walls of the mesochannels, and the shape of the mesochannels gives rise to a broad variety of novel, qualitative disclination-line structures that are reported here for the first time.DFG, 65143814, GRK 1524: Self-Assembled Soft-Matter Nanostructures at Interface
Maximum approximate entropy and r threshold: A new approach for regularity changes detection
Approximate entropy (ApEn) has been widely used as an estimator of regularity
in many scientific fields. It has proved to be a useful tool because of its
ability to distinguish different system's dynamics when there is only available
short-length noisy data. Incorrect parameter selection (embedding dimension
, threshold and data length ) and the presence of noise in the signal
can undermine the ApEn discrimination capacity. In this work we show that
() can also be used as a feature to
discern between dynamics. Moreover, the combined use of and
allows a better discrimination capacity to be accomplished, even in
the presence of noise. We conducted our studies using real physiological time
series and simulated signals corresponding to both low- and high-dimensional
systems. When is incapable of discerning between different
dynamics because of the noise presence, our results suggest that
provides additional information that can be useful for classification purposes.
Based on cross-validation tests, we conclude that, for short length noisy
signals, the joint use of and can significantly decrease
the misclassification rate of a linear classifier in comparison with their
isolated use
Screening of Obstructive Sleep Apnea with Empirical Mode Decomposition of Pulse Oximetry
Detection of desaturations on the pulse oximetry signal is of great
importance for the diagnosis of sleep apneas. Using the counting of
desaturations, an index can be built to help in the diagnosis of severe cases
of obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome. It is important to have automatic
detection methods that allows the screening for this syndrome, reducing the
need of the expensive polysomnography based studies. In this paper a novel
recognition method based on the empirical mode decomposition of the pulse
oximetry signal is proposed. The desaturations produce a very specific wave
pattern that is extracted in the modes of the decomposition. Using this
information, a detector based on properly selected thresholds and a set of
simple rules is built. The oxygen desaturation index constructed from these
detections produces a detector for obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome
with high sensitivity () and specificity () and yields better
results than standard desaturation detection approaches.Comment: Accepted in Medical Engineering and Physic
Noise-assisted estimation of attractor invariants
In this article, the noise-assisted correlation integral (NCI) is proposed. The purpose of the NCI is to estimate the invariants of a dynamical system, namely the correlation dimension (D), the correlation entropy (K2), and the noise level (Ï). This correlation integral is induced by using random noise in a modified version of the correlation algorithm, i.e., the noise-assisted correlation algorithm. We demonstrate how the correlation integral by Grassberger et al. and the Gaussian kernel correlation integral (GCI) by Diks can be thought of as special cases of the NCI. A third particular case is the U-correlation integral proposed herein, from which we derived coarse-grained estimators of the correlation dimension (DmU), the correlation entropy (KmU), and the noise level (ÏmU). Using time series from the Henon map and the Mackey-Glass system, we analyze the behavior of these estimators under different noise conditions and data lengths. The results show that the estimators DmU and ÏmU behave in a similar manner to those based on the GCI. However, for the calculation of K2, the estimator KmU outperforms its GCI-based counterpart. On the basis of the behavior of these estimators, we have proposed an automatic algorithm to find D,K2, and Ï from a given time series. The results show that by using this approach, we are able to achieve statistically reliable estimations of those invariants.Fil: Restrepo Rinckoar, Juan Felipe. Universidad Nacional de Entre RĂos. Facultad de IngenierĂa. Departamento de MatemĂĄtica e InformĂĄtica. Laboratorio de Señales y DinĂĄmicas no Lineales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientĂficas y TĂ©cnicas; ArgentinaFil: Schlotthauer, Gaston. Universidad Nacional de Entre RĂos. Facultad de IngenierĂa. Departamento de MatemĂĄtica e InformĂĄtica. Laboratorio de Señales y DinĂĄmicas no Lineales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientĂficas y TĂ©cnicas. Centro de Investigaciones y Transferencia de Entre RĂos. Universidad Nacional de Entre RĂos. Centro de Investigaciones y Transferencia de Entre RĂos; Argentin
Classifying sleep-wake stages through recurrent neural networks using pulse oximetry signals
The regulation of the autonomic nervous system changes with the sleep stages
causing variations in the physiological variables. We exploit these changes
with the aim of classifying the sleep stages in awake or asleep using pulse
oximeter signals. We applied a recurrent neural network to heart rate and
peripheral oxygen saturation signals to classify the sleep stage every 30
seconds. The network architecture consists of two stacked layers of
bidirectional gated recurrent units (GRUs) and a softmax layer to classify the
output. In this paper, we used 5000 patients from the Sleep Heart Health Study
dataset. 2500 patients were used to train the network, and two subsets of 1250
were used to validate and test the trained models. In the test stage, the best
result obtained was 90.13% accuracy, 94.13% sensitivity, 80.26% specificity,
92.05% precision, and 84.68% negative predictive value. Further, the Cohen's
Kappa coefficient was 0.74 and the average absolute error percentage to the
actual sleep time was 8.9%. The performance of the proposed network is
comparable with the state-of-the-art algorithms when they use much more
informative signals (except those with EEG).Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, 2 table
- âŠ