Do stock markets love misery? Evidence from the COVID-19

This study examines the impact of the change in the Barro Misery Index (BMI) and the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) cases and deaths on the stock markets’ returns and volatility. Based on a sample of 76 different countries, we find that an increase in BMI adversely affects the stock returns and increases stock volatility. We also find that an increase in BMI coupled with an in crease in percentage cases of COVID-19 adversely affect stock returns and increases volatility. We find that the impacts of BMI on stock returns and volatility are driven by real GDP changes, unemployment rate, and long-term interest rate instead of inflation rates, especially for the developed countries. Our findings are consistent with Barro (1999), which indicates that the BMI represents a better measure relative to the original misery index in predicting the economic outcome, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also find that the impacts of BMI components on stock returns and volatility for the developed countries are different from the emerging markets

How do equity markets react to COVID-19? Evidence from emerging and developed countries

Based on the supply of stock market returns hypothesis, we argue that the unprecedented adverse shock of COVID-19 on the countries’ economic growth translates into a negative shock to the stock markets. According to the institutional theory, we also argue that the impact of COVID-19 in emerging countries is different from developed countries. Based on the overreaction hypothesis, we expect that the market reaction during the stabilizing period of COVID-19 spread is different from the market reaction during the infection period. Using high-frequency daily data across 53 emerging and 23 developed countries from January 14 to August 20, 2020, we find that COVID-19 cases and deaths adversely affect stock returns and increase volatility and trading volume. Cases and deaths affected stock returns and volatility in the emerging markets, while only cases of COVID-19 affected stock returns, volatility, and trading volume in the developed markets. COVID-19 cases and deaths are related to returns, volatility, and trading volume for emerging countries during the rising infection of COVID-19 (pre-April 2020), while cases and mortality rates are related to returns, volatility, and trading volume in developed countries during the stabilizing spread (post-April 2020). Therefore, the emerging markets’ investors seem to react to COVID-19 cases and mortality rates differently from those in the developed markets across two different periods of COVID-19 infection

Performances Evaluation of a Low-Cost Platform for High-Resolution Plant Phenotyping

This study aims to test the performances of a low-cost and automatic phenotyping platform, consisting of a Red-Green-Blue (RGB) commercial camera scanning objects on rotating plates and the reconstruction of main plant phenotypic traits via the structure for motion approach (SfM). The precision of this platform was tested in relation to three-dimensional (3D) models generated from images of potted maize, tomato and olive tree, acquired at a different frequency (steps of 4°, 8° and 12°) and quality (4.88, 6.52 and 9.77 µm/pixel). Plant and organs heights, angles and areas were extracted from the 3D models generated for each combination of these factors. Coefficient of determination (R2), relative Root Mean Square Error (rRMSE) and Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) were used as goodness-of-fit indexes to compare the simulated to the observed data. The results indicated that while the best performances in reproducing plant traits were obtained using 90 images at 4.88 µm/pixel (R2 = 0.81, rRMSE = 9.49% and AIC = 35.78), this corresponded to an unviable processing time (from 2.46 h to 28.25 h for herbaceous plants and olive trees, respectively). Conversely, 30 images at 4.88 µm/pixel resulted in a good compromise between a reliable reconstruction of considered traits (R2 = 0.72, rRMSE = 11.92% and AIC = 42.59) and processing time (from 0.50 h to 2.05 h for herbaceous plants and olive trees, respectively). In any case, the results pointed out that this input combination may vary based on the trait under analysis, which can be more or less demanding in terms of input images and time according to the complexity of its shape (R2 = 0.83, rRSME = 10.15% and AIC = 38.78). These findings highlight the reliability of the developed low-cost platform for plant phenotyping, further indicating the best combination of factors to speed up the acquisition and elaboration process, at the same time minimizing the bias between observed and simulated data

Triple positive breast cancer. A distinct subtype?

Breast cancer is a heterogeneous disease, and within the HER-2 positive subtype this is highly exemplified by the presence of substantial phenotypical and clinical heterogeneity, mostly related to hormonal receptor (HR) expression. It is well known how HER-2 positivity is commonly associated with a more aggressive tumor phenotype and decreased overall survival and, moreover, with a reduced benefit from endocrine treatment. Preclinical studies corroborate the role played by functional crosstalks between HER-2 and estrogen receptor (ER) signaling in endocrine resistance and, more recently, the activation of ER signaling is emerging as a possible mechanism of resistance to HER-2 blocking agents. Indeed, HER-2 positive breast cancer heterogeneity has been suggested to underlie the variability of response not only to endocrine treatments, but also to HER-2 blocking agents. Among HER-2 positive tumors, HR status probably defines two distinct subtypes, with dissimilar clinical behavior and different sensitivity to anticancer agents. The triple positive subtype, namely, ER/PgR/Her-2 positive tumors, could be considered the subset which most closely resembles the HER-2 negative/HR positive tumors, with substantial differences in biology and clinical outcome. We argue on whether in this subgroup the "standard" treatment may be considered, in selected cases, i.e., small tumors, low tumor burden, high expression of both hormonal receptors, an overtreatment. This article review the existing literature on biologic and clinical data concerning the HER-2/ER/PgR positive tumors, in an attempt to better define the HER-2 subtypes and to optimize the use of HER-2 targeted agents, chemotherapy and endocrine treatments in the various subsets

Scale up your In-Memory Accelerator: leveraging wireless-on-chip communication for AIMC-based CNN inference

Analog In-Memory Computing (AIMC) is emerging as a disruptive paradigm for heterogeneous computing, potentially delivering orders of magnitude better peak performance and efficiency over traditional digital signal processing architectures on Matrix-Vector multiplication. However, to sustain this throughput in real-world applications, AIMC tiles must be supplied with data at very high bandwidth and low latency; this poses an unprecedented pressure on the on-chip communication infrastructure, which becomes the system's performance and efficiency bottleneck. In this context, the performance and plasticity of emerging on-chip wireless communication paradigms provide the required breakthrough to up-scale on-chip communication in large AIMC devices. This work presents a many-tile AIMC architecture with inter-tile wireless communication that integrates multiple heterogeneous computing clusters, embedding a mix of parallel RISC-V cores and AIMC tiles. We perform an extensive design space exploration of the proposed architecture and discuss the benefits of exploiting emerging on-chip communication technologies such as wireless transceivers in the millimeter-wave and terahertz bands.This work was supported by the WiPLASH project (g.a. 863337), founded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Bleeper Evo-an easy-to-handle ROV for benthic study

1 page, 1 figureBleeper Evo is a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) developed by the company Praesentis in collaboration with Institut de Ciències del Mar (CSIC) in Barcelona. The main goal of this project was to develop an >easy-to-handle> ROV for benthic studies on the continental shelf. The 40-kg, 110 x 80 x 40-cm Bleeper Evo is capable of seafloor surveys to a maximum depth of 100 m. This ROV can be operated from small boats without a winch system and provides high-quality video images along with temperature and depth data. Two parallel laser beams (532 nm, 50 mW) provide scale in video footage, enabling quantitative analyses of seafloor features as well as characterization and measurement of substrate and faunaThis work was supported by the European Project HER MES (EU contract 511234) and the PETR I Project (PTR 94-0119). A. Gori was supported by an I3P contract (CSIC and European Social Found)Peer Reviewe

Use of Sentinel-2 Derived Vegetation Indices for Estimating fPAR in Olive Groves

Olive tree cultivation is currently a dominant agriculture activity in the Mediterranean basin, where the increasing impact of climate change coupled with the inefficient management of olive groves is negatively affecting olive oil production and quality in some marginal areas. In this context, satellite imagery may help to monitor crop growth under different environmental conditions, thus providing useful information for optimizing olive grove management and final production. However, the spatial resolution of freely-available satellite products is not yet adequate to estimate plant biophysical parameters in complex agroecosystems such as olive groves, where both olive trees and grass cover contribute to the vegetation indices (VIs) signal at pixel scale. The aim of this study is therefore to test a disentangling procedure to partition the VIs signal among the different components of the agroecosystem to use this information for the monitoring of olive growth processes during the season. Specifically, five VIs (GEMI, MCARI2, NDVI, OSAVI, MCARI2/OSAVI) as recorded by Sentinel-2 at a spatial resolution of 10 m over five olive groves in the Montalbano area (Tuscany, Central Italy), were tested as a proxy for olive tree intercepted radiation. The olive tree volume per pixel was initially used to linearly rescale the VIs signal into the relevant value for the grass cover and olive trees. The models, describing the relationship between rescaled VIs and observed fraction of Photosynthetically Active Radiation (fPAR), were fitted and then validated against independent datasets. While in the calibration phase, a greater robustness at predicting fPAR was obtained using NDVI (r = 0.96 and RRMSE = 9.86), the validation results demonstrating that GEMI and MCARI2/OSAVI provided the highest performances (GEMI: r = 0.89 and RRMSE = 21.71; MCARI2/OSAVI: r = 0.87 and RRMSE = 25.50), in contrast to MCARI2 that provided the lowest (r = 0.67 and RRMSE = 36.78). These results may be related to the VIs’ intrinsic features (e.g., lower sensitivity to atmosphere and background effects), which make some of these indices, compared to others, less sensitive to saturation effects by improving fPAR estimation (e.g., GEMI vs. NDVI). On this basis, this study evidenced the need to improve the current methodologies to reduce inter-row effects and select appropriate VIs for fPAR estimation, especially in complex agroecosystems where inter-row grass growth may affect remote sensed-derived VIs signal at an inadequate pixel resolution

Body mass index in HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer treated with first-line paclitaxel and bevacizumab

The evidence emerged from the TOURANDOT trial encourages evaluating the role of anthropometric determinants on treatment outcomes in HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer patients treated with bevacizumab-including regimens. We thus analyzed data from a subgroup of these patients from a larger cohort previously assessed for treatment outcomes. Patients were included in the present analysis if body mass index values had been recorded at baseline. Clinical benefit rates, progression free survival and overall survival were assessed for the overall study population and subgroups defined upon molecular subtype. One hundred ninety six patients were included (N:196). Body mass index showed no impact on clinical benefit rates in the overall study sample and in the luminal cancer subset (p = 0.12 and p = 0.79, respectively), but did so in the triple negative subgroup, with higher rates in patients with body mass index ≥25 (p = 0.03). In the overall study sample, body mass index did no impact progression free or overall survival (p = 0.33 and p = 0.67, respectively). Conversely, in triple negative patients, progression free survival was significantly longer with body mass index ≥25 (6 vs 14 months, p = 0.04). In this subset, overall survival was more favorable (25 vs 19 months, p = 0.02). The impact of the molecular subtype was confirmed in multivariate models including the length of progression free survival, and number of metastatic sites (p < 0.0001). Further studies are warranted to confirm our findings in more adequately sized, ad hoc, prospective studies

Oral chondroitin sulfate and prebiotics for the treatment of canine Inflammatory Bowel Disease: a randomized, controlled clinical trial

BACKGROUND Canine inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic enteropathy of unknown etiology, although microbiome dysbiosis, genetic susceptibility, and dietary and/or environmental factors are hypothesized to be involved in its pathogenesis. Since some of the current therapies are associated with severe side effects, novel therapeutic modalities are needed. A new oral supplement for long-term management of canine IBD containing chondroitin sulfate (CS) and prebiotics (resistant starch, β-glucans and mannaoligosaccharides) was developed to target intestinal inflammation and oxidative stress, and restore normobiosis, without exhibiting any side effects. This double-blinded, randomized, placebo-controlled trial in dogs with IBD aims to evaluate the effects of 180 days administration of this supplement together with a hydrolyzed diet on clinical signs, intestinal histology, gut microbiota, and serum biomarkers of inflammation and oxidative stress. RESULTS Twenty-seven client-owned biopsy-confirmed IBD dogs were included in the study, switched to the same hydrolyzed diet and classified into one of two groups: supplement and placebo. Initially, there were no significant differences between groups (p > 0.05) for any of the studied parameters. Final data analysis (supplement: n = 9; placebo: n = 10) showed a significant decrease in canine IBD activity index (CIBDAI) score in both groups after treatment (p < 0.001). After treatment, a significant decrease (1.53-fold; p < 0.01) in histologic score was seen only in the supplement group. When groups were compared, the supplement group showed significantly higher serum cholesterol (p < 0.05) and paraoxonase-1 (PON1) levels after 60 days of treatment (p < 0.01), and the placebo group showed significantly reduced serum total antioxidant capacity (TAC) levels after 120 days (p < 0.05). No significant differences were found between groups at any time point for CIBDAI, WSAVA histologic score and fecal microbiota evaluated by PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP). No side effects were reported in any group. CONCLUSIONS The combined administration of the supplement with hydrolyzed diet over 180 days was safe and induced improvements in selected serum biomarkers, possibly suggesting a reduction in disease activity. This study was likely underpowered, therefore larger studies are warranted in order to demonstrate a supplemental effect to dietary treatment of this supplement on intestinal histology and CIBDAI