Testing Semi-strong Form Efficiency of Stock Market

The efficient market hypothesis suggests that stock markets are “informationally efficient”. That is, any new information relevant to the market is spontaneously reflected in the stock prices. A consequence of this hypothesis is that past prices cannot have any predictive power for future prices once the current prices have been used as an explanatory variable. In other words the change in future prices depends only on arrival of new information that was unpredictable today hence it is based on surprise information. Another consequence of this hypothesis is that arbitrage opportunities are wiped out instantaneously. Empirical tests of the efficient market hypothesis actually test for these consequences in various ways. Some of them have been summarised in earlier chapters. These tests generally could not conclusively accept the random-walk hypothesis of stock returns even when GARCH effects were accounted for. Many studies have found empirical regularities that are contrary to the efficient market hypothesis. For example, the monthly, weekly and daily returns on stocks tend to exhibit discernable patterns, such as seasonal affects, month of the year affect, day of the week affect, hourly affect etc. In case of Pakistan’s stock markets too such affects are identified. Such as the Ramadan affect [see Hussain and Uppal (1999)], seasonal effects and day of the week affect. Further, the wide spread use of “technical analysis” among stock traders and their ability to predict to some extent the direction of movements in the prices of individual stocks over medium term testifies to the existence of patterns and seasonal trends.

Testing Semi-strong Form Efficiency of Stock Market

The efficient market hypothesis suggests that stock markets are “informationally efficient”. That is, any new information relevant to the market is spontaneously reflected in the stock prices. A consequence of this hypothesis is that past prices cannot have any predictive power for future prices once the current prices have been used as an explanatory variable. In other words the change in future prices depends only on arrival of new information that was unpredictable today hence it is based on surprise information. Another consequence of this hypothesis is that arbitrage opportunities are wiped out instantaneously. Empirical tests of the efficient market hypothesis actually test for these consequences in various ways. Some of them have been summarised in earlier chapters. These tests generally could not conclusively accept the random-walk hypothesis of stock returns even when GARCH effects were accounted for. Many studies have found empirical regularities that are contrary to the efficient market hypothesis. For example, the monthly, weekly and daily returns on stocks tend to exhibit discernable patterns, such as seasonal affects, month of the year affect, day of the week affect, hourly affect etc. In case of Pakistan’s stock markets too such affects are identified. Such as the Ramadan affect [see Hussain and Uppal (1999)], seasonal effects and day of the week affect. Further, the wide spread use of “technical analysis” among stock traders and their ability to predict to some extent the direction of movements in the prices of individual stocks over medium term testifies to the existence of patterns and seasonal trends

Fungal osteomyelitis in a patient with chronic granulomatous disease: Case report and review of the literature

Chronic granulomatous disease (CGD) is the most common of the primary immunodeficiency in children. It is caused by single gene defect resulting in dysfunctional nicotinamide adenine dineucleotide phosphate (NADPH) oxidase complex causing recurrent bacterial and fungal infections. Here we present the case of a 9 year old boy who was a known case of CGD since three years of age. He presented with recent history of fever, left sided pain in the scapular region and difficulty in breathing. Chest imaging revealed developing left upper lobe consolidation and erosion of the 3rd posterior rib. The child underwent video assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) and biopsy of the lesion. Histopathology revealed fungal hyphae which were confirmed to be Aspergillus nidulans on staining. He was successfully treated with voriconazole therapy. We will also review the literature on fungal osteomyelitis in CGD patients

Photoplethysmography temporal marker-based machine learning classifier for anesthesia drug detection

Anesthesia drug overdose hazards and lack of gold standards in anesthesia monitoring lead to an urgent need for accurate anesthesia drug detection. To investigate the PPG waveform features affected by anesthesia drugs and develop a machine-learning classifier with high anesthesia drug sensitivity. This study used 64 anesthesia and non-anesthesia patient data (32 cases each), extracted from Queensland and MIMIC-II databases, respectively. The key waveform features (total area, rising time, width 75%, 50%, and 25%) were extracted from 16,310 signal recordings (5-s duration). Discriminant analysis, support vector machine (SVM), and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) were evaluated by splitting the dataset into halve training (11 patients, 8570 segments) and halve testing dataset (11 patients, 7740 segments). Significant differences exist between PPG waveform features of anesthesia and non-anesthesia groups (p  0.05). The KNN classifier achieved 91.7% (AUC = 0.95) anesthesia detection accuracy with the highest sensitivity (0.88) and specificity (0.90) as compared to other classifiers. Kohen’s kappa also shows almost perfect agreement (0.79) with the KNN classifier. The KNN classifier trained with significant PPG features has the potential to be used as a reliable, non-invasive, and low-cost method for the detection of anesthesia drugs for depth analysis during surgical operations and postoperative monitoring. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT: [Image: see text

“Not A Bug Splat turned the tables on who was watching whom. The pressure brought about real change in drone policy” – Ali Rez

In February Ali Rez and Assam Khalid spoke at the South Asia Centre on the topic of art and marketing as a protest device in Pakistan. Before the event they were in conversation with Hasna Syed and Sonali Campion about their social impact projects, advertising in Pakistan and the need for brands to be authentic in their communications

Sistem Kenaikan Pangkat dan Kepuasan Kerja : Satu Kajian Kes Ke atas Perkhidmatan Awam Persekutuan Di Malaysia

This research is a case study exploring the relationship between the promotion system and job satisfaction among federal civil servants in federal departments and agencies in Malaysia. The samples involved in this study are government officers serving in federal departments and agencies in the state of Sabah, Malaysia. A quantitative method was used in this study. A total of 700 questionnaires were distributed among federal civil servants in grades 41 to grades 54. A total of 420 questionnaires were returned but after screening only 380 questionnaires were found useable and analysed in the study. Questionnaires were distributed to respondents based on purposive sampling methods. A significant positive relationship was found between the promotion system and job satisfaction. This study will contribute knowledge through the empirical data obtained as well as gaining a better understanding of the relationship between the promotion system and the level of job satisfaction among federal public servants in Malaysia. From a practical perspective, the findings of this study can be used by policy makers, managers and researchers who are interested in improving the policy of human resource management within the public sector in Malaysia

CHALLENGING THE MULTILAYERED CRISES WITHIN ORGANIZATIONS THROUGH APPLICATION OF EFFECTIVE HUMAN RESOURCE STRATEGIES (A CRISES MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE FOR ORGANIZATION’S EFFECTIVENESS)

Crises in organizations are not only multilayered but deeplyrooted thus compromising their effectiveness. To sustain and competein the global world, strategic approaches to manage these crisesbecome inevitable. This study explores the existing body of theorieson both organisational crises (operational, fraudulent and publicity),and the role of Human Resource practices in managing crises with anintent to develop a framework of application for utilising effectiveHRM practices in crisis management. We find that it is essential toassess the degree of change and complexity that a crisis might bringinto work setting and a high level of awareness of the nature of crisesmanagement among employees enhances the chances of bettermanagement performance. By comprehending the nature of variouscrises, and uncertainty factors useful measures can be created to avoidand mitigate organisational crises

Dengue fever in Northern Pakistan: The Hepatic Implications

Background: To gauge the clinical spectrum of dengue fever in northern Pakistan and to assess its hepatic implications Methods: This prospective study was conducted at Rawalpindi General Hospital (now BBH), Rawalpindi from 1st Oct 2006 to 31st Dec 2008. It included all 264 patients suffering from dengue fever who presented during this period. Dengue infection was suspected if two or more of the following features in addition to fever were present: headache, retro-orbital pain, myalgias/arthralgias, scarlet/maculopapular rash, vomiting/epigastric pain and haemorrhagic manifestations. Blood samples were sent for dengue virus IgM. A blood complete picture, liver function tests, serum urea and creatinine, and urine R/E were also obtained. Specific evidence of liver involvement was also sought on examination. Results: The 264 patients comprised of 146 males and 118 females. Age of patients ranged from 14 to 80 years. 220 patients were seen in the last three months of 2006, the time of the dengue epidemic. Fever and myalgias were present in all patients. Vomiting was seen in 223 (85%) and abdominal pain in 163 (62%) patients. A skin rash was present in 148 (56%) while 56 (21%) complained of joint pains and 53 (20%) of retro-orbital pain. 26 (10%) patients had a bleeding disposition and jaundice was noted in 6 (2%). Leukopenia and thrombocytopenia were present in all patients, while 254 (96%) had proteinuria. ALT was elevated in 163 (62%) and AST was raised in 135 (51%) patients. Conclusion: The liver is affected in a large number of cases of dengue fever. Liver function tests are useful to evaluate the degree of liver damage and markers such as AST and ALT may be used as parameters to assess severit

Family Business Background, Motivation and Culture in Determining Women Entrepreneurial Success

Purpose-The main purpose of this study is to investigate the key success factors in determining the entrepreneurial success among women entrepreneurs in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. The key success factors for this study include family business background, motivation and; two of hofstede’s cultural dimension which include femininity/masculinity and uncertainty avoidance. Design/methodology/approach- The respondents for this study were women entrepreneurs operating businesses for a period of three years, located around Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. The total population for this study was 454. The total number of questionnaires distributed was 330 and the total number of usable questionnaires was 216. Findings-Based on the results and findings of this study, it was found that only family business background contributed significantly towards women entrepreneurial success. Motivation, femininity/masculinity and uncertainty avoidance were not among the predictors in determining women entrepreneurial success in this study. Originality/value- This study through its research and findings has contributed significantly to both theoretical and practical implications. This study can help to provide information related to women entrepreneurial success and can benefit the government in an effort to encourage and support the success of women in their entrepreneurial ventures. The study suggested that further research should include a comparative study among the various states in Malaysia as well as between genders in determining entrepreneurial success

Table Structure Extraction with Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit Networks

Tables present summarized and structured information to the reader, which makes table structure extraction an important part of document understanding applications. However, table structure identification is a hard problem not only because of the large variation in the table layouts and styles, but also owing to the variations in the page layouts and the noise contamination levels. A lot of research has been done to identify table structure, most of which is based on applying heuristics with the aid of optical character recognition (OCR) to hand pick layout features of the tables. These methods fail to generalize well because of the variations in the table layouts and the errors generated by OCR. In this paper, we have proposed a robust deep learning based approach to extract rows and columns from a detected table in document images with a high precision. In the proposed solution, the table images are first pre-processed and then fed to a bi-directional Recurrent Neural Network with Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) followed by a fully-connected layer with soft max activation. The network scans the images from top-to-bottom as well as left-to-right and classifies each input as either a row-separator or a column-separator. We have benchmarked our system on publicly available UNLV as well as ICDAR 2013 datasets on which it outperformed the state-of-the-art table structure extraction systems by a significant margin.Comment: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) 2019, Sydney, Australi