Hedging the exchange rate risk in international portfolio diversification : currency forwards versus currency options

As past research suggest, currency exposure risk is a main source of overall risk of international diversified portfolios. Thus, controlling the currency risk is an important instrument for controlling and improving investment performance of international investments. This study examines the effectiveness of controlling the currency risk for international diversified mixed asset portfolios via different hedge tools. Several hedging strategies, using currency forwards and currency options, were evaluated and compared with each other. Therefore, the stock and bond markets of the, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and the U.S, in the time period of January 1985 till December 2002, are considered. This is done form the point of view of a German investor. Due to highly skewed return distributions of options, the application of the traditional mean-variance framework for portfolio optimization is doubtful when options are considered. To account for this problem, a mean-LPM model is employed. Currency trends are also taken into account to check for the general dependence of time trends of currency movements and the relative potential gains of risk controlling strategies

Graph-based Performance Estimation on Customized MIPS Processors

The desire for greater processor performance with shrinking technologies and increasing heterogeneity, leads to a need for improvement in performance estimation. Being able to estimate the performance of an application without needing to implement the application on the available hardware and soft-core choices can decrease development time and help expedite the process of choosing which platform would be the best choice to use for development. This thesis work focuses on using a graph-based description of an application to estimate performance. By using a graph-based approach, the need for a hardware specific implementation is eliminated and the design space is simplified. Breaking down an application into a graph allows a new approach review to be taken as nodes of the graph can be assigned to levels in the pipelined architecture. This research uses pipelined customized Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) processors as the platform choice. The customized ISA soft-core processors allow the user more control over the resources used in the processor and provides a viable hardware/software choice to demonstrate the capabilities of the graph-based approach. The testcase applications used were the Dot Product, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) application, and the AES with TBox application. The results of this work show that performance can be accurately estimated on a customized processor using a graph-based approach for the application with accuracy ranging from approximately 75% to 89%

Labour Migration and Development: Towards a North-South Vision for Change

This article is adapted from a presentation made at a meeting of policy experts of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Trade Union Advisory Council. The presentation provided the "trade union expert perspective" at the seminar held in Paris, October 17, 2007, entitled "Fair Labour Migration – from vision to reality." Tracing an alternative approach to understanding ‘global labour supply’, the article makes links between jobless growth, trade and investment liberalization, and the increased use of temporary migrant workers around the world. The article concludes with proposals for a broad framework of change leading to decent work and sustainable development – in both the global North and the global South

The War on Gangs: El Salvador’s Playground for International Human Rights Violations

International human rights law was developed with the underlying philosophy that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. However, since its development, we have seen a vast number of human rights violations persist with no recourse. The War on Gangs in El Salvador is just one example of this. This Note examines the history of the War on Gangs in El Salvador, the tumultuous political landscape that has spurred as a result, and how political efforts to address gang violence have been used as a tactic to strip Salvadorans of their fundamental rights and dignity. This Note goes on to analyze the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in relation to El Salvador’s War on Gangs. In doing so, this Note highlights the fundamental inadequacy of international human rights law in preventing, mitigating, and remedying human rights violations

Carthaginian Casualties: The Socioeconomic Effects of the Losses Sustained in the First Punic War

This thesis seeks to investigate the short- and long-term socio-economic impact of the First Punic War on Carthage and its people. It will do so by exploring three parts of the Carthaginian political and socio-economic system during the fourth through the second centuries BCE. The first is its navy, and specifically the costs – in both material and man – of its use. This will be the subject of the first chapter. The second analyses the additional expenditures which the war extracted from Carthage, such as the outlays to recruit, maintain, and provide for the land army. The final chapter focuses on the long-term ramifications of the war, which will be explored by means of an in-depth analysis of the last few battles of the First Punic War from an economic angle

BIOMECHANICAL MODELS FOR ESTIMATING LOADS AND INJURY RISK TO THE LUMBAR SPINE – A REVIEW

INTRODUCTION: The use of mathematical models to estimate tissue loads and injury risk to lumbar spine, and to provide insight into its function, has increased over the last 30 years. It is important to review model features because lumbar tissue loading predicted by these models forms the cornerstone for the development of lifting guidelines. The following brief review is an attempt to analyze underlying modeling philosophies and to interpret the output of a few spine models

Investigating the operating mechanism of a diffraction based biosensor

In this work, we describe our recent efforts aimed at determining the mechanism of signal change for a diffraction-based sensor (DBS) system. The DBS detects analyte-binding events by monitoring the change in diffraction efficiency that takes place when analyte molecules adsorb to target molecules that have been patterned onto a surface. The exact parameters that affect the intensity of the diffraction intensity are currently not well understood.In this work, the formalism used to describe the behaviour of volume-phase holography is used to understand the parameters that effect the diffraction intensity. It is hypothesized that the major factors that effect the diffraction intensity are the differences in optical path length between the wave trains that reflect off the diffraction grating and those that reffect off the substrate surface. Also key is the difference in refractive index between the two media. Two approaches were developed to investigate this hypothesis; the first was to develop a series of gratings of varying thickness using polyelectrolyte multilayers. The indices of refraction of these gratings were adjusted by the incorporation of charged gold nanoparticles. Since DBS systems operate by monitoring the binding of analyte molecules, a second series of experiments were developed to investigate the changes in diffraction intensity as micometer sized carboxylated beads were loaded onto an avidin grating. The first aspect that was investigated was the effect of adding more particles onto the grating surface on diffraction intensity. Second, the extent to which the particles reduced the periodicity of the diffraction grating, and the effect on the observed intensity of the diffraction signal were also investigated. Finally, this work shows the first use of a DBS system to extract the rate of and the maximum surface coverage of a specific binding reaction

Chemical Characteristics, Provenance Determination and Genesis Conditions of Clay Deposits of Kahrizak Formation (Early-Late Pleistocene), East of Tehran, Iran

The Early-Late Pleistocene deposits in South-East of Tehran (Kahrizak Formation) consist of gravel, sand and clay facies which are related to alluvial fan deposits. The XRD analysis on fine grained deposits of the formation indicated the existence of clay minerals including montmorillonite, illite and chlorite; also quartz, calcite and anorthite are present as the minor components. We determined provenance and paleoclimate condition of the deposits based on clay minerals type. Montmorillonite and illite were used as the provenance indicator showing volcanic rock as the source rock. All clay minerals indicate low to moderate leaching in temperate to cold climatic setting. Their ICV values are >1 indicating negligible recycling or weathering of the clays. K2O/ Al2O3<0.4 and ternary plot of CaO+Na2O-Al2O3-KO2 suggests the deposits compositions same as basalt. Also that displays weathering trend. Low ICV values of the deposits exhibit low to intermediate degree of weathering for the parental rock. Based on Bhatia diagram, using DF1 and DF2and K2O/Na2O versus SiO2, its tectonic setting was determined as being active continental margin