1,448 research outputs found
Birds of a feather flock together and get money from the crowd
In constructing online alternative finance instruments as a new form of financial
democratization and financial inclusion, this article aims at verifying the presence of
similarity effect in equity crowdfunding investments. Discussion focuses on ethnic and gender
similarity between the seekers and investors that sustained the project. Our analysis is based
on 5,996 personal investors that have participated in 81 equity crowdfunding campaigns, on
Crowdcube, a British equity crowdfunding platform from 2011 and 2016.
Results show that in equity crowdfunding gender and ethnic similarities play different role
based on investors’ characteristics - gender, ethnicity and the combination of two. In
particular, ethnic similarity positively influence the level of amount invested by both female
and male investors belonging to an ethnic minority. Even if female investors tend to prefer
male company, their preference changes if a female proponent belonging to an ethnic
minority runs the company.
From a practical perspective, our findings shed new light on how individual characteristics
can be important factor in financing situations. Results allow entrepreneurs and equity
crowdfunding platforms to understand better potential investor behaviour and highlights the
role of equity crowdfunding as tool for minorities’ financial inclusion and women
entrepreneur empowerment
Reversible myocardial injury aggravated by complex arrhythmias in three Toxoplasma gondii-positive dogs
Although Toxoplasma gondii represents an oft-cited cause of myocarditis in veterinary medicine, the existing literature on the pre-mortem demonstration of T. gondii-associated myocardial injury (MI) in dogs is scant. In this case series, we provide detailed clinical, laboratory, echocardiographic and electrocardiographic description of three T. gondii-positive dogs diagnosed with MI. In all cases, etiological diagnosis was based on the antibody screening test (all dogs had IgM titres ≥1:64) and MI was demonstrated by a concomitant increase of the serum concentration of cardiac troponin I (0.25-9.6 ng/ml, upper hospital limit <0.15 ng/ml). In all dogs, MI was aggravated by complex arrhythmias (ventricular in two dogs, and either ventricular and supraventricular in the remaining dog). In one case, left ventricular systolic dysfunction was also present. All dogs underwent an extensive diagnostic work-up aimed at excluding additional comorbidities, either cardiac and extra-cardiac, possibly able to contribute to MI, arrhythmias and systolic dysfunction. All dogs received appropriate antiprotozoal (i.e., clindamycin) and antiarrhythmic (i.e., amiodarone, sotalol) therapy. This was systematically followed by a simultaneous decline in T. gondii serology titres, normalisation of troponin level and left ventricular systolic function, and the resolution of clinical and electrocardiographic abnormalities. In light of this result, therapies were interrupted and subsequent controls ruled out any disease relapse. In these cases, the clinical and instrumental findings obtained at admission and rechecks strongly supported the clinical suspicion of toxoplasmic myocarditis
Edge channel mixing induced by potential steps in an integer quantum Hall system
We investigate the coherent mixing of co-propagating edge channels in a
quantum Hall bar produced by step potentials. In the case of two edge channels
it is found that, although a single step induces only a few percent mixing, a
series of steps could yield 50% mixing. In addition, a strong mixing is found
when the potential height of a single step allows a different number of edge
channels on the two sides of the step. Charge density probability has been also
calculated even for the case where the step is smoothened.Comment: final version: 7 pages, 6 figure
How did COVID-19 affect medical and cardiology journals? A pandemic in literature
BACKGROUND AND AIMS: The spreading speed of the COVID-19 pandemic forced the medical community to produce efforts in updating and sharing the evidence about this new disease, trying to preserve the accuracy of the data but at the same time avoiding the potentially harmful delay from discovery to implementation. The aim of our analysis was to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on medical literature in terms of proportion of COVID-19-related published papers and temporal patterns of publications within a sample of general/internal medicine and cardiology journals. METHODS: We searched through PubMed scientific papers published from 1 January 2020 to 31 January 2021 about COVID-19 in ten major medical journals, of which five were in general/internal medicine and five in the cardiology field. We analyzed the proportion of COVID-19-related papers, and we examined temporal trends in the number of published papers. RESULTS: Overall, the proportion of COVID-19-related papers was 18.5% (1986/10 756). This proportion was higher among the five selected general/internal medicine journals, compared with cardiology journals (23.8% vs 9.5%). The vast majority of papers were not original articles; in particular, in cardiology journals, there were 28% 'original articles', 17% 'review articles' and 55.1% 'miscellaneous', compared with 20.2%, 5.1% and 74.7% in general/internal medicine journals, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Our analysis highlights the big impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on international scientific literature. General and internal medicine journals were mainly involved, with cardiology journals only at a later time
Quantum Annealing Applied to De-Conflicting Optimal Trajectories for Air Traffic Management
We present the mapping of a class of simplified air traffic management (ATM)
problems (strategic conflict resolution) to quadratic unconstrained boolean
optimization (QUBO) problems. The mapping is performed through an original
representation of the conflict-resolution problem in terms of a conflict graph,
where nodes of the graph represent flights and edges represent a potential
conflict between flights. The representation allows a natural decomposition of
a real world instance related to wind-optimal trajectories over the Atlantic
ocean into smaller subproblems, that can be discretized and are amenable to be
programmed in quantum annealers. In the study, we tested the new programming
techniques and we benchmark the hardness of the instances using both classical
solvers and the D-Wave 2X and D-Wave 2000Q quantum chip. The preliminary
results show that for reasonable modeling choices the most challenging
subproblems which are programmable in the current devices are solved to
optimality with 99% of probability within a second of annealing time.Comment: Paper accepted for publication on: IEEE Transactions on Intelligent
Transportation System
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