Access to FHLBank advances and the performance of thrift institutions

This article examines thrift financial data from 1985 to 1991 and finds that financially distressed thrifts, especially those benefiting from regulatory forbearance policies, tended to borrow more from Federal Home Loan Banks. The authors also find that the stock returns of distressed thrifts reflected the subsidized rates at which they were able to borrow from the Federal Savings and Loan Corporation.Federal home loan banks ; Savings and loan associations

Occurrence of Parasitoid Wasps, Baeus sp. and Gelis sp., in the Egg Sacs of the Wolf Spiders Pardosa moesta and Pardosa sternalis (Araneae, Lycosidae) in Southeastern Idaho

Egg sacs of the wolf spiders Pardosa moesta and Pardosa sternalis were sampled for two years during June to September in southeastern Idaho. Parasitoid wasps, Baeus sp. (Sceleonidae) and Gelis sp. (Ichneumonidae), were observed in the egg sacs of both Pardosa species. Of 322 egg sacs examined, 14.6% were parasitized. Parasitism of egg sacs occurred throughout most of the Pardosa egg sac-carrying season

Evaluation of Technology Concepts for Traffic Data Management and Relevant Audio for Datalink in Commercial Airline Flight Decks

Datalink is currently operational for departure clearances and in oceanic environments and is currently being tested in high altitude domestic enroute airspace. Interaction with even simple datalink clearances may create more workload for flight crews than the voice system they replace if not carefully designed. Datalink may also introduce additional complexity for flight crews with hundreds of uplink messages now defined for use. Finally, flight crews may lose airspace awareness and operationally relevant information that they normally pickup from Air Traffic Control (ATC) voice communications with other aircraft (i.e., party-line transmissions). Once again, automation may be poised to increase workload on the flight deck for incremental benefit. Datalink implementation to support future air traffic management concepts needs to be carefully considered, understanding human communication norms and especially, the change from voice- to text-based communications modality and its effect on pilot workload and situation awareness. Increasingly autonomous systems, where autonomy is designed to support human-autonomy teaming, may be suited to solve these issues. NASA is conducting research and development of increasingly autonomous systems, utilizing machine-learning algorithms seamlessly integrated with humans whereby task performance of the combined system is significantly greater than the individual components. Increasingly autonomous systems offer the potential for significantly improved levels of performance and safety that are superior to either human or automation alone. Two increasingly autonomous systems concepts - a traffic data manager and a conversational co-pilot - were developed to intelligently address the datalink issues in a complex, future state environment with significant levels of traffic. The system was tested for suitability of datalink usage for terminal airspace. The traffic data manager allowed for automated declutter of the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) display. The system determined relevant traffic for display based on machine learning algorithms trained by experienced human pilot behaviors. The conversational co-pilot provided relevant audio air traffic control messages based on context and proximity to ownship. Both systems made use of the connected aircraft concepts to provide intelligent context to determine relevancy above and beyond proximity to ownship. A human-in-the-loop test was conducted in NASA Langley Research Centers Integration Flight Deck B-737-800 simulator to evaluate the traffic data manager and the conversational co-pilot. Twelve airline crews flew various normal and non-normal procedures and their actions and performance were recorded in response to the procedural events. This paper details the flight crew performance and evaluation during the events

Advancing Aircraft Operations in a Net-Centric Environment with the Incorporation of Increasingly Autonomous Systems and Human Teaming

NextGen has begun the modernization of the nations air transportation system, with goals to improve system safety, increase operation efficiency and capacity, provide enhanced predictability, resilience and robustness. With these improvements, NextGen is poised to handle significant increases in air traffic operations, more than twice the number recorded in 2016, by 2025.1 NextGen is evolving toward collaborative decision-making across many agents, including automation, by use of a Net-Centric architecture, which in itself creates a very complex environment in which the navigation and operation of aircraft are to take place. An intricate environment such as this, coupled with the expected upsurge of air traffic operations generates concern respecting the ability of the human-agent to both fly and manage aircraft within. Therefore, it is both necessary and practical to begin the process of increasingly autonomous systems within the cockpit that will act independently to assist the human-agent achieve the overall goal of NextGen. However, the straightforward technological development and implementation of intelligent machines into the cockpit is only part of what is necessary to maintain, at minimum, or improve human-agent functionality, as desired, while operating in NextGen. The full integration of Increasingly Autonomous Systems (IAS) within the cockpit can only be accomplished when the IAS works in concert with the human, formulating trust between the two, thereby establishing a team atmosphere. Imperative to cockpit implementation is ensuring the proper performance of the IAS by the development team and the human-agent with which it will be paired when given a specific piloting, navigation, or observational task. Described in this paper are the steps taken, at NASA Langley Research Center, during the second and third phases of the development of an IAS, the Traffic Data Manager (TDM), its verification and validation by human-agents, and the foundational development of Human Autonomy Teaming (HAT) between the two

The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles

Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles. We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigateOAin three populations: (1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, (2) recent journal articles indexed in Web of Science, and (3) articles viewed by users of Unpaywall, an open-source browser extension that lets users find OA articles using oaDOI. We estimate that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA (19M in total) and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. The most recent year analyzed (2015) also has the highest percentage of OA (45%). Because of this growth, and the fact that readers disproportionately access newer articles, we find that Unpaywall users encounter OA quite frequently: 47% of articles they view are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made freeto- read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license. We also examine the citation impact of OA articles, corroborating the so-called open-access citation advantage: accounting for age and discipline, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA.Weencourage further research using the free oaDOI service, as a way to inform OA policy and practice

Development of a radiographic dental implant guide for identification of dental implant types

INTRODUCTION: Identification of dental implant types can be a complex process for inexperienced health care professionals. Dental implants can have subtle differences in their morphology, which make it difficult to distinguish them from one another The unique appearance of dental anatomy and the placement of custom restorations ensure accurate identification of bodies or human remains when radiographic techniques are correctly applied. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: To develop a radiographic dental implant guide for ten common dental implant types currently used in the Western Cape, South Africa; using their morphological characteristics observed on pantomographs. DESIGN: The methodology considered for this research study was a positivist approach through a quantitative, exploratory, non-experimental research design. METHODS: Ten commonly used dental implants were radiographed at straight tube (ST), off-centre (OC) and severe off-centre (SOC) angles to create a reference instrument Two reviewers used the morphologies of the different dental implant types, namely the apex, thread and neck, observed on ante-mortem pantomographs, and compared it to the appearance of the dental implants in the reference instrument to make a positive identification match. The straight tube image of all ten dental implant types in the reference instrument was used as the initial point of reference to positively identify the morphological characteristics of each dental implant type on the pantomographs. RESULTS: A total of 380 dental implants could be identified on 105 pantomographs reviewed. Of the 380 dental implants, 350 dental implants (91%) were identified as dental implant types listed in the reference instrument while 30 dental implants were identified as another type of dental implant type not listed in the reference instrument A total of 208 dental implants (54.2%) could be positively identified on the ante-mortem pantomographs using the straight tube images in the reference instrument. The morphological characteristics of the dental implant types were described using x-ray imaging of dental implants. The ten commonly used dental implants types could be positively identified by two independent reviewers and based on this a radiographic dental implant guide was developed. CONCLUSION: Each dental implant type had unique morphological characteristics as well as similarities which enabled distinction between the different dental implant types. The dental implant guide developed could be used by dentistry and radiography students. The dental implant guide may be useful in the field of forensic dentistry and forensic radiology

FTIR Spectroscopic Studies on Protein Migration in the Retina due to Light Exposure

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Autonomous System Technologies for Resilient Airspace Operations

Increasing autonomous systems within the aircraft cockpit begins with an effort to understand what autonomy is and developing the technology that encompasses it. Autonomy allows an agent, human or machine, to act independently within a circumscribed set of goals; delegating responsibility to the agent(s) to achieve overall system objective(s). Increasingly Autonomous Systems (IAS) are the highly sophisticated progression of current automated systems toward full autonomy. Working in concert with humans, these types of technologies are expected to improve the safety, reliability, costs, and operational efficiency of aviation. IAS implementation is imminent, which makes the development and the proper performance of such technologies, with respect to cockpit operation efficiency, the management of air traffic and data communication information, vital. A prototype IAS agent that attempts to optimize the identification and distribution of "relevant" air traffic data to be utilized by human crews during complex airspace operations has been developed

Directional changes of the geomagnetic field in West Africa: Insights from the metallurgical site of Korsimoro

This work shows the first archeomagnetic directions from Western Africa measured on 32 iron smelting kilns dated between 650 and 1800 AD. The archeological excavation of the vast metallurgical site of Korsimoro established the existence of four distinct iron-smelting techniques. The time-frame of each technique could be clearly determined with radiocarbon dating. Many of the kilns investigated in this study could also be dated individually with residual charcoals found in their inside. The results indicate that the inclination of the field changed gradually from shallow normal to shallow reversed during 800 to 1300 AD, and then went back to shallow normal around 1600–1700 AD. The declination was instead stable around 10°E between 800 and 1400 AD, thereafter it started changing towards North. This trend correlates well with available secular variation curves from the Balkan and from Spain, and indicates that the field variation in West Africa was similar to the one in Europe