Stock loan with Automatic termination clause, cap and margin

This paper works out fair values of stock loan model with automatic termination clause, cap and margin. This stock loan is treated as a generalized perpetual American option with possibly negative interest rate and some constraints. Since it helps a bank to control the risk, the banks charge less service fees compared to stock loans without any constraints. The automatic termination clause, cap and margin are in fact a stop order set by the bank. Mathematically, it is a kind of optimal stopping problems arising from the pricing of financial products which is first revealed. We aim at establishing explicitly the value of such a loan and ranges of fair values of key parameters : this loan size, interest rate, cap, margin and fee for providing such a service and quantity of this automatic termination clause and relationships among these parameters as well as the optimal exercise times. We present numerical results and make analysis about the model parameters and how they impact on value of stock loan.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figure

Design and Implementation of a Shared Task Queue Groupware

Cooperation between workers in the same company or several companies has become increasingly important nowadays. The cooperation on some task usually involves sharing information about the following steps involved in the task as well as negotiation between workers who are considered to form a group. There is already software for helping people to work together and program components that can support cooperation in a particular application. Typically, they are either too specific for a certain task or too complex to configure. In this thesis, we design groupware for handling task queues within and between companies. The groupware offers a protocol for workers in the same company to work together and to handle tasks in the shared queue. It also supports cooperation between workers in different companies. The workers cooperate in an asynchronous way but see the updates of the task queue state in real time. Information about the shared task queue is made consistent across all clients who may be physically distributed. The thesis also compares different ways to design groupware that implements the shared task queue. A concurrency control algorithm for the application is adopted from literature and implemented. Finally, the correctness of concurrency control algorithm is assessed by developing a formal model in the Promela language and by examining the state space using the Spin model checker

Fabrication Sequence Optimization for Minimizing Distortion in Multi-Axis Additive Manufacturing

Additive manufacturing of metal parts involves phase transformations and high temperature gradients which lead to uneven thermal expansion and contraction, and, consequently, distortion of the fabricated components. The distortion has a great influence on the structural performance and dimensional accuracy, e.g., for assembly. It is therefore of critical importance to model, predict and, ultimately, reduce distortion. In this paper, we present a computational framework for fabrication sequence optimization to minimize distortion in multi-axis additive manufacturing (e.g., robotic wire arc additive manufacturing), in which the fabrication sequence is not limited to planar layers only. We encode the fabrication sequence by a continuous pseudo-time field, and optimize it using gradient-based numerical optimization. To demonstrate this framework, we adopt a computationally tractable yet reasonably accurate model to mimic the material shrinkage in metal additive manufacturing and thus to predict the distortion of the fabricated components. Numerical studies show that optimized curved layers can reduce distortion by orders of magnitude as compared to their planar counterparts

A Novel Web Page Filtering System by Combining Texts and Images

With the rapid development of the Internet, people benefit much from the sharing of information. Meanwhile, the WWW era is a double-edged sword which spreads harmful and erotic content widely. In this paper, a new statistical approach has been exploited by combining the results of two or more different classification methods using our filtering system. We first briefly introduce the classification of discrete texts, continuous texts and images separately, and then describe the specific way we have been exploring to merge the text and image classification result. Also there is a section illustrating our system framework. Finally we assess our method by demon-strating the experimental results and comparing it to some common-used filtering methods

Spectrum of malignancies among the population of adults living with HIV infection in China: A nationwide follow-up study, 2008-2011.

BackgroundAlthough increasingly studied in high-income countries, there is a paucity of data from the Chinese population on the patterns of cancer among people living with HIV (PLHIV).MethodsWe conducted a nationwide follow-up study using routinely collected data for adult PLHIV diagnosed on or before 31 December 2011 and alive and in care as of 1 January 2008. Participants were observed from 1 January 2008 (study start) to 30 June 2012 (study end). Main outcome measures were gender-stratified age-standardized incidence rates for China (ASIRC) and standardized incidence ratios (SIR) for all malignancy types/sites observed.ResultsAmong 399,451 subjects, a majority was aged 30-44 years (49.3%), male (69.8%), and Han Chinese (67.9%). A total of 3,819 reports of cancer were identified. Overall, ASIRC was 776.4 per 100,000 for males and 486.5 per 100,000 for females. Malignancy sites/types with highest ASIRC among males were lung (226.0 per 100,000), liver (145.7 per 100,000), and lymphoma (63.1 per 100,000), and among females were lung (66.8 per 100,000), lymphoma (48.0 per 100,000), stomach (47.8 per 100,000), and cervix (47.6 per 100,000). Overall SIR for males was 3.4 and for females was 2.6. Highest SIR was observed for Kaposi sarcoma (2,639.8 for males, 1,593.5 for females) and lymphoma (13.9 for males, 16.0 for females).ConclusionsThese results provide evidence of substantial AIDS-defining and non-AIDS-defining cancer burden among adult Chinese PLHIV between 2008 and 2011. Although further study is warranted, China should take action to improve cancer screening, diagnosis, and treatment for this vulnerable population