An examination of bank risk measures and their relationship to systemic risk measurement : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctoral of Philosophy in Finance at Massey University, Manawatu (Turitea), New Zealand

This research explores ways of measuring bank risk, both individual bank risk and systemic risk, with the main focus on z-score. Z-score is a popular indicator of individual bank risk-taking. Despite its popularity among academics, there is a lack of consensus on a standard way to construct a time-varying z-score measure. Meanwhile, in the post-GFC period, increasing attention has been given to macro-prudential policy and its role in mitigating systemic risk. This research discusses major challenges in existing approaches to the construction of time-varying z-score measure. It empirically compares these approaches using quarterly data of New Zealand banks. Both conceptual discussions and empirical analyses support the use of a rolling window in the computation of time-varying z-score, which is consistent with changing bank risk profiles through time. This research is also the first study to propose a risk-weighted z-score measure. This research further proposes a new systemic risk measure based on z-score, which is developed on the concept of Leave-One-Out (LOO) approach. The systemic risk contribution of an individual bank can be captured by the variation of risk-taking of a banking system when excluding the particular bank. The LOO z-score measure can be computed using accounting information only, and is therefore applicable to both listed and unlisted banks. Empirical analysis on the LOO z-score measure in assessing banks’ systemic risk contribution is first applied to the New Zealand and Australian markets, and then extended to an international sample including 17 countries. The LOO z-score measure is proved to be useful for assessing banks’ systemic risk contribution, with a positive rank correlation with Marginal Expected Shortfall (MES) and Delta Conditional Value-at-Risk (ΔCoVaR). The LOO z-score measure provides a new approach to assess systemic risk contribution using accounting data, which can be used as a complement to market-based approaches. This measure is especially useful for systemic risk analyses of banks with limited or even no share market data at all, which is the key advantage. The ability to include both listed and unlisted banks in the evaluation of systemic risk is fundamental in macro-prudential policy frameworks

Chinese Research on EFL Writing Teaching in the Past 5 Years: Based on the Statistics and Analysis of Language Authoritative Journals From 2009 to 2013

This study is devoted to revealing the research characteristic on EFL writing teaching in the past 5 years by Chinese authors. Result of contrastive analysis and survey of the essays published on 14 kinds of authoritative linguistic journals from year 2009 to 2013 shows: a) the research of Chinese EFL writing teaching develops steadily in spite of low internationalization level and scale. b) From the point of the research content, although the current scope is extensive with all major aspects involved, it is disproportionate in certain topics, perceptual thinking and the micro level accounts for large proportion. c) In terms of the research methods, statistical results show that Chinese researchers apply the three research methods evenly, but the proportion of qualitative method is overweight. d) And the research object is too centralized

More than Encoder: Introducing Transformer Decoder to Upsample

Medical image segmentation methods downsample images for feature extraction and then upsample them to restore resolution for pixel-level predictions. In such a schema, upsample technique is vital in restoring information for better performance. However, existing upsample techniques leverage little information from downsampling paths. The local and detailed feature from the shallower layer such as boundary and tissue texture is particularly more important in medical segmentation compared with natural image segmentation. To this end, we propose a novel upsample approach for medical image segmentation, Window Attention Upsample (WAU), which upsamples features conditioned on local and detailed features from downsampling path in local windows by introducing attention decoders of Transformer. WAU could serve as a general upsample method and be incorporated into any segmentation model that possesses lateral connections. We first propose the Attention Upsample which consists of Attention Decoder (AD) and bilinear upsample. AD leverages pixel-level attention to model long-range dependency and global information for a better upsample. Bilinear upsample is introduced as the residual connection to complement the upsampled features. Moreover, considering the extensive memory and computation cost of pixel-level attention, we further design a window attention scheme to restrict attention computation in local windows instead of the global range. We evaluate our method (WAU) on classic U-Net structure with lateral connections and achieve state-of-the-art performance on Synapse multi-organ segmentation, Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) Brain, and Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) datasets. We also validate the effectiveness of our method on multiple classic architectures and achieve consistent improvement.Comment: Accepted by BIBM202

Job Satisfaction Among Methadone Maintenance Treatment Clinic Service Providers in Jiangsu, China: A Cross-sectional Survey.

ObjectiveService providers' job satisfaction is critical to the stability of the work force and thereby the effectiveness of methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) programs. This study aimed to explore MMT clinic service providers' job satisfaction and associated factors in Jiangsu, China.MethodsThis secondary study used baseline data of a randomized interventional trial implemented in Jiangsu, China. A survey was conducted among 76 MMT service providers using the computer-assisted self-interview (CASI) method. Job satisfaction responses were assessed via a 30-item scale, with a higher score indicating a higher level of job satisfaction. Perceived institutional support and perceived stigma due to working with drug users were measured using a 9-item scale. Correlation and multiple linear regression analyses were performed to identify factors associated with job satisfaction.ResultsCorrelation analyses found a significant association between job satisfaction and having professional experience in the prevention and control of HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, or other infectious diseases (P = 0.046). Multiple regression analyses revealed that working at MMT clinics affiliated with Center for Disease Control and Prevention sites was associated with a lower level of job satisfaction (P = 0.014), and perception of greater institutional support (P = 0.001) was associated with a higher level of job satisfaction.ConclusionJob satisfaction among MMT clinic service providers was moderate in our study. Our findings suggest that institutional support for providers should be improved, and that acquisition of additional expertise should be encouraged

Nutrient inversion and hyperspectral feature extraction of sea rice at diff erent growth stages

Nitrogen is a large amount of essential elements for the growth and development of sea rice. Monitoring the nitrogen nutrition status of sea rice timely and accurately, and rational fertilization of sea rice is of great signifi cance for increasing yield, optimizing quality and reducing water pollution. The remote sensing diagnosis technology of sea rice nutrition has the characteristics of simple, non_x005fdestructive and rapid, and has been widely studied and applied by experts in various countries. In this experiment, the sea red rice varieties were taken as an example. Through field experiment, the leaves of sea rice in four growth stages were collected by using chlorophyll analyzer and near infrared spectrometer, and the chlorophyll value and spectral refl ectance of sea rice leaves were determined. The results showed that the spectral refl ectance of sea rice leaves in diff erent growth stages had obvious changes. The sensitive band of sea rice leaves was further found by combining the spectral curve, which laid the foundation for the future nitrogen nutrition diagnosis of sea rice

Potential novel bZIP-like gene for resistance to Erysiphe necator identified in Chinese wild Vitis pseudoreticulata

In this study, a novel bZIP-like gene was isolated from Chinese wild Vitis pseudoreticulata W. T. acc. Baihe-35-1. The full-length complementary deoxyribonucleic acid (cDNA) sequence of the gene was 1583 bp including 159 bp 5’ untranslated region (UTR), 365 bp 3’ UTR and a 1083 bp ORF which encodes a polypeptide of 360 amino acids with a molecular weight of 38.662 kDa. The deduced amino acid sequence shares an overall 46 to 69.8% sequence similarity with bZIP from other plants. Therefore, we designated this gene as V. pseudoreticulata bZIP (VpbZIP-like). The expression of VpbZIP-like was induced 12 h post inoculation (hpi) by Erysiphe necator, but transiently decreased, then increased in these two genotypes and its expression was lower in highly resistant genotype Baihe-35-1 than in susceptible genotype Hunan-1 at 24, 48 and 72 hpi. We further tested whether the expression was also a response to plant signaling molecules. Results indicate that the susceptible genotype Hunan-1 showed higher expression of VpbZIP-like than the highly resistant genotype Baihe-35-1 after exogenous application of methyl jasmonate (MeJA), salicylic acid (SA) and ethephon (Eth). Moreover, tissue specific expression pattern of VpbZIP-like was analyzed by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Results reveal that it was in lower lever in flower than in leaf, stem, tendril and fruit. The CDS of VpbZIP-like was inserted into the prokaryotic expression construct pGEX-4T-1, and then transformed into Escherichia coli BL21-code induced by isopropyl-b-D-thiogalactopyranoside (IPTG) which resulted in the production of a Mr. 64 kDa of GST- VpbZIP-like fusion protein displayed in sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE).Key words: Chinese wild Vitis, bZIP, gene expression, signaling molecules, fusion protein expression

Protecting Effects of Dexamethasone on Thymus of Rats with Severe Acute Pancreatitis

Purpose. To study the protecting effects of dexamethasone on thymus of rats with severe acute pancreatitis (SAP). Methods. The SAP rats were randomly assigned to the model group and dexamethasone-treated group, the other normal healthy rats were assigned to the sham operation group. The rat survival, thymus pathological changes, apoptotic index, as well as expression levels of NF-κB, P-selectin, Bax, Bcl-2, and Caspase-3 protein of all groups were observed, respectively, at 3 hours, 6 hours, and 12 hours. The contents of amylase and endotoxin in plasma as well as the contents of TNF-α, PLA2, and NO in serum were determined. Results. There was no marked difference between the model group and treated group in survival. The contents of different indexes in blood of treated group were lower than those of the model group to various degrees at different time points. The thymus pathological score was lower in treated group than in model group at 12 hours.The treated group in Caspase-3 protein expression of thymus significantly exceeded the model group at 12 hours. The apoptotic index was significantly higher in treated group than in model group. Conclusion. Dexamethasone has protecting effects on thymus of SAP rats

Self-consistent Reasoning For Solving Math Word Problems

Math word problems (MWPs) is a task that automatically derives solution expression from a giving math problems in text. The previous studies suffer from spurious correlations between input text and output expression. To mitigate this issue, we propose a self-consistent reasoning framework called SCR, which attempts to adopt a pruning strategy to correct the output distribution shift so as to implicitly fix those spurious correlative samples. Specifically, we firstly obtain a sub-network by pruning a roberta2tree model, for the sake to use the gap on output distribution between the original roberta2tree model and the pruned sub-network to expose spurious correlative samples. Then, we calibrate the output distribution shift by applying symmetric Kullback-Leibler divergence to alleviate spurious correlations. In addition, SCR generates equivalent expressions, thereby, capturing the original text's logic rather than relying on hints from original text. Extensive experiments on two large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that our model substantially outperforms the strong baseline methods.Comment: Submitted to IEEE ICASSP 202

Diurnal Variation of Tropical Ice Cloud Microphysics: Evidence from Global Precipitation Measurement Microwave Imager Polarimetric Measurements

The diurnal variation of tropical ice clouds has been well observed and examined in terms of the occurring frequency and total mass but rarely from the viewpoint of ice microphysical parameters. It accounts for a large portion of uncertainties in evaluating ice cloud's role on global radiation and hydrological budgets. Owing to the advantage of precession orbit design and paired polarized observations at a high-frequency microwave band that is particularly sensitive to ice particle microphysical properties, three years of polarimetric difference (PD) measurements using the 166 GHz channel of Global Precipitation Measurement Microwave Imager (GPM-GMI) are compiled to reveal a strong diurnal cycle over tropical land (30degS-30deg N) with peak amplitude varying up to 38%. Since the PD signal is dominantly determined by ice crystal size, shape, and orientation, the diurnal cycle observed by GMI can be used to infer changes in ice crystal properties. Moreover, PD change is found to lead the diurnal changes of ice cloud occurring frequency and total ice mass by about 2 hours, which strongly implies that understanding ice microphysics is critical to predict, infer, and model ice cloud evolution and precipitation processes