Measuring Risk And Return Of Sustainable And Responsible Investment (Sri) Sukuk In Malaysia

The Sustainable and Responsible Investment (SRI) sukuk is a financing instrument that could utilize Islamic finance to tap into the growing social impact investment markets around the world. Given the novelty of the SRI sukuk, it is still relatively unexplored. To further contribute to the development of SRI sukuk, this paper aims to provide a critical review on how the Sukuk Ihsan compare to Malaysia sovereign bonds, Malaysia Islamic sovereign bonds, Malaysia corporate issued AAA-rated bonds and other educational social impact bonds around the world. I find that the SRI sukuk is significantly different from similar AAA-rated corporate bonds, Islamic sovereign bond and Malaysia sovereign bond. The SRI sukuk is riskier than Islamic sovereign bond and Malaysia sovereign bond but less risky than similar AAA-rated corporate bonds. There is also significant difference between SRI sukuk and other educational social impact bonds. The yield spread of SRI sukuk and sovereign bonds tend to be on the lower side when compared with other educational social impact bonds and is attributed to its credit rating and bond structure

Measuring Risk And Return Of Sustainable And Responsible Investment (Sri) Sukuk In Malaysia

The Sustainable and Responsible Investment (SRI) sukuk is a financing instrument that could utilize Islamic finance to tap into the growing social impact investment markets around the world. Given the novelty of the SRI sukuk, it is still relatively unexplored. To further contribute to the development of SRI sukuk, this paper aims to provide a critical review on how the Sukuk Ihsan compare to Malaysia sovereign bonds, Malaysia Islamic sovereign bonds, Malaysia corporate issued AAA-rated bonds and other educational social impact bonds around the world. I find that the SRI sukuk is significantly different from similar AAA-rated corporate bonds, Islamic sovereign bond and Malaysia sovereign bond. The SRI sukuk is riskier than Islamic sovereign bond and Malaysia sovereign bond but less risky than similar AAA-rated corporate bonds. There is also significant difference between SRI sukuk and other educational social impact bonds. The yield spread of SRI sukuk and sovereign bonds tend to be on the lower side when compared with other educational social impact bonds and is attributed to its credit rating and bond structure

RGBT Salient Object Detection: A Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark

Salient object detection in complex scenes and environments is a challenging research topic. Most works focus on RGB-based salient object detection, which limits its performance of real-life applications when confronted with adverse conditions such as dark environments and complex backgrounds. Taking advantage of RGB and thermal infrared images becomes a new research direction for detecting salient object in complex scenes recently, as thermal infrared spectrum imaging provides the complementary information and has been applied to many computer vision tasks. However, current research for RGBT salient object detection is limited by the lack of a large-scale dataset and comprehensive benchmark. This work contributes such a RGBT image dataset named VT5000, including 5000 spatially aligned RGBT image pairs with ground truth annotations. VT5000 has 11 challenges collected in different scenes and environments for exploring the robustness of algorithms. With this dataset, we propose a powerful baseline approach, which extracts multi-level features within each modality and aggregates these features of all modalities with the attention mechanism, for accurate RGBT salient object detection. Extensive experiments show that the proposed baseline approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on VT5000 dataset and other two public datasets. In addition, we carry out a comprehensive analysis of different algorithms of RGBT salient object detection on VT5000 dataset, and then make several valuable conclusions and provide some potential research directions for RGBT salient object detection.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures https://github.com/lz118/RGBT-Salient-Object-Detectio

A Novel Single Domain Antibody Targeting FliC Flagellin of Salmonella enterica for Effective Inhibition of Host Cell Invasion

The enteric pathogen, Salmonella enterica is a major cause of human gastroenteritis globally and with increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics, alternative solutions are urgently needed. Single domain antibodies (sdAbs), the smallest antibody fragments that retain antigen binding specificity and affinity, are derived from variable heavy-chain only fragments (VHH) of camelid heavy-chain-only immunoglobulins. SdAbs typically contain a single disulfide bond simplifying recombinant protein production in microbial systems. These factors make sdAbs ideally suited for the development of effective anti-bacterial therapeutics. To this end, we generated an anti-Salmonella VHH library from which we screened for high affinity sdAbs. We present a novel sdAb (Abi-Se07) that targets the Salmonella virulence factor, FliC, required for bacterial motility and invasion of host cells. We demonstrate that Abi-Se07 bound FliC with a KD of 16.2 ± 0.1 nM. In addition, Abi-Se07 exhibited cross-serovar binding to whole cells of S. enterica serovar Typhimurium, Heidelberg, and Hadar. Abi-Se07 significantly inhibited bacterial motility and significantly reduced S. enterica colonization in a more native environment of chicken jejunum epithelium. Taken together, we have identified a novel anti-Salmonella sdAb and discuss future efforts toward therapeutic development.Fil: Huen, Jennifer. AbCelex Technologies Inc.; Canadá. University of Toronto; CanadáFil: Yan, Zhun. AbCelex Technologies Inc.; CanadáFil: Iwashkiw, Jeremy. AbCelex Technologies Inc.; CanadáFil: Dubey, Shraddha. AbCelex Technologies Inc.; CanadáFil: Gimenez, Maria C.. University of Toronto; CanadáFil: Ortiz, María Eugenia. University of Toronto; Canadá. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Salta. Instituto de Investigaciones para la Industria Química. Universidad Nacional de Salta. Facultad de Ingeniería. Instituto de Investigaciones para la Industria Química; ArgentinaFil: Patel, Saumil V.. AbCelex Technologies Inc.; CanadáFil: Jones, Michael D.. AbCelex Technologies Inc.; CanadáFil: Riazi, Ali. AbCelex Technologies Inc.; CanadáFil: Terebiznik, Mauricio. University of Toronto; CanadáFil: Babaei, Saeid. AbCelex Technologies Inc.; CanadáFil: Shahinas, Dea. AbCelex Technologies Inc.; Canad

PROKINETIC AND LAXATIVE EFFECTS OF XIAO'ER QIXINGCHA, A HOUSEHOLD PEDIATRIC HERBAL FORMULA

Background: Xiao'er Qixingcha, a household Chinese Medicinal formula, has been extensively applied in pediatric clinic for dyspepsia and constipation for hundreds of years. The present study firstly inspected whether the extract of Xiao'er Qixingcha (EXQ) has in vivo and in vitro prokinetic and laxative effects, and evaluated its acute toxicity. Materials and methods: In the in vivo study, small intestinal transit rates and fecal output characters (number and fecal weight) were measured on normal and two models of constipated mice (induced by diphenoxylate and by water-fasting respectively). In the in vivo study, the contraction rates of ileum smooth muscle were examined with EXQ treatment. Moreover, in acute toxicity study, EXQ was administered orally for 14 days to juvenile SD rats, and clinical signs, viscera lesion and body weight were monitored daily. Results: EXQ at all doses significantly increased the small intestinal transit rates, and ameliorated the fecal output characters of normal mice. In diphenoxylate-induced constipated mice, EXQ dose-dependently improved the small intestinal transit rates and fecal output. In water-fasting-induced constipated mice, EXQ dose-dependently improved the small intestinal transit rates, and significantly ameliorated the fecal output characters at 2.92 and 6.75 g/kg. Furthermore, in the in vitro study, EXQ dose-dependently raised the contraction rates of the isolated rabbit ileum smooth muscle. Finally, the acute toxicity study indicated that no toxicological effect was observed in terms of clinical signs, viscera lesion or change of body weight. Conclusions: Taken together, EXQ exhibited prominent prokinetic and laxative activities, promising it as a safe and effective alternative pharmaceutical therapy for constipation