U.S. Quantitative Easing Policy Effect on TAIEX Futures Market Efficiency

This paper examines the market efficiency of the Taiwan Stock Exchange Capitalization Weighted Stock Index (TAIEX) Futures after the announcement of Quantitative Easing (QE) policy. Order imbalance is used to explore the relationship between return and order imbalance. We find that under the unconditional OLS model, lagged order imbalances almost have no significantly positive predictive power for current return. Nonetheless, on the trading day after the announcement of QE 1 policy, one-minute interval data show that the lagged order imbalance has predictive power for current return. Under the conditional OLS model, the reversed relation between current return and lagged order imbalance is not universal; on the other hand, after the announcement of QE 2 policy, the reversed relation between current return and lagged order imbalance is more common. Moreover, under volatility-GARCH (1, 1), one-minute interval data shows significantly positive relation between order imbalance and volatility

Parallel Residual Bi-Fusion Feature Pyramid Network for Accurate Single-Shot Object Detection

We propose the Parallel Residual Bi-Fusion Feature Pyramid Network (PRB-FPN) for fast and accurate single-shot object detection. Feature Pyramid (FP) is widely used in recent visual detection, however the top-down pathway of FP cannot preserve accurate localization due to pooling shifting. The advantage of FP is weaken as deeper backbones with more layers are used. To address this issue, we propose a new parallel FP structure with bi-directional (top-down and bottom-up) fusion and associated improvements to retain high-quality features for accurate localization. Our method is particularly suitable for detecting small objects. We provide the following design improvements: (1) A parallel bifusion FP structure with a Bottom-up Fusion Module (BFM) to detect both small and large objects at once with high accuracy. (2) A COncatenation and RE-organization (CORE) module provides a bottom-up pathway for feature fusion, which leads to the bi-directional fusion FP that can recover lost information from lower-layer feature maps. (3) The CORE feature is further purified to retain richer contextual information. Such purification is performed with CORE in a few iterations in both top-down and bottom-up pathways. (4) The adding of a residual design to CORE leads to a new Re-CORE module that enables easy training and integration with a wide range of (deeper or lighter) backbones. The proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance on UAVDT17 and MS COCO datasets.Comment: accepted by IEEE transactions on Image Processin

Tourist shopping behavior : a case of Shanghai outbound tourists / Yingzhi Guo...[et al.]

Shopping is an important tourist activity and its contribution to the economy is significant. For many visitors no trip is complete without having spent time shopping and tourists often feel they cannot return home without buying “something”. This research explored the basic shopping behaviour model of Shanghai outbound tourists. Data from 65 respondents were collected using the convenient sampling method. The motivations of Shanghai outbound tourists’ shopping behaviour were presented in seven dimensions including function, gift giving, affection, curiosity, scarcity, memory and cultural orientations. Quality, brand, shortage of specific goods in China’s domestic market, the lower price of goods in the outbound market and the convenient payments in the destinations are important attributes that spark their shopping behaviours. This outcome has at least had significant implications for tour operators and marketers to understand the needs of Chinese outbound tourists

White-Matter Structural Connectivity in Relation to Humor Styles: An Exploratory Study

To investigate the potential relationship between white matter (WM) microstructure and humor styles, diffusion tensor images of brain WM and humor style tendencies were obtained from thirty healthy adults. Using connectivity efficiency measures from graph theoretical analysis and controlling for the influence of gender, age, educational level, and the big five personality traits, we preliminarily examined the prediction of humor styles from brain network efficiency. The results showed that the local efficiency within particular brain networks positively predicted a self-enhancing humor style and negatively predicted an aggressive humor style. The node efficiency of the left superior temporal gyrus distinguished the benevolent or hostile way that individuals coped with interpersonal embarrassment. These findings from this exploratory study support the hypothesis that WM structure influences humor styles, and provide the initial evidence and implications regarding the relationship between biological mechanisms and mental health for future research

Financial Policy Announcement Efficiency in Financial Crisis

In 2008 financial crisis, stock market turned highly volatile while U.S. government had proposed a series of policies rescuing the economy. This study examines convergence to market efficiency from government financial policies. We find a significant impact of contemporaneous order imbalance on return, while the relation between return and lagged imbalances is insignificant, implying that lagged order imbalances have no predictability on return. From a time-varying GARCH model, we find that explaining power of order imbalance on return declining, implying that volatility plays an important role in return-order imbalance relation. We take a further step to find that there is no strong direct relationship between order imbalances and stock volatility. The story casts on market maker behaviors. Market makers accommodate high inventory levels to mitigate stock volatility on financial policies announcements. An imbalance based trading strategy we develop fails to beat the market. It supports financial policy announcement efficiency

The Impact of Liquidity on GARCH Option Pricing Error during Financial Crisis

In this paper, we explore the valuation performance of Heston and Nandi GARCH (HN GARCH) model on the pricing of options of financial stocks listed for AMEX during pre and post financial crisis periods. We find that the GARCH pricing model presents better performance than the traditional Black-Scholes model for the out-of-sample option pricing, no matter what the moneyness and the time-to-maturity. Specifically, the models show the effects of liquidity is not significant. Intuitionally, smaller liquidity tends to exhibit more pricing errors, especially for longer mature options. Unfortunately, we cannot get the expected outcomes, which is that the period of post financial crisis tend to have larger pricing errors. In sum, except more computational convenience, the HN GARCH model offers another vision of the relationship between liquidity and its effect on pricing errors

Assimilation of GPS Refractivity from FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC Using a Nonlocal Operator with WRF 3DVAR and Its Impact on the Prediction of a Typhoon Event

A nonlocal observation operator has been developed to assimilate GPS radio occultation (RO) refractivity with WRF 3DVAR. For simplicity, in the past GPS RO refractivity was often assimilated using a local observation operator with the assumption that the GPS RO observation was representative of amodel local point. Such an operator did not take into account the effects of horizontal inhomogeneity on the derived GPS RO refractivity. In order to more accurately model the observables, Sokolovskiy et al. (2005a) developed a nonlocal observation operator, which would take into account the effects of horizontal inhomogeneity on GPS RO measurements. This nonlocal observation operator calculates the integrated amount of the model refractivity along the ray paths centered at the perigee points. For comparative purposes, the nonlocal observation operator can be simplified by limiting the length of integration near the RO point. This is called the "local operator variant", which is equivalent to the original local operator except that the original one is performed with fixed tangent points at observation levels. For computational efficiency, assimilation using both the nonlocal operator and local operator variant now is performed with smear tangent points at the mean height of each model vertical level. In this study, the statistics of observation errors using both local and nonlocal operators were estimated based on WRF simulations. The observation errors produced by the nonlocal operator are about two times smaller than those generated by the local operator and in agreement with Sokolovskiy et al. (2005b)

Safety assessment of poly-ε-caprolactone in the treatment of primary spontaneous pneumothorax

Background/purposeBiomaterial-based implants are gaining traction as an option for pleurodesis treatment, yet the search for the best biomaterial or the most suitable shape to handle spontaneous pneumothorax continues. This forward-looking research assessed the use of a poly-ε-caprolactone membrane for its safety when applied as a sclerosant in pleurodesis procedures in human patients.MethodsFrom July 2017 to February 2018, we conducted a Phase I trial in which 10 patients with primary spontaneous pneumothorax were treated using video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery with a poly-ε-caprolactone membrane. These procedures encompassed bleb resection and mechanical pleurodesis through parietal pleura scrubbing. After resection, a 150 × 150 mm poly-ε-caprolactone membrane was applied to the apex. The primary outcome measures were the adverse events and laboratory outcomes.ResultsAfter surgery, we observed no cardiopulmonary-related adverse events or indications of systemic inflammation. Furthermore, no episodes of hypothermia or hyperthermia occurred. Chest radiographs showed no evident pneumonitis or effusion associated with tissue reactions. The average follow-up duration was 31.7 ± 17.7 months, during which two patients exhibited recurrence.ConclusionThis study is the first to show the biocompatibility of poly-ε-caprolactone in humans, suggesting its potential as a treatment option for patients with primary spontaneous pneumothorax. Despite the relatively small number of patients, we maintain confidence in the reliability and safety profile of the PCL membrane, bolstered by its previously established efficacy in applications involving other organs. Phase II and phase III clinical studies are needed to support these observations

Genetically Determined Plasma Lipid Levels and Risk of Diabetic Retinopathy: A Mendelian Randomization Study.

Results from observational studies examining dyslipidemia as a risk factor for diabetic retinopathy (DR) have been inconsistent. We evaluated the causal relationship between plasma lipids and DR using a Mendelian randomization approach. We pooled genome-wide association studies summary statistics from 18 studies for two DR phenotypes: any DR (N = 2,969 case and 4,096 control subjects) and severe DR (N = 1,277 case and 3,980 control subjects). Previously identified lipid-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms served as instrumental variables. Meta-analysis to combine the Mendelian randomization estimates from different cohorts was conducted. There was no statistically significant change in odds ratios of having any DR or severe DR for any of the lipid fractions in the primary analysis that used single nucleotide polymorphisms that did not have a pleiotropic effect on another lipid fraction. Similarly, there was no significant association in the Caucasian and Chinese subgroup analyses. This study did not show evidence of a causal role of the four lipid fractions on DR. However, the study had limited power to detect odds ratios less than 1.23 per SD in genetically induced increase in plasma lipid levels, thus we cannot exclude that causal relationships with more modest effect sizes exist