Sovereign Risk Management in Recession: The Cases of Sweden and China

Sovereign risk became a common issue after 2007 financial crisis happened. However, the crisis was only an incentive. Some high sovereign risk countries had lacked reliable sovereign risk management framework and lend overmuch debt before the crisis came. High cost of crisis and succeeding recession gave the world a critical strike. Using the cases of Sweden and China, I argue that fiscal expenditure constraints, debt control, and surplus accumulation in common time are most important measures to manage sovereign risk. A stable and efficient sovereign risk management regime framework is beneficial. A medium-term fiscal stability target should be included. Early intention, temporary stimulus policy and other budget measures could decrease cost of crisis and recession. A development domestic debt market could help relief refinancing pressure of government when some external shock happened. Perfect framework of statistics, specific accounting standard, high transparency will help the government, creditors, and investors reach some debt restructure agreement.China, Sweden, risk management, Sovereign risk,

The Anchoring Effect of “Quality Threshold for Monetary Incentive” on Online Review Platforms

The “quality threshold for monetary incentive” mechanism is a common practice in online review platforms. However, the effect of the quality threshold is still not clear in the extant literature. This study attempts to investigate how the introduction of the quality threshold affects content quality. Based on the Anchoring Effect theory, this study first derives some theoretical conclusions based on theoretical models and then conducts a natural experiment to test the conclusions. The findings show that after introducing the quality threshold, (1) the proportion of content with the threshold-level quality will increase; (2) the proportion of content higher than the quality threshold is reduced when there is the “Anchoring Effect”. Moreover, the empirical study also shows that the quality threshold leads to an overall negative effect on the average review quality. Our findings are meaningful to the stakeholders of the online review platforms

Sovereign Risk Management in Recession: The Cases of Sweden and China

Sovereign risk became a common issue after 2007 financial crisis happened. However, the crisis was only an incentive. Some high sovereign risk countries had lacked reliable sovereign risk management framework and lend overmuch debt before the crisis came. High cost of crisis and succeeding recession gave the world a critical strike. Using the cases of Sweden and China, I argue that fiscal expenditure constraints, debt control, and surplus accumulation in common time are most important measures to manage sovereign risk. A stable and efficient sovereign risk management regime framework is beneficial. A medium-term fiscal stability target should be included. Early intention, temporary stimulus policy and other budget measures could decrease cost of crisis and recession. A development domestic debt market could help relief refinancing pressure of government when some external shock happened. Perfect framework of statistics, specific accounting standard, high transparency will help the government, creditors, and investors reach some debt restructure agreement

Sovereign Risk Management in Recession: The Cases of Sweden and China

Sovereign risk became a common issue after 2007 financial crisis happened. However, the crisis was only an incentive. Some high sovereign risk countries had lacked reliable sovereign risk management framework and lend overmuch debt before the crisis came. High cost of crisis and succeeding recession gave the world a critical strike. Using the cases of Sweden and China, I argue that fiscal expenditure constraints, debt control, and surplus accumulation in common time are most important measures to manage sovereign risk. A stable and efficient sovereign risk management regime framework is beneficial. A medium-term fiscal stability target should be included. Early intention, temporary stimulus policy and other budget measures could decrease cost of crisis and recession. A development domestic debt market could help relief refinancing pressure of government when some external shock happened. Perfect framework of statistics, specific accounting standard, high transparency will help the government, creditors, and investors reach some debt restructure agreement

An innovative vehicle-mounted GPR technique for fast and efficient monitoring of tunnel lining structural conditions

AbstractThe health status of a railway tunnel should be regularly inspected during its service period to ensure safe operation. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) has been used as a key technique for tunnel detection; however, so far, the measurements of GPR are only obtainable in contact mode. Such methods cannot meet the requirements of the operational tunnel disease census and regular inspections. Therefore, a new method—vehicle-mounted GPR with long-range detection—has been developed. It consists of six channels. The distance from its air-launched antenna to the tunnel lining is approximately 0.93 m–2.25 m. The scanning rate of each channel is 976 1/s. When the sampling point interval is 5 cm, the maximum speed can reach up to 175 km/h. With its speed and air-launched antenna, this system has a significant advantage over existing methods. That is, for an electrified railway, there is no need for power outages. Indeed, the proposed system will not interrupt normal railway operation. Running tests were carried out on the Baoji–Zhongwei and Xiangfan–Chongqing railway lines, and very good results were obtained

Different effects of rat interferon alpha, beta and gamma on rat hepatic stellate cell proliferation and activation

BACKGROUND: Liver fibrosis is the common sequel of chronic liver diseases. Recent studies have identified hepatic stellate cells as the primary cell type mediating hepatic fibrogenesis. It has been demonstrated that hepatic stellate cells undergo a process of activation during the development of liver fibrosis. During the activation process, hepatic stellate cells acquire myofibroblast-like phenotype featuring the expression of smooth muscle alpha actin. Interferons have been employed for the treatment of viral hepatitis. However, it is unclear what is the effect of interferons on the prevention and treatment of liver fibrosis. Moreover, it is not clear whether there are any differences among interferon alpha, interferon beta, and interferon gamma in the treatment of liver fibrosis. Therefore, our objective in current study is to investigate the effects of rat interferon-α, interferon-β, and interferon-γ on the proliferation and activation of rat hepatic stellate cells. RESULTS: Rat interferon-β and interferon-γ significantly inhibited rat hepatic stellate cell proliferation while rat interferon-α did not affect the cell proliferation under the same culture condition. Inhibition of cell proliferation was confirmed by both WST-1 cell proliferation assay and 5-bromo-2'-deoxy-uridine incorporation assay. Similar results were observed regarding interferons regulation of hepatic stellate cell activation. Both rat interferon-β and interferon-γ reduced smooth muscle α-actin abundance after 6 days treatment, but rat interferon-α did not alter smooth muscle α-actin level. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that rat interferon-α and interferon-β have different biological effects on rat hepatic stellate cells and suggest that there are different signaling events between interferon-α and interferon-β in hepatic stellate cells

N-(1-Naphth­yl)benzene­sulfonamide

In the title compound, C16H13NO2S, the C—SO2—NH—C torsion angle is −70.1 (2)°. The dihedral angle between the planes of the naphthyl ring system and the phenyl ring is 34.67 (4)°. In the crystal, mol­ecules are linked by inter­molecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds into chains along [100]. There are also π–π inter­actions between adjacent naphthyl groups [inter­planar spacing = 3.541 (3) Å] for mol­ecules stacked along [100]

From Awareness to Action: Exploring End-User Empowerment Interventions for Dark Patterns in UX

The study of UX dark patterns, i.e., UI designs that seek to manipulate user behaviors, often for the benefit of online services, has drawn significant attention in the CHI and CSCW communities in recent years. To complement previous studies in addressing dark patterns from (1) the designer's perspective on education and advocacy for ethical designs; and (2) the policymaker's perspective on new regulations, we propose an end-user-empowerment intervention approach that helps users (1) raise the awareness of dark patterns and understand their underlying design intents; (2) take actions to counter the effects of dark patterns using a web augmentation approach. Through a two-phase co-design study, including 5 co-design workshops (N=12) and a 2-week technology probe study (N=15), we reported findings on the understanding of users' needs, preferences, and challenges in handling dark patterns and investigated the feedback and reactions to users' awareness of and action on dark patterns being empowered in a realistic in-situ setting.Comment: Conditionally Accepted at CSCW 202

Deep Radon Prior: A Fully Unsupervised Framework for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Although sparse-view computed tomography (CT) has significantly reduced radiation dose, it also introduces severe artifacts which degrade the image quality. In recent years, deep learning-based methods for inverse problems have made remarkable progress and have become increasingly popular in CT reconstruction. However, most of these methods suffer several limitations: dependence on high-quality training data, weak interpretability, etc. In this study, we propose a fully unsupervised framework called Deep Radon Prior (DRP), inspired by Deep Image Prior (DIP), to address the aforementioned limitations. DRP introduces a neural network as an implicit prior into the iterative method, thereby realizing cross-domain gradient feedback. During the reconstruction process, the neural network is progressively optimized in multiple stages to narrow the solution space in radon domain for the under-constrained imaging protocol, and the convergence of the proposed method has been discussed in this work. Compared with the popular pre-trained method, the proposed framework requires no dataset and exhibits superior interpretability and generalization ability. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can generate detailed images while effectively suppressing image artifacts.Meanwhile, DRP achieves comparable or better performance than the supervised methods.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures, Journal pape

A Model of the Optical Properties of a Non-absorbing Media with Application to Thermotropic Materials for Overheat Protection

AbstractThermotropic materials offer the potential to provide overheat protection for polymer absorbers. These materials are composed of a matrix material in which a second material, referred to as the scattering domain, is dispersed. Temperature control is accomplished by a reduction in transmittance at a desired temperature corresponding to the phase change temperature of the scattering domain. The phase change is accompanied by a change in refractive index. This paper describes a numerical model to predict the transmittance and reflectance of a polymer based thermotropic material as a function of the relative index of refraction m between the matrix and scattering domains, the scattering domain size and volume fraction fv, and the sheet thickness. The thermotropic material is modelled as a non-absorbing sheet comprised of discrete anisotropic scattering spherical particles embedded in a matrix material. Under the assumption that the particles scatter incident radiation independently, the direction of scattered radiation is determined by Mie theory. A Monte Carlo numerical technique is used to predict the transmittance and reflectance for thermotropic materials in which the matrix index of refraction is 1.5 (representative of polymers) and the incident wavelength is 550nm. Model results are validated by comparison to measured transmittance for 0.3mm thick polymer samples containing particles with 200nm radius at m ranging from 0.97 to 1.09 and fv ranging from 5 to 18.2%. As the mismatch in refractive indices and volume fraction increase, the transmittance is reduced. For example, the transmittance is reduced from 83% for m=1.02 and fv = 9.6 to approximately 50% for m=1.09 and fv =13.5% (200nm radius and 0.3mm thick)