A currency union or an exchange rate union: evidence from Northeast Asia

This paper examines whether or not Northeast Asia economies, namely, China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, can form a currency union, where a single currency and a uniform monetary policy are adopted, or an exchange rate union where all the currencies are pegged to an internal or external currency or an optimum currency basket. The analysis of correlations of supply shocks, exchange rate shocks, monetary shocks, and demand shocks, which are estimated applying the structural VAR model with identification restrictions imposed, to the data for the period from 1970 through 2004, shows that shocks of these economies are not symmetric, in general, implying that the Northeast Asian economies are not ready yet to form a common currency union. However, it is found that the Northeast Asian countries can form an exchange rate union with a major currency basket, which consists of the U.S. dollar, the euro and the Japanese yen, as an anchor currency. The paper also examines the option of pegging to a basket of regional currencies, similar to the Asian Currency Unit (ACU), and discusses policy implications.currency union; exchange rate union; optimum currency areas; Northeast Asia

HST-MRF: Heterogeneous Swin Transformer with Multi-Receptive Field for Medical Image Segmentation

The Transformer has been successfully used in medical image segmentation due to its excellent long-range modeling capabilities. However, patch segmentation is necessary when building a Transformer class model. This process may disrupt the tissue structure in medical images, resulting in the loss of relevant information. In this study, we proposed a Heterogeneous Swin Transformer with Multi-Receptive Field (HST-MRF) model based on U-shaped networks for medical image segmentation. The main purpose is to solve the problem of loss of structural information caused by patch segmentation using transformer by fusing patch information under different receptive fields. The heterogeneous Swin Transformer (HST) is the core module, which achieves the interaction of multi-receptive field patch information through heterogeneous attention and passes it to the next stage for progressive learning. We also designed a two-stage fusion module, multimodal bilinear pooling (MBP), to assist HST in further fusing multi-receptive field information and combining low-level and high-level semantic information for accurate localization of lesion regions. In addition, we developed adaptive patch embedding (APE) and soft channel attention (SCA) modules to retain more valuable information when acquiring patch embedding and filtering channel features, respectively, thereby improving model segmentation quality. We evaluated HST-MRF on multiple datasets for polyp and skin lesion segmentation tasks. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models and can achieve superior performance. Furthermore, we verified the effectiveness of each module and the benefits of multi-receptive field segmentation in reducing the loss of structural information through ablation experiments

Linking Social Media Use to Leader-Follower Relationships: The Roles of Perceived Social Support and Secure Attachment

Social media present a critical role in changing and transforming workplace relationships. Drawing upon theories of Conservation of Resources and Sense-Making, this study purposes to develop a theoretical framework to describe the impact of leaders’ social media use on leader-member guanxi. We specifically propose the mediating roles of perceived social support and secure attachment, and the moderating effect of task interdependence in this relationship. This study not only contributes to research on social media in interpreting how social media improve leader-member guanxi, but also assists practitioners in interpreting and developing strategies related to social media within organizations

Essays on the optimal choice of exchange rate regimes

The way a country manages its currency can affect its volume of trade, capital flows and income. A country, especially one with high degree of trade openness, needs to find the most suitable exchange rate arrangement to reduce the volatility of its currency value and output. This thesis examines the optimal choice of exchange rate arrangements from various aspects.The first essay examines whether or not the Northeast Asian economies, that is, China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan can form a currency union, where a single currency and a uniform monetary policy are adopted, or an exchange rate union, where all the currencies are pegged to an internal or external currency or currency basket. It also attempts to find the optimal currency or currency basket for the four Asian economies if an exchange rate union is feasible. Structural VAR models with identification assumptions are applied to analyze the correlations of supply, exchange rate, monetary, and demand shocks. The paper finds that the shocks of these four economies are not symmetric, implying that the Northeast Asian economies are not ready yet to form a common currency union. However, it is found that these economies can form an exchange rate union with a major currency basket including the U.S. dollar, the Japanese yen and the Euro as currency anchor. The paper also examines the option of pegging to a basket of regional currencies, similar to the Asian Currency Unit (ACU).The second essay uses panel data on emerging and developing countries to study the interrelationships between balance-sheet currency mismatches and the choice of exchange rate regimes. The evidence shows that the lack of exchange rate flexibility reinforces currency mismatches and increases dollar liabilities, but the estimated economic effects are small.The third essay uses a three-country model to analyze the choice of the optimal weights of a currency basket for emerging market economies. This model assumes imperfect capital mobility and allows the domestic country to impose a reserve requirement on capital inflows. The optimal weights are derived by minimizing the loss from the volatility of output and trade. The result shows that the optimal weights are affected by variance of the cross exchange rate between the two major currencies, the covariance between inflations in the two large countries and the cross exchange rate, the relative weights assigned to trade and output, and price and exchange rate elasticities of trade, demand and supplies.Ph.D., Business -- Drexel University, 200

DynGO: a tool for visualizing and mining of Gene Ontology and its associations

BACKGROUND: A large volume of data and information about genes and gene products has been stored in various molecular biology databases. A major challenge for knowledge discovery using these databases is to identify related genes and gene products in disparate databases. The development of Gene Ontology (GO) as a common vocabulary for annotation allows integrated queries across multiple databases and identification of semantically related genes and gene products (i.e., genes and gene products that have similar GO annotations). Meanwhile, dozens of tools have been developed for browsing, mining or editing GO terms, their hierarchical relationships, or their "associated" genes and gene products (i.e., genes and gene products annotated with GO terms). Tools that allow users to directly search and inspect relations among all GO terms and their associated genes and gene products from multiple databases are needed. RESULTS: We present a standalone package called DynGO, which provides several advanced functionalities in addition to the standard browsing capability of the official GO browsing tool (AmiGO). DynGO allows users to conduct batch retrieval of GO annotations for a list of genes and gene products, and semantic retrieval of genes and gene products sharing similar GO annotations. The result are shown in an association tree organized according to GO hierarchies and supported with many dynamic display options such as sorting tree nodes or changing orientation of the tree. For GO curators and frequent GO users, DynGO provides fast and convenient access to GO annotation data. DynGO is generally applicable to any data set where the records are annotated with GO terms, as illustrated by two examples. CONCLUSION: We have presented a standalone package DynGO that provides functionalities to search and browse GO and its association databases as well as several additional functions such as batch retrieval and semantic retrieval. The complete documentation and software are freely available for download from the website

Modified Generalized-Brillouin-Zone Theory with On-site Disorders

We study the characterization of the non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE) in non-Hermitian systems with on-site disorder. We extend the application of generalized-Brillouin-zone (GBZ) theory to these systems. By proposing a modified GBZ theory, we give a faithfully description of the NHSE. For applications, we obtain a unified $\beta$ for system with long-range hopping, and explain the conventional-GBZ irrelevance of the magnetic suppression of the NHSE in the previous study.Comment: 7-pages, 3 figure