A model for the Yield curve

The starting point is an interrogation about the non-broken character of the term structure of interest rates. Some arguments for that smooth character are presented here, all of which are based upon the assumption that market participants - arbitrageurs and speculators - always try to explore any misalignments discovered in the interest market. This led to the basic concept behind the model that the current short-term rate determines most of the value of the rate level for the subsequent period. A linear model describing that simple relationship is assumed and that constitutes the building block from where one can develop the mathematical equations necessary to work with different sets of market data. A number of different yield curves were modelled by adjustment to real market data using this basic model, all of them showing a very high quality of the fits when measured by the non-linear ratio R2. Nevertheless this fact still needs to be confirmed as the examples were drawn from non-independent markets and from a very short time window. The model can be improved by simple addition of a liquidity premium depend only upon the maturity of the rates. However, that improvement sophisticates tremendously the mathematical tractability of any real situation without any assurance that this added cost compensates for the increased quality of the fit. The model is designed around only 3 parameters that can all be interpreted in economic terms. Two of them, in particular, bring a significant improvement over the traditional views frequently extracted from the shape of the yield curve. Provided future tests confirm the high quality of the basic and the improved (with a liquidity premium) models, both are supportive of the expectation hypothesis (EH) and the liquidity premium hypothesis (LPH).

Seismic vulnerability of Modern Architecture building's: Le Corbusier style: a case study

In Portugal, at the end of the World War II, a new generation of architects emerged, influenced by the Modern Movement Architecture, born in Central-Europe in the early twenties but now influenced also by the Modern Brazilian Architecture. They worked with new typologies, such as multifamily high-rise buildings, and built them in the most important cities of the country, during the fifties, reflecting the principles of the Modernity and with a strong formal conception inspired in the International Style’s codes. Concrete, as material and technology, allowed that those “Unity Centre” buildings become modern objects, expressing the five-point formula that Le Corbusier enounced in 1927 and draw at the “Unité d’Habitation de Marseille”, namely: the building lifted in pilotis, the free design of the plan, the free design of the façade, the unbroken horizontal window and the roof terrace. In Lisbon, late forties urban plans transformed and expanded the city, creating modulated buildings repeated in great extensions – that was a progressist idea of standardization. The Infante Santo complex is a successful adaptation to the Lisbon reality of the Modern Urbanism and Architecture. In the fifties, it was built a large number of Modern housing buildings in Lisbon, with structural characteristics that, in certain conditions, can induce weaknesses in structural behaviour, especially under earthquake loading. For example, the concept of buildings lifted in pilotis can strongly facilitate the occurrence of soft-storey mechanisms, which turns these structures very vulnerable to earthquake actions. The development and calibration of refined numerical tools, as well as, assessment and design codes makes feasible the structural safety assessment of existing buildings. To investigate the vulnerability of this type of construction, one building representative of the Modern Architecture, at the Infante Santo Avenue, was studied. This building was studied with the non-linear dynamic analysis program PORANL, which allows the safety evaluation according to the recently proposed standards

Efficiency of low versus high airline pressure in stunning cattle with a pneumatically powered penetrating captive bolt gun

The efficiency of stunning cattle was assessed in 443 animals (304 pure Zebu and 139 crossbred cattle), being mainly mature bulls and cows. Cattle were stunned using a Jarvis pneumatically powered penetrating captive bolt gun operating with low (160–175 psi, N = 82) and high (190 psi, N = 363) airline pressure, which was within the manufactures specifications. Signs of brain function and the position of the shots on the heads were recorded after stunning. Velocity of the captive bolt and its physical parameters were calculated. Cattle shot with low pressures showed more rhythmic respiration (27 vs. 8%, P < 0.001), less tongue protrusion (4 vs. 12%, P = 0.03) and less masseter relaxation (22 vs. 48%, P < 0.001). There was an increased frequency of shots in the ideal position when cattle were shot with the low compared to high airline pressures (15.3 vs. 3.1%). Bolt velocity and its physical parameters were significantly (P < 0.01) higher when using high pressure. Airline pressures below 190 psi are inappropriate when shooting adult Zebu beef cattle with pneumatically powered penetrating captive bolt guns

Analyzing Trails in Complex Networks

Even more interesting than the intricate organization of complex networks are the dynamical behavior of systems which such structures underly. Among the many types of dynamics, one particularly interesting category involves the evolution of trails left by moving agents progressing through random walks and dilating processes in a complex network. The emergence of trails is present in many dynamical process, such as pedestrian traffic, information flow and metabolic pathways. Important problems related with trails include the reconstruction of the trail and the identification of its source, when complete knowledge of the trail is missing. In addition, the following of trails in multi-agent systems represent a particularly interesting situation related to pedestrian dynamics and swarming intelligence. The present work addresses these three issues while taking into account permanent and transient marks left in the visited nodes. Different topologies are considered for trail reconstruction and trail source identification, including four complex networks models and four real networks, namely the Internet, the US airlines network, an email network and the scientific collaboration network of complex network researchers. Our results show that the topology of the network influence in trail reconstruction, source identification and agent dynamics.Comment: 10 pages, 16 figures. A working manuscript, comments and criticisms welcome

Portuguese Yeld Curve: Volatility and Correlations

Stronger competition in Europe triggered by the launch of the Euro and increasing regulatory demands upon the capitalisation of banks and other financial intermediaries in the continent have raised the importance of a sound and accurate measurement of the risks brought to them by the positions they take in different assets. In Portugal banks still invest predominantly in debt instruments due to the small size of the domestic equity market, and this makes their profitability and solvency more sensitive to interest rate volatility than to the uncertainty of equity indices. But some VaR models require statistic information about the form of the local yield curve as well as how it tends to evolve along the time. However, it is important to note that there are reasons to believe that a common currency within the EU does not eliminate differences at this level between, on one hand, small and peripheral countries and, on the other hand, central and larger ones. This paper makes a first approach into this direction suggesting models to estimate the Portuguese yield curve, the spreads against German spot rates, and some values of volatility and correlation for our domestic interest rates.N/

Assessing consumer literacy on financial complex products

Consumer financial education has become an important research topic, due to the growth of a wide range of investment products available in online banking. The individuals are exposed to highly complex financial products without understanding the risk and what product is suitable for them. This study investigates and measured the financial education of individuals in complex financial products. A quiz game was developed for a bank website to measure 1597 bank clients in complex products literacy. The survey also enabled a comparison between the basic and advanced skills of financial literacy knowledge. The results highlight a satisfactory overall financial literacy level. While basic knowledge level between individuals has a higher degree, there are serious concerns in advanced skill level. This study contributes to an understanding of adults’ knowledge about the prediction of the risk of investments in complex financial products, as well as providing value to ongoing financial literacy research.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Gamification to teach and assess financial education: a case study of self-directed bank investors

Financial education has become a popular research topic, due the growth of marketing financial services, and the wide range and complexity of investment products available online. To assess the investment risk, and decide what product is suitable for individuals, it becomes essential to use tools to improve financial education. An educational game may be a possible solution since is a serious game designed to teach adults about a specific subject and to teach them a skill. Games-based learning software are interactive play that helps to solve problems, teaches, and gives the fundamental needs of learning by providing – enjoyment and motivation. This study investigates the financial education of self-directed investors in complex financial products, and portfolio management to answer our research question – how well adult self-directed investors understand financial education about complex financial products and portfolio management – and evaluates the financial education level of self-directed bank investors in complex financial products with high risk. An online quiz game with multiple-choice questions was developed, and deployed on a bank website to assess knowledge across investment product literacy - in addition to sociodemographic characteristics – involving the participation of 1,597 self-directed adult investors. The survey also enabled a comparison between the core and advanced skills of financial education knowledge. To measure and assess the financial education, we calculate the individual score by the amount of correct answers from the three multiple answer quiz questions. The results highlight that participants have a satisfactory overall financial literacy level. While core competencies, knowledge among private investors have a higher degree of general financial education, there are particular areas in which they scored low in advanced skills (i.e., complex financial product questions). This result provides valuable insights, information for further investigation of distance education research through games, which can only continue to grow because of the increasing complexity and importance of financial education in modern societies. This study contributes to an understanding of adults’ knowledge regarding investments in complex financial products, as well as providing a valuable contribution to ongoing financial education research.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Assessment patterns during the Portuguese Emergency Remote Teaching

COVID-19 certainly brought more negative aspects than positives to education. On the one hand, new gaps and challenges emerged from the lockdowns worldwide. On the other hand, we have been assisting in the increased relationship between technology and education, which created an opportunity for education to evolve and enhance the use of digital tools in classes. During several lockdowns worldwide, due to the pandemic crisis, millions of students and teachers were forced to continue the process of teaching and learning at home and experienced Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT), which led to new challenges in the process of students’ assessment. To understand what assessment challenges teachers face during the ERT and their patterns for evaluation, we performed a survey in Portugal where the ERT lasted several months in the last two years. The survey was validated and conducted in the first semester of 2021. We found two main patterns: i) the group of teachers that prefer oral discussion and dialogue simulation and present disbelief on traditional test and educational games; and ii) the group of teachers that tend to prefer oral simulation and present greater disbelief about educational games, dialogue simulation and peers work and review. From the survey analysis, we also found that teachers considered their students more distracted and less engaged in online classes. They were negatively affected both in their learning and evaluation process. Using digital tools to collect and validate data and creating patterns between collected data is essential to understand what to expect in future crises. The presented analysis should be correlated with other studies to extract patterns of knowledge from data and to be able to obtain conclusions about how to evolve education.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Multitask and transfer learning for cardiac abnormality detection in heart sounds

We present a deep learning model for the automatic detection of murmurs and other cardiac abnormalities from the analysis of digital recordings of cardiac auscultations. This approach was developed in the context of the George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge 2022. More precisely, we consider multi-objective neural networks, with several Transformer blocks at their core, trained to perform 3 distinct tasks simultaneously: murmur detection, outcome classification and audio signal segmentation. We also perform pre-training with the 2016’s Challenge data. We entered the challenge under the team name matLisboa. Our results on the hidden test dataset were: Murmur score (weighted accuracy): 0.735 (ranked 15th). Outcomes score (cost): 12593 (ranked 16th).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio