Heat waves or Meteor showers: Empirical evidence from the stock markets

In order to study the volatility spillovers / the transfer of volatilities from spot and futures markets for the period 1st January 2001 to 30th November 2005 with high frequency data i.e., one minute intervals, we have used GARCH models to compute volatilities and VAR models for the returns of different markets and for the volatilities. It is evident that, these VAR models for the volatilities can exhibit the nature of the change in volatility. In a heat wave, the conditional variance of the returns in spot (futures) market depends only upon the past shocks in the given market. For meteor showers, the impact of shocks on spot (futures) markets are transferred from other i.e., futures (spot) markets. With the VAR (1)-GARCH (1,1) analysis, we found that both series are I(1) and that a bi-directional relationship exists between the spot and future market return series. Empirically it is evident that both heat waves and meteor showers exist in Indian spot and futures markets.Volatility Spillovers, Heat Waves, Meteor Showers, Indian Stock Market.

Production planning under dynamic product environment: a multi-objective goal programming approach

Production planning is a complicated task that requires cooperation among multiple functional units in any organization. In order to design an efficient production planning system, a good understanding of the environment in terms of customers, products and manufacturing processes is a must. Although such planning exists in the company, it is often incorrectly structured due to the presence of multiple conflicting objectives. The primary difficulty in modern decision analysis is the treatment of multiple conflicting objectives. A formal decision analysis that is capable of handling multiple conflicting goals through the use of priorities may be a new frontier of management science. The objective of this study is to develop a multi objective goal programming (MOGP) model to a real-life manufacturing situation to show the trade-off between different some times conflicting goals concerning customer, product and manufacturing of production planning environment. For illustration, two independent goal priority structures have been considered. The insights gained from the experimentation with the two goal priority structures will guide and assist the decision maker for achieving the organizational goals for optimum utilization of resources in improving companies competitiveness. The MOGP results of the study are of very useful to various functional areas of the selected case organization for routine planning and scheduling. Some of the specific decision making situations in this context are: (i). the expected quality costs and production costs under identified product scenarios, (ii).under and over utilization of crucial machine at different combinations of production volumes, and (iii). the achievement of sales revenue goal at different production volume combinations. The ease of use and interpretation make the proposed MOGP model a powerful communication tool between top and bottom level managers while converting the strategic level objectives into concrete tactical and operational level plans.

Are stock exchanges integrated in the world? - A critical Analysis

In the recent rapid reforms made the global into a global village in nature and in terms of efficiency, transparency. The information flow in one market may affect the other markets in the world, because of its integration. In this regard, this paper explores the objective whether there is any integration of markets taken place or not. For reaching the objective, we have used rigorous time series techniques for the equal period of data (1st January, 2001 to 30th April, 2009) of 17 stock exchanges in the world, which includes Asia, Europe, north America, Latin America etc.,. Our findings are markets within the region are well integrated both in terms of short run and long run equilibrium, because of its less cross-country restrictions. Many of the markets are showing granger causal relations between each other.Stock Markets, Cointegration, Economic Reforms

When Men are the Victims: Factors Affecting Rape Victim Blame & Bystander Aid

Rape is a widespread problem, particularly on college campuses. While most research has focused on female victims, male victimization is more common than previously thought. Studies reveal that gender may play an important role in rape myth acceptance, as male victims of rape committed by female perpetrators are often perceived as more responsible for being raped and less traumatized than in cases with male perpetrators. Rape myth acceptance is associated with victim blame, as individuals who accept rape myths are more likely to attribute responsibility to rape victims for the assault. Rape myth acceptance and victim blame both influence bystander intervention, as those who endorse rape myths and blame the victim are less likely to intervene before, during, or after sexual assault.This study examined the impact of participant gender, victim gender, and victim- perpetrator relationship on victim blame and bystander aid in a college population. Participants were 265 college students, aged 18-25, who were recruited online at a university located in the southeastern United States, and an online research participation platform (Prolific). Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions involving a vignette of a cisgender heterosexual rape. Vignettes differed in terms of victim gender (male or female) and relationship between victim and perpetrator (dating or acquaintance). After reading the vignette, participants completed measures assessing victim blame, bystander aid, demographic information, rape myth acceptance, alcohol consumption, history of sexual victimization, and social desirability. Results indicated that male participants endorsed higher levels of victim blame and lower levels of bystander aid than female participants, male victims were blamed more than female victims, and participants were more willing to provide bystander aid to female victims than to male victims. Results also suggested no significant difference between acquaintance and dating conditions with regards to victim blame or bystander aid. In addition, rape myth acceptance predicted victim blame and was significantly negatively associated with bystander aid across conditions. History of sexual victimization and alcohol consumption were significantly negatively associated with bystander aid in the female-victim condition but not the male-victim condition. Results and implications of findings are discussed

Characterization of short chain fatty acids in microbial cultures by DART-MS and GC-MS

Colonic bacterial degradation of starch and other carbon sources produces short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) such as butyrate and lactate, which are important in human health and disease. Analysis of the results of mono- and co-cultures in in vitro systems has led to the conclusion that diverse microbial organisms may each contribute in part to the complete metabolism to produce SCFA. GC- MS and DART- MS were investigated as analytical tools in the present study to evaluate the production of butyrate and lactate in a test tube and bioreactor mono- and co-cultures. The overall research goal is to investigate biological model systems and analytical methods to allow determination of lactate and butyrate levels under conditions that effectively emulate those that prevail in the gastrointestinal tract. These approaches will provide some understanding of the extent to which organisms work together to generate important biomolecules, in particular, the short-chain fatty acids

Boosting autophagy in the diabetic heart: a translational perspective

Diabetes, obesity, and dyslipidemia are main risk factors that promote the development of cardiovascular diseases. These metabolic abnormalities are frequently found to be associated together in a highly morbid clinical condition called metabolic syndrome. Metabolic derangements promote endothelial dysfunction, atherosclerotic plaque formation and rupture, cardiac remodeling and dysfunction. This evidence strongly encourages the elucidation of the mechanisms through which obesity, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome induce cellular abnormalities and dysfunction in order to discover new therapeutic targets and strategies for their prevention and treatment. Numerous studies employing both dietary and genetic animal models of obesity and diabetes have demonstrated that autophagy, an intracellular system for protein degradation, is impaired in the heart under these conditions. This suggests that autophagy reactivation may represent a future potential therapeutic intervention to reduce cardiac maladaptive alterations in patients with metabolic derangements. In fact, autophagy is a critical mechanism to preserve cellular homeostasis and survival. In addition, the physiological activation of autophagy protects the heart during stress, such as acute ischemia, starvation, chronic myocardial infarction, pressure overload, and proteotoxic stress. All these aspects will be discussed in our review article together with the potential ways to reactivate autophagy in the context of obesity, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes

Traffic Optimization for Multimodal Cooperative Networks

Resource allocation and traffic optimization are crucial problems in multi-traffic wireless networks as resources are scarce and the traffic is shared by multiple users. When application performance is the key concern in a network, utility is considered as a reliable metric. A lot of research has been done on capacity limits of wireless networks under some assumptions on the physics of propagation and some restrictions on the communication strategy employed by the nodes. It has been proved that due to the physical limitation that holds for any communication system, the decrease in throughput problem as wireless nodes increase in a fixed area cannot be overcome. In this thesis, multimodal networks, where other modes of communication like wires, infrared links may operate in addition to wireless nodes to improve the performance of the wireless network are studied and rate and power optimization problems are considered.;In this thesis, rate and power optimizations for heterogeneous traffic multimodal networks are proposed by solving them separately. First, the total rate is divided between delay-sensitive data and voice to achieve maximum utility in the network and in the next step, we divide transmit power between the wireless channel and the wired channel for a source-destination pair multimodal network and a diamond cooperative multimodal network implemented with Lanemann protocol. We consider a utility function for delay-sensitive data as a function of rate, reliability and delay and, the utility function of voice is a function of rate and delay. Traffic optimization problem is then solved by maximizing the sum of utilities of all voice and data users in the network and optimal rates that can be allocated to data and voice are calculated. Power allocation for a source-destination pair multimodal networks is done by optimizing instantaneous rate and outage probability in the network. For implementing a cooperative wireless relay network, we consider two cases: wire place between source and relay and wire placed between relay and destination. Optimal power allocation to wired and wireless channels is done by analytically minimizing the high-SNR outage probability expressions