Integration, productivity and technological spillovers: Evidence for eurozone banking industries

In the context of the current debate on increased integration of eurozone banking markets following the global financial and sovereign debt crises, this paper evaluates the impact of regulatory reform, starting from the inception of the Single Market in 1992, on bank productivity and assesses the cross-border benefits of integration in terms of technological spillovers. We utilise a parametric meta-frontier Divisia index to estimate productivity change and identify technological gaps. We then assess the extent to which productivity converges within and across banking industries as a result of technological spillovers. Our results suggest that productivity growth has occurred for eurozone countries, driven by technological progress, both at the country and the supra-country level, although the latter slows or in some cases reverses since the onset of the crisis. Technological spillovers do exist, and have led to progression toward the best technology. However, convergence is not complete and significant long run differences in productivity persist. Improvements in technology are increasingly concentrated in fewer banking industries

Cognitive Impairment and Age-Related Vision Disorders: Their Possible Relationship and the Evaluation of the Use of Aspirin and Statins in a 65 Years-and-Over Sardinian Population

Neurological disorders (Alzheimer’s disease, vascular and mixed dementia) and visual loss (cataract, age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, and diabetic retinopathy) are among the most common conditions that afflict people of at least 65 years of age. An increasing body of evidence is emerging, which demonstrates that memory and vision impairment are closely, significantly, and positively linked and that statins and aspirin may lessen the risk of developing age-related visual and neurological problems. However, clinical studies have produced contradictory results. Thus, the intent of the present study was to reliably establish whether a relationship exist between various types of dementia and age-related vision disorders, and to establish whether statins and aspirin may or may not have beneficial effects on these two types of disorders. We found that participants with dementia and/or vision problems were more likely to be depressed and displayed worse functional ability in basic and instrumental activities of daily living than controls. Mini mental state examination scores were significantly lower in patients with vision disorders compared to subjects without vision disorders. A closer association with macular degeneration was found in subjects with Alzheimer’s disease than in subjects without dementia or with vascular dementia, mixed dementia, or other types of age-related vision disorders. When we considered the associations between different types of dementia and vision disorders and the use of statins and aspirin, we found a significant positive association between Alzheimer’s disease and statins on their own or in combination with aspirin, indicating that these two drugs do not appear to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease or improve its clinical evolution and may, on the contrary, favor its development. No significant association in statin use alone, aspirin use alone, or the combination of these was found in subjects without vision disorders but with dementia, and, similarly, none in subjects with vision disorders but without dementia. Overall, these results confirm the general impression so far; namely, that macular degeneration may contribute to cognitive disorders (Alzheimer’s disease in particular). In addition, they also suggest that, while statin and aspirin use may undoubtedly have some protective effects, they do not appear to be magic pills against the development of cognitive impairment or vision disorders in the elderly

Quantitative optical and near-infrared spectroscopy of molecular hydrogen towards HH91A

Integral-field spectroscopy of molecular hydrogen in the optical wavelength region and complementary long-slit near-infrared spectroscopy are presented towards HH91A.The detection of some 200 H_2 lines arising from ro-vibrational levels up to v'=8 ranging between 7700A and 2.3 microns is reported. The emission arises from thermally excited gas where the bulk of the material is at 2750 K and where 1% is at 6000 K. The total column density of shocked gas is N(H_2) = 10^{18} cm^{-2}. Non-thermal excitation scenarios such as UV-fluorescence do not contribute to the excitation of H_2 towards HH91A. The emission is explained in terms of a slow non-dissociative J-shock which propagates into a low-density medium which has been swept-up by previous episodes of outflows which have occurred in the evolved HH90/91 complex.Comment: A&A accepte

Dental pathology in present-day and copper age samples

Dental paleopathology has become an excellent discipline to reconstruct the oral health of ancient populations and its trend from the past to the present day, especially regarding dietary habits. Our preliminary research aims to perform a comparative analysis on dental health status of two widely chronologically distant samples from Sardinia: the first one dates back to the Copper Age (III mill. B.C.) and comes from a collective hypogean burial named Scab’e Arriu (Siddi, SU), the second one is composed by extracted teeth of present-day individuals, collected during some traineeships at the Department of Surgical Science of the Dentistry School, in Cagliari

Development of an EM Device for Cerebrovascular Diseases Imaging and Hardware Acceleration for Imaging Algorithms within the EMERALD Network

This paper is presenting the first months of research activities within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network “EMERALD” developed by the Politecnico di Torino group. Our research work is related to the development of an electromagnetic device for cerebrovascular diseases imaging and to the hardware acceleration of the implemented imaging algorithms via field-programmable gate arrays or application-specific integrated circuits coupled with regular multicore central processing units and even graphics processing unit

Integration, productivity and technological spillovers : evidence for eurozone banking industries

In the context of the current debate on increased integration of eurozone banking markets following the global financial and sovereign debt crises, this paper evaluates the impact of regulatory reform, starting from the inception of the Single Market in 1992, on bank productivity and assesses the cross-border benefits of integration in terms of technological spillovers. We utilise a parametric meta-frontier Divisia index to estimate productivity change and identify technological gaps. We then assess the extent to which productivity converges within and across banking industries as a result of technological spillovers. Our results suggest that productivity growth has occurred for eurozone countries, driven by technological progress, both at the country and the supra-country level, although the latter slows or in some cases reverses since the onset of the crisis. Technological spillovers do exist, and have led to progression toward the best technology. However, convergence is not complete and significant long run differences in productivity persist. Improvements in technology are increasingly concentrated in fewer banking industries.PostprintPeer reviewe

Microwave imaging device prototype for brain stroke 3D monitoring

This paper summarizes the development and the experimental testing of a scanning device, in the microwave range, to monitor brain stroke. The device comprehends 4 main sections: a sensors helmet, a switching matrix, a data acquisition part, and a control/processing core. The sensors in the helmet are 22 custom-made flexible antennas working around 1 GHz, placed conformally to the upper head part. A first validation of the system consists in the detection of a target in the head region. Experimental testing is performed on a single-cavity head phantom, while the target is a balloon mimicking the stroke. The shape of the balloon and phantom are extracted from medical images, and tissues properties are emulated with liquids that resemble their dielectric properties. A differential measurement approach senses the field on the antennas in two different situations, and from their difference computes a 3-D image through a singular value decomposition of the discretized scattering operator obtained from an accurate numerical model. The results verify the capabilities of the system on detecting and monitoring stroke evolution

A low-complexity microwave scanner for cerebrovascular diseases monitoring

This work gathers the pathway from the design to the experimental testing of a microwave imaging prototype to monitor brain stroke in real-time conditions, approaching thus the electromagnetic inverse problem of retrieving a dielectric temporal variation within the head. To this end, it presents a low-complexity device consisting of twentytwo custom-made radiating elements working with a linear imaging algorithm based on distorted Born approximation and a truncated singular value decomposition, able to localize, identify and track the stroke evolution. The system is prototyped using a compact two-ports vector analyzer and electromechanical switching matrix. It is assessed experimentally via a mimicked hemorrhagic condition, demonstrating the system’s capabilities to follow up centimetric confined variations, retrieving 3-D maps of the studied cases in real-time

Quark Orbital Angular Momentum in the Baryon

Analytical and numerical results, for the orbital and spin content carried by different quark flavors in the baryons, are given in the chiral quark model with symmetry breaking. The reduction of the quark spin, due to the spin dilution in the chiral splitting processes, is transferred into the orbital motion of quarks and antiquarks. The orbital angular momentum for each quark flavor in the proton as a function of the partition factor $\kappa$ and the chiral splitting probability $a$ is shown. The cancellation between the spin and orbital contributions in the spin sum rule and in the baryon magnetic moments is discussed.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures, revised version with minor eq. no and ref. no. corrections. Discussion on the $\Lambda$ spin and a new ref. are adde