Systemic oversight frameworks in LAC : current practices and reform agenda

The world financial crisis that started in the US housing market in 2008 brought into evidence deep failures of prudential oversight, linked for the most part to a failure to comprehend and handle systemic risk in a way that could prevent systemic crises. This paper summarizes the responses to the joint World Bank -ASBA survey o the state of systemic oversight in the Latin American and Caribbean financial sectors and reflects on some of the challenges identified by respondents. We found that there is broad consensus among regional financial authorities on the need to enhance the current systemic oversight framework. Improving consolidated supervision to mitigate risk-shifting in conglomerates, adjusting prudential regulations to account for the accumulation of systemic risks, redefining the role of the supervisor to make it more proactive, and improving coordination among local supervisors as well as with foreign supervisors figure preeminently in the regional reform agenda.Banks&Banking Reform,Debt Markets,Emerging Markets,Access to Finance,Currencies and Exchange Rates

The History of the Cameo Theater

On March 20, 2015, Pastor Doug Robins held a church service in the Cameo Theater. He remembered one of the parishioners stating, “Hey, Pastor Doug, I went to a rave and I did Ecstasy right there, and now I’m coming to church here.” From its founding in 1940, up to the present day, the Cameo Theater has been a host to a number of diverse events, everything from religious services to raves. On June 11, 1940, the Cameo Theater opened and was owned by Carl Milentz

An analysis of options for a sustainable Texel

The need to reduce energy consumption and to increase the energy generation from renewable resources is imminent. The community of the Dutch island of Texel has the ambition to be part of this energy transition towards sustainability and has adopted the goal of becoming fully sustainable by the year 2020 [1]. To achieve this, some projects are already taking place and Alliander is assessing the different strategies related to the grid management to maximize the level of energy neutrality with lower investment costs as part of the "Proeftuin Texel" project. This study continues the analysis of the "Proeftuin Texel" to identify the optimal solutions for the creation of a sustainable energy system. The study has two main objectives. The first objective is to calculate the maximum installed capacity of renewable energy sources (RES) technologies by optimizing the use of the current infrastructure; the second is to assess the benefits of energy balancing solutions. These solutions include heat pumps, electrical vehicles, and an energy management system (EMS). Three scenarios are created and the benefits are measured in terms of cost per reduction of CO2 emissions for each scenario. The results from this study could serve as a reference for energy related decisions in Texel and could be adapted to other cases. The three scenarios are composed by the following solutions: the first scenario analyses the maximum capacity of the actual grid to implement PV panels; the second scenario adds wind turbines and alternative solutions for the use of the actual grid; and in the third scenario the electricity consumption is increased by electrifying the residential heating and private transport to add flexibility on the demand side and balance it with the EMS. The results show that the greater benefits are achieved by the second scenario, while the benefits of the first and those of the third (in comparison with the second scenario) are notable lower; consequently their costs per tonne of CO2 reduction are higher. A further analysis shows the effect from each solution of the three scenarios, showing that the lower cost solutions are wind turbines combined with the grid solutions consisting on cable-pooling and the use of the backup installation. From this study it can be concluded that for this case with the given timeframe, a smart design is more effective than a smart grid

Personalised automated assessments

Consider an evaluator, or an assessor, who needs to assess a large amount of information. For instance, think of a tutor in a massive open online course with thousands of enrolled students, a senior program committee member in a large peer review process who needs to decide what are the final marks of reviewed papers, or a user in an e-commerce scenario where the user needs to build up its opinion about products evaluated by others. When assessing a large number of objects, sometimes it is simply unfeasible to evaluate them all and often one may need to rely on the opinions of others. In this paper we provide a model that uses peer assessments to generate expected assessments and tune them for a particular assessor. Furthermore, we are able to provide a measure of the uncertainty of our computed assessments and a ranking of the objects that should be assessed next in order to decrease the overall uncertainty of the calculated assessments.This work is supported by the CollectiveMind project (funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, under grant number TEC2013-49430-EXP) and the PRAISE project (funded by the European Commission, under grant number 318770).Peer reviewe

Trustworthy advice

Abstract 'If you go to Ferran Adria's restaurant you will have the time of your life!' 'If you study everyday for two hours you will get very good marks next semester.' These are examples of advice. We say an advice has two components: a plan to perform and a goal to achieve. In dynamic logic, an advice could be formalised as: [Pη]G. That is, if η performs plan P, then goal G will necessarily be achieved. An adviser is an entity which provides such advice. An adviser may be an agent, a planner, or a complex recommender system. This paper proposes a novel trust model for assessing the trustworthiness of advice and advisers. It calculates the expectation of an advice's outcome by assessing the probabilities of the advised plan being picked up and performed, and the goal being achieved. These probabilities are learned from an analysis of similar past experiences using tools such as semantic matching and action empowerment. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work is supported by the PRAISE project (funded by the European Commission under the FP7 STREP grant number 318770), and the Agreement Technologies project (funded by CONSOLIDER CSD 2007-0022, INGENIO 2010).Peer Reviewe

Control Interno en la Cooperativa Agropecuaria de Producción de Hortalizas (COOPRAHOR, R.L), del municipio de Sebaco departamento de Matagalpa, en el I semestre del año 2013

El tema abordado en este Seminario trata de los Sistemas Contables y Control Interno, en las cooperativas del departamento de Matagalpa, durante el año 2013. El propósito de esta investigación fue Evaluar el Sistema Contable y Control Interno que se aplica en la Cooperativa Agropecuaria de producción de Hortalizas COOPRAHOR, R.L, para que dicha Cooperativa se dé cuenta si está realizando razonablemente el manejo de sus recursos tanto económicos y administrativos. Es de gran importancia que la Cooperativa realice evaluaciones de los procedimientos de Control Interno, ya que estas les permitirán detectar las debilidades que estos pudieran presentar en el desarrollo de sus operaciones, y de tal manera implementar medidas que sean necesarias para lograr la efectividad y eficiencia y resguardo de sus activos. Los resultados obtenidos indican que el Manual de Control Interno que la Cooperativa posee cuenta con muchas debilidades en lo que respecta a la segregación de funciones ya que la contadora general realiza las función de cajera y demás funciones administrativas lo cual también afecta directamente a la estructura organizativa de la misma, lo cual es de gran importancia considerar la necesidad de implementar mejoras que permitan un mejor funcionamiento dentro de la Cooperativa, así como también se carece de conocimientos del modelo de Control Interno COS

? Puede ser humedal de Tibanica un ambiente de aprendizaje en ciencias naturales para los estudiantes del ciclo II del colegio Gimnacio Caceres?

97 p. Recurso Electr?nicoEn el transcurso de este proyecto o tema de investigaci?n nos vamos a encontrar con diferentes problem?ticas ambientales alrededor del Humedal Tibanica ubicado en la localidad de Bosa, basados en esta problem?tica queremos reconstruir paso a paso sus referencias, su historia, su tem?tica ambiental y as? mismo encontrar una soluci?n frente a ella, inmersos en un punto de vista institucional y un poco m?s all? de la comunidad, el Colegio Gimnasio C?ceres nos va a ser de gran ayuda en este proceso, ya que nos va a brindar un punto de vista diferente. Vamos a inmiscuirnos en algunas referencias anteriores de autores o personas que han tratado de solucionar esta problem?tica ambiental, dando nuestro punto de vista y adem?s de ello nuestra manera de llegar a la soluci?n real, por medio de ayudas did?cticas o te?ricas que lleven tanto a la instituci?n, como a la comunidad a tener una mejor perspectiva del uso del Humedal Tibanica, y sus beneficios frente a la misma.During this project or research topic we will find different environmental issues around Tibanica wetland located in the area of Bosa, based on this issue we want to rebuild step by step its references, its history, its environmental issue and the same way get a solution about this, immersed in an institutional point of view and going a little beyond of the community, the Gimansio C?ceres school is going to be a great help in this process, it will offer us a different point of view. We will meddle in some previous references of authors and people who have tried to resolve this environmental issue, giving our point of view and besides our way to get a real solution, through teaching aids or theorical aids which leading as the institution as the community to have a better perspective about how use the wetland Tibanica and its benefits against the same one

Effect of row orientation on soil water content and vine water status on a Cabernet franc vineyard in Madrid, spain

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of row orien¬tation on vine and soil water status in an irrigated vineyard. The trial was developed during 2006, 2007 and 2008, in the South East region of Madrid (Spain) on 5-year old Cabernet franc grapevines (Vitis vinifera L.) grafted onto 140Ru. Plant spacing was 2.5 m x 1.5 m and vines were trained to a VSP. Four orientations were stu¬died: North-South (N-S), East-West (E-W), Northeast-Southwest (N+45) and North-South +20o (N+20). Irrigation (0.4•ET0) started when shoot growth stopped. Soil water availability was measured using a TDR technique with forty buried probes. Row orientation did not have any effect on water consumption in the vineyard. At maturity, leaf water potential was measured at predawn, early mor¬ning, midday and 14:00 solar time, on both canopy sides - sun and shade – ; the early morning measurement was the one that better differentiated treatments. Leaf water potential was a good indica¬tor of plant water status. Differences between (N-S and E-W) and (N+20 and N+45) treatments were obtained both on sun and shade canopy sides, N+20 and N+45 having lower leaf water potentials then drier leaves. The water stress integral shows that N-S and E-W reach the end of maturation with a greater level of hydration than N+45 and N+20. As a whole, N+45 and N+20 orientations, without affecting too much the soil available water content, induce regularly more water stress to the vine at some periods, probably due to an higher sunlight interception in early morning which makes water limitation for the vine more early and thus more severe during the day

The Lubrication Ability of Ionic Liquids as Additives for Wind Turbine Gearboxes Oils

The amount of energy that can be gained from the wind is unlimited, unlike current energy sources such as fossil and coal. While there is an important push in the use of wind energy, gears and bearing components of the turbines often fail due to contact fatigue, causing costly repairs and downtime. The objective of this work is to investigate the potential tribological benefits of two phosphonium-based ionic liquids (ILs) as additives to a synthetic lubricant without additives and to a fully formulated and commercially available wind turbine oil. In this work, AISI 52100 steel disks were tested in a ball-on-flat reciprocating tribometer against AISI 440C steel balls. Surface finish also affects the tribological properties of gear surfaces. In order to understand the combined effect of using the ILs with surface finish, two surface finishes were also used in this study. Adding ILs to the commercial available or synthetic lubricant reduced the wear scar diameter for both surface finishes. This decrease was particularly important for trihexyltetradecylphosphonium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl) amide, where a wear reduction of the steel disk around 20% and 23% is reached when 5 wt % of this IL is added to the commercially available lubricant and to the synthetic lubricant without additives, respectively