Geldpolitik und Zinsbildung unter besonderer Berücksichtingung der Gegenwärtigen Situation

At present the ECB is striving, through its so-called zero interest rate policy, to avoid deflationary developments because, as past experience shows, a further price decay would be expected to lead to bankruptcies and be a strain on the real economy. Complementary quantitative easing (QE) and the resulting drop in returns on bought up securities will hopefully lead to the commercial banks giving more credits to small and medium-sized enterprises which are unable to, or have difficulty in financing themselves through bonds. Reducing the margin between interest income and refinancing costs to the lowest level possible has caused serious problems for credit institutions. The same applies, due to the reduced interest rates on loans, to the insurance companies and pension funds, which tend to invest conservatively. — Zero interest rate policy, which in itself is a contradiction of the principles of a market economy, should be relinquished as soon as possible. A return to a monetary policy which does not lead to misallocation and structural distortions is urgently necessary

Domain adaptive segmentation in volume electron microscopy imaging

In the last years, automated segmentation has become a necessary tool for volume electron microscopy (EM) imaging. So far, the best performing techniques have been largely based on fully supervised encoder-decoder CNNs, requiring a substantial amount of annotated images. Domain Adaptation (DA) aims to alleviate the annotation burden by 'adapting' the networks trained on existing groundtruth data (source domain) to work on a different (target) domain with as little additional annotation as possible. Most DA research is focused on the classification task, whereas volume EM segmentation remains rather unexplored. In this work, we extend recently proposed classification DA techniques to an encoder-decoder layout and propose a novel method that adds a reconstruction decoder to the classical encoder-decoder segmentation in order to align source and target encoder features. The method has been validated on the task of segmenting mitochondria in EM volumes. We have performed DA from brain EM images to HeLa cells and from isotropic FIB/SEM volumes to anisotropic TEM volumes. In all cases, the proposed method has outperformed the extended classification DA techniques and the finetuning baseline. An implementation of our work can be found on https://github.com/JorisRoels/domain-adaptive-segmentation