Fiscal Explanations for Inflation: Any Evidence from Transition Economies?

Recent arguments, motivated partly by the new fiscal theory of price level, suggest that fiscal deficits undermine price stability in transition economies. This paper addresses these claims by examining vector-autoregressive models of inflation for three crisis-hidden transition economies (Bulgaria, Romania and Russia). The results indicate that while fiscal deficits have increased inflation in Bulgaria to a certain extent, this has not been the case in Romania and Russia. Even in the Bulgarian case, the usual money aggregate has proven more influential to inflation than fiscal deficits. The analysis based on this method therefore suggests that monetary policy plays an influential role in inflation determination in these countries. In other words, inflationary financing of deficits, rather than deficits themselves, accounts for inflation.fiscal policy; inflation; vector autoregressive models; transition economies

MUUTOSJOHTAMISEN OPAS

Opinnäytetyö pohjautuu pitkälti Easmar Logistics Oy:ssä tehtyyn laatuprojektiin joka toteutettiin hyvin nopealla aikataululla asiakasvaatimuksien pohjalta. Organisaatioon tuli suuri määrä erilaisia uusia toimintatapoja ja sääntöjä, jotka vaikuttivat hyvin paljon päivittäisiin rutiineihin. Työn tavoitteena on se, että se olisi apuna tulevissa muutoksissa: mitä asioita tulisi pohtia ennen muutosta, sen aikana ja muutoksen jälkeen. Johtaminen on olennainen osa muutoksen onnistunutta läpiviemistä organisaatiossa. Muutosjohtamisen täytyy alkaa ennen varsinaisen muutoksen alkua, olla tehokkaasti läsnä koko muutoksen ajan sekä jatkua vielä sen jälkeenkin. Mikäli johtaminen ei ole tehokasta ja hyvin suunniteltua niin muutoksesta syntyy helposti kaaos, joka taas helposti johtaa itse aiottua muutosta suurempaan muutokseen. Muutoksen syiden täytyy olla hyvin perusteluja henkilökunnalle, jolloin sen läpivieminen on helpompaa ja onnistuminen varmempaa. Muutos vaatii paljon aikaa niin johtajilta kuin henkilökunnaltakin. Muutos vaatii paljon huolenpitoa vielä senkin jälkeen kun se on näennäisesti läpiviety.The Thesis is largely based on to quality project of Easmar Logistics Oy, which was carried out with short notice based on customers’ requirements. There came a great number of new practices and rules for this organization, which also effected on daily routines. Objective of this Thesis is that this would be helpful in the changes, which are coming in the future. What things should be considered before the change, during and after the change? Leadership is an essential part of a successful change through the introduction into the organization. Change management must begin before the actual change, to be effectively present during the change and even continue after the change. If management is not effective and well planned, the change will create a chaos, which can easily lead even to bigger change, which was plan in the beginning. Reasons for the change have to be well justified to the staff, so it will be easier to car-ry throw successful and safer. The change requires a lot of time from the managers as from the staff. The change requires a lot of care, even after it has been apparently al-ready been completed

Complementary Countermeasures for Detecting Scenic Face Spoofing Attacks

The face recognition community has finally started paying more attention to the long-neglected problem of spoofing attacks. The number of countermeasures is gradually increasing and fairly good results have been reported on the publicly available databases. There exists no superior anti-spoofing technique due to the varying nature of attack scenarios and acquisition conditions. Therefore, it is important to find out complementary countermeasures and study how they should be combined in order to construct an easily extensible anti-spoofing framework. In this paper, we address this issue by studying fusion of motion and texture based countermeasures under several types of scenic face attacks. We provide an intuitive way to explore the fusion potential of different visual cues and show that the performance of the individual methods can be vastly improved by performing fusion at score level. The Half-Total Error Rate (HTER) of the best individual countermeasure was decreased from 11.2% to 5.1% on the Replay Attack Database. More importantly, we question the idea of using complex classification schemes in individual countermeasures, since nearly same fusion performance is obtained by replacing them with a simple linear one. In this manner, the computational efficiency and also probably the generalization ability of the resulting anti-spoofing framework are increased

Face liveness detection using dynamic texture

User authentication is an important step to protect information, and in this context, face biometrics is potentially advantageous. Face biometrics is natural, intuitive, easy to use, and less human-invasive. Unfortunately, recent work has revealed that face biometrics is vulnerable to spoofing attacks using cheap low-tech equipment. This paper introduces a novel and appealing approach to detect face spoofing using the spatiotemporal (dynamic texture) extensions of the highly popular local binary pattern operator. The key idea of the approach is to learn and detect the structure and the dynamics of the facial micro-textures that characterise real faces but not fake ones. We evaluated the approach with two publicly available databases (Replay-Attack Database and CASIA Face Anti-Spoofing Database). The results show that our approach performs better than state-of-the-art techniques following the provided evaluation protocols of each database2014This work has been performed within the context of the TABULA RASA project, part of the 7th Framework Research Programme of the European Union (EU), under the grant agreement number 257289. The financial support of FUNTTEL (Brazilian Telecommunication Technological Development Fund), Academy of Finland and Infotech Oulu Doctoral Program is also gratefully acknowledg

The 2nd competition on counter measures to 2D face spoofing attacks

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. I. Chingovska, J. Yang, Z. Lei, D. Yi, S. Z. Li, O. Kahm, C. Glaser, N. Damer, A. Kuijper, A. Nouak, J. Komulainen, T. Pereira, S. Gupta, S. Khandelwal, S. Bansal, A. Rai, T. Krishna, D. Goyal, M.-A. Waris, H. Zhang, I. Ahmad, S. Kiranyaz, M. Gabbouj, R. Tronci, M. Pili, N. Sirena, F. Roli, J. Galbally, J. Fiérrez, A. Pinto, H. Pedrini, W. S. Schwartz, A. Rocha, A. Anjos, S. Marcel, "The 2nd competition on counter measures to 2D face spoofing attacks" in International Conference on Biometrics (ICB), Madrid (Spain), 2013, 1-6As a crucial security problem, anti-spoofing in biometrics, and particularly for the face modality, has achieved great progress in the recent years. Still, new threats arrive inform of better, more realistic and more sophisticated spoofing attacks. The objective of the 2nd Competition on Counter Measures to 2D Face Spoofing Attacks is to challenge researchers to create counter measures effectively detecting a variety of attacks. The submitted propositions are evaluated on the Replay-Attack database and the achieved results are presented in this paper.The authors would like to thank the Swiss Innovation Agency (CTI Project Replay) and the FP7 European TABULA RASA Project4 (257289) for their financial support

Contribution of rare and common variants to intellectual disability in a sub-isolate of Northern Finland

The contribution of de novo variants in severe intellectual disability (ID) has been extensively studied whereas the genetics of mild ID has been less characterized. To elucidate the genetics of milder ID we studied 442 ID patients enriched for mild ID (>50%) from a population isolate of Finland. Using exome sequencing, we show that rare damaging variants in known ID genes are observed significantly more often in severe (27%) than in mild ID (13%) patients. We further observe a significant enrichment of functional variants in genes not yet associated with ID (OR: 2.1). We show that a common variant polygenic risk significantly contributes to ID. The heritability explained by polygenic risk score is the highest for educational attainment (EDU) in mild ID (2.2%) but lower for more severe ID (0.6%). Finally, we identify a Finland enriched homozygote variant in the CRADD ID associated gene.Peer reviewe

Trans-ancestry meta-analyses identify rare and common variants associated with blood pressure and hypertension

High blood pressure is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease and premature death. However, there is limited knowledge on specific causal genes and pathways. To better understand the genetics of blood pressure, we genotyped 242,296 rare, low-frequency and common genetic variants in up to ~192,000 individuals, and used ~155,063 samples for independent replication. We identified 31 novel blood pressure or hypertension associated genetic regions in the general population, including three rare missense variants in RBM47, COL21A1 and RRAS with larger effects (>1.5mmHg/allele) than common variants. Multiple rare, nonsense and missense variant associations were found in A2ML1 and a low-frequency nonsense variant in ENPEP was identified. Our data extend the spectrum of allelic variation underlying blood pressure traits and hypertension, provide new insights into the pathophysiology of hypertension and indicate new targets for clinical intervention

Rare and low-frequency coding variants alter human adult height

Height is a highly heritable, classic polygenic trait with ~700 common associated variants identified so far through genome - wide association studies . Here , we report 83 height - associated coding variants with lower minor allele frequenc ies ( range of 0.1 - 4.8% ) and effects of up to 2 16 cm /allele ( e.g. in IHH , STC2 , AR and CRISPLD2 ) , >10 times the average effect of common variants . In functional follow - up studies, rare height - increasing alleles of STC2 (+1 - 2 cm/allele) compromise d proteolytic inhibition of PAPP - A and increased cleavage of IGFBP - 4 in vitro , resulting in higher bioavailability of insulin - like growth factors . The se 83 height - associated variants overlap genes mutated in monogenic growth disorders and highlight new biological candidates ( e.g. ADAMTS3, IL11RA, NOX4 ) and pathways ( e.g . proteoglycan/ glycosaminoglycan synthesis ) involved in growth . Our results demonstrate that sufficiently large sample sizes can uncover rare and low - frequency variants of moderate to large effect associated with polygenic human phenotypes , and that these variants implicate relevant genes and pathways