Une Larme

Transcribed for violin with piano accompaniment by A. Walter Kramer. Separate violin part missing

Urban mobility planning as a frame for urban design of squares and streets, the Peja case in Kosovo

Urban streets and squares have a dual function: as links in transport networks and as places for accommodating urban life. In this paper an integrated approach of urban design of the public domain is developed, highlighting the layers multimodal mobility planning can provide for the design. The approach is shown on the basis of some cases for the city of Peja (Kosovo). The designs of two strategic elements in the urban network, the railway station boulevard and the Haxhi Zeka Square as well as a district collector street within the Zatra living area are described. These design projects were elaborated by a mixed international and local team, working together in design studios within the frame of the ‘MOBKOS’ cooperation project (www.mobkos.eu). This project was co financed by the Flemish and the Kosovar Governments in the period 2009-2011. A well the structured road categorisation system and urban parking strategy are determining elements of the design. But even so a ‘soft spine’ accommodating walking and biking routes and a new system of urban bus routes are important layers of the design. The paper doesn’t call for a traffic engineering dominated design. It is gradually understood that the prevailing ‘city for cars’ practices in Kosovo (that had already shown its limits in Pristine) would lead Peja into a dead end street. That is why concepts such as urban boulevards, ‘shared spaces’, green trails… are used in the designs. The same international team is preparing design studios in the city of Shkodra in Albania

The economic effects of a Spanish trade boycott against Catalan products

We study the potential consequences of a hypothetical trade boycott against Catalan products organized by some sectors of the Spanish society mainly for political reasons. A symmetric trade boycott would have two effects: a reduction of Catalan exports to Spain and a partial process of import substitution in Catalonia. In order to quantify the economic impact of the boycott, we compare the "actual" Catalan economy, as described in the input-output table for 2005, with a "simulated" Catalan economy that takes into account the effects of a boycott on the trade exchanges between Catalonia and Spain.trade boycott, input output analysis

Development of a Multiphase Photon Monte Carlo Method for Spray Combustion and its Application in High-pressure Conditions

In this work the development of a multiphase photon Monte Carlo (PMC) method with a focus on resolving radiative heat transfer in combustion simulations is presented. The multiphase PMC solver can account for description of participating media in both Lagrangian and Eulerian frameworks. The solver is validated against exact solutions in several one-dimensional configurations. The developed solver is then applied to Diesel spray combustions, where liquid spray droplets are assumed to be cold, nonemitting, large, and isotropically scattering. Several formulations for radiative properties of the Diesel spray are first explored. The PMC solver has then been coupled with the multiphase spray combustion solver in OpenFOAM and the coupled solver is used for simulations of high pressure Diesel spray combustion. It was found that in typical Diesel spray combustion applications, such as in an internal combustion engine, impact of radiation on the evolution of the liquid spray was insignificant. Although the impact of radiation on the spray was minimal, nongray spectral properties and the assumption of semi-transparency for Diesel spray were found to impact the radiative transfer significantly, while impact of scattering was marginal. Spray radiation was also found not to have much effect on global combustion characteristics in high-pressure engine-relevant configurations. However, a small but noticeable effect on minor species distribution relevant to pollutant formation was observed

Mutual Fund Performance Evaluation: A Comparison of Benchmarks and Benchmark Comparisons

Our primary goal in this paper is to ascertain whether the absolute and relative rankings of managed funds are sensitive to the benchmark chosen to measure normal performance. We employ the standard CAPM benchmarks and a variety of APT benchmarks to investigate this question. We found that there is little similarity between the absolute and relative mutual fund rankings obtained from alternative benchmarks which suggests the importance of knowing the appropriate model for risk and expected return in this context. In addition, the rankings are quite sensitive to the method used to construct the APT benchmark. One would reach very different conclusions about the funds' performance using smaller numbers of securities in the analysis or the less efficient methods for estimating the necessary factor models than one would arrive at using the maximum likelihood procedures with 750 securities. We did, however, find the rankings of the funds are not very sensitive to the exact number of common sources of systematic risk that are assumed to impinge on security returns. Finally, we found statistically significant measured abnormal performance using all the benchmarks. The economic explanation of this phenomenon appears to be an open question.

The Empirical Foundations of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory I: The Empirical Tests

This paper provides a detailed and extensive examination of the validity of the APT based on maximum likelihood factor analysis of large cross-sections of securities. Our empirical implementation of the theory proved in capable of explaining expected returns on portfolios composed of securities with different market capitalizations although it provided an adequate account of the expected returns of portfolios formed on the basis of dividend yield and own variance where risk adjustment with the CAPM employing the usual market proxies failed. In addition, it appears that the zero beta version of the APT is sharply rejected in favor of the riskless rate model and that there is little basis for discriminating among five and ten factor versions of the theory.

Innovative and reference business models in the agrofood industry

Successful business models: Cellar of the Priorat region “Costers del Siurana” and Agromillora Catala

Linear and nonlinear market correlations: characterizing financial crises and portfolio optimization

Pearson correlation and mutual information based complex networks of the day-to-day returns of US S&P500 stocks between 1985 and 2015 have been constructed in order to investigate the mutual dependencies of the stocks and their nature. We show that both networks detect qualitative differences especially during (recent) turbulent market periods thus indicating strongly fluctuating interconnections between the stocks of different companies in changing economic environments. A measure for the strength of nonlinear dependencies is derived using surrogate data and leads to interesting observations during periods of financial market crises. In contrast to the expectation that dependencies reduce mainly to linear correlations during crises we show that (at least in the 2008 crisis) nonlinear effects are significantly increasing. It turns out that the concept of centrality within a network could potentially be used as some kind of an early warning indicator for abnormal market behavior as we demonstrate with the example of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Finally, we apply a Markowitz mean variance portfolio optimization and integrate the measure of nonlinear dependencies to scale the investment exposure. This leads to significant outperformance as compared to a fully invested portfolio.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, Phys. Rev. E, accepte