Impressionistic techniques applied in sound art & design

Sound art and design collectively refer to the process of specifying, acquiring, manipulating or generating sonic elements to evoke emotion and environment. Sound is used to convey the intentions, emotions, spirit or aura of a story, performance, or sonic installation. Sound connects unique aural environments, creating an immersive experience via mood and atmosphere. Impressionistic techniques such as Impasto, Pointillism, Sgraffito, Stippling introduced by 19th-century painters captured the essence of their subject in more vivid compositions, exuding authentic movements and atmosphere. This thesis applied impressionistic techniques using sound art and design to project specific mood and atmosphere responses among listeners. Four unique sound textures, each representing a technique from Impressionism, and a fifth composite sound texture were created for this project. All five sound textures were validated as representative of their respective Impressionistic technique. Only sonic Pointillism matched its emotive intent. This outcome supports the research question that sound art and design can be used to direct listeners’ mood and atmosphere responses. Partnering Impressionistic principles with sound art and design offers a deeper palette to sonically deliver more robust, holistic soundscapes for amplifying an audience’s listening experience. This project provides a foundation for future explorations and studies in applying cross-disciplinary artistic techniques with sound art and design or other artistic endeavors

Segmentation across International Equity, Bond, and Foreign Exchange Markets

In this paper, we examine the integration of international financial markets. The integration of financial markets across countries and across asset classes is assumed to hold in most empirical studies, but has only been tested for certain countries and certain asset classes. We test for the integration of international equity, bond and foreign exchange markets. Our results indicate that the three classes of assets are segmented. Investigating potential explanations for this segmentation, we find that there are differing degrees of segmentation across these markets and that this is related to the asset returns from each class being explained by different sets of economic risk factors. In pair-wise tests we find that the bond-equity and bond-foreign exchange markets appear to be more segmented than the equity-foreign exchange market.Market integration; GMM; Stochastic discount factor models; Hansen and Jagannathan distance

Belief Dispersion and Order Submission Strategies in the Foreign Exchange Market

This paper empirically examines how dispersions across investors beliefs influence traders order submission decisions in the foreign exchange market. Previous research has found that dispersion in traders beliefs regarding future macroeconomic announcements has a significant impact on both price dynamics and trading volume before the announcements in the foreign exchange and other financial markets. However, little is known about how this dispersion impacts traders choice in submitting different types of orders and thus to supply and demand liquidity either before or after such announcements. Since the types of orders submitted by traders at these times are the building blocks of the observed price and trading dynamics, it is important to understand how differences in investors' information sets before and after important macroeconomic announcements affect their order submission decisions. We find that (i) belief dispersion affects the size and aggressiveness of orders both before and after macroeconomic announcements, (ii) the magnitude of the impact of factors known to affect order choice depends on the level of belief dispersion, and (iii) the influence of information shocks (the revelation of unexpected information) on order choices depends on the level of belief dispersion.Exchange rates; Market structure and pricing

Trading Activity and Foreign Exchange Market Quality

This paper studies intraday market quality for currency pairs with very different trading characteristics, the Euro-U.S. dollar and the Canadian dollar-U.S. dollar. Two sets of tests - the first based on the ratio of long term to short term variances, and the second based on information spillovers - provide consistent conclusions regarding market quality. The variance ratio analysis shows that market quality is highest for the Euro during European trading and lowest during Asian trading. For the Canadian dollar, market quality is highest during North American trading and lowest during Asian trading. Analysis of information spillovers shows that innovations in returns and volatility for the more heavily-traded Euro predict returns and volatility for the Canadian dollar during Asian and European trading, but innovations for the dollar have predictive power for the Euro during North American trading. Our results suggest that foreign exchange market quality is high, not always when quoting and trading activity are heavy but rather, and somewhat unexpectedly, when activity is not only high, but also geographically focused and concentrated among a limited number of major dealers.

Order Aggressiveness and Quantity: How Are They Determined in a Limit Order Market?

Dealers trading in a limit order market must choose both the order aggressiveness and the quantity for their orders. We empirically investigate how dealers jointly make these decisions in the foreign exchange market using a unique simultaneous equations model. The model uses an ordered probit model to account for the discrete nature of order aggressiveness and a censored regression model to capture the clustering of orders placed at the smallest available quantity, $1 million. We find evidence of a clear trade-off between order aggressiveness and quantity: more aggressive orders tend to be smaller in size. The increased competition (demand) suggested by increased depth on the same (opposite) side of the market leads to less (more) aggressive orders in smaller (larger) size. This holds for the depths at both the best and off-best prices, even though off-best depths are not observable to dealers.Exchange rates; Financial markets

Order Submission: The Choice between Limit and Market Orders

Most financial markets allow investors to submit both limit and market orders, but it is not always clear what affects the choice of order type. The authors empirically investigate how the time between order submissions, changes in the state of the order book, and price uncertainty influence the rate of submission of limit and market orders. The authors measure the expected time (duration) between the submissions of orders of each type using an asymmetric autoregressive conditional duration model. They find that the execution of market orders, as well as changes in the level of price uncertainty and market depth, impact the submissions of both best limit orders and market orders. After correcting for these factors, the authors also find differences in behaviour around market openings, closings, and unexpected events that may be related to changes in information flows at these times. In general, traders use more market (limit) orders at times when execution risk for limit orders is highest or the risk of unexpected price movements is highest.Exchange rate; Financial institution; Market structure and pricing

A Structural Error-Correction Model of Best Prices and Depths in the Foreign Exchange Limit Order Market

Traders using the electronic limit order book in the foreign exchange market can watch the posted price and depth of the best quotes change over the day. The authors use a structural errorcorrection model to examine the dynamics of the relationship between the best bid price, the best ask price, and their associated depths. They incorporate measures of the market depth behind the best quotes as regressors. They report four main findings. First, best prices and their associated depths are contemporaneously related to each other. More specifically, an increase in the ask (bid) price is associated with a drop (rise) in the ask (bid) depth. This suggests that sell traders avoid the adverse-selection risk of selling in a rising market. Second, when the spread-the error-correction term-widens, the bid price rises and the ask price drops, returning the spread to its long-term equilibrium value. Further, the best depth on both sides of the market drops, due to increased market uncertainty. Third, the lagged best depth impacts the price discovery on both sides of the market, with the effect being strongest on the same side of the market. Fourth, changes in the depth behind the best quotes impact both the best prices and quantities, even though those changes are unobservable to market participants.Exchange rates; Financial markets

Integrated payload and mission planning, phase 3. Volume 1: Integrated payload and mission planning process evaluation

The integrated payload and mission planning process for STS payloads was defined, and discrete tasks which evaluate performance and support initial implementation of this process were conducted. The scope of activity was limited to NASA and NASA-related payload missions only. The integrated payload and mission planning process was defined in detail, including all related interfaces and scheduling requirements. Related to the payload mission planning process, a methodology for assessing early Spacelab mission manager assignment schedules was defined

A Symbiotic View Of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals

The notion of the biological individual is crucial to studies of genetics, immunology, evolution, development, anatomy, and physiology. Each of these biological subdisciplines has a specific conception of individuality, which has historically provided conceptual contexts for integrating newly acquired data. During the past decade, nucleic acid analysis, especially genomic sequencing and high-throughput RNA techniques, has challenged each of these disciplinary definitions by finding significant interactions of animals and plants with symbiotic microorganisms that disrupt the boundaries that heretofore had characterized the biological individual. Animals cannot be considered individuals by anatomical or physiological criteria because a diversity of symbionts are both present and functional in completing metabolic pathways and serving other physiological functions. Similarly, these new studies have shown that animal development is incomplete without symbionts. Symbionts also constitute a second mode of genetic inheritance, providing selectable genetic variation for natural selection. The immune system also develops, in part, in dialogue with symbionts and thereby functions as a mechanism for integrating microbes into the animal-cell community. Recognizing the holobiont -the multicellular eukaryote plus its colonies of persistent symbionts-as a critically important unit of anatomy, development, physiology, immunology, and evolution opens up new investigative avenues and conceptually challenges the ways in which the biological subdisciplines have heretofore characterized living entities

Price Formation and Liquidity Provision in Short-Term Fixed Income Markets

Differences in market structures may affect the manner in which fundamental information is incorporated into prices. High levels of quote and trade transparency plus substantial quoting obligations in European government securities markets ensure that prices are informationally efficient. The relationship between price changes, order flow, relative depth and spreads across European and Canadian short-term government bond markets is examined via a reduced-form vector autoregression model. In European markets, dealers are able to quickly absorb private information elsewhere in the market. Consequently, spreads and the relative depth on the bid and offer sides of the market are found to be only slightly informative. Similarly, order flow, which reflects inventory management practices in addition to private information, explains a smaller proportion of the variation in asset returns in European markets than in Canadian interdealer brokered markets where no quoting obligations exist.Market structure and pricing; Financial markets; Interest rates