On the K-theoretic fundamental classes of Deligne-Lusztig varieties

In this paper we express the class of the structure sheaves of the closures of Deligne--Lusztig varieties as explicit double Grothendieck polynomials in the first Chern classes of appropriate line bundles on the ambient flag variety. This is achieved by viewing such closures as degeneracy loci of morphisms of vector bundles.Comment: 8 pages, minor change

Implied correlations of iTraxx tranches during the financial crisis

Implied Base Correlations of Single-tranche CDOs on standardized Credit Indices such as the iTraxx Europe have been used in the credit derivatives market for price communication. During the financial crisis, implied correlations have been quite volatile indicating the growing fraction of systematic credit risk of STCDOs. This paper analyses the determinants of tranche implied base correlations for the period September 2006 until April 2009. It will be shown that realized asset correlations between iTraxx Europe corporates are not able to explain the extreme movements of tranche implied correlations during the financial crisis. Additionally, it will be seen that the worsening creditworthiness of market participants in the interbank market as well as growing pressure on their refinancing conditions correlated significantly with the development of implied base correlations of iTraxx tranches. --Implied Correlation,Asset Correlation,Systematic Credit Risk,Market Liquidity,Funding Liquity

Simple yet efficient real-time pose-based action recognition

Recognizing human actions is a core challenge for autonomous systems as they directly share the same space with humans. Systems must be able to recognize and assess human actions in real-time. In order to train corresponding data-driven algorithms, a significant amount of annotated training data is required. We demonstrated a pipeline to detect humans, estimate their pose, track them over time and recognize their actions in real-time with standard monocular camera sensors. For action recognition, we encode the human pose into a new data format called Encoded Human Pose Image (EHPI) that can then be classified using standard methods from the computer vision community. With this simple procedure we achieve competitive state-of-the-art performance in pose-based action detection and can ensure real-time performance. In addition, we show a use case in the context of autonomous driving to demonstrate how such a system can be trained to recognize human actions using simulation data.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC) 2019. Code will be available soon at https://github.com/noboevbo/ehpi_action_recognitio

Bargaining Around the TRIPS Agreement: The Case for Ongoing Public-Private Initiatives to Facilitate Worldwide Intellectual Property Transactions. A Comment on the Paper Presented by David Lange and J.H. Reichman

Light trapping is an ideal method for surveying nocturnal moths, but in the absence of standardised survey methods effects of confounding factors may impede interpretation of the acquired data. We explored the influence of weather, time of year, and light source on nightly catches of macro moths in light traps, and compared four strategies for sampling by estimating observed species richness using rarefaction. We operated two traps with different light sources for 225 consecutive nights from mid-March to the end of October in eastern Germany in 2011. In total, 49 472 individuals of 372 species were recorded. Species richness and abundance per night were mainly influenced by night temperature, humidity and lamp type. With a limited sample size (less than10 nights) it was slightly better to concentrate sampling on the warmest summer nights, but with more sampling nights it was slightly better to sample during the warmest nights in each month (March to October). By exploiting the higher moth activity during warm nights and an understanding of the species phenology, it is possible to increase the number of species caught and reduce effects of confounding abiotic factors

The Economic Effects of Democratic Participation

Considerable concern has been expressed in recent years about declines in voter participation rates in the United States and in several other major democratic countries. Some feel low participation rates introduce a “class bias” into the political process and thereby worsen the outcomes from it. Little empirical work exists, however, that measures the effects of lower participation on the welfare of a country. This paper begins to fill this void. It presents cross-national evidence that high levels of democratic participation are associated with more equal distributions of income. The paper’s results also imply, however, that this reduction in income inequality comes at a cost. High participation rates are related to larger government sectors which in turn lead to slower economic growth. We also present evidence of the “capture” of government by upper income groups in Latin and Central American countries.

Gastric Adenocarcinoma Presenting as Chronic Back Pain: A Case Report

Introduction: Early stage gastric cancer is usually asymptomatic. It is not until later stages of the disease, usually with metastasis, that patients typically develop symptoms that would prompt further evaluation.Case Report: We present a case of a patient with chronic back pain who was found to have a gastric antral mass as the etiology of her pain. The patient proceeded to have a partial gastrectomy with complete surgical excision of her early-stage gastric cancer, after which her chronic back pain resolved.Conclusion: This case demonstrates the importance of considering significant pathology in patients presenting with chronic complaints to the emergency department