Temporal structure and gain/loss asymmetry for real and artificial stock indices

We demonstrate that the gain/loss asymmetry observed for stock indices vanishes if the temporal dependence structure is destroyed by scrambling the time series. We also show that an artificial index constructed by a simple average of a number of individual stocks display gain/loss asymmetry - this allows us to explicitly analyze the dependence between the index constituents. We consider mutual information and correlation based measures and show that the stock returns indeed have a higher degree of dependence in times of market downturns than upturns

Brigitte Schwaiger, Wie kommt das Salz ins Meer : eine kritische Betrachtung : a thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in German at Massey University

Text in GermanIndem zunächst aufpezeigt wird, wie sich das literarische Schaffen in den beiden letzten Jahrzehnten entwickelt hat, das heisst, wie die Thematik der Schrift steller dieser Zeit ihre Erzählformen bestimmt und wie sich eine neue Ausdrucksform aus den historisch bedingten Perspektiven herausgebildet hat, kann das Verständnis von Brigitte Schwaigers Erzählung Wie kommt das Salz ins Meer 1 B. Schwaigeri: Wie kommt das Salz ins Meer.- Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt (1979). Alle Zitate sind dieser Ausgabe entnommen und werden in den Anmerkungen lediglich mit Seitenzahl nachgewiesen, (Erstausgabe bei Zsolnay, Wien, Hamburg 1977). vorbereitet werden. In der deutschen Literatur der sechziger Jahre bis zur Gegenwart gibt es eine Entwicklung (...) von objektbezogener, in der Regel politisch aufklärender, meist dokumentarischer Literatur zu ichbezogener, gegenüber politischen Ideologien kritischer, meist fiktionaler Literatur (...)2 H-G. Winter: Von der Dokumentarliteratur zur 'neuen Subjektivität': Anmerkungen zur westdeutschen Literatur der siebziger Jahre.- In: Seminar. Vol. XVII,2. (1981) S.95 (Unterstreichungen von mir)

New Zealand’s Hosting of APEC in 2021

Hosting APEC in 2021 is a unique and timely opportunity for New Zealand to take responsibility for providing regional leadership that can advance and sustain APEC as an institution, including through its development of trade and economic policies that will support the region’s economic recovery from the effects of Covid-19. This article reviews why APEC matters to New Zealand and the international context which will influence New Zealand’s APEC host year. It outlines how New Zealand will approach its virtual hosting of APEC 2021, and the key themes which will inform our priorities

Effect of Intellectual Capital on Performance of Firms Listed on Nigeria Stock Exchange

This study assesses the effect of intellectual capital on performance of firms listed on Nigeria Stock Exchange. Three specific objectives were formulated to determine the extent to which intellectual capital affects corporate performance. From the specific objectives, hypotheses were also formulated and to test the hypotheses a sample of forty (40) companies were selected from 213 companies listed on Nigeria Stock Exchange using multi-phases sampling method. The study applied Ex-post Facto Research Design and made use of secondary data sourced from annual reports and accounts of sampled firms and Nigeria Stock Exchange Fact Book. Pulic 1998 Value Added Intellectual Capital Co-efficient (VAIC) model which enable the determination of specific effects of the components of intellectual capital (Human Capital Efficiency (HCE), Structural Capital Efficiency (SCE) and Capital Employed Efficiency (CEE) was adopted and transformed into ordinary least square approach and a multiple regression performed to test the hypotheses at 5% level of significance using E-view statistical software (version 8.0). The analysis of the test shows that Intellectual Capital affects significantly, Company Process measured by ADM/OPA and market to Book value ratio of companies listed on Nigeria Stock Exchange whereas there was no significant effect of Intellectual Capital on Asset Turnover (ATO) . The study therefore recommends among other factors that corporate management should endeavour to provide adequate and conducive working environment, good welfare package reviewing the performance and engaging on regular training and development programmes which will automatically increase the efficiency and productivity of the workforce. Keywords: Intellectual Capital, Firms Performance, Nigerian Stock            Exchange

Visual exploration of semantic-web-based knowledge structures

Humans have a curious nature and seek a better understanding of the world. Data, in- formation, and knowledge became assets of our modern society through the information technology revolution in the form of the internet. However, with the growing size of accumulated data, new challenges emerge, such as searching and navigating in these large collections of data, information, and knowledge. The current developments in academic and industrial contexts target the corresponding challenges using Semantic Web techno- logies. The Semantic Web is an extension of the Web and provides machine-readable representations of knowledge for various domains. These machine-readable representations allow intelligent machine agents to understand the meaning of the data and information; and enable additional inference of new knowledge. Generally, the Semantic Web is designed for information exchange and its processing and does not focus on presenting such semantically enriched data to humans. Visualizations support exploration, navigation, and understanding of data by exploiting humans’ ability to comprehend complex data through visual representations. In the context of Semantic- Web-Based knowledge structures, various visualization methods and tools are available, and new ones are being developed every year. However, suitable visualizations are highly dependent on individual use cases and targeted user groups. In this thesis, we investigate visual exploration techniques for Semantic-Web-Based knowledge structures by addressing the following challenges: i) how to engage various user groups in modeling such semantic representations; ii) how to facilitate understanding using customizable visual representations; and iii) how to ease the creation of visualizations for various data sources and different use cases. The achieved results indicate that visual modeling techniques facilitate the engagement of various user groups in ontology modeling. Customizable visualizations enable users to adjust visualizations to the current needs and provide different views on the data. Additionally, customizable visualization pipelines enable rapid visualization generation for various use cases, data sources, and user group