1,005 research outputs found
Disturbing Extremal Behavior of Spot Rate Dynamics
This paper presents a study of extreme interest rate movements in the U.S. Federal Funds market over almost a half century of daily observations from the mid 1950s through the end of 2000. We analyze the fluctuations of the maximal and minimal changes in short term interest rates and test the significance of time-varying paths followed by the mean and volatility of extremes. We formally determine the relevance of introducing trend and serial correlation in the mean, and of incorporating the level and GARCH effects in the volatility of extreme changes in the federal funds rate. The empirical findings indicate the existence of volatility clustering in the standard deviation of extremes, and a significantly positive relationship between the level and the volatility of extremes. The results point to the presence of an autoregressive process in the means of both local maxima and local minima values. The paper proposes a conditional extreme value approach to calculating value at risk by specifying the location and scale parameters of the generalized Pareto distribution as a function of past information. Based on the estimated VaR thresholds, the statistical theory of extremes is found to provide more accurate estimates of the rate of occurrence and the size of extreme observations.extreme value theory, volatility, interest rates, value at risk
Quark and Pole Models of Nonleptonic Decays of Charmed Baryons
Quark and pole models of nonleptonic decays of charmed baryons are analysed
from the point of view of their symmetry properties. The symmetry structure of
the parity conserving amplitudes that corresponds to the contribution of the
ground-state intermediate baryons is shown to differ from the one hitherto
employed in the symmetry approach. It is pointed out that the "subtraction" of
sea quark effects in hyperon decays leads to an estimate of -exchange
contributions in charmed baryon decays that is significantly smaller than
naively expected on the basis of . An constraint questioning
the reliability of the factorization technique is exhibited. Finally, a
successful fit to the available data is presented.Comment: 25 pages, LATEX, 1643/PH IFJ Krako
Perspective of turkish medicine students on cancer, cancer treatments, palliative care, and oncologists (ares study): A study of the palliative care working committee of the turkish oncology group (TOG)
Cancer is one of the most common causes of death all over the World (Rahib et al. in Cancer Res 74(11):2913–2921, 2014; Silbermann et al. in Ann Oncol 23(Suppl 3):iii15–iii28, 2012). It is crucial to diagnose this disease early by effective screening methods and also it is very important to acknowledge the community on various aspects of this disease such as the treatment methods and palliative care. Not only the oncologists but every medical doctor should be educated well in dealing with cancer patients. Previous studies suggested various opinions on the level of oncology education in medical schools (Pavlidis et al. in Ann Oncol 16(5):840–841, 2005). In this study, the perspectives of medical students on cancer, its treatment, palliative care, and the oncologists were analyzed in relation to their educational status. A multicenter survey analysis was performed on a total of 4224 medical school students that accepted to enter this study in Turkey. After the questions about the demographical characteristics of the students, their perspectives on the definition, diagnosis, screening, and treatment methods of cancer and their way of understanding metastatic disease as well as palliative care were analyzed. The questionnaire includes questions with answers and a scoring system of Likert type 5 (absolutely disagree = 1, completely agree = 5). In the last part of the questionnaire, there were some words to detect what the words “cancer” and “oncologist” meant for the students. The participant students were analyzed in two study groups; “group 1” (n = 1.255) were phases I and II students that had never attended an oncology lesson, and “group 2” (n = 2.969) were phases III to VI students that had attended oncology lessons in the medical school. SPSS v17 was used for the database and statistical analyses. A value of p < 0.05 was noted as statistically significant. Group 1 defined cancer as a contagious disease (p = 0.00025), they believed that early diagnosis was never possible (p = 0.042), all people with a diagnosis of cancer would certainly die (p = 0.044), and chemotherapy was not successful in a metastatic disease (p = 0.003) as compared to group 2. The rate of the students that believed gastric cancer screening was a part of the national screening policy was significantly more in group 1 than in group 2 (p = 0.00014). Group 2 had a higher anxiety level for themselves or their family members to become a cancer patient. Most of the students in both groups defined medical oncologists as warriors (57% in group 1 and 40% in group 2; p = 0.097), and cancer was reminding them of “death” (54% in group 1 and 48% in group 2; p = 0.102). This study suggested that oncology education was useful for the students’ understanding of cancer and related issues; however, the level of oncology education should be improved in medical schools in Turkey. This would be helpful for medical doctors to cope with many aspects of cancer as a major health care problem in this country. © 2018, American Association for Cancer Education
Cabibbo-allowed nonleptonic weak decays of charmed baryons
Cabibbo-allowed nonleptonic weak decays of charmed baryons
\lamc,~\xin,~\xip and into an octet baryon and a pseudoscalar
meson are analyzed. The nonfactorizable contributions are evaluated under pole
approximation, and it turns out that the -wave amplitudes are dominated by
the low-lying \halfm resonances, while -wave ones governed by the
ground-state \halfp poles. The MIT bag model is employed to calculate the
coupling constants, form factors and baryon matrix elements. Our conclusions
are: (i) waves are no longer dominated by commutator terms; the
current-algebra method is certainly not applicable to parity-violating
amplitudes, (ii) nonfactorizable exchange effects are generally important;
they can be comparable to and somtimes even dominate over factorizable
contributions, depending on the decay modes under consideration, (iii)
large- approximation for factorizable amplitudes also works in the heavy
baryon sector and it accounts for the color nonsuppression of \lamc\ri
p\bar{K}^0 relative to \lamc\ri\Lambda\pi^+, (iv) a measurement of the decay
rate and the sign of the asymmetry parameter of certain proposed decay
modes will help discern various models; especially the sign of in
\lamc\ri\Sigma\pi decays can be used to unambiguously differentiate recent
theoretical schemes from current algebra, and (v) waves are the dominant
contributions to the decays \lamc\ri\Xi^0 K^+ and \xin\ri\Sigma^+ K^-, but
they are subject to a large cancellation; this renders present theoretical
predictions on these two channels unreliable.Comment: PHYZZX, 31 pages, 3 tables, IP-ASTP-10-93, ITP-SB-93-2
Charm and Bottom Semileptonic Decays
We review the present status of theoretical attempts to calculate the
semileptonic charm and bottom decays and then present a calculation of these
decays in the light--front frame at the kinematic point . This allows us
to evaluate the form factors at the same value of , even though the
allowed kinematic ranges for charm and bottom decays are very different. Also,
at this kinematic point the decay is given in terms of only one form factor
. For the ratio of the decay rates given by the E653 collaboration we
show that the determination of the ratio of the Cabibbo--Kobayashi--Maskawa
(CKM) matrix elements is consistent with that obtained from the unitarity
constraint. At present, though, the unitarity method still has greater
accuracy. Since comparisons of the semileptonic decays into and either
electrons or muons will be available soon from the E791 Fermilab experiment, we
also look at the massive muon case. We show that for a range of the
symmetry breaking is small even though the contributions of the
various helicity amplitudes becomes more complicated. For decays, the decay
at involves an extra form factor
coming from the photon contribution and so is not amenable to the same kind of
analysis, leaving only the decay as a
possibility. As the mass of the decaying particle increases we note that the
symmetry becomes badly broken at .Comment: Latex, 19 pages, two figures are attached, a minor change in the
manuscript related to thi
Universal Extra Dimensions and Kaluza Klein Bound States
We study the bound states of the Kaluza-Klein (KK) excitations of quarks in
certain models of Universal Extra Dimensions. Such bound states may be detected
at future lepton colliders in the cross section for the pair production of
KK-quarks near threshold. For typical values of model parameters, we find that
"KK-quarkonia" have widths in the 10 - 100 MeV range, and production cross
sections of order a few picobarns for the lightest resonances. Two body decays
of the constituent KK-quarks lead to distinctive experimental signatures. We
point out that such KK resonances may be discovered before any of the higher KK
modes.Comment: 21 pages LaTeX, 9 eps figure
Cilostazol for Secondary Stroke Prevention: History, Evidence, Limitations, and Possibilities
Cilostazol is a phosphodiesterase III inhibitor with a long track record of safety that is FDA and EMA approved for the treatment of claudication in patients with peripheral arterial disease. In addition, cilostazol has been approved for secondary stroke prevention in several Asian countries based on trials that have demonstrated a reduction in stroke recurrence among patients with non-cardioembolic stroke. The onset of benefit appears after 60–90 days of treatment, which is consistent with cilostazol’s pleiotropic effects on platelet aggregation, vascular remodeling, blood flow, and plasma lipids. Cilostazol appears safe and does not increase the risk of major bleeding when given alone or in combination with aspirin or clopidogrel. Adverse effects such as headache, gastrointestinal symptoms and palpitations, however, contributed to a 6% increase in drug discontinuation among patients randomized to cilostazol in a large secondary stroke prevention trial (CSPS.com). Due to limitations of prior trials, such as open label design, premature trial termination, large loss to follow-up, lack of functional or cognitive outcome data, and exclusive enrollment in Asia, the existing trials have not led to a change in clinical practice or guidelines in Western countries. These limitations could be addressed by a double-blind placebo-controlled randomized trial conducted in a broader population. If positive, it would increase the evidence in support of long-term treatment with cilostazol for secondary prevention in the millions of patients worldwide who have suffered a non-cardioembolic ischemic stroke
b --> s \tau^+ \tau^- decay in the two Higgs doublet model with flavor changing neutral currents
We study the decay width and forward-backward asymmetry of the lepton pair
for the inclusive decay b --> s \tau^+ \tau^- in the two Higgs doublet model
with three level flavor changing neutral currents (model III) and analyse the
dependencies of these quantities on the model III parameters, including the
leading order QCD corrections. We found that there is a considerable
enhancement in the decay width and neutral Higgs effects are detectable for
large values of the parameter \bar{\xi}_{N,\tau\tau}^D.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figure
- …