An Overview of the East-Asian Economic Crisis

The objective of this project is to analyse the possible causes and the effects of the economic crisis in East-asian region with particular emphasis of the impact on Malaysia in respect of the RINGGIT and the KUALA LUMPUR STOCK EXCHANGE; how the crisis affects countries in other regions. The issues of whether the I MF can solve the prevailing problems in this region and how Mexican's crisis is different from the East-asian are also discussed. Lastly, several recommendations are made with a view to strengthen and improve the economic fundamentals of Malaysia. The possible causes of the crisis incudes: poor financial and banking system resulting in substantial non-performing loans, Investors' loss of confidence, less competitive exports, unproductive investments and over-dependence on the foreign capital. Malaysia was hit badly by this crisis. The value of Ringgit fell from 2. 6450 in July 1997 to 4. 1 550 against the US Dollar in July 1998 whilst the Composite Index fell from 1,0 1 2. 84 in July 1997 to 402.65 in July 1998 . The Gross Domestic Product ( GDP ) growth rate was forecasted to be - 1% to -2% compared with the average GDP growth rate of 8.8 % for the period between 1988 to 1997.It is evident that IMF cannot provide solution to East-asian countries as countries who resorted to I MF's bail-out do not seem to recover from their crisis. East-asian's crisis is by nature different from that of the Mexican's crisis in 1995. The former is solvency crisis whereas the latter is liquidity crisis. Malaysian government should strengthen its economic fundamentals by implementing several measures such as making it compulsory to make use of local manufactured parts. Agriculture sector should be revived as it can save the country for RM 9 billion on food. To develop Information Technology, Education and Tourism sectors to generate foreign exchange for the country. Regulations should be imposed to prevent sudden outflow of foreign portfoliofunds. The Banking sectors has to be strengthen and not to allow politicians to have hands in the Banking industry loans should only be approved based on its merit only

Factors Influencing Auction Outcomes: Bidder Turnout, Auction Houses and Market Conditions

This study provides new evidence on the outcomes of auctions of residential real estate, focusing on the effects of bidder turnout, pricing, market conditions and auction houses. Our analysis of properties offered for sale by auction in Singapore from 1995 to 2000 shows that several variables are significant in explaining why an auction results in a sale or not. These variables included the state of the market, the timing of the auction (year), the number of bidders at the auction and the auction house. We also find that the probability of a sale is higher for distress sales, for more homogenous properties and for those located in the central region. Finally, we provide a sensitivity analysis of how market conditions and the choice of auction house influence the probability of a sale.

Optimization of Analytic Window Functions

Analytic functions represent the state-of-the-art way of performing complex data analysis within a single SQL statement. In particular, an important class of analytic functions that has been frequently used in commercial systems to support OLAP and decision support applications is the class of window functions. A window function returns for each input tuple a value derived from applying a function over a window of neighboring tuples. However, existing window function evaluation approaches are based on a naive sorting scheme. In this paper, we study the problem of optimizing the evaluation of window functions. We propose several efficient techniques, and identify optimization opportunities that allow us to optimize the evaluation of a set of window functions. We have integrated our scheme into PostgreSQL. Our comprehensive experimental study on the TPC-DS datasets as well as synthetic datasets and queries demonstrate significant speedup over existing approaches.Comment: VLDB201

Dynamic dissipative cooling of a mechanical oscillator in strong-coupling optomechanics

Cooling of mesoscopic mechanical resonators represents a primary concern in cavity optomechanics. Here in the strong optomechanical coupling regime, we propose to dynamically control the cavity dissipation, which is able to significantly accelerate the cooling process while strongly suppressing the heating noise. Furthermore, the dynamic control is capable of overcoming quantum backaction and reducing the cooling limit by several orders of magnitude. The dynamic dissipation control provides new insights for tailoring the optomechanical interaction and offers the prospect of exploring macroscopic quantum physics.Comment: accepetd in Physical Review Letter