Characterizing neuromorphologic alterations with additive shape functionals

The complexity of a neuronal cell shape is known to be related to its function. Specifically, among other indicators, a decreased complexity in the dendritic trees of cortical pyramidal neurons has been associated with mental retardation. In this paper we develop a procedure to address the characterization of morphological changes induced in cultured neurons by over-expressing a gene involved in mental retardation. Measures associated with the multiscale connectivity, an additive image functional, are found to give a reasonable separation criterion between two categories of cells. One category consists of a control group and two transfected groups of neurons, and the other, a class of cat ganglionary cells. The reported framework also identified a trend towards lower complexity in one of the transfected groups. Such results establish the suggested measures as an effective descriptors of cell shape

Cobb-Douglas Utility - Eventually!

Consider the following two opinions, both of which can be found in the literature of consumer demand systems: (a) As the real income of a consumer becomes indefinitely large, re-mixing the consumption bundle becomes irrelevant: having chosen the ultimately satisfying budget shares at any given set of relative prices, the superlatively wealthy continue to allocate additional income in the same proportions. With very large and increasing per capita income, ultimately the utility function becomes indistinguishable from Cobb-Douglas. (b) Consumer demand systems in which the income elasticities monotonically approach one (from above, in the case of luxuries; from below, in the case of necessities) are unsatisfactory both theoretically and empirically. For instance, a necessity with a low (consumer demand system; applied general equilibrium; separability; implicitly directly additive preferences; effectively global regularity; Cobb-Douglas, calibration; AIDADS.

Should the advanced measurement approach be replaced with the standardized measurement approach for operational risk?

Recently, Basel Committee for Banking Supervision proposed to replace all approaches, including Advanced Measurement Approach (AMA), for operational risk capital with a simple formula referred to as the Standardised Measurement Approach (SMA). This paper discusses and studies the weaknesses and pitfalls of SMA such as instability, risk insensitivity, super-additivity and the implicit relationship between SMA capital model and systemic risk in the banking sector. We also discuss the issues with closely related operational risk Capital-at-Risk (OpCar) Basel Committee proposed model which is the precursor to the SMA. In conclusion, we advocate to maintain the AMA internal model framework and suggest as an alternative a number of standardization recommendations that could be considered to unify internal modelling of operational risk. The findings and views presented in this paper have been discussed with and supported by many OpRisk practitioners and academics in Australia, Europe, UK and USA, and recently at OpRisk Europe 2016 conference in London

Modelling electron interactions: a semi-rigorous method

We report total electron scattering cross sections (TCS) for SF6, SF5 CF3, and CF3I, molecules of interest to the plasma industry over the energy range from threshold to 2000 eV. We also report the total scattering cross sections for e-formaldehyde for which there are currently no theoretical or experimental results reported. The ionization cross sections for these targets are also estimated using the Deustch and Maerk formalism and are compared with Binary Encounter Bethe (BEB) data of Kim

Sequence alignment, mutual information, and dissimilarity measures for constructing phylogenies

Existing sequence alignment algorithms use heuristic scoring schemes which cannot be used as objective distance metrics. Therefore one relies on measures like the p- or log-det distances, or makes explicit, and often simplistic, assumptions about sequence evolution. Information theory provides an alternative, in the form of mutual information (MI) which is, in principle, an objective and model independent similarity measure. MI can be estimated by concatenating and zipping sequences, yielding thereby the "normalized compression distance". So far this has produced promising results, but with uncontrolled errors. We describe a simple approach to get robust estimates of MI from global pairwise alignments. Using standard alignment algorithms, this gives for animal mitochondrial DNA estimates that are strikingly close to estimates obtained from the alignment free methods mentioned above. Our main result uses algorithmic (Kolmogorov) information theory, but we show that similar results can also be obtained from Shannon theory. Due to the fact that it is not additive, normalized compression distance is not an optimal metric for phylogenetics, but we propose a simple modification that overcomes the issue of additivity. We test several versions of our MI based distance measures on a large number of randomly chosen quartets and demonstrate that they all perform better than traditional measures like the Kimura or log-det (resp. paralinear) distances. Even a simplified version based on single letter Shannon entropies, which can be easily incorporated in existing software packages, gave superior results throughout the entire animal kingdom. But we see the main virtue of our approach in a more general way. For example, it can also help to judge the relative merits of different alignment algorithms, by estimating the significance of specific alignments.Comment: 19 pages + 16 pages of supplementary materia

Determinants of transient and chronic poverty : evidence from rural China

Are the determinants of chronic and transient poverty different? Do policies that reduce transient poverty also reduce chronic poverty? The authors decompose measures of household poverty into chronic and transient components and use censored conditional quantile estimators to investigate the household and geographic determinants of both chronic and transient poverty, taking panel data for post-reform rural China. They find that a household's average wealth holding is an important determinant for both transient and chronic poverty. Although household demographics, levels of education, and the health status of members of the households are important for chronic poverty, they are not significant determinants of transient poverty. Both chronic and transient poverty are reduced by greater command over physical capital, and life-cycle effects for the two types of poverty are similar. But there the similarities end. Smaller and better-educated households have less chronic poverty, but household size and level of education matters little for transient poverty. Living in an area where health and education are better reduces chronic poverty but appears to be irrelevant to transient poverty. Nor are higher foodgrain yields a significant determinant of transient poverty, although they are highly significant in reducing chronic poverty. These findings suggest that China's poor-area development program may be appropriate for reducing chronic poverty but is likely to help reduce variations in consumption that households typically face in poor areas -- the exposure to uninsured income risk that underlies transient poverty will probably persist. Other policy instruments may be needed to deal with transient poverty, including seasonalpublic works, credit schemes, buffer stocks, and insurance options for the poor.Poverty Reduction Strategies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Services&Transfers to Poor,Health Economics&Finance,Public Health Promotion,Safety Nets and Transfers,Poverty Assessment,Environmental Economics&Policies,Poverty Reduction Strategies,Rural Poverty Reduction