Options and national discretions under the Deposit Guarantee Scheme Directive and their treatment in the context of a European Deposit Insurance Scheme. Final Report November 2019

In the European Union, the Deposit Guarantee Schemes Directive1 adopted in 2014 sets out rules and procedures to ensure depositor protection and is a key step towards harmonisation of deposit insurance in the European Union. It contains 22 national options and discretions (NODs) which Member States may apply to reflect specific national circumstances. The purpose of this study is to assess the respective national implementations of the NODs, including their practical impact on depositor protection, and to propose policy recommendations regarding their possible treatment under the European Deposit Insurance Scheme, under the assumption that the latter would take the form of a full insurance scheme. The analysis of the NODs is based on extensive surveys and interviews with representatives of national deposit guarantee schemes and authorities, including national competent authorities, central banks, Ministries of Finance, and banks. Based on the above analysis of the NODs, this study proposes alternative approaches for 12 NODs and full harmonisation for 3 NODs. It also recommends that 2 NODs could be retained in their current form while 5 NODs could be eliminated

Yawn on Way?

Nail a tiny lever on a fumed, well-let sewer. An Amtrak car is evil, one-post angel. A snail likes a can. Is Atlas not Roman? Is Don Regan a mega-star? A stage manager nods. In a Morton Salt, as in a case Kilian\u27s Ale, gnats open olives. I rack art, man. Are we still (lewd emu fan or Evelyn) Italian

Nods, vocal continuers, and the perception of empathy in storytelling

In her influential paper on stance, alignment, and affiliation in conversational storytelling, Tanya Stivers argued that two basic conversational means of receiving a story, nods and vocal continuers, differ in their function: whereas vocal continuers display alignment with the telling activity, nods, during the mid-telling, convey affiliation with the storytellers' affective stance. In this paper, we elaborate these insights on the basis of a quantitative study informed by conversation analysis. Using a database of 317 stories told in Finnish, we analyzed how story recipients' nods and continuers in different phases of storytelling (before and after the story climax) predict naive raters' judgments of the story recipients' empathy toward the storyteller. We found that vocal continuers accounted for the perception of empathy during mid-telling, whereas the effect of nods remained weak. The study offers further support to the notion of structural organization of storytelling, and suggests that the significance of vocal continuers as a vehicle of empathy may be greater than has been generally thought of.Peer reviewe

Assessing severity of problem gambling–confirmatory factor and Rasch analysis of three gambling measures

The comparative psychometric properties of self-report measures for gambling are insufficiently evaluated, in particular regarding factor structure and item response properties. Confirmatory factor and Rasch analyses were tested for three widely used gambling measures assessing problem gambling and related constructs, that is, the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI), the Problem and Pathological Gambling Measure (PPGM), and the NORC Diagnostic Screen for Gambling Problems (NODS). Psychometric data was analyzed, including help-seeking and recreational gambling samples (N = 598). Compared to the PPGM and the NODS, the PGSI performed worse in the confirmatory factor analysis, and showed poor fit for the theoretically assumed unidimensional model. The Rasch analysis indicated that the PPGM had an adequate difficulty range (i.e. lowest to highest item difficulty) to detect gambling problems across a severity continuum. Compared to the PPGM, the PGSI and NODS had smaller item difficulty ranges, indicating detection of higher gambling severity problems. We conclude that using the PGSI for detection of low severity problems, such as at-risk gambling, might be problematic. The PPGM can be used in general populations and clinical contexts to detect problem gambling and pathological gambling. The NODS is suitable for use in clinical samples for identification of pathological gambling.publishedVersio

Some Uses of Head Nods in “Third Position” in Talk-in-Interaction

Previous research on the use of head nods in talk-in-interaction has demonstrated that they can be used for various interactional purposes by speakers and recipients in different sequential positions. In this report, I examine speakers’ uses of nods in “third position,” in the course of “minimal post-expansions” (Schegloff, 2007). I identify three possible distinct types of nods. The first of these can be used to register a prior utterance as news; the second appears to be designed to register receipt of a prior utterance without treating it as news; and the third embodies features of the first two types, and may be designed to register receipt and acknowledgment of “dispreferred” news. These findings are suggestive of rich complexities in the use of head movements in the production of actions-in-interaction, and of the importance of a fine-grained analytic approach for understanding their situated uses

Detection of cyanotoxins (microcystins/nodularins) in hepatic tissues and epidermal mats of stranded bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in Northeast Florida

The St. Johns River (SJR; Jacksonville, FL, USA) is a large, brackish, estuarine system characterized by considerable anthropogenic pollution, recurrent harmful algal blooms (HABs), and diverse toxin-producing cyanobacteria. The most prevalent toxins in SJR water samples are microcystins/nodularins (MCs/NODs). Additionally, the SJR provides critical habitat for a genetically and behaviorally distinct estuarine community of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) that routinely uses and strands in low mesohaline and oligohaline areas of the river. This population has been subject to two unusual mortality events (UME) since 2010 and has since been described as having substantial declines in population health, characterized by widespread dermatitis and emaciation. Additionally, three dolphins have been recovered from low salinity habitats with epidermal algal mats. Because dolphin illness and strandings overlapped temporally and spatially with confirmed cyanobacterial blooms in the SJR, there is concern that estuarine dolphin health may be declining due to exposure to toxic cyanobacteria and HAB events. Specific to this study, the SJR estuarine community was considered a high-risk group for cyanotoxin exposure in relation to coastal animals. This study analyzed all available hepatic tissues for estuarine dolphins, and used samples from coastal individuals that stranded outside of the known cyanotoxin bloom season as controls. Three analytical methods were used to determine MCs/NODs presence in dolphin liver and epidermal algal mat samples. An Adda ELISA and LC-MS/MS were used to determine free MCs/NODs presence while the MMPB technique was used to determine total (bound and free) concentrations and as confirmatory analyses. ELISA analyses produced high values that were not supported by concurrent LC-MS/MS or MMPB analyses, indicative of false positives. MMPB testing resulted in low-level total MCs/NODs detection in some specimens. Results indicate that both estuarine and coastal dolphins are exposed to MCs/NODs, with potential toxic and immune health impacts

New tricks for old NODs

The mammalian NOD-like receptor NLRX1 appears to have a role as a regulator of antiviral response pathways

Head movement in conversation

This work explores the function and form of head movement and specifically head nods in free conversation. It opens with a comparison of three theories that are often considered as triggers for head nods: mimicry, backchannel responses, and responses to speakers' trouble. Early in this work it is assumed that head nods are well defined in terms of movement, and that they can be directly attributed, or at least better explained, by one theory compared to the others. To test that, comparisons between the theories are conducted following two different approaches. In one set of experiments a novel virtual reality method enables the analysis of perceived plausibility of head nods generated by models inspired by these theories. The results suggest that participants could not consciously assess differences between the predictions of the different theories. In part, this is due to a mixture of gamification and study design challenges. In addition, these experiments raise the question of whether or not it is reasonable to expect people to consciously process and report issues with the non-verbal behaviour of their conversational partners. In a second set of experiments the predictions of the theories are compared directly to head nods that are automatically detected from motion capture data. Matching the predictions with automatically detected head nods showed that not only are most predictions wrong, but also that most of the detected head nods are not accounted by any of the theories under question. Whereas these experiments do not adequately answer which theory best describe head nods in conversation, they suggest new avenues to explore: are head nods well defined in the sense that multiple people will agree that a specific motion is a head nod? and if so, what are their movement characteristics and what is their reliance on conversational context? Exploring these questions revealed a complex picture of what people consider to be head nods and their reliance on context. First, the agreement on what is a head nod is moderate, even when annotators are presented with video snippets that include only automatically detected nods. Second, head nods share movement characteristics with other behaviours, specifically laughter. Lastly, head nods are more accurately defined by their semantic characteristics than by their movement properties, suggesting that future detectors should incorporate more contextual features than movement alone. Overall, this thesis questions the coherence of our intuitive notion of a head nod and the adequacy of current approaches to describe the movements involved. It shows how some of the common theories that describe head movement and nods fail to explain most head movement in free conversation. In addition, it highlights subtleties in head movement and nods that are often overlooked. The findings from this work can inform the development of future head nods detection approaches, and provide a better understanding of non-verbal communication in general

Using Text Comprehension Analyses to Enhance the Readability of Self-Report Questionnaires of Gambling Disorder

The purpose of this study was to use advanced text-comprehension tools to develop a questionnaire of gambling disorder symptoms, the Memphis Gambling Measure (MGM), then experimentally compare rates of accurate comprehension and symptom identification as compared to the NODS, an often used and theoretically less readable questionnaire of the same symptoms. Eighty-five volunteers identified symptoms in a clinical vignette by completing either the MGM or NODS in a between-subjects experimental design. Participants who completed the MGM correctly identified more symptoms of gambling disorder than participants who completed the NODS. Participants with more education more accurately reponded to the questionnaire items, but this did not moderate the effect of questionnaire assignment on item comprehension. We concluded that item comprehension can be accurately predicted using the present text-analysis assessment methods, and that rates at which individuals accurately report on symptoms of psychopathology is related to the readability of the questionnaire items themselves