Pan-European Advertising: Think Europe—Act Local

Changes in Europe resulting from the unification of EC countries and the accessibility of new Eastern European markets have fundamentally altered the trading environment in which advertising agencies operate. As the advertising industry attempts to get to grips with legislative and media changes, agencies are working hard to create alliances and develop networks which encompass markets in which they did not traditionally have a presence. This article draws on a combination of quantitative and qualitative information collected from secondary sources and extended personal interviews with key agency personnel, advertisers and representatives from the UK's Advertising Association and The Advertising Standards Authority. The objective is to show how the advertising industry and agencies are continuing to gear up to meeting the new demands of the Europeanized market.     

Parallel visualization of seismic wave propagation

Today parallel visualization of massive datasets from observation and numerical simulation of seismic waves is one of the major goals of geoscience community. A majority of these datasets are time-varying volume data (TVVD), also known as 4D field data. The difficulty of visualizing them on distributed parallel system mainly lies in the algorithm designing for distributed preprocessing of raw datasets, hierarchical point-to-point or collective communication implementation based on distributed data allocation, synchronous volume rendering techniques. In this work we present viable solutions for preprocessing of raw data sets, novel algorithms of parallel rendering and display matrix. Our main objective is focused on the parallel visualization of results coming from full 4D seismic wave propagation simulations.     

Optimal dynamic reinsurance with dependent risks: variance premium principle

In this paper, we consider the optimal proportional reinsurance strategy in a risk model with two dependent classes of insurance business, where the two claim number processes are correlated through a common shock component. Under the criterion of maximizing the expected exponential utility with the variance premium principle, we adopt a nonstandard approach to examining the existence and uniqueness of the optimal reinsurance strategy. Using the technique of stochastic control theory, closed-form expressions for the optimal strategy and the value function are derived for the compound Poisson risk model as well as for the Brownian motion risk model. From the numerical examples, we see that the optimal results for the compound Poisson risk model are very different from those for the diffusion model. The former depends not only on the safety loading, time, and the interest rate, but also on the claim size distributions and the claim number processes, while the latter depends only on the safety loading, time, and the interest rate.     

Some results on the compound Markov binomial model

Abstract

Some years ago, in the course of an analysis of upper and lower limits for incomplete moments of statistical distributions I established an elementary summation formula¹ which proved rather useful for the purpose I had in view. Subsequently the formula was generalized by professor Steffensen, who showed² that the formula in question could be looked upon as giving the first term of an expansion in a certain type of series. Professor Steffensen established recurrence formulae for the coefficients of the series and computed the second, third and fourth term and the corresponding remainders¹, but did not arrive at a general, explicite expression for the coefficient of the n-th term and the corresponding remainder. A year later I found these expressions accidentally while I was working on some other problem. I also discovered the real nature of the procedure in question which proved to be a certain kind of least square fitted polynomial approximation. I did not, however, at the time publish the result. Taking the question up again later I found that the whole problem could be considerably generalized. The type of generalization in question is analogous to the generalization from polynomials to arbitrary functions.     

Workshop on Computational Studies of Interfacial Phenomena: Nanoscale to Mesoscale

This is a report of a workshop on nanoscale to mesoscale phenomena held at the Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory (EMSL) of the Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL) in Richland, Washington on September 24 to 25, 1998. Around thirty scientists from physics, chemistry, geology, geophysics, computer science, soil science, and applied mathematics gathered and presented 14 lectures covering many areas, which included interfacial mineral chemistry, large-scale molecular dynamics, constitutive relationships and quantum chemistry, cross-scaling studies, molecular dynamics of interfaces and new approaches in molecular dynamics. This workshop demonstrates a need for an interdisciplinary forum wherein many different issues crossing many scales and disciplinary boundaries can be discussed openly.     

Foreign exchange market efficiency under recent crises: Asia-Pacific focus

The Asia-Pacific region’s currency markets are generally efficient within-country when tested using the 30 and 31 cointegration technique whereas market efficiency fails to hold when tested using Fama’s (1984) conventional regression. Using the Pilbeam and Olmo (2011) model, we reconcile these conflicting findings. The Pilbeam and Olmo (2011) model confirms within-country market efficiency. It further confirms that free-float currency markets are more resilient than managed-float currency markets among 12 Asia-Pacific economies. From the across-country perspective, the foreign exchange markets are mostly efficient and the results show that the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis was a more disturbing event than the 2008–2009 global financial crisis in the region.     

Do changes in credit ratings of REITs affect their capital structure decisions?

Existing research has highlighted the high leverage ratio of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). To the extent that credit rating is important to REITs when sourcing for capital from the public debt markets, our paper investigates the effect of changes in REIT credit ratings on capital structure decisions while controlling for endogeneity effects. Our results indicate that REITs that face the prospect of an imminent credit rating downgrade issue approximately 11% less debt net of equity as a percentage of total assets than other REITs. This effect is asymmetric in that positive rating outlooks do not have a significant impact on REIT capital structure activities.     

浅谈高校图书馆特色馆藏的形成

本文从读者需求入手,阐述了形成特色馆藏的几个"窗口"以及加强特色馆藏建设的重要性.     

WEB-IS (integrated system): an overall view

WEB-IS, Web-based Integrated System, allows remote, interactive visualization of large-scale 3-D data over the Internet, along with data analysis and data mining. In this paper, we discuss the overall structure of WEB-IS. Up until now we have developed three sub-modules geared towards geophysical problems. WEB-IS1 allows geoscientists to navigate through their 3-D geophysical data, such as seismic structures or numerical simulations, and interactively analyze the statistics or apply data-mining techniques, such as cluster analysis. WEB-IS2 lets a user control Amira (a powerful 3-D visualization package) remotely and analyze, render and view large datasets across the Internet. WEB-IS3 is an imaging service that enables the user to control the scale of features to view through interactive zooming. In the near future, we propose to integrate the three components together through a middleware framework called NaradaBrokering (iNtegrated Asynchronous Real-time Adaptive Distributed Architecture, a distributed messaging infrastructure that can be used to intelligently route data between the originators and registered consumers) without regard for time or location. As a result, WEB-IS will improve its scalability and acquire properties of fault-tolerance. WEB-IS uses a combination of Java, C++, and through the use of NaradaBrokering will seamlessly integrate the server-side processing and user interaction utilities on the client. The server takes care of the processor intensive tasks, such as visualization and data mining, and sends either the resulting bitmap image or statistical results to the middleware across the Internet for viewing. WEB-IS is an easy-to-use service, which will eventually help geoscientists collaborate from different sites in a natural manner. It will be very useful in the next 10 years because of the increasing number of space missions and geophysical campaigns.