Inked: historic African-American beach site as collective memory and group ‘Third Place’ sociability on Martha’s Vineyard

Using data gained from ethnographic research and interviews, this article examines ‘third place’ sociability in the social interactions of the Polar Bears of Martha’s Vineyard, a group of predominantly but not exclusively middle-aged and senior African-American men and women who swim, exercise and socialise together each morning at ‘the Inkwell’ beach. Using Georg Simmel’s concept of sociability and Ray Oldenburg’s third-place theoretical framework, this study explores the key role of the Monday communal breakfast and the function of conversation in establishing bonds between individuals. It further investigates the promotion of strong feelings of social connectedness, belonging, social support, social capital gains and community among its group members. The ongoing sociability and informal rules of the Polar Bears of Martha’s Vineyard has enabled it to become a model group demonstration of third-place community building. The importance of race, class and place is socio-historically investigated within the broader social context of the popular racialised section of the beach, ‘the Inkwell’, of African-American community life, and within the sub-community milieu of group social interaction.     

Forecasting in Short-Term Planning and Management for a Casino Buffet Restaurant

SUMMARY

Demand fluctuation accounts for an important consideration in a restaurant's daily operational decisions. Good short-term planning and management require accurate forecasts of daily demand. The objective of this study is three-fold: (1) to apply, evaluate, and compare different methods of forecasting customer counts for an on-premises buffet restaurant of a local casino in Las Vegas, (2) to describe and propose a combined forecasting approach for this casino buffet restaurant, and (3) to explore the concept of revenue and capacity management for this buffet restaurant. Eight forecasting models were tested and evaluated by two common error measures. The results suggest that a double moving average model was the most accurate model with the smallest MAPE and RMSPE. Extensive discussions on forecasting and planning/management in buffet operations are provided along with recommended future research.     

Tourism,terrorism and political violence in Tunisia: Evidence from Markov-switching models

This study investigates the impact of terrorist attacks and political violence on the number of tourist arrivals and overnight stays in Tunisia. The dataset employed consists of monthly data that covers the period from January 2000 to September 2016, which includes several political and terrorist attacks in Tunisia and the region. Empirically, we investigate the true data generating process (DGP) of these two proxies of tourism activity by accounting for four statistical properties that characterize these series: (1) seasonality, (2) unit roots, (3) breaks, and (4) long memory behavior.Our empirical findings show strong evidence of stationarity, five breaks in the tourist arrival time series and spurious long memory behavior. By estimating a 3-state Markov switching model consisting of the mean, trend, and variance, we find that the Tunisian Jasmine revolution and two recent terrorist attacks, one at the Bardo National Museum on March 18, 2015 and the other at the tourist resort at Port El Kantaoui, Sousse on June 26, 2015, played an important role in influencing the tourism activity of the country. Our empirical findings show also that local shocks have a more important impact than international shocks in influencing tourism activity. Interestingly, we find that the effects of terrorist shocks have a long duration compared to political violence shocks. Several security, marketing, and economic policies have been proposed and discussed in the paper.     

基于OID编码体系的汽车电子标识编码应用研究

本文为了解决物联网所连接对象的多样性带来的标识体系存在不兼容、相互矛盾的问题,基于车联网RFID汽车电子标识的使用特点,创造性地提出将OID编码和汽车电子标识编码相结合的方案。首先简单介绍了基于发证机构及时间和基于汽车VIN码的两种OID编码规则;然后提出了OID编码在汽车电子标识芯片中的规划,主要是内存分配方案;最后介绍了相应区域的读写操作的具体方法。     

Medicaid and long‐term care: The effects of penalizing strategic asset transfers

Medicaid provides a critical source of insurance for long‐term care, and individuals may strategically offload assets (typically to children) to meet the means‐tested eligibility requirement. In this article, we quantify the extent of such behavior using variation in the penalty for improper parent‐to‐child transfers induced by the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. We estimate difference‐in‐differences models based on the hypothesis that only individuals with high levels of nursing home risk (high risk) will alter transfers because of the Act. We find that over a 2‐year horizon, high‐risk individuals reduced transfers to children on the extensive margin by 11 percent and that the average total amount of transfers decreased by $4,860. The results hold only for coupled respondents. We also conduct a triple‐differences analysis to examine heterogeneity with financial literacy and find that even those with a low level of financial literacy responded to the penalty.     

Exploring the predictability of range‐based volatility estimators using recurrent neural networks

We investigate the predictability of several range‐based stock volatility estimates and compare them with the standard close‐to‐close estimate, which is most commonly acknowledged as the volatility. The patterns of volatility changes are analysed using long short‐term memory recurrent neural networks, which are a state‐of‐the‐art method of sequence learning. We implement the analysis on all current constituents of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index and report averaged evaluation results. We find that the direction of changes in the values of range‐based estimates are more predictable than that of the estimate from daily closing values only.     

目标企业创新能力对并购双方收益的影响——基于中国A股市场的实证分析

本文以中国A股市场的2 143件并购交易为样本,以并购溢价和短期超额收益作为并购收益的测度指标,分析目标企业创新能力对并购收益的影响。结果表明,并购溢价与目标企业的创新能力显著正相关,且创新能力水平越高,并购溢价越显著;并购企业获得的短期超额收益也与创新能力显著正相关。因此,以有创新能力的企业为目标的并购交易能够使双方获得更大的短期收益,资本市场的并购是反映创新的市场价值的重要途径,能够提供激励企业创新的重要机制。     

2011年上半年国际金融市场运行综述

2011年上半年,美元总体走弱;美元短期利率下降,欧元、英镑短期利率上升,日元短期利率基本走平;主要国家中长期国债收益率先升后降;欧美主要股指振荡走高。     

基于KMV模型的中国短期融资券信用风险评级研究

针对短期融资券主体信用评级未能完全准确地反映出短期融资券信用风险的问题,本文引入信用风险计量的KMV模型,运用Matlab软件计算出短期融资券的违约距离,按照违约距离的大小通过聚类分析将样本划分为六组。在此基础上,以信用利差表示投资者对短期融资券信用风险的认可,将各组信用利差与其违约距离对应起来,对各组的信用利差进行方差分析,结果显示各组之间的差异非常显著,表明分组状况比较理想,按违约距离判断短期融资券的信用风险是合适的,实现了对短期融资券的信用风险评级。     

2012年5月国际金融市场运行综述

2012年5月,美元指数大幅上涨;欧元、英镑短期利率下降,美元、日元短期利率基本走平;主要发达国家中长期国债收益率总体振荡下行;全球主要股指振荡下行。