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Bayesian learning provides the core concept of processing noisy information. In standard Bayesian frameworks, assessing the price impact of information requires perfect knowledge of news’ precision. In practice, however, precision is rarely dis- closed. Therefore, we extend standard Bayesian learning, suggesting traders infer news’ precision from magnitudes of surprises and from external sources. We show that interactions of the different precision signals may result in highly nonlinear price responses. Empirical tests based on intra-day T-bond futures price reactions to employment releases confirm the model’s predictions and show that the effects are statistically and economically significant.
The popular Nelson-Siegel (1987) yield curve is routinely fit to cross sections of intra-country bond yields, and Diebold and Li (2006) have recently proposed a dynamized version. In this paper we extend Diebold-Li to a global context, modeling a potentially large set of country yield curves in a framework that allows for both global and country-specific factors. In an empirical analysis of term structures of government bond yields for the Germany, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S., we find that global yield factors do indeed exist and are economically important, generally explaining significant fractions of country yield curve dynamics, with interesting differences across countries.
Measuring financial asset return and volatilty spillovers, with application to global equity markets
(2008)
We provide a simple and intuitive measure of interdependence of asset returns and/or volatilities. In particular, we formulate and examine precise and separate measures of return spillovers and volatility spillovers. Our framework facilitates study of both non-crisis and crisis episodes, including trends and bursts in spillovers, and both turn out to be empirically important. In particular, in an analysis of nineteen global equity markets from the early 1990s to the present, we find striking evidence of divergent behavior in the dynamics of return spillovers vs. volatility spillovers: Return spillovers display a gently increasing trend but no bursts, whereas volatility spillovers display no trend but clear bursts.
Research with Keynesian-style models has emphasized the importance of the output gap for policies aimed at controlling inflation while declaring monetary aggregates largely irrelevant. Critics, however, have argued that these models need to be modified to account for observed money growth and inflation trends, and that monetary trends may serve as a useful cross-check for monetary policy. We identify an important source of monetary trends in form of persistent central bank misperceptions regarding potential output. Simulations with historical output gap estimates indicate that such misperceptions may induce persistent errors in monetary policy and sustained trends in money growth and inflation. If interest rate prescriptions derived from Keynesian-style models are augmented with a cross-check against money-based estimates of trend inflation, inflation control is improved substantially.
Religious conversion has become a dangerous social and individual problem. In Latin America, a traditional Catholic area, Protestant sects are successfully con-verting more and more Catholics into their own communities. Therefore the Pope demands a strict control of these activities. In India e.g., the Catholic hierarchy is critizising the Indian governments which have forbidden conversion on non-spiritual reasons. Hindu organizations have started even very successfully to re-convert Indian Christians particularly of Dalit and tribal background. Buddhists are very successful in indirect and even direct conversion of many Westerners. Wah-habit missionaries spread their Neo-Islam in the Muslim societies and get more and more even non-Muslim converts. We should add the forcible and sometimes ex-tremely cruel conversions the atheistic states had executed since the last century. ...
In the course of the ME period, HAVE began to encroach on territory previously held by BE. According to Rydén and Brorström (1987); Kytö (1997), this occurred especially in iterative and durational contexts, in the perfect infinitive and modal constructions. In Early Modern English (henceforth EModE), BE was increasingly restricted to the most common intransitives come and go, before disappearing entirely in the 18th and 19th centuries. This development raises a number of questions, both historical and theoretical. First, why did HAVE start spreading at the expense of BE in the first place? Second, why was the change conditioned by the factors mentioned by Rydén and Brorström (1987) and Kytö (1997)? Third, why did the change take on the order of 800 years to go to completion? Fourth, what implications does the change have for general theories of auxiliary selection? In this paper we’ll try to answer the first question by focusing on one the earliest clearly identifiable advance of HAVE onto BE territory – its first appearance with the verb come, which for a number of reasons is an ideal verb to focus on. First, come is by far the most common intransitive verb, so we get large enough numbers for statistical analysis. Second, clauses containing the past participle of come with a form of BE are unambiguous perfects: they cannot be passives, and they did not continue into modern English with a stative reading like he is gone. Third, and perhaps most importantly, come selected BE categorically in the early stages of English, so the first examples we find with HAVE are clear evidence for innovation. We will present evidence from a corpus study showing that the first spread of HAVE was due to a ban on auxiliary BE in certain types of counterfactual perfects, and will propose an account for that ban in terms of Iatridou’s (2000) Exclusion theory of counterfactuals.
Verbs, nouns and affixation
(2008)
What explains the rich patterns of deverbal nominalization? Why do some nouns have argument structure, while others do not? We seek a solution in which properties of deverbal nouns are composed from properties of verbs, properties of nouns, and properties of the morphemes that relate them. The theory of each plus the theory of howthey combine, should give the explanation. In exploring this, we investigate properties of two theories of nominalization. In one, the verb-like properties of deverbal nouns result from verbal syntactic structure (a “structural model”). See, for example, van Hout & Roeper 1998, Fu, Roeper and Borer 1993, 2001, to appear, Alexiadou 2001, to appear). According to the structural hypothesis, some nouns contain VPs and/or verbal functional layers. In the other theory, the verbal properties of deverbal nouns result from the event structure and argument structure of the DPs that they head. By “event structure” we mean a representation of the elements and structure of a linguistic event, not a representation of the world. We refer to this view as the “event model”. According to the event model hypothesis, all derived nouns are represented with the same syntactic structure, the difference lying in argument structure – which in turn is critically related to event structure, in the way sketched in Grimshaw (1990), Siloni (1997) among others. In pursuing these lines of analysis, and at least to some extent disentangling their properties, we reach the conclusion that, with respect to a core set of phenomena, the two theories are remarkably similar – specifically, they achieve success with the same problems, and must resort to the same stipulations to address the remaining issues that we discuss (although the stipulations are couched in different forms).
Class features as probes
(2008)
In this article, we adress (i) the form and (ii) the function on inflection class features in minimalist grammar. The empirical evidence comes from noun inflection systems involving fusional markers in German, Greek, and Russian. As for (i), we argue (based on instances of transparadigmatic syncretism) that class features are not privative; rather, class information must be decomposed into more abstract, binary features. Concerning (ii), we propose that class features qualify as the very device that brings about fusional infection: They are uninterpretable in syntax and actas probes on stems, with matching inflection markers as goels, and thus trigger morphological Agree operations that merge stem and inflection marker before syntax is reached.
Background: Polymorphisms within the insulin gene can influence insulin expression in the pancreas and especially in the thymus, where self-antigens are processed, shaping the T cell repertoire into selftolerance, a process that protects from ß-cell autoimmunity.
Methods: We investigated the role of the -2221Msp(C/T) and -23HphI(A/T) polymorphisms within the insulin gene in patients with a monoglandular autoimmune endocrine disease [patients with isolated type 1 diabetes (T1D, n = 317), Addison´s disease (AD, n = 107) or Hashimoto´s thyroiditis (HT, n = 61)], those with a polyglandular autoimmune syndrome type II (combination of T1D and/or AD with HT or GD, n = 62) as well as in healthy controls (HC, n = 275).
Results: T1D patients carried significantly more often the homozygous genotype "CC" -2221Msp(C/T) and "AA" -23HphI(A/T) polymorphisms than the HC (78.5% vs. 66.2%, p = 0.0027 and 75.4% vs. 52.4%, p = 3.7 × 10-8, respectively). The distribution of insulin gene polymorphisms did not show significant differences between patients with AD, HT, or APS-II and HC.
Conclusion: We demonstrate that the allele "C" of the -2221Msp(C/T) and "A" -23HphI(A/T) insulin gene polymorphisms confer susceptibility to T1D but not to isolated AD, HT or as a part of the APS-II.
Poster presentation A central problem in neuroscience is to bridge local synaptic plasticity and the global behavior of a system. It has been shown that Hebbian learning of connections in a feedforward network performs PCA on its inputs [1]. In recurrent Hopfield network with binary units, the Hebbian-learnt patterns form the attractors of the network [2]. Starting from a random recurrent network, Hebbian learning reduces system complexity from chaotic to fixed point [3]. In this paper, we investigate the effect of Hebbian plasticity on the attractors of a continuous dynamical system. In a Hopfield network with binary units, it can be shown that Hebbian learning of an attractor stabilizes it with deepened energy landscape and larger basin of attraction. We are interested in how these properties carry over to continuous dynamical systems. Consider system of the form Math(1) where xi is a real variable, and fi a nondecreasing nonlinear function with range [-1,1]. T is the synaptic matrix, which is assumed to have been learned from orthogonal binary ({1,-1}) patterns ξμ, by the Hebbian rule: Math. Similar to the continuous Hopfield network [4], ξμ are no longer attractors, unless the gains gi are big. Assume that the system settles down to an attractor X*, and undergoes Hebbian plasticity: T´ = T + εX*X*T, where ε > 0 is the learning rate. We study how the attractor dynamics change following this plasticity. We show that, in system (1) under certain general conditions, Hebbian plasticity makes the attractor move towards its corner of the hypercube. Linear stability analysis around the attractor shows that the maximum eigenvalue becomes more negative with learning, indicating a deeper landscape. This in a way improves the system´s ability to retrieve the corresponding stored binary pattern, although the attractor itself is no longer stabilized the way it does in binary Hopfield networks.
Introduction To investigate the predictive value of clinical and biological markers for a pathological complete remission after a preoperative dose-dense regimen of doxorubicin and docetaxel, with or without tamoxifen, in primary operable breast cancer. Methods Patients with a histologically confirmed diagnosis of previously untreated, operable, and measurable primary breast cancer (tumour (T), nodes (N) and metastases (M) score: T2-3(>= 3 cm) N0-2 M0) were treated in a prospectively randomised trial with four cycles of dose-dense (bi-weekly) doxorubicin and docetaxel (ddAT) chemotherapy, with or without tamoxifen, prior to surgery. Clinical and pathological parameters (menopausal status, clinical tumour size and nodal status, grade, and clinical response after two cycles) and a panel of biomarkers (oestrogen and progesterone receptors, Ki-67, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), p53, bcl-2, all detected by immunohistochemistry) were correlated with the detection of a pathological complete response (pCR). Results A pCR was observed in 9.7% in 248 patients randomised in the study and in 8.6% in the subset of 196 patients with available tumour tissue. Clinically negative axillary lymph nodes, poor tumour differentiation, negative oestrogen receptor status, negative progesterone receptor status, and loss of bcl-2 were significantly predictive for a pCR in a univariate logistic regression model, whereas in a multivariate analysis only the clinical nodal status and hormonal receptor status provided significantly independent information. Backward stepwise logistic regression revealed a response after two cycles, with hormone receptor status and lymph-node status as significant predictors. Patients with a low percentage of cells stained positive for Ki-67 showed a better response when treated with tamoxifen, whereas patients with a high percentage of Ki-67 positive cells did not have an additional benefit when treated with tamoxifen. Tumours overexpressing HER2 showed a similar response to that in HER2-negative patients when treated without tamoxifen, but when HER2-positive tumours were treated with tamoxifen, no pCR was observed. Conclusion Reliable prediction of a pathological complete response after preoperative chemotherapy is not possible with clinical and biological factors routinely determined before start of treatment. The response after two cycles of chemotherapy is a strong but dependent predictor. The only independent factor in this subset of patients was bcl-2. Trial registration number NCT00543829
Background This study was carried out to compare the HRQoL of patients in general practice with differing chronic diseases with the HRQoL of patients without chronic conditions, to evaluate the HRQoL of general practice patients in Germany compared with the HRQoL of the general population, and to explore the influence of different chronic diseases on patients HRQoL, independently of the effects of multiple confounding variables. Methods A cross-sectional questionnaire survey including the SF-36, the EQ-5D and demographic questions was conducted in 20 general practices in Germany. 1009 consecutive patients aged 15–89 participated. The SF-36 scale scores of general practice patients with differing chronic diseases were compared with those of patients without chronic conditions. Differences in the SF-36 scale/summary scores and proportions in the EQ-5D dimensions between patients and the general population were analyzed. Independent effects of chronic conditions and demographic variables on the HRQoL were analyzed using multivariable linear regression and polynomial regression models. Results The HRQoL for general practice patients with differing chronic diseases tended to show more physical than mental health impairments compared with the reference group of patients without. Patients in general practice in Germany had considerably lower SF-36 scores than the general population (P < 0.001 for all) and showed significantly higher proportions of problems in all EQ-5D dimensions except for the self-care dimension (P < 0.001 for all). The mean EQ VAS for general practice patients was lower than that for the general population (69.2 versus 77.4, P < 0.001). The HRQoL for general practice patients in Germany seemed to be more strongly affected by diseases like depression, back pain, OA of the knee, and cancer than by hypertension and diabetes. Conclusion General practice patients with differing chronic diseases in Germany had impaired quality of life, especially in terms of physical health. The independent impacts on the HRQoL were different depending on the type of chronic disease. Findings from this study might help health professionals to concern more influential diseases in primary care from the patient´s perspective.
Background: This article reports on the relationship between cultural influences on life style, coping style, and sleep in a sample of female Portuguese immigrants living in Germany. Sleep quality is known to be poorer in women than in men, yet little is known about mediating psychological and sociological variables such as stress and coping with stressful life circumstances. Migration constitutes a particularly difficult life circumstance for women if it involves differing role conceptions in the country of origin and the emigrant country.
Methods: The study investigated sleep quality, coping styles and level of integration in a sample of Portuguese (N = 48) and Moroccan (N = 64) immigrant women who took part in a structured personal interview.
Results: Sleep quality was poor in 54% of Portuguese and 39% of Moroccan women, which strongly exceeds reports of sleep complaints in epidemiologic studies of sleep quality in German women. Reports of poor sleep were associated with the degree of adoption of a German life style. Women who had integrated more into German society slept worse than less integrated women in both samples, suggesting that non-integration serves a protective function. An unusually large proportion of women preferred an information-seeking (monitoring) coping style and adaptive coping. Poor sleep was related to high monitoring in the Portuguese but not the Moroccan sample.
Conclusion: Sleep quality appears to be severely affected in women with a migration background. Our data suggest that non-integration may be less stressful than integration. This result points to possible benefits of non-integration. The high preference for an information-seeking coping style may be related to the process of migration, representing the attempt at regaining control over an uncontrollable and stressful life situation.
In this paper we compare the distribution of PPs introducing external arguments in nominalizations with PPs introducing external arguments in the verbal domain. We show that several mismatches exist between the behavior of PPs in nominalizations and PPs in the verbal domain. This leads us to suggest that while PPs in the verbal domain are licensed by functional structure alone, within the nominal domain, PPs can also be licensed via an interplay of the encyclopaedic meaning of the root involved and the properties of the preposition itself. This second mechanism kicks in in the absence of functional structure.
Structuring participles
(2008)
In this paper we discuss three types of adjectival participles in Greek, ending in -tos and –menos, and provide a further argument for the view that finer distinctions are necessary in the domain of participles (Kratzer 2001, Embick 2004). We further compare Greek stative participles to their German (and English) counterparts. We propose that a number of semantic as well as syntactic differences shown by these derive from differences in their respective morpho-syntactic composition.
In this paper we investigate the distribution of PPs related to external arguments (agent, causer, instrument, causing event) in Greek. We argue that their distribution supports an analysis, according to which agentive/instrument and causer PPs are licensed by distinct functional heads, respectively. We argue against a conceivable alternative analysis, which links agentivity and causation to the prepositions themselves. We furthermore identify a particular type of Voice head in Greek anticausative realised by non-active Voice morphology.
On the role of syntactic locality in morphological processes : the case of (Greek) derived nominals
(2008)
The paper is structured as follows. In section 2, I briefly summarize the facts on English and Greek nominalizations. In section 3, I discuss English nominal derivation in some detail. In section 4, I turn to the question of licensing of AS in nominals. In section 5, I turn to the issue of the optionality of licensing of AS in the nominal system.
This paper deals with the variable position of adjectives in the Romanian DP. As all other Romance languages, Romanian allows for adjectives to appear in both prenominal and post-nominal position. In addition, however, Romanian has a third pattern: the so-called cel construction, in which the adjective in the post-nominal position is preceded by a determiner-like element, cel. This pattern is superficially similar to Determiner Spreading in Greek. In this paper we contrast the cel construction to Greek DS and discuss the similarities and differences between the two. We then present an analysis of cel as involving an appositive specification clause, building on de Vries (2002). We argue that the same structure is also involved in the context of nominal ellipsis, the second environment in which cel is found.