Poverty analysis is often based on national level indicators that are compared over time or across countries. The broad trends that can be identified using aggregate information are useful for evaluating and monitoring the overall performance of a country. For many policy and research applications, however, the information that can be extracted from aggregate indicators is not sufficient. Resea...

This paper examines the out-of-sample performance of various financial variables as predictors of U.S. recessions. Series such as interest rates and spreads, stock prices, and monetary aggregates are evaluated individually and in comparison with other financial and nonfinancial indicators. The analysis focuses on out-of-sample performance from one to eight quarters ahead. Results show that stoc...

In this paper, we investigate competition in banking systems in the EU27 as a whole for the period 2004– 2010, but also for old members’ banking systems compared with new members’ banking systems and for banking systems from countries member of euro zone compares with banking systems from countries non-member of euro zone. In order to investigate this issue, we estimate a non-structural indicat...

Understanding the neural basis of behaviour requires studying brain activity in behaving subjects using complementary techniques that measure neural responses at multiple spatial scales, and developing computational tools for understanding the mapping between these measurements. Here we report the first results of widefield imaging of genetically encoded calcium indicator (GCaMP6f) signals from...

It is widely recognized that citation counts for papers from different fields cannot be directly compared because different scientific fields adopt different citation practices. Citation counts are also strongly biased by paper age since older papers had more time to attract citations. Various procedures aim at suppressing these biases and give rise to new normalized indicators, such as the rel...

We present a modular approach for analyzing calcium imaging recordings of large neuronal ensembles. Our goal is to simultaneously identify the locations of the neurons, demix spatially overlapping components, and denoise and deconvolve the spiking activity from the slow dynamics of the calcium indicator. Our approach relies on a constrained nonnegative matrix factorization that expresses the sp...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Posterior fossa syndrome is a severe postoperative complication occurring in up to 29% of children undergoing posterior fossa tumor resection; it is most likely caused by bilateral damage to the proximal efferent cerebellar pathways, whose fibers contribute to the Guillain-Mollaret triangle. When the triangle is disrupted, hypertrophic olivary degeneration develops. We hy...

Risk analysis has recently emerged as a structured and precise methodology to help modern companies understand their risks and plan the relative countermeasures well in advance. It is based on a number of indicators: parameters that quantify the key concepts on which an enterprise designs its security and safety investments. A modificator is a function that further modifies an existing indicato...

We describe a kinetic, fluorometric assay for urinary Nacetyl-j3-glucosaminidase (EC 3.2.1.30) by measurement of the release of 4-methylumbelliferone (7-hydroxy-4-methylcoumarin). The method is simple, involving only a single reagent, and is applicable to the assay of other enzymes that hydrolyze similar fluorescent-labeled substrates. The enzyme distribution in human tissues and fluids is desc...

The problem of denoising damage indicator signals for improved operational health monitoring of systems is addressed by applying soft computing methods to design filters. Since measured data in operational settings is contaminated with noise and outliers, pattern recognition algorithms for fault detection and isolation can give false alarms. A direct approach to improving the fault detection an...