Search results for "SETS"
showing 10 items of 592 documents
Cost and profit efficiency in the Spanish banking sector (1985–1996): a non-parametric approach
2003
The aim of this article is to analyse the efficiency in costs and in profits of the Spanish banking sector (SBS) in the period 1985–1996 using a non-parametric approach. The results obtained show the existence of profit efficiency levels well below those corresponding to cost efficiency, alternative profit efficiency being below standard profit efficiency. These results imply the existence of market power in the setting of prices and/or the existence of differences in the quality of bank output reflected in the differences in prices. With regard to the immediate future, of full economic and monetary integration, the reduction of profit levels associated with higher competitive pressure may …
What Drives the Microfinance Lending Rate?
2012
Is the microfinance institution (MFI) able to charge unduly high lending rates and obtain a profitability incompatible with perfect competition? We use a global panel data set of MFIs. The Panzar and Rosse revenue test in static and dynamic versions is employed, together with analyses of price (the lending rate) and return on assets. We control for microfinance specific variables such as average loan and institutional background variables, and also perform estimations in sub-samples of ownership types, regulation, and founder type. We find that the average MFI does not enjoy monopoly market power in its market, but cannot reject that perfect competition or monopolistic competition are bette…
A Detailed Account of The Inconsistent Labelling Problem of Stutter-Preserving Partial-Order Reduction
2021
One of the most popular state-space reduction techniques for model checking is partial-order reduction (POR). Of the many different POR implementations, stubborn sets are a very versatile variant and have thus seen many different applications over the past 32 years. One of the early stubborn sets works shows how the basic conditions for reduction can be augmented to preserve stutter-trace equivalence, making stubborn sets suitable for model checking of linear-time properties. In this paper, we identify a flaw in the reasoning and show with a counter-example that stutter-trace equivalence is not necessarily preserved. We propose a stronger reduction condition and provide extensive new correc…
Modelling Photoionisation in Isocytosine: Potential Formation of Longer‐Lived Excited State Cations in its Keto Form
2021
Abstract Studying the effects of UV and VUV radiation on non‐canonical DNA/RNA nucleobases allows us to compare how they release excess energy following absorption with respect to their canonical counterparts. This has attracted much research attention in recent years because of its likely influence on the origin of our genetic lexicon in prebiotic times. Here we present a CASSCF and XMS‐CASPT2 theoretical study of the photoionisation of non‐canonical pyrimidine nucleobase isocytosine in both its keto and enol tautomeric forms. We analyse their lowest energy cationic excited states including 2π+ , 2nO+ and 2nN+ and compare these to the corresponding electronic states in cytosine. Investigat…
The second round of Critical Assessment of Automated Structure Determination of Proteins by NMR: CASD-NMR-2013
2015
The second round of the community-wide initiative Critical Assessment of automated Structure Determination of Proteins by NMR (CASD-NMR-2013) comprised ten blind target datasets, consisting of unprocessed spectral data, assigned chemical shift lists and unassigned NOESY peak and RDC lists, that were made available in both curated (i.e. manually refined) or un-curated (i.e. automatically generated) form. Ten structure calculation programs, using fully automated protocols only, generated a total of 164 three-dimensional structures (entries) for the ten targets, sometimes using both curated and un-curated lists to generate multiple entries for a single target. The accuracy of the entries could…
CODING PARTITIONS OF REGULAR SETS
2009
A coding partition of a set of words partitions this set into classes such that whenever a sequence, of minimal length, has two distinct factorizations, the words of these factorizations belong to the same class. The canonical coding partition is the finest coding partition that partitions the set of words in at most one unambiguous class and other classes that localize the ambiguities in the factorizations of finite sequences. We prove that the canonical coding partition of a regular set contains a finite number of regular classes and we give an algorithm for computing this partition. From this we derive a canonical decomposition of a regular monoid into a free product of finitely many re…
The NFκB-inducing kinase is essential for the developmental programming of skin-resident and IL-17-producing γδ T cells
2015
γδ T cells contribute to first line immune defense, particularly through their ability for rapid production of proinflammatory cytokines. The cytokine profile of γδ T cells is hard-wired already during thymic development. Yet, the molecular pathways underlying this phenomenon are incompletely understood. Here we show that signaling via the NFκB-inducing kinase (NIK) is essential for the formation of a fully functional γδ T cell compartment. In the absence of NIK, development of Vγ5+ dendritic epidermal T cells (DETCs) was halted in the embryonic thymus, and impaired NIK function caused a selective loss of IL-17 expression by γδ T cells. Using a novel conditional mutant of NIK, we could show…
The Relationship Between Polygenic Risk Scores and Cognition in Schizophrenia
2020
Abstract Background Cognitive impairment is a clinically important feature of schizophrenia. Polygenic risk score (PRS) methods have demonstrated genetic overlap between schizophrenia, bipolar disorder (BD), major depressive disorder (MDD), educational attainment (EA), and IQ, but very few studies have examined associations between these PRS and cognitive phenotypes within schizophrenia cases. Methods We combined genetic and cognitive data in 3034 schizophrenia cases from 11 samples using the general intelligence factor g as the primary measure of cognition. We used linear regression to examine the association between cognition and PRS for EA, IQ, schizophrenia, BD, and MDD. The results wer…
UNCLES: Method for the identification of genes differentially consistently co-expressed in a specific subset of datasets
2015
Background Collective analysis of the increasingly emerging gene expression datasets are required. The recently proposed binarisation of consensus partition matrices (Bi-CoPaM) method can combine clustering results from multiple datasets to identify the subsets of genes which are consistently co-expressed in all of the provided datasets in a tuneable manner. However, results validation and parameter setting are issues that complicate the design of such methods. Moreover, although it is a common practice to test methods by application to synthetic datasets, the mathematical models used to synthesise such datasets are usually based on approximations which may not always be sufficiently repres…
Myeloid dendritic cell: From sentinel of immunity to key player of peripheral tolerance?
2009
Myeloid dendritic cells (DC) are "sentinels" of immunity, ideally positioned throughout the body gateways and equipped with unique properties to transport antigens from the periphery to lymphoid tissues. They are professional antigen-presenting cells transmitting incoming infectious signals to T cells, the key players of adaptive immunity. For induction of effective antigen-specific T-cell immunity, crosstalk of DC and naive T cells is mandatory. However, besides this essential immunostimulatory function of DC, consolidated findings from the DC research field in the last 10 years have shown that DC have an additional important function. They act as pivotal players in the peripheral toleranc…