Search results for "level"
showing 10 items of 3465 documents
Video-based Pain Level Assessment: Feature Selection and Inter-Subject Variability Modeling
2018
Automatic pain level assessment, based on video features, may provide clinically-relevant, objective measures of pain intensity. In various clinical contexts accurate pain level estimation by health care personnel is challenging. This problem is compounded by considerable inter- and intra-individual variability of both perceived pain levels and of the associated facial expressions, especially at low pain levels. Thus, providing objective video-based indices for pain level assessment is a rather computationally challenging problem. In the present work both geometric and color-based features were extracted. The most informative features were identified with lasso regression, and subject varia…
Faith and Worldview Communities and Their Leaders–Inward or Outward Looking?
2017
This chapter analyzes some of the ways that the faith and worldview communities deal with the growing religious diversity. The first part outlines the development of the “interfaith infrastructures” during the past decades. There has been a growth of interfaith bodies and religious umbrella organizations in all the five countries. These bodies are stronger at the national level in Norway and Finland, while local bodies are important in Sweden. The second part analyzes interview data of Norwegian national religious leaders, which show that most of them have an outward orientation and participate in bridgebuilding activities. The growth in the interfaith infrastructure has contributed to a de…
Family business internationalization: an insight into opportunities and challenges.
2020
The theme of internationalization in family businesses is a highly topical issue that is increasingly attracting management scholars. This is because, in addition of being a particular type of business (Alcorn, 1982), they play a central role in most economies worldwide. Accounting for 65-80 percent of all the world’s firms, they generate around 70-90 percent of annual global GDP, and are the source of 50-80 percent of new jobs in most countries. Their essence lies in the close bond they have with their founders and above all, in the family’s involvement in the business ownership and management (Franco and Prata, 2019). This bond may prove to be a limit for fuelling internationalization pro…
Cardiac arrhythmias induced by an electrical stimulation at a cellular level
2008
To provide insights into the impulse propagation between cardiac myocytes, we performed studies of excitation spread with cellular resolution in confluent monolayers of cultured cardiomyocytes (CM). Multisite field potentials have been recorded using microelectrode arrays (MEA) technology in a basal condition and in proarrhythmic conditions induced by a high frequency electrical stimulation. The in vitro observation of spiral waves opens a new way to test the anti-arrhythmic drugs or strategies at cellular level.
Synthesis, structural characterization and magnetic behaviour of a family of [CoIII2LnIII2] butterfly compounds
2017
We have successfully prepared and structurally characterized a family of butterfly-like [Co2 IIILn2 III] complexes where all magnetic properties are due to the Ln(iii) ions. The complexes with Ln = Tb(1), Dy(2), Ho(3), Er(4) and Yb(5) are iso-structural. An exception is the complex with Ln = Gd(6) which strings in a one dimensional chain. The structural similarity together with the high tendency of the crystallites to align under an applied magnetic field allowed an overall DC magnetic data treatment to extract phenomenological crystal field parameters and hence to determine the ground state multiplet energy level splitting. The Dy(iii) member is the only one showing slow relaxation of magn…
Walk the Talk: Financial Fairness in European Club Football
2017
AbstractUEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations represent the most restrictive regulatory intervention European club football has ever seen. Put simply, it demands from clubs to operate on the basis of their own football-related incomes. While the policy has attracted considerable attention from the economic and social sciences, very few contributions systematically investigate it from a philosophical-ethical perspective. The present paper fills this research gap by posing questions on FFP in relation to fair play as a normative concept. We draw on sport economic assessments concerning potential outcomes of FFP and argue that the policy should go beyond the mere pragmatic goal of promo…
You Cannot Save Alone - Financial and Social Mobilization in Savings and Credit Groups
2007
Savings and credit groups are becoming increasingly popular, both as a cost-efficient alternative to mainstream microfinance and as a mean to mobilize people around individual and common challenges. Whether donors should promote and support Self Help Microfinance Groups that confine themselves to financial intermediation only - the specialist, or minimalist approach - or if they should support those pursuing a more integrated approach and incorporate a broader set of activities, is increasingly being debated. The study proposes a framework to better analyze and understand the different group-models, their advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore, the study outlines how social and financial…
Young adults’ knowledge and understanding of personal finance in Germany: Interviews with experts and test-takers
2017
In recent years, the financial education of young adults has gained importance in Germany; however, very few valid test instruments to assess the knowledge and understanding of personal finance are suitable for use in Germany. In this article, we describe results of a survey in which experts in Germany in areas related to personal finance judged the relevance of the items of the American Council of Economic Education’s Test of Financial Literacy for use in Germany. Overall, they found the German version of the Test of Financial Literacy to be a valid instrument for assessing the knowledge and understanding of personal finance of young adults in Germany. Also, we conducted cognitive intervi…
On the Relevance of Agency Conflicts in SME Debt Maturity Structure
2015
Previous theoretical research asserts that an optimal policy of debt maturity structure mitigates the various agency conflicts that arise through debt contracts. We test this hypothesis on Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs), which are very sensitive to agency problems. Such problems mainly arise between owners and debt providers, due to SMEs recording high growth and having few fixed assets and informational asymmetry. We provide evidence on the relevant effect of underinvestment, asset substitution, and overinvestment problems on SME debt structure. Results appear to be robust to both the endogeneity problem of explanatory variables and the censored dependent variable.
The Convenience of Applying Multilevel Modeling on Real Estate Valuation
2015
There are many economic agents interested in valuing big amounts of real estate assets. One of these agents are the financial institutions, which must value their vast mortgage portfolios periodically. In this paper we analyze the use of the Hierarchical Linear Model to value real estate portfolios. This model gives valuable information compared with the traditional OLS models and is more accurate, as it takes into account the hierarchical structure of the data. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/ICBM.2015.1314