Factor investing has become very popular during the last decades, especially with respect to equity markets. After extending Fama–French factors to corporate bond markets, recent research more often concentrates on the government bond space and reveals that there is indeed clear empirical evidence for the existence of significant government bond factors. Voices that state the opposite refer to outdated data samples. By the documentation of rather homogeneous recent empirical evidence, this review underlines the attractiveness of more sophisticated investment approaches, which are well established in equity and even in corporate bond markets, to the segment of government bonds.
Factor investing has become very popular during the last decades, especially with respect to equity markets. After extending Fama–French factors to corporate bond markets, recent research more often concentrates on the government bond space and reveals that there is indeed clear empirical evidence for the existence of significant government bond factors. Voices that state the opposite refer to outdated data samples. By the documentation of rather homogeneous recent empirical evidence, this review underlines the attractiveness of more sophisticated investment approaches, which are well established in equity and even in corporate bond markets, to the segment of government bonds.
In this paper, three variants of the Floyd-Warshall (FW) All Pairs Shortest Path (APSP) algorithm are presented and compared - the sequential implementation, the parallel implementation using the Nvidia CUDA API, and the blocked parallel version of the FW algorithm. A performance analysis between these three approaches, as well as between the individual phases of the parallel algorithm is provided. The performance of these algorithms has been measured on regular as well as on embedded GPU hardware, and a significant speedup has been achieved. Additionally, this paper shows that a blocked data access results in significant energy savings of up to 72% on embedded hardware.
This work studies hardware and software aspects concerning the implementation and the performance evaluation of a fast real-time embedded Model Predictive Control (MPC). This study is carried out using a low cost and a low power off-the-shelf high performance embedded computing platform (ARM Cortex M) and an off-the-shelf generic embedded MPC software implementation, with a general purpose QP (quadratic programming) solver (MATLAB). As an example, two oscillating masses system subject to input and output constraints is used. Throughout MPC evaluation is done using a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experiments, achieving a couple of milliseconds sampling rates.
This paper shows how to integrate data from enterprise database with spatial data, publish them together to online interactive map, and enable public users to perform analysis in simple web interface. The fact, that this is a public site, where users are not known in advanced and not trained, calls for importance of usability and intuitive user interface design. Also, system administrators are not willing to invest a lot of time in learning the basics of a system, and data providers need effective geoportals to enable access to spatial data and services via the Internet. All these needs should be reconciled during the implementation of the solution. Due to increasing interest of forestry and agricultural organizations in spatial data infrastructure (SDI) development and public users' needs for biomass data web presentation and analysis in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as case study is used the project of Biomass Potential Database with Online Atlas development. Additionally, here is proposed application of the geoportal using online atlas as spatial decision support tool.
Summary Background/Aim: Potentially malignant oral lesions (PMOL) are lesions that have an increased risk of malignant transformation concerning healthy oral mucosa. This research aimed to assess the knowledge of students of final years of study on the potentially malignant lesions of the oral cavity. Material and Methods: 120 students of the fourth and fifth years of study participated in this research,60 respondents were fourth-year students, 60 respondents were fifth-year students. All of the respondents signed informed consent.According to the type of research, this is a cross-sectional study which was conducted by completing a 15-item questionnaire. The results were statistically analyzed and processed in the SPSS Statistics 21.0 program. Results: The results indicate that during the clinical examination the fourth and fifth-year students examine the oral mucosa as well. 61% of the students find themselves poorly informed on the PMOL. In the fourth year of study, only 5,5% of students responded that they were well informed, while in the fifth year that number totaled 28,5%. When knowledge self-assessment is concerned the difference has shown itself to be statistically significant between the fourth and fifth-year students. When asked what knowledge on the prevention of oral cancer they expect to receive during their studies, 78% of the students expected more knowledge than at that moment – 36% of which were fifth-year students, and 42% were fourth-year students. Conclusions: Even though the oral cavity is easily accessible to examination, the discovery of oral cancer occurs quite late. Ours, as well as results of other studies, impose the need for better theoretical and practical education of the students.
Introduction: COVID-19 is the disease caused by an infection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, first identified in the city of Wuhan, in China’s Hubei province in December 2019. COVID-19 was previously known as 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) respiratory disease before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the official name as COVID-19 in February 2020. Aim: The aim of this study is to search scientific literature in the biomedicine and analyzed current results of investigations regarding morbidity and mortality rates as consequences of COVID-19 infection of Cardiovascular diseases (CVD), and other most common chronic diseases which are on the top mortality and morbidity rates in almost all countries in the world. Also, to propose most useful measures how to prevent patients to keep themselves against COVID-19 infection. Methods: We used method of descriptive analysis of the published papers with described studies about Corona virus connected with CVD, and, also, Guidelines proposed by World Health Organization (WHO) and European Society of Cardiology (ESC), and some other international associations which are included in global fighting against COVID-19 infection. Results: After searching current scientific literature we have acknowledged that not any Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) study in the world during last 5 months from the time when first cases of COVID-10 infection was detected. Also, there is no unique proposed ways of treatments and drugs to protect patients, especially people over 65 years old, who are very risk group to be affected with COVID-19. Expectations that vaccine against COVID-19 will be produced optimal during at least 10 months to 2 years, and in all current Guidelines most important proposed preventive measures are the same like which one described in Strategic documents of WHO, in statements of Declaration of Primary Health Care in Alma Ata in 1978. Conclusion: WHO proposed preventive measures can be helpful to everybody. Physicians who work at every level of Health Care Systems, but especially at primary health care level, must follow those recommendations and teach their patients about it. But, the fact is that current focus of COVID-19 epidemic has targeted on protection of physical health of population in global, however, the influence on mental health which will be one of the important consequences of COVID-19 pandemic in the future, and which could be declared as «Post-coronavirus Stress Syndrome„ (PCSS) could be bigger challenge for Global Public Health.
Introduction: Results of preclinical and clinical studies in medicine could be trusted only if their design and statistical analysis were appropriate. Aim: The aim of our study was to investigate whether preclinical and clinical studies published in medical journals of Bosnia and Herzegovina satisfy basic requirements for appropriate design and statistical interpretation of data. Methods: Preclinical and clinical studies published in medical journals of Bosnia and Herzegovina were retrieved from the PubMed database, and the sample for analysis was randomly chosen from the retrieved publications. Implementation rate of basic principles of experimental design (local control, randomization and replication) and rate of the most common errors in design of clinical/observational studies was established by careful reading of the sampled publications and their checking against predefined criteria. Results: Our study showed that only a minority of experimental preclinical studies had basic principles of design completely implemented (7%), while implementation rate of single aspects of appropriate experimental design varied from as low as 12% to as high as 77%. Only one of the clinical/observational studies had none of the errors searched for (2%), and specific errors rates varied from 10% to 89%. Average impact factor of the surveyed studies was around one, and average publication date recent, less than 5 years ago. Conclusion: Prevalence of preclinical studies that did not follow completely basic principles of research design, and that of clinical/observational studies with errors are high, raising suspicion to validity of their results. If incorrect and not protected against bias, results of published studies may adversely influence future research.
Introduction: The number of newly diagnosed skin cancers per year is greater than the sum of the four most common cancers: breast, prostate, lung, and colon. The implementation of primary and secondary prevention measures, over the last 2 to 3 decades, has made a major contribution to successful treatment. Aim: Evaluate the accuracy and reliability of teledermoscopic versus clinical diagnosis for skin cancers when diagnostic algorithms are used, and when GPs and surgical specialties are involved in the clinical procedure. Methods: Digital dermoscope (TS-DD, by Teleskin company) was used for the acquisition of teledermoscopic photographs and specialized teledermoscopic software was used for clinical examination and teledermoscopic consultation. The teledermoscopic procedure itself was performed in two steps. The first step was a clinical examination using the ABCDE rule with digital dermoscopic photography of the suspected lesion. The second step was a 2-step dermoscopic evaluation using the second step ABCD algorithm for the second step. Accuracy and diagnostic reliability were calculated for: teledermoscopic diagnosis versus histopathological diagnosis; clinical diagnosis versus histopathological diagnosis and teledermoscopic diagnosis versus clinical diagnosis. Results: The study included 120 patients with 121 Pigmented Skin Lesions, of which 75 (62%) were benign and 46 (38%) were malignant lesions (6 melanomas and 40 NonMelanoma Skin Cancers). Diagnostic accuracy between teledermoscopic and histopathologic diagnosis was 90.91% and reliability k=0.81; between clinical and histopathological diagnosis the diagnostic accuracy was 82.64% and the reliability k=0.64 and between the clinical and teledermoscopic diagnosis the diagnostic accuracy was 81.82% and the reliability k=0.62. Conclusion: The achieved diagnostic accuracy between clinical and teledermoscopic diagnosis, when using diagnostic algorithms, establishes a feasible screening path for skin cancers and indicates that general practitioners and specialized surgeons may equally be involved in prevention.
Distributed Ledger Technologies are one of the pillars of future technologies, prognozing to have a great impact to many aspects of our lives, including social, economic, juristic, security and many others. Bitcoin is still the most popular blockchain currency, but the opportunities to use Distribute Ledger Technologies are much more wide, outperforming financial applications as most known and popular. Besides blockchains, there are also other architectures of Distributed Ledger Technologies. This paper observes and analyses one technology as a very strong alternative to blockchains: hashgraphs, which are promising to outperform blockchains, but also tangles. Basis of their architecture and functionality will be explained and directions and prognosis of the further development will be given. The main paper contribution is a comparison of a hashgraph technology to its concurrent architectures, i.e. blockchains and tangles, considering different segments and different properties that define a quality of Distributed Ledgers.
The main objective of this study was to determine the content of heavy metals Cd, Pb, Hg and metalloid As in samples of date mussels Lithophaga lithophaga L., 1758 in order to evaluate the health risks for mussel consumers. Samples of shellfish were obtained from commercial sources and fishery in the area of Sarajevo. The content of heavy metals and arsenic is determined in a total of 46 samples. Samples were prepared by microwave digestion. For the analysis of total As, cadmium and lead, an atomic absorption spectrophotometer with graphite furnace was used, while mercury content was determined using a direct Hg analyser. In all samples, the content of heavy metals and arsenic was above the quantification limit of the given methods. The content of all analysed metals and metalloid was below the limits of their maximum allowable concentration in food, according to the current regulations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the European Union. Evaluation of the public health risks associated with date mussels' consumption indicates that there is no evident risk for a moderate adult consumer.
Abstract The main objective of this investigation was to determine and summarize the economic burden of severe COPD exacerbations that required hospitalization and the difference in the costs of treatment between patients with frequent (at least two exacerbations in one year) and infrequent exacerbation. Our results suggested that significantly more resources had to be spent to treat patients with at least two hospitalizations during the study related to the use of medications primarily affecting the respiratory system (corticosteroids, p = 0.013, theophylline, p = 0.007) and total hospital stay (31336.68 ± 19140 RSD/517.53 ± 316.1 EUR versus 23650.15 ± 14956.0 RSD/390.59 ± 247 EUR, p=0.002) compared to patients who stayed in a semi-intensive care unit (12875.35 ± 20742.54 RSD versus 4310.62 ± 9779.78 RSD/ 212.64 ± 342.57 EUR versus 71.19 ± 161.51 EUR, p=0.006). Based on the total number of days in the hospital, the costs of the drugs, the materials used and services provided, patients from the frequent exacerbation group had significantly higher costs (80034.1 ± 36823.7 RSD/1321.78 ± 608.15 EUR versus 69425.5 ± 34083.1 RSD/1146.58 ± 562.89 EUR) comparedthan patients in the infrequent exacerbation group (p=0.039). Our results indicate that significantly more funds will be spent treating the deterioration of patients who stay longer in the hospital or in the semi-intensive care unit. Their condition will require a significantly greater use of drugs that are primarily used to treat the respiratory system and, therefore, will utiliseutilize significantly more resources.
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