Terrellbland7970

Correlations between stock/gold and stock/cryptocurrency pairs are found to be positive in most cases. Our findings imply that adding gold or cryptocurrency to a stock portfolio does not enhance its risk-adjusted return.Bitcoin and the blockchain technology on which it is based are the key drivers behind the accelerated pace of Fourth Industrial Revolution in the domain of Finance. The offshoots of this technology however are not limited and are rapidly spreading in other domains such as oil market. This paper investigates the causality or influences that both markets, Bitcoin price (BP) and oil price (OP) have on each other by applying the bootstrap Granger causal relationship tests considering full as well as sub-samples. Our analysis reveals that shocks originated in OP and transmitted towards BP can be both positive or negative. The positive impact indicates that Bitcoin can be viewed as an asset helpful in avoiding the risks of the high OP, which also indicates that Bitcoin and oil are in the same boat, however, the negative effects cannot support this view. The negative influence of OP on BP can be explained by the burst of the Bitcoin bubble which has weakened its hedging ability. In turn, there is also a negative influence or reverse causality running from BP to OP, highlighting that the demand for oil by investors can be threatened by the increasing BP. Keeping in view the more integrated and complexed financial dynamics which are the results of Fourth Industrial Revolution, investors can benefit from this interrelationship to diversify the risks and optimize their investment by building a more balanced portfolio. Also, governments could promote and protect the healthy development of the Bitcoin and energy market by preventing the Bitcoin bubbles and understanding the reasons of oil price volatility.FinTech (Financial Technology) and Blockchain are prevalent topics among technology leaders in finance today. This article describes the impact and revolution of FinTech and Blockchain in the financial industry and demonstrates the main characteristics of such technology. Then, we present three critical challenges as well as three ethical issues about using Blockchain technology. Next, we discuss the development of Blockchain for the financial sector. In addition, we describe the real motivations for banks to explore Blockchain, and problems they face. In order to have a good understanding of the industry, a qualitative method was adopted, and sixteen experts were interviewed. It was identified that knowledge hiding in Blockchain was common and the rationale behind was analyzed using the TPB (Theory of Planned Behavior) approach. The analysis results suggested that knowledge hiding was due to affective, behavioral and cognitive evaluations. The interviewees also provided several recommendations and success factors to overcome current issues in Blockchain adoption. Therefore, four important propositions have been developed. Finally, this article suggests how financial services should respond to this new technology and how to manage knowledge sharing in a more structured way. Ko143 ic50 This article contributes to the literature related to the current entrepreneurial finance landscape for Blockchain.Pandemic influenza is a regularly recurring form of infectious disease; this work analyses its economic effects. Like many other infectious diseases influenza pandemics are usually of short, sharp duration. Human coronavirus is a less regularly recurring infectious disease. The human coronavirus pandemic of 2019 (COVID-19) has presented with seemingly high transmissibility and led to extraordinary socioeconomic disruption due to severe preventative measures by governments. To understand and compare these events, epidemiological and economic models are linked to capture the transmission of a pandemic from regional populations to regional economies and then across regional economies. In contrast to past pandemics, COVID-19 is likely to be of longer duration and more severe in its economic effects given the greater uncertainty surrounding its nature. The analysis indicates how economies are likely to be affected due to the risk-modifying behaviour in the form of preventative measures taken in response to the latest novel pandemic virus.Pollen retention on clothes, footwear, hair and body has been used to link people to localities with distinctive vegetation, or soils containing distinctive palynomorphs. Little attention has been given to human skin as a possible medium for carrying a forensically important pollen load and whether this might survive attempts to remove it. We report here the results of experiments testing the retention of pollen of 10 flowering plant species on the human skin through repeated cycles of washing and drying hands, using the WHO protocol to standardize hand-washing and drying. Between 0.36% and 2.74% (mean 0.93%) of the initial pollen load was retained through a single hand-wash. Trace amounts of some species survived multiple hand-wash cycles. It is concluded that forensic analyses can be made of the pollen load of those parts of the skin that may have been in contact with palynologically distinctive vegetation, even in cases where the person involved has washed, or been washed. These observations may also be of relevance in cases where human skin became contaminated with other microscopic particulates.In the aftermath of Russia's military incursion in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, a flurry of articles predicted the next territorial conquest of President Vladimir Putin's Russian revanchism. High on the list were the Baltic countries, which sit precariously on the edge of Europe and historically have been the "bloodlands" between East and West in author Timothy Snyder's phrasing. More specifically, journalists and analysts pointed to the "Russian enclaves" in northeastern Estonia and southeastern Latvia, where, by many accounts, large ethnic Russian populations were prepared to rise up against Baltic governments with a bit of provocation from across the eastern border. However, six years on, there is little indication that Russian speakers in the Baltic countries are on the brink of causing an internal uprising. While there are multiple factors that can help explain the Baltic "dog that didn't bark," this essay considers an often overlooked variable in the equation the depth of civic and cultural integration among Russian speakers in Latvia.Since the beginning of Vladimir Putin's rule in Russia 20 years ago, Russia has lost much of the leverage that it previously enjoyed in the Baltics. On the one hand, Russia has antagonized Baltic states through its wars in Georgia and Ukraine, on the other hand, deep integration in the EU and NATO has pulled the Baltic states from the Russian zone of influence. This article discusses the gradual decrease of Russia's influence in the Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania while considering the increased NATO presence in the region, Baltic energy security, and Baltic Russian-speaking communities.The Vladimir Putin regime has framed the Russian national idea in terms of security and militarization, both domestically and internationally. This unifying vision emerged as a reaction against the 1990s and blended together a cultivation of militant and anti-Western patriotism, Soviet nostalgia, and religious orthodoxy. Emphasis on cultivation of the youth has been another key defining feature of these efforts. This vision required a growing Russian presence regionally and globally, which in turn necessitated restoration of Russian military power. It resulted in growing self-confidence, internal repressions, and external military interventionism. There are glimmers of hope, but the Putin regime has shown that it will fight to stay in power, and the cult of militarization which has permeated multiple aspects of the Russian society will influence Russia's uncertain future.In his 20 years in power, Vladimir Putin has employed a savvy use of social policy to bolster his popularity, but it is a set of policies not well designed to address Russia's chronic under-provision of healthcare, education, and other social services-particularly in rural areas. The COVID-19 global pandemic will only exacerbate Russia's social policy challenges and could pose a threat to Putin's political survival.Self-mixed optical feedback interferometry based laser sensors show promising results in the measurement of the vibration frequency. To date several measurement methods have been developed to extract the vibration information from the self-mixed (SM) signal; however, the complexity and accuracy of the methods still need improvement. The presented work tries to fulfill the gap by realizing a novel method using maximal overlap discrete wavelet transformation (MODWT) and multi-resolution analysis (MRA). The proposed method can reconstruct the micro-harmonic ( less then 5 μ m ) vibration up to 1 kHz even under weak feedback conditions. The mean squared error and the maximum relative error of the proposed method for this range remained below 1.89 × 1 0 - 3 & 8.79%, respectively. Although, above 1 kHz, the proposed method turns out to be futile to reconstruct the vibration signal but still capable to measure vibration frequency up to 10 kHz with an accuracy of ± 0.0001. The method also found suitable to measure non-sinusoidal vibration frequency with reasonable accuracy even for the moderate feedback conditions. The authors envision that the proposed method will provide a compact, non-contact, and low-cost alternative for the vibration frequency measurement hence useful in early fault detection schemes and lung abnormality diagnosis.In this study, it was aimed to investigate the effects of both using curcumin and microencapsulation method on in vitro release behaivour of chia seed oil and its antioxidant potential during simulated gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Maltodextrin (MD) and gum Arabic (GA) was used as wall materials for freeze dried capsules. Sample 6, having 13 MD to GA ratio, 15 chia seed oil to wall material ratio and 40% total dry matter content, was found to have the optimum results in terms of emulsion stability (CI% = 0), zeta potential (-32.2 ± 0.8 mV) and size distribution (600 ± 8 nm). Moreover, release profiles of encapsulated chia seed oil samples were evaluated to determine if curcumin addition has any significant effect. The results revealed that curcumin addition decreased the release of chia seed oil from 44.6% to 37.2%. On contrary, it increased total phenolic content of in fraction of intestine to 22 mg gallic acid equivalents (GAE)/L.Ragweed or Ambrosia artemisiifolia pollen is an important atmospheric constituent affecting the Earth's climate and public health. The literature on light scattering by pollens embedded in ambient air is however rather sparse polarization measurements are limited to the sole depolarization ratio and pollens are beyond the reach of numerically exact light scattering models mainly due to their tens of micrometre size. Also, ragweed pollen presents a very complex shape, with a small-scale external structure exhibiting spikes that bears some resemblance with coronavirus, but also apertures and micrometre holes. In this paper, to face such a complexity, a controlled-laboratory experiment is proposed to evaluate the scattering matrix of ragweed pollen embedded in ambient air. It is based on a newly-built polarimeter, operating in the infra-red spectral range, to account for the large size of ragweed pollen. Moreover, the ragweed scattering matrix is also evaluated in the visible spectral range to reveal the spectral dependence of the ragweed scattering matrix within experimental error bars.