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Loan size concentration under the UK enterprise finance guarantee scheme and SME access to finance
Get PDFCredit rationing is most severe for young and small firms. Public loan guarantee schemes are explicitly designed to increase the supply of loans to these types of firms. In this article, we explore how the EFG scheme evolved through the lens concentration of the cash volume of loans issued. Adopting the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI), we find that loan size concentration had increased substantially over time, and there was a smaller number of larger loan sizes issued. In short, we posit that it had less relevance to the most acutely rationed small firms and had transitioned into a less targeted scheme. However, we observe different lending behaviors for lenders of different sizes, as smaller lenders became more focused and targeted in their lending over time. It is evident that increasing the diversity of lenders for such schemes would reinforce the effectiveness and relevance of the scheme
Locating online labour: the salience of the national scale in remote digital work
Get PDFDigital work that takes place exclusively online is often presented as spatially unbound, with workers able to work flexibly whenever and wherever they wish to do so, resulting – it is claimed – in the emergence of a ‘planetary labour market’ for online labour. Recent analyses have shown that fully remote work still clusters in geographical concentrations and is unevenly distributed across the globe. Drawing on an original data set of in-depth interviews with 67 adult webcam performers, we argue that spatially embedded, nationally scaled institutions, cultural norms and infrastructures such as regulatory, welfare and linguistic regimes have enduring salience in shaping the labour markets and labour processes of remote digital workers. We illustrate these through case studies with workers in three European countries (The United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Romania). We propose a novel theorisation of digital work and digital labour markets which understands them – even when purely online – as embedded and constituted by specific and pre-existing spatial, institutional and cultural arrangements largely at scale of the nation-state. The wider significance is that in identifying contextually specific labour processes, we argue that labour is often sold as part of discrete supply chains and bounded markets. We retheorise such labour as immanently constituted by nation-scale cultural and infrastructural norms and practices such as regulation and gender-regimes and show how these remain salient to online-only digital work
Strengthening the Resilience of Objective-Oriented Health System Reforms. Analysis of the Left-Turn in the Health Reform Proposals in Mexico (2019) and Colombia (2023)
Get PDFMusic streaming, cultural consumption and the everyday routines of algorithm management:Exploring how trust and objective setting shape everyday encounters with algorithmic systems
Get PDFBedmap3 updated ice bed, surface and thickness gridded datasets for Antarctica
Get PDFWe present Bedmap3, the latest suite of gridded products describing surface elevation, ice-thickness and the seafloor and subglacial bed elevation of the Antarctic south of 60 °S. Bedmap3 incorporates and adds to all post-1950s datasets previously used for Bedmap2, including 84 new aero-geophysical surveys by 15 data providers, an additional 52 million data points and 1.9 million line-kilometres of measurement. These efforts have filled notable gaps including in major mountain ranges and the deep interior of East Antarctica, along West Antarctic coastlines and on the Antarctic Peninsula. Our new Bedmap3/RINGS grounding line similarly consolidates multiple recent mappings into a single, spatially coherent feature. Combined with updated maps of surface topography, ice shelf thickness, rock outcrops and bathymetry, Bedmap3 reveals in much greater detail the subglacial landscape and distribution of Antarctica’s ice, providing new opportunities to interpret continental-scale landscape evolution and to model the past and future evolution of the Antarctic ice sheets
Co-speech gesture comprehension in autistic children
Get PDFCo-speech gesture accompany or replace speech in communication. Studies investigating how autistic children understand them are scarce, inconsistent and often focus on decontextualized, iconic gestures. This study compared 73 three- to twelve-year-old autistic children to 73 neurotypical peers matched on age, non-verbal IQ and morphosyntax. Specifically, we examined (1) their ability to understand deictic (i.e., pointing), iconic (e.g., gesturing ball) and conventional (e.g., gesturing hello) speechless video-taped gestures following verbal information in a narrative, and (2) the impact of linguistic (e.g., vocabulary, morphosyntax) and cognitive factors (i.e., working memory) on their performance, to infer on the underlying mechanisms involved. Autistic children displayed overall good performance in gesture comprehension, although a small but significant difference advantage was observed in neurotypical children. Findings suggest that combining speech and gesture sequentially may be relatively spared in autism and might represent a way to alleviate the demand of simultaneous cross-modal processing
Endothelial c-REL orchestrates atherosclerosis at regions of disturbed flow through crosstalk with TXNIP-p38 and non-canonical NF-κB pathways
Get PDFAims
Atherosclerosis initiation at sites of disturbed blood flow involves heightened inflammation coupled to excessive endothelial cell (EC) proliferation. Here, we unveil the pivotal role of c-REL, a member of the NF-κB transcription factor family, in orchestrating these processes by driving dual pathological inflammatory and cell cycle pathways.
Methods and results
Analysis of cultured EC and murine models revealed enrichment and activation of c-REL at atherosusceptible sites experiencing disturbed flow. Transcriptome analysis, extensively validated in vitro and in vivo, demonstrates that endothelial c-REL drives inflammation via a TXNIP-p38 MAP kinase signalling pathway and enhances proliferation through a non-canonical NFKB2-p21 pathway. Consistent with its pivotal role in EC pathology, genetic deletion of c-Rel in EC significantly reduces plaque burden in hypercholesterolaemic mice.
Conclusion
These findings underscore the fundamental role of c-REL in endothelial responses to disturbed flow and highlight therapeutic targeting of endothelial c-REL as a potential strategy for atherosclerosis treatment
Broadcasting through the (new) Iron Curtain: practices, challenges, and legacies of Russia's independent media in exile
Get PDFThe Russo-Ukrainian war and the Kremlin's military censorship have made independent reporting from within Russia impossible. After a few weeks of the conflict, all institutional journalism was forced into exile. Funding sources, access to informants, and the ability to provide objective conflict coverage quickly vanished. Now in exile, Russian journalists have become entirely reliant on donor funding to sustain operations and on new technologies to reach audiences inside Russia. Over 18 months in exile, we conducted more than 50 interviews with editors-in-chief, senior correspondents, and individual journalists adapting to these new circumstances. We asked about audience access, funding opportunities, reliance on new technologies, and organisational challenges within newsrooms. This paper argues that these new conditions have underscored pre-existing issues within Russian media while introducing challenges brought about by the war and exile. However, in a global context, these issues closely mirror those faced by exiled journalists worldwide
Blind Augmentation: Calibration-free Camera Distortion Model Estimation for Real-time Mixed-reality Consistency
Get PDFReal camera footage is subject to noise, motion blur (MB) and depth of field (DoF). In some applications these might be considered distortions to be removed, but in others it is important to model them because it would be ineffective, or interfere with an aesthetic choice, to simply remove them. In augmented reality applications where virtual content is composed into a live video feed, we can model noise, MB and DoF to make the virtual content visually consistent with the video. Existing methods for this typically suffer two main limitations. First, they require a camera calibration step to relate a known calibration target to the specific cameras response. Second, existing work require methods that can be (differentiably) tuned to the calibration, such as slow and specialized neural networks. We propose a method which estimates parameters for noise, MB and DoF instantly, which allows using off-the-shelf real-time simulation methods from e.g., a game engine in compositing augmented content. Our main idea is to unlock both features by showing how to use modern computer vision methods that can remove noise, MB and DoF from the video stream, essentially providing self-calibration. This allows to auto-tune any black-box real-time noise+MB+DoF method to deliver fast and high-fidelity augmentation consistency
Do home mathematical activities relate to early mathematical skills? A systematic review and meta-analysis
Get PDFChildren's foundational mathematical skills are critical for future academic attainment. While home mathematical activities (HMAs) have been proposed to support these skills, the extent to which engaging in them supports mathematical skills remains unclear. This preregistered systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis identified 351 effect sizes from 72 samples in 20 countries, exploring the relation between frequency of HMAs and mathematical skills in children aged 7 years and under (Mage = 61 months). A small significant positive relation was found (r = .13), moderated by risk of bias, with larger effects associated with a higher risk of bias. Specific ways the field can move forward are discussed to better understand the role of the home mathematical environment in early mathematics
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