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The Cost of Stress Test Transparency
Get PDFThis paper empirically attempts to evaluate whether the information within Federal Reserve Stress Tests changes with public disclosures. In particular, this paper runs a regression discontinuity on the March 2019 changes to stress test transparency. This paper measures market information using the absolute value of cumulative abnormal returns and the abnormal trading volume of the stress test results announcement. Both the Dodd Frank Annual Stress Test and the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review are reviewed. Overall, this paper finds no evidence that the public disclosures affected the information generated by Federal Reserve stress tests
A Model for Public Market Impact Investing: Measuring Corporate ESG Intentionality
Get PDFThe Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) lists intentionality as one of its four core characteristics of impact investing. It defines intentionality as an impact investor “intentional desire to contribute to measurable social or environmental benefit”.[1] Most importantly, it uses this core attribute of intentionality to differentiate true impact investing from ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) investing strategies which it says only incorporates “impact considerations”.
This research paper rebuts the assertion that impact intentionality and ESG are mutually exclusive and proposes a solution for impact investing using ESG data. By surfacing companies who have shown dramatic improvement in their cumulative ESG score, investors are now able to isolate quantitatively the intentional actions undergone by companies to improve the positive societal impacts of their business. This paper puts forth a methodology on how to measure this Corporate ESG Intentionality and compares the incremental ESG performance of an intentionality portfolio against an alternative ESG portfolio and the US Equity benchmark.
The findings show that an ESG intentionality portfolio has a higher correlation between data providers than their overall score universes. This confirms that rating providers agree more on intentionality level improvements than overall scores, minimizing individual rater biases. It also finds an intentionality sample to outperform on impact measures such as GHG emissions per $1M revenue and gender diversity compared to the benchmark and US industry. Lastly, a Scope 1 and 2 emissions model found just 91 companies showing GHG intentionality accounted for 87% of the total GHG reduction in the Russel 3000 universe over a 4 year period.
This paper sets the stage for a needed addition to the use cases of ESG data for investors to show impact intentionality: by measuring a corporation’s intention and resulting action to improve their non-financial impact on society through ESG data. Section 1 will analyze the background and current uses of ESG data. Section 2 will discuss the concepts of intentionality and additionality in bringing ESG to the impact investing space. Section 3 will discuss a proposed intentionality measurement methodology and highlight the findings. Section 4 will conclude and summarize the findings
Penn Library\u27s LJS 385 - [School miscellany]. (Video Orientation)
No full texthttps://repository.upenn.edu/sims_video/1137/thumbnail.jp
State Transitions Within the Cortex Are Strongly Influenced by Local Interactions Under General Anesthesia
No full textGeneral anesthetics are a class of drugs with diverse molecular mechanisms that cause a state of unconsciousness. Generally, anesthetics are thought to exert this effect by co- opting endogenous sleep pathways within the brain, and activity patterns recorded during anesthesia resemble those recorded during natural sleep. Monitors of anesthetic depth take advantage of the relationship between brain activity patterns and anesthetic concentration to define a depth of exposure. Recovery from anesthetic-induced unconsciousness is typically assumed to be a passive, linear process that relies upon elimination of drug from the body. However, it has been shown that activity patterns undergo discrete transitions between several distinct brain states under anesthesia. Furthermore, the brain exhibits a resistance to recovery of consciousness during emergence from anesthesia. Together, these results show that emergence cannot be explained by drug elimination alone. In this dissertation, we present evidence to suggest that stochastic fluctuations between distinct brain states account for this resistance to emergence. Furthermore, we show evidence to suggest that local cortical interactions are the principal organizing mechanism that gives rise to the brain states and state transitions recorded under general anesthesia. This mechanism is distinct from those known to drive state transitions during natural sleep. During sleep, broadly projecting modulatory pathways engage neurons throughout the thalamocortical network in coherent activity patterns and state transitions. Here, we demonstrate local heterogeneity in activity patterns and transition times within the cortex. Furthermore, our results indicate that, despite there being only weak coupling between activity patterns and transition times between different cortical regions, this coupling is sufficient to give rise to global brain states. Altogether, the work presented in this dissertation indicates that the nature of oscillations within the cortex is strongly influenced by local interactions. This finding suggests that the mechanisms thought to give rise to state transitions during sleep are not the same as those that give rise to transitions under anesthesia. This finding that local interactions are potentially a stronger organizing mechanism for cortical activity than previously appreciated has important implications for anesthetic monitoring, clinical sleep disorders, and our basic understanding of thalamocortical activity patterns
The Geometry of Capillary and Constant Mean Curvature Surfaces
No full textConstant mean curvature (CMC) surfaces are critical points of the area functional for variations that preserve the volume of the region enclosed by the surface. Capillary surfaces are defined in a similar way, but instead of the area functional, one considers a functional that is the sum of the surface area with a boundary term. Both of these types of surfaces arise in nature as the interface between a liquid and air. The index of a CMC or a capillary surface is an integer that measures how far the surface is from minimizing the functional. In this thesis, we explore the relationship between the index and the geometry of capillary and CMC surfaces. We begin by showing that the index together with the area bound the genus of compact CMC surfaces embedded in a compact 3-manifold. We also show that in the case where the surface is not minimal and the 3-manifold has finite fundamental group, the index and the mean curvature are sufficient to bound the genus. Then we move on to study capillary surfaces immersed in 3-manifolds. Amongst other results, we describe the conformal structure of noncompact capillary surfaces with finite index, one consequence of this description is that the only noncompact capillary surface immersed in a half-space with acute contact angle and zero index is the half-plane
Lifelong Machine Learning of Functionally Compositional Structures
No full textA hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to construct self-contained chunks of knowledge and reuse them in novel combinations for solving different yet structurally related problems. Learning such compositional structures has been a significant challenge for artificial systems, due to the underlying combinatorial search. To date, research into compositional learning has largely proceeded separately from work on lifelong or continual learning. This dissertation integrated these two lines of work to present a general-purpose framework for lifelong learning of functionally compositional structures. The framework separates the learning into two stages: learning how to best combine existing components to assimilate a novel problem, and learning how to adapt the set of existing components to accommodate the new problem. This separation explicitly handles the trade-off between the stability required to remember how to solve earlier tasks and the flexibility required to solve new tasks. This dissertation instantiated the framework into various supervised and reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Empirical evaluations on a range of supervised learning benchmarks compared the proposed algorithms against well-established techniques, and found that 1) compositional models enable improved lifelong learning when the tasks are highly diverse by balancing the incorporation of new knowledge and the retention of past knowledge, 2) the separation of the learning into stages permits lifelong learning of compositional knowledge, and 3) the components learned by the proposed methods represent self-contained and reusable functions. Similar evaluations on existing and new RL benchmarks demonstrated that 1) algorithms under the framework accelerate the discovery of high-performing policies in a variety of domains, including robotic manipulation, and 2) these algorithms retain, and often improve, knowledge that enables them to solve tasks learned in the past. The dissertation extended one lifelong compositional RL algorithm to the nonstationary setting, where the distribution over tasks varies over time, and found that modularity permits individually tracking changes to different elements in the environment. The final contribution of this dissertation was a new benchmark for evaluating approaches to compositional RL, which exposed that existing methods struggle to discover the compositional properties of the environment
Collation Model for Ms. Codex 662: [L\u27evangile de l\u27enfance] ...[etc.].
Get PDFVerse work relating apocryphal stories of the childhood of Jesus Christ, attributed to King Charles VI as translator; followed by the Gospel of Nicodemus, an apocryphal prose work on the Passion; and selections from Jean Lefèvre\u27s translation of Cato\u27s distichs (as identified by Anne D. Hedeman).https://repository.upenn.edu/sims_models/1031/thumbnail.jp
Enhancing the Antitumor Activity of Nk-92 Natural Killer Cells by Ectopic Expression of Sodium Hydrogen Exchanger 1
No full textAdoptive cell transfer immunotherapy has remarkable efficacy against some hematological malignancies. However, its efficacy in solid tumors is limited by the adverse tumor microenvironment (TME) conditions, most notably that acidity inhibits T and NK cell mTORC1 activity and impairs cytotoxicity. In several reported studies, systemic buffering of tumor acidity enhanced the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors. Paradoxically, we found in a Myc-inducible hepatocellular carcinoma model that buffering increased tumor mTORC1 activity, negating inhibition of tumor growth by anti-PD1 treatment. To avoid such adverse effects of systemic buffering favoring tumor growth, we overexpressed activated RHEB in the human NK-92 cell line, thereby rescuing acid-blunted mTORC1 activity and enhancing cytotoxicity. To mitigate the effect of acidity, we sought to metabolically engineer NK-92 cells with ectopically expressed acid extruder proteins. Whereas ectopic expression of carbonic anhydrase IX (CA9) moderately increased mTORC1 activity, it did not enhance effector function. In contrast, overexpressing a constitutively active Na+/H+-exchanger 1 (NHE1; SLC9A1) in NK-92 did not elevate mTORC1 but enhanced degranulation, target engagement, in vitro cytotoxicity, and in vivo antitumor activity. Our findings provide proof-of-concept that metabolic engineering of NK cells can enhance ACT for better efficacy against solid tumors without increasing mTORC1 activity
Collation Model for Ms. Codex 919: [Hymni cum glossis] [manuscript].
Get PDFCollection of hymns with marginal annotations about poetic devices; a poem (possibly nonsensical) about Joannes Benssius of Rotenburg, a teacher, and the possible compiler of the hymns; a copy of Sermon 30 from the pseudo-Augustinian Sermones ad heremitas, inserted in the middle of the poem; a manual for letter writing based on Cicero\u27s De officiis and Sallust; and a poem praising the visitation of the Virgin Mary.https://repository.upenn.edu/sims_models/1037/thumbnail.jp
Cellular Agriculture
Get PDFCellular agriculture is a field of biotechnology focused on the production of animal products using cells grown in vitro . Traditional meat production consumes vast amounts of water, arable land, and feed crops, as well as driving deforestation, emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases, and creating large potential reservoirs for zoonotic diseases. As the global demand for meat increases, continuing to scale up the industry for slaughtered meat could have disastrous consequences for the environment. Growing cells in bioreactors creates the potential to drastically decrease land requirements, feed requirements, and other environmental impacts. For example, hindgut fermentation of feed, the main source of methane emissions from cattle farming, can be eliminated entirely by supplying the cells with pure glucose.
This report proposes a process to produce 35 million pounds per year of a cultured ground beef product. The process starts with a starter colony of bovine muscle satellite cells, which are proliferated, differentiated to bovine muscle fiber, and then dewetted, mixed with plant-based fat, and extruded to the final product. Bubble column bioreactors are used for the seed train, final proliferation, and differentiation steps in order to adequately oxygenate large process volumes without threatening cell viability. The process shows profitability at a price of 2 billion over the plant’s lifespan