The financial crisis has brought a new focus on the accuracy of credit rating agencies (CRAs). In this paper, we highlight the incentives of analysts at the CRAs to provide accurate ratings. We construct a model in which analysts initially work at a CRA and can then either remain or move to a bank. The CRA uses incentive contracts to motivate analysts, but does not capture the benefits if the a...

While clause resolution is central to logic programming, practical eeorts to optimize resolution have largely concerned eecient clause indexing. One recent exception is Uniication Factoring 5], which optimizes backtracking through clause heads. Here we consider the problem of optimizing clause resolution in a more general setting than Uniication Factoring. One fundamental change is to use mode ...

Based on first-principles electron structure calculations and employing the frozen-magnon approximation, we study the exchange interactions in a series of transition-metal binary alloys crystallizing in the zinc-blende structure and calculate the Curie temperature within both the mean-field approximation and random-phase approximation. We study two Cr compounds, CrAs and CrSe, and four Mn compo...

The increased prevalence of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) has coincided with enhanced transmissibility and severity of disease, which is often linked to two distinct clonal lineages designated PCR-ribotype 027 and 017 responsible for CDI outbreaks in the USA, Europe and Asia. We assessed sporulation and susceptibility of three PCR-ribotypes; 012, 017 and 027 to four classes of disinfect...

Brazil faces an enormous challenge to implement its revised Forest Code. Despite big losses for the environment, the law introduces new mechanisms to facilitate compliance and foster payment for ecosystem services (PES). The most promising of these is a market for trading forest certificates (CRAs) that allows landowners to offset their restoration obligations by paying for maintaining native v...

Although a substantial amount of cross-cultural psychology research has investigated acculturative stress in general, little attention has been devoted specifically to communication-related acculturative stress (CRAS). In line with the view that cross-cultural adaptation and second language (L2) learning are social and interpersonal phenomena, the present study examines the hypothesis that migr...

For a long time, optimal competitive factors of online algorithms used to be approximated by manually finding and improving upper and lower bounds. The concept of a competitive ratio approximation scheme (CRAS), introduced by Günther et al. in 2012 [13], defines a method of reducing this process to a task that can be executed automatically by a computer up to an arbitrarily good precision: A CR...

As the threat potential of Code-Reuse Attacks (CRAs) is rising we want to develop a tool that can mitigate such state-of-the-art attacks (e.g., the attack dubbed Counterfeit Object-Oriented Programming (COOP)). This attack is particularly hard to defend against since traditional Control Flow Integrity (CFI) approaches are useless. Based on source code recompilation techniques we want to harden ...

Since smartphones are usually personal devices full of private information, they are a popular target for a vast variety of real-world attacks such as Code Reuse Attack (CRA). CRAs enable attackers to execute any arbitrary algorithm on a device without injecting an executable code. Since the standard platform for mobile devices is ARM architecture, we concentrate on available ARM-based CRAs. Cu...

Primary sinonasal intestinal-type adenocarcinomas (ITAC) are defined on the basis of their morphological similarities to colorectal adenocarcinomas (CRA). Thus, differential diagnosis with sinonasal metastasis of CRA could be a real challenge. Neuroendocrine differentiation has been variably described in several types of adenocarcinomas and notably in ITACs and CRAs. In a series of 25 ITACs and...