Technical Analysis
The authors did not appear to be concerned with thwarting analysis, as the samples analyzed have contained little if any obfuscation, anti-debugging, or VM-aware code. However, the malware makes use of an exploit developed by NSA analysts which was patched by Microsoft 14 March 2017 (MS17-010, see -us/library/security/ms17-010.aspx for details), although there are many unpatched systems still vulnerable. Applying this patch will mitigate the spread of WannaCry, but will not prevent infection.
technical analysis
The "head and shoulders." The "Ichimoku cloud." The "death cross." Technical analysts see these patterns in stock price charts and use them to decide future trades. Economic literature has long held that technical analysis is a poor predictor of a stock or a bond's performance, but plenty of traders and popular media outlets still use it daily.
Technical analysis (TA) is a methodology used in the financial market to forecast the direction of prices of different instruments, such as futures, commodities, indices, and stocks. TA is based on the idea that identification of previous price changes provides an accurate prediction of future price trajectories by using historical price charts.6 TA may evaluate monthly, weekly, daily, and even intraday data. This methodology is, therefore, useful for a mid-short-term forecast. TA uses different mathematical indicators that generate signals to buy or to sell financial security indicating that a trend reversal is likely to occur. More frequently used indicators are the use of simple moving averages (SMAs) and the moving average convergence/divergence (MACD).7,8 In more detail, SMA calculates the average of a range of closing prices by several periods in that range. A common use of SMA is to combine a pair of SMAs with each covering different time frames. If the shorter-term (fast), SMA crosses a longer-term (slow) SMA from above, an uptrend is expected. On the other hand, if the slow SMA is crossed by the fast SMA from below, a downtrend might be expected.
The TA approach is opposed to fundamental analysis (FA), which focuses on the intrinsic value of a specific asset for future investments. In FA, daily prices are ignored, the attention is entirely focused on the balance sheet, strategic initiatives, microeconomic indicators, and consumer behavior.6 Therefore, TA but not FA, is a methodology potentially usable outside the financial market being based on data trends.
In this regard, a combination of fast and slow SMAs and MACD are among the most commonly used technical indicators in the financial market. These indicators are particularly appreciated for their sensitivity to predict trend reversals and for the ease of their use. We, therefore, tested if both indicators would be potentially useful to detect SARS-CoV-2 epidemic trend reversals using the number of daily reported new confirmed cases as data instead of prices. We found that combined SMAs and MACD were capable to signal prompt trend reversals, which were then confirmed by subsequent and lasting trends in the predicted direction. The reliability of TA indicators was confirmed by analyzing data from either Italy, Iran, or Brazil. We took these 3 countries into consideration because the health system reacted to the pandemic in different ways. In Italy, a mass quarantine was prescribed soon after the awareness of the COVID-19 outbreak. In Iran, after an initial period of lockdown, a precocious lift of the restrictive measures was decided due to economic reasons. In Brazil, although the increase of new cases was constant within the observation period, no mass quarantine was instituted.
Technical analysis, also known as charting,' has been part of financial practice for many decades, but this discipline has not received the same level of academic scrutiny and acceptance as more traditional approaches such as fundamental analysis. One of the main obstacles is the highly subjective nature of technical analysis the presence of geometric shapes in historical price charts is often in the eyes of the beholder. In this paper, we propose a systematic and automatic approach to technical pattern recognition using nonparametric kernel regression, and apply this method to a large number of U.S. stocks from 1962 to 1996 to evaluate the effectiveness to technical analysis. By comparing the unconditional empirical distribution of daily stock returns to the conditional distribution conditioned on specific technical indicators such as head-and-shoulders or double-bottoms we find that over the 31-year sample period, several technical indicators do provide incremental information and may have some practical value.
Staff modelled useful life scenarios that require trucks (or buses) older than 18 years of age or those with more than 800,000 miles and at least 13 years old to turn over to new zero emissions (ZE), new diesel combustion, and new methane combustion technology. The baseline included the impact of the following regulations: Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT), Heavy-Duty Omnibus (HD Omnibus), Heavy-Duty Inspection & Maintenance (HD I/M) with a 4x testing frequency, and Advanced Clean Fleets (ACF). Note that this baseline choice means that very substantial electrification is already assumed in this analysis; without these CARB policies favoring electric vehicles and cleaning up remaining internal combustion engines, the remaining pollution addressed in this analysis would be substantially greater and the need for electrification more acute. Of course, even with CARB policies operating to clean the fleet, turning over remaining trucks in later years is important, as this analysis shows.
This analysis considered heavy-duty Class 4-8 (Gross Vehicle Weight Rating > 14,000 lbs.) vehicles. All new California engine sales must meet the Omnibus standard beginning 2024. As such, new combustion methane and diesel vehicles are assumed to meet the Omnibus in-use standard, i.e. 0.03 g/bhp-hr (in-use threshold = 1.5). However, this assumption represents an ideal case. Preliminary results from the 200-vehicle study indicate that real-world heavy-duty emission rates can be substantially larger than their certification standard. For example, 0.02-certified methane combustion vehicles have an average in-use emission rate of 0.07 g/bhp-hr. Emissions from new combustion vehicles will be managed somewhat by regulations (e.g. in-use testing improvements through HD Omnibus), but will be larger than the in-use standard due to various vehicle operational characteristics, such as duty cycle and idling time. The summary presented in this document represents a statewide analysis and not a community level health impact analysis.
The tensions and complicated relationships between technical considerations and politics and bureaucratic versus public arenas of conflict are important influences that can cause items to rise and fall on policy agendas.
Primary care maternity services were included in the capitation basket of services in the initial design, and implementation started in January 2012 in the Ashanti region. However, by March 16, 2012 after less than three months implementation of the policy amid heavy public arena social and political contestation of the policy; primary care maternal health services were removed from the basket of service. The specific research questions this study tries to answer are: Who were the policy actors involved? How did they include and subsequently exclude primary care maternity services in the capitation policy and why? This analysis firstly provides insights on how and why primary care maternal health services got onto the capitation policy agenda, implemented and later removed. Secondly, it contributes to the general understanding of policy agenda setting, formulation and implementation in a LMIC setting.
We used a case study design because it allows collection and analysis of comprehensive and systematic data at different points in a real-life context to trace policy discussions and change over time [21, 22]. Data was collected between July 2012 and August 2014 using in-depth interviews, document reviews, observations and feedback discussions with respondents. The in-depth interviews were conducted to obtain real-life experiences from key actors involved in the decision making and pilot implementation of the per capita payment system especially in relation to maternity services. The interviews lasting on average 1 h were conducted face to face using a semi-structured guide to investigate how policy actors included and later excluded primary care maternal services from the capitation policy. AK (one of the authors) interviewed twenty-eight respondents summarized in Table 2. For confidentiality, names and positions are not used. Ten of these were identified from the documents review and the rest (18) were suggested by other respondents.
The per capita rate for the basket of services was computed from a combination of an analysis of historical NHIS annual expenditure on the services in the basket against annual enrolment; and an estimate of the NHIA ability to pay. The per capita rate was then adjusted further for service fixed cost difference between private and public health facilities [11]. The calculation of the per capita rate drew from the G-DRG payment system data. Even in the computation of the G-DRG rates, there had and continued to be challenges related to data quality and completeness and the need therefore to model and estimate. However this was the best data available and the G-DRG system had been developed with it and accepted by providers [18].
This case illustrates the tensions and complicated relationships between technical consideration, contestation and political responsiveness in policy processes that combine to determine the outcomes of policy agenda setting and formulation, with the result of implementation processes sometimes leading backwards to a revision of the policy agenda and formulation.
Despite the recognition of the importance of stakeholder engagement and the use of a multi-stakeholder Committee that included providers; stakeholder identification, analysis and consultation was perhaps inadequate. Contestation is often an inevitable part of policy reform, and reform as major as provider payment with all the incentives inherent in different payment methods holds huge potential for contestation. More careful stakeholder analysis as part of the design and implementation process might have perhaps made some of the problems that precipitated a crisis e.g. selecting an opposition region for pilot of major reform; anticipated and perhaps avoided. 041b061a72