Thesis: M. Fin., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Master of Finance Program, 2019 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (page 26). / Since late 2017 when the worldwide business optimism was at its highest, highly leveraged energy companies began to issue unique preferred shares that have character of perpetual subordinated bond and that trade in bond market. Among those firms, DCP Midstream issued another preferred shares that have same feature, but trade in mezzanine market. This paper explores the recent rising preferred shares and its market inefficiency, especially between bond market (par 1000) and mezzanine market (par 25). Assuming the firm exercise its call option for both securities, the paper finds that one can construct a profitable arbitrage strategy with annual Sharpe ratio of 1.775 from these two almost identical securities. My results bring some empirical substance to the discussion on the law of one price in financial markets. Although there are some limitations such as transaction costs and liquidity issues, this market has a degree of inefficiency. / by Junghwan (Steve) Lee. / M. Fin. / M.Fin. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Master of Finance Program

Ultra wideband (UWB) is vastly under consideration of research industry that promises high data rata, low power consumption and economic solution. UWB was in use of military since 1950’s. In 2002 Federal communication commission (FCC) approved the use of 3.1-10.6 GHz band for unlicensed UWB applications. UWB is a suitable choice for sensing and position objects because of high bandwidth and fine time resolution. The goal of this work is to explore the UWB technology in context of distance measurement between two nodes. We have described the characterization; reliability and ranging precision of an impulse UWB based transceiver for both indoor and outdoor environments. This thesis discuss in detail about UWB technology. Chapter 1 discusses about UWB applications, regulation and bandwidth properties. Chapter 2 and 3 discuss about single band and multi band modulation and detection techniques. Chapter 4 gives a complete description how to measure position through ranging and positioning parameters. Finally, to estimate the ranging and positioning, a two way ranging algorithm based on TOA employed as part of this work is described in detail in chapter 5. A theoretical analysis of impulse UWB radio for wireless communication and ranging is provided employing the Shannon Hartley theorem and Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) method.

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In the beginning of the 2004 video essay Los Angeles plays itself, the Hollywood critical film theorist Thom Andersen states ‘The city is big. The image is small’. What Andersen refers to, as a long-time citizen of Los Angeles, is the way Hollywood tends to create a romanticised and narrowed image of its city through film. The three-hour long documentary by Andersen is built up mainly by the use of clips from different Hollywood movies through its history of filmmaking. By representing and reproducing these clips, he examines the ways the city has been depicted through decades. Utilizing and disassembling these misinterpreted images and stories, Andersen creates his own story which further reveals what he believes to be the truth. What interests me in Andersen’s case is the way he works with a city and its architecture, displaying the embedded social and political structures, by twisting the perspectives through the use and repetition of these historically recognizable clips. When he takes something that already exists and alters its presence or meaning, other questions might be evoked, making it more visible by exposing its opposites.

[No copyright notice] Background: Moderate and chronic consumption of red wine protects against cardiovascular disease. Wine is a complex matrix containing multiple molecules whose concentrations can vary from one bottle to another. Therefore, the delineation of the putative cardioprotective components in wine such as alcohol, resveratrol and melatonin is very challenging when using commercially available red wine. Aim: We aimed to use synthetic wine, whose composition is well characterized, to explore whether the presence of alcohol, resveratrol and melatonin (as found in commercial wines) contributes to the cardioprotective effect of chronic and moderate consumption of red wine (equivalent to 2 glasses of wine/day) in an animal model. Additionally, we hypothesized that synthetic wine enriched with resveratrol and melatonin confers cardioprotection via improvement of overall antioxidant profile.

Mentoring has the potential to benefit preservice, new teachers, and experienced teachers, but it is a complex process with few agreements about what might make it most effective. Furthermore, due to teacher demographics affecting the availability of veteran teachers, mentors are consequently drawn from various career points, and some of them have few years of teaching experience. The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the complexities of mentoring, particularly of the role that age, experience, and situational factors might play in their work. To pursue this study, I used these research questions: What are the goals and approaches of these six mentors in mentoring new teachers? How do these six mentors carry out that approach? How are mentors’ perspectives impacted by situational factors within a formal program such as working conditions and expectations? I examined mentors’ perspectives about their experiences to give insight as to how to develop the overall support structure of formal mentoring for new teachers. Through in‐depth qualitative research interviews and document analysis, I investigated mentors’ perspectives on their particular set of experiences within a formal mentoring program. Through inductive analysis, my study yielded information about whether and how mentors at different career points identify and understand their mentoring. Even though I anticipated experience would impact the goals and approaches of mentors, my first key finding was that these mentors with varying amounts of teaching experience shared similar goals and approaches. The second key finding was that situational and programmatic factors supported collaboration among the mentors and supported the development of common goals and a common approach. The third key finding was that the structure of the VA program helped to foster collective responsibility for the new teachers amongst the mentor team, and this may have reinforced the mentors’ similar goals and approaches. Given these findings that years of teaching experience may not always be a critical factor in mentors’ approaches, this study shows the potential importance of shared experience and socialization within a mentor team, and scaffolding within a mentoring program.

Today's engineering companies rely heavily on an engineer's ability to use computers to analyze and optimize designs. With this use of computers in the design process, products undergo multiple design iterations between preliminary concept and final form. This in turn results in Computer Aided Design (CAD) models being passed from one discipline to the next. In attempts to keep consistency within the design process, an industry wide shift towards the use of CAD master models is taking place. With this change to master models, manufacturing and engineering development companies are attempting to more fully employ the use of parametrics in their initial CAD models. This is in hopes that the initial models handed downstream are robust enough to be used throughout the entire design loop. Unfortunately, current parameter definitions are often not robust enough to incorporate all the design changes from the various analyses and manufacturing operations. To address this problem, we present a more robust parametric methodology that broadens the current definition of parametrics as currently employed on CAx master models within CAD packages.

MacMahon's Master Theorem is an important result in the theory of algebraic combinatorics. It gives a precise connection between coefficients of certain power series defined by linear relations. We give a complete proof of MacMahon's Master Theorem based on MacMahon's original 1960 proof. We also study a specific infinite dimensional matrix inverse due to C. Krattenthaler.

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Thesis: M. Fin., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Master of Finance Program, February, 2021 / Cataloged from the official PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (page 23). / The objective of this project is to use machine learning to predict the occurrence of corporate takeovers. The findings show that random forest yields the best predictions out-of-sample based on the area under the curve (AUC) metric. As such, 8 independent variables are considered statistically significant. A time series machine learning approach is also used at the end of the study to predict these events in 2019 based on each company's data from 2010 to 2018. Random forest is still determined as the model with the best out-of-sample performance. A strategy of investing equal amounts across the companies predicted to be takeover targets in 2019 based on the model yields a profit of 7.4%. / by Georges Geha. / M. Fin. / M.Fin. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Master of Finance Program