CME Group (United States)

Subject. The 2023 reform of the Dated Brent benchmark, one of the world’s most important crude oil pricing indicators, marked a significant development in the global commodities market. As part of this reform, the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) Midland grade was added to the Brent basket. Objective. This article examines the goals and intentions of the reform’s initiators and developers who revised the Dated Brent assessment methodology in 2023. It also explores the key factors that made the reform possible. These include the depletion of North Sea oil fields — which for decades served as the physical basis for Dated Brent — the surge in U.S. production of light, low-sulfur crude oil, and European Union sanctions against the Russian oil industry. These sanctions have triggered a sharp increase in U.S. hydrocarbon exports to Europe. Findings. The study demonstrates that the reform was also driven by unsuccessful attempts to create an influential oil benchmark based on U.S. crude exported from Gulf of Mexico ports.

This study investigates the primary sources of menstrual hygiene information and the impact of cultural beliefs on menstrual hygiene management among adolescent girls in Ghana, focusing on variations across tribal groups to foster positive attitudes and behaviors. A descriptive survey methodology was employed, utilising questionnaires and semi-structured interviews to collect comprehensive data from college students. The study sample consists of 384 female adolescents from three selected schools within the Tamale Metropolis of Ghana. Respondents were acquired by stratified, purposive, and random sampling methods. We used the SPSS 20.0 software to assess the hypotheses with a chi-square test since it evaluates relationships between categorical variables while accounting for the distribution of frequencies. The findings indicated statistically significant variations in the sources of information on menstrual hygiene across the different tribes. Therefore, we rejected the null hypothesis 1. The finding for hypothesis 2 reveals that there is no statistically significant variation in the cultural and religious beliefs about menstruation across the different tribes. Therefore, we accepted the null hypothesis. The study highlights menstrual hygiene as a sociocultural and educational issue, necessitating a comprehensive approach involving education, cultural sensitivity, and stakeholder involvement from parents, schools, healthcare providers, and religious leaders. The Ghana Education Service should incorporate menstrual hygiene education into the national curriculum, ensuring all students receive accurate and consistent information. Similarly, NGOs should foster effective collaboration between traditional and religious leaders to challenge harmful cultural practices and promote supportive environments for menstrual health.

Abstract This document presents a portfolio optimization framework that employs a hybrid quantum computing algorithm and a futures market sentiment indicator—The Market Sentiment Meter (MSM) variable, developed jointly by CME Group and 1QBit. The methodology used was the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE). The work presented here is divided into four portfolio optimization problem formulations, of binary and continuous variable formulations, determining which assets to pick their weights. This work demonstrates that adding the MSM variable can improve the performance of hybrid quantum solutions, by informing the asset selection problem with market environment information through the four MSM states.

In the current economic and political conditions there is a need to regulate the conduct of exchange traders. Currently, exchanges carry out this regulation directly, but it is not sufficient. Therefore, a comparative legal analysis of approaches to regulating the ethical conduct of traders in foreign jurisdictions is particularly relevant. Foreign experience shows that regulators and exchanges identify trader misconduct, establish criteria for such conduct and measures to punish it. At the same time, to minimize potential consequences for the commodity market, for example, due to erroneous actions by exchanges in qualifying conduct, and maintain its stability, the foreign regulator exercises control over activities of exchanges and trader compliance with local legislation, issues relevant acts and recommendations containing a list of desirable and undesirable market practices. According to the author, when introducing amendments and additions to regulatory legal acts regarding the powers of the Bank of Russia, it may be beneficial to consider foreign experience in regulating misconduct of exchange traders in the commodity market in Russian practice.

To compare results from facility-level and state-level severe maternal morbidity (SMM) reviews in Illinois. We report descriptive characteristics about SMM cases and compare the results of both review processes, including the primary cause, assessment of preventability, and factors that contributed to the severity of the SMM cases. All birthing hospitals in Illinois. A total of 81 SMM cases were reviewed by a facility-level committee and the state-level review committee. SMM was defined as any intensive care or critical care unit admission and/or transfusion of 4 or more units of packed red blood cells from conception to 42 days postpartum. Among the cases reviewed by both committees, hemorrhage was the primary cause of morbidity, with 26 (32.1%) and 38 (46.9%) hemorrhage cases identified by the facility-level and state-level committees, respectively. Both committees identified infection/sepsis (n = 12) and preeclampsia/eclampsia (n = 12) as the next most common causes of SMM. State-level review found more cases potentially preventable (n = 29, 35.8% vs n = 18, 22.2%) and more cases not preventable but improvement in care needed (n = 31, 38.3% vs n = 27, 33.3%). State-level review found more provider and system opportunities to alter the SMM outcome and fewer patient opportunities than facility-level review. State-level review found more SMM cases potentially preventable and identified more opportunities to improve care than facility-level review. State-level review has the potential to strengthen facility-level reviews by identifying opportunities to improve the review process and develop recommendations and tools to aid facility-level reviews.

The probabilistic topic model imposes a low-rank structure on the expectation of the corpus matrix. Therefore, singular value decomposition (SVD) is a natural tool of dimension reduction. We propose an SVD-based method for estimating a topic model. Our method constructs an estimate of the topic matrix from only a few leading singular vectors of the data matrix, and has a great advantage in memory use and computational cost for large-scale corpora. The core ideas behind our method include a pre-SVD normalization to tackle severe word frequency heterogeneity, a post-SVD normalization to create a low-dimensional word embedding that manifests a simplex geometry, and a post-SVD procedure to construct an estimate of the topic matrix directly from the embedded word cloud. We provide the explicit rate of convergence of our method. We show that our method attains the optimal rate in the case of long and moderately long documents, and it improves the rates of existing methods in the case of short documents. The key of our analysis is a sharp row-wise large-deviation bound for empirical singular vectors, which is technically demanding to derive and potentially useful for other problems. We apply our method to a corpus of Associated Press news articles and a corpus of abstracts of statistical papers. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Abstract The PFAS Experts Symposium 2, held virtually from June 29 to July 1, 2021, brought together experts from a wide range of disciplines to discuss recent advances and current thinking regarding per‐ and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in the environment. Within the general areas of characterization and fate and transport, three topics were identified that are of relevance for site assessment and remediation, and for which our understanding has greatly expanded or evolved since the first PFAS Experts Symposium in 2019: the significance of background PFAS sources to the environment, the relevance and use of nonselective analytes in site characterization, and PFAS retention in soil and the vadose zone. PFAS have been identified in shallow soil nearly worldwide, including far from known or suspected PFAS sources, and PFAS detected in soil and groundwater at sites under environmental investigation may not reflect on‐site sources. New advances in nonselective preparation and analytical methods offer promise for more rapid site screening and for assessing the presence and relative concentration of nontargeted PFAS. We also now recognize that a wide range of soil characteristics and processes may affect PFAS sorption and desorption from soil, and ultimately influence PFAS mobility and concentration in groundwater and surface water.

Selecting a scholarly journal is an important decision that authors make in the pre-publication stage of their research. Unpublished research is just another unperformed research, so is the published research with no visibility because of being placed in a wrong journal. Determining a suitable journal to publish a manuscript entails many variables: visibility and focus of the journal, its appropriateness to the topic of the manuscript, peer-review policies, timeliness of the editorial process, whether or not the journal feedback and editorial process is productive, publishing costs, as well as the governance of the journal. With rapidly changing biomedical publishing and new challenges associated with this, it is necessary to periodically scrutinize the journals in the field of your interest and keep an updated publication shortlist.