This study examines literature relevant to adult and intercultural training and education, and teaching online, and explores the implications of this delivery medium in the context of a graduate institution preparing students for cross-cultural service. The theoretical and practical issues discussed are applied to the creation of a subset of an online cross cultural teaching seminar for graduate students. This seminar is intended for students with no prior teaching experience and has no prerequisites.
This paper has been prepared to stimulate discussion at the FSA stakeholder meeting on diet and low income, following publication of the Low Income Diet and Nutrition Survey (LIDNS). The emphasis is on the next steps to be taken by the FSA to tackle inequalities and the links between food supplies,diets and health outcomes for people living on a low income, but other issues, such as food safety and hygiene, and the responsibilities of other government departments as well as non-governmental organisations should also be considered.
The paper uses the term nutrition insecurity as a term to describe the failure to meet the recommended dietary guidelines, and is intended to be used in the context of current concerns about the need for action to improve nutrition and reduce obesity for both low income groups and the wider population. The LIDNS survey and other NDNS surveys have shown that a failure to meet the recommended dietary guidelines extends across a broad range of lower and middle income households, suggesting that policies targeted only at lower income groups may be helpful but that ‘upstream’ measures may be needed to reduce nutrition insecurity – i.e. to remove barriers to achieving healthy diets.
In this paper we present a modelling framework for portfolio credit risk which incorporates a new methodology to model the dependence between risk-free interest-rates and the default loss process, allowing direct dependence between interest-rates and the loss process. We provide a stochastic and arbitrage-free framework for the evolution of the prices of a set of contingent-claims on the credit portfolio’s loss distribution. This set of contingent claims is complete in the sense that it spans all European contingent claims on the loss process L(t). In particular, the prices of index credit default swaps (CDS) and single tranche collateralized debt obligations (STCDO) of all maturities and attachment points can be easily constructed from these contingent claims. This allows a straightforward calibration of the model to the so-called “correlation smile”. In contrast to Schönbucher (2005), though, these prices can not be interpreted as probabilities under the spot martingale measure as we allow dependence between the loss process and risk-free interest-rates.
The prices of the basic contingent claims are parameterized using a set of loss-contingent forward interest-rates fn(t, T) and loss-contingent forward credit protection rates Fn(t, T). The forward interest-rates fn(t, T) must be loss contingent in order to allow us to capture its credit dependence. These rates can be viewed as the interest-rates of forward-rate agreements that are contingent on a certain number of losses L(T) = n. Clearly, if there is dependence between the loss process and the default-free interest-rates, the loss-contingent forward rates fn(t, T) must differ over different values of n. We show that (up to weak regularity conditions), existence of such a parametrization is necessary and sufficient for the absence of static arbitrage opportunities in the underlying assets, i.e. the parameterization fully describes the set of arbitrage-free price systems in this model.
