Monetary Policy Committee Transparency: Measurement, Determinants, and Economic Effects

This paper studies monetary policy committee transparency (MPCT) based on a new index that measures central bankers' educational and professional backgrounds as disclosed through central bank websites. Based on a novel cross-sectional data set covering 75 central banks, we investigate the determinants of MPCT as well as its economic consequences. We find that past inflation, quality of institutional setup, and extent of Internet use in a country are important determinants of MPCT. MPCT has a robust and significantly negative impact on inflation variability, even after controlling for important macroeconomic variables and institutional transparency, as well as instrumenting MPCT in various ways

Greek political marketing online

The new communication system of interconnected computer networks is altering the nature of political communication in many innovative and significant ways. In Greece, the development of the Internet as a mass communication medium has a history of no more than five years, and it is far from being a fully fledged medium of political communication. With the exception of relatively few cases, the use of the Internet has been shown to increase during the pre-election campaign periods. This paper presents the results of a research project, which explores the personal Web sites of the Greek parliamentarians in an off-campaign period. The research was conducted through the systematic observation, examination, and analysis of a sample of personal Web pages owned by cross-party elected members of the Greek Parliament. © 2005, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved

Cyber-Typhon: An Online Multi-task Anomaly Detection Framework

According to the Greek mythology, Typhon was a gigantic monster with one hundred dragon heads, bigger than all mountains. His open hands were extending from East to West, his head could reach the sky and flames were coming out of his mouth. His body below the waste consisted of curled snakes. This research effort introduces the “Cyber-Typhon” (CYTY) an Online Multi-Task Anomaly Detection Framework. It aims to fully upgrade old passive infrastructure through an intelligent mechanism, using advanced Computational Intelligence (COIN) algorithms. More specifically, it proposes an intelligent Multi-Task Learning framework, which combines On-Line Sequential Extreme Learning Machines (OS-ELM) and Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) in order to control data flows. The final target of this model is the intelligent classification of Critical Infrastructures’ network flow, resulting in Anomaly Detection due to Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks

Covid-19 as cultural trauma

This paper has two aims. The first is to introduce the concept of compressed cultural trauma, and the second is to apply the theory of cultural trauma in two case studies of the current covid-19 pandemic, Greece and Sweden. Our central question is whether the pandemic will evolve into a cultural trauma in these two countries. We believe the pandemic presents a challenge to cultural trauma theory, which the idea of compressed trauma is meant to address. We conclude that, while the ongoing covid-19 pandemic has had traumatic consequences in Sweden and Greece, it has not evolved into cultural trauma in either country. © 2020, Springer Nature Limited