Policy Assessment of the European Central Bank and the Stability and Growth Pact’s Echo of the Conventional Wisdom on Budget Management

This paper provides an in-depth normative analysis in two parts: 1) ECB monetary policy focusing on credibility, accountability, transparency, flexibility, and both goal and instrument independence; 2) Theoretical analysis of discrepancies of the Stability and Growth Pact rules vs. discretionary framework that is comprised of the conventional view on budget deficits and how budget deficit targeting creates a procyclical and endogenous policy.Central Bank Credibility, Accountability, Flexibility, Ricardian Equivalence

Combination of molecular similarity measures using data fusion

Many different measures of structural similarity have been suggested for matching chemical structures, each such measure focusing upon some particular type of molecular characteristic. The multi-faceted nature of biological activity suggests that an appropriate similarity measure should encompass many different types of characteristic, and this article discusses the use of data fusion methods to combine the results of searches based on multiple similarity measures. Experiments with several different types of dataset and activity suggest that data fusion provides a simple, but effective, approach to the combination of individual similarity measures. The best results were generally obtained with a fusion rule that sums the rank positions achieved by each molecule in searches using individual measures

The Long-term Coercive Effect of State Community Benefit Laws on Hospital Community Health Orientation

This study is an examination of the long-term coercive effect of state community benefit laws (CB Laws) on the provision of community health activities in U.S. acute care hospitals. The sample included all the not-for-profit and investor owned acute care hospitals for which 1994 and 2006 AHA Annual Survey data were available. A panel design was used to longitudinally examine the effect that state CB Laws had on hospital community health orientation activities and the provision of health promotion services, after controlling for the influence of other organizational and environmental variables that might affect these activities and services. The authors found that both CB Law state and non CB Law state hospitals increased their number of orientation activities and promotion services from 1994 to 2006. However, there was no significant difference in the gains in these activities and services between these two groups of hospitals. These results suggest that other environmental and organizational factors may mediate the effect of the state CB Laws over time

Flexible Wing Designs with Sensor Control Feedback for Demonstration on the X-56A (MUTT)

Presenting an overview of the research DFRC is planning within the Subsonic Fixed Wing (SFW) Light Weight Airframes and Propulsion. Describ ing our TRL maturation and new research going forward using the X-56A as a validation testbed

PARA-INTERFACE: A Novel Interface for Para-AEH Software Suite

Para-AEH is a software suite designed to the Asymptotic Expansion Homogenization method. This method is commonly used to model structures by using differential equations to represent larger structure from a smaller structure input. In order to facilitate the University of Mississippi’s Department of Mechanical Engineering’s research purposes the software needed to be installed. A novel interface was designed to remove the overhead of interacting with the software on a command line based level. The software allows the management of users that can access the software and jobs that package several commands together for asynchronous execution without manual intervention

Some Initial Thoughts on Wilson v. Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd and Edmonton (City) v. Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres Ltd

Administrative law focusses on the way in which, and the extent to which, courts should oversee the exercise of administrative authority. The law on substantive review of administrative decision-making has changed drastically over the last several decades, particularly around choice of standard of review. In the words of the Honorable John M Evans, courts have returned to this issue “with almost monotonous regularity over the last 30 years”. Two Supreme Court of Canada decisions from 2016, Wilson v Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd and Edmonton (City) v Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres Ltd, have regenerated discussion about standard of review in relation to questions of law. No less an authority than the Honourable Justice David Stratas has suggested that the Court may be “about to embark on one of its once-a-decade, wholesale revisions to the law of judicial review”. To assess how Wilson and Capilano relate to the Supreme Court’s last wholesale revision of the law on substantive review in Dunsmuir v New Brunswick, this article: a) considers Justice Abella’s suggestion in Wilson that a separate standard of correctness review is no longer needed; b) assesses the trend, developing pre-Capilano and implicitly accepted by the majority in that decision, of limiting correctness review to the four categories of legal questions identified in Dunsmuir; and c) discusses the difficulties of applying the Dunsmuir understanding of reasonableness where there are only two possible interpretations of the legislative provision in dispute (Wilson and Capilano), or where the administrative decision-maker has not provided reasons on an issue under review (Capilano)

Naturalizing a Programming Language via Interactive Learning

Our goal is to create a convenient natural language interface for performing well-specified but complex actions such as analyzing data, manipulating text, and querying databases. However, existing natural language interfaces for such tasks are quite primitive compared to the power one wields with a programming language. To bridge this gap, we start with a core programming language and allow users to "naturalize" the core language incrementally by defining alternative, more natural syntax and increasingly complex concepts in terms of compositions of simpler ones. In a voxel world, we show that a community of users can simultaneously teach a common system a diverse language and use it to build hundreds of complex voxel structures. Over the course of three days, these users went from using only the core language to using the naturalized language in 85.9\% of the last 10K utterances.Comment: 10 pages, ACL201

Phase Shaping In The Infrared By Planar Quasi-periodic Surfaces Comprised Of Sub-wavelength Elements

Reflectarrays are passive quasi-periodic sub-wavelength antenna arrays designed for discrete reflected phase manipulation at each individual antenna element making up the array. By spatially varying the phase response of the antenna array, reflectarrays allow a planar surface to impress a non-planar phasefront upon re-radiation. Such devices have become commonplace at radio frequencies. In this dissertation, they are demonstrated in the infrared for the first time--at frequencies as high as 194 THz. Relevant aspects of computational electromagnetic modeling are explored, to yield design procedures optimized for these high frequencies. Modeling is also utilized to demonstrate the phase response of a generalized metallic patch resonator in terms of its dependence on element dimensions, surrounding materials, angle of incidence, and frequency. The impact of realistic dispersion of the real and imaginary parts of the metallic permittivity on the magnitude and bandwidth of the resonance behavior is thoroughly investigated. Several single-phase reflectarrays are fabricated and measurement techniques are developed for evaluating these surfaces. In all of these cases, there is excellent agreement between the computational model results and the measured device characteristics. With accurate modeling and measurement, it is possible to proceed to explore some specific device architectures appropriate for focusing reflectarrays, including binary-phase and phase-incremental approaches. Image quality aspects of these focusing reflectarrays are considered from geometrical and chromatic-aberration perspectives. The dissertation concludes by briefly considering two additional analogous devices--the transmitarray for tailoring transmissive phase response, and the emitarray for angular control of thermally emitted radiation