Hands Up Don\u27t Shoot

This image was created by Sam Fleming for Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities, volume 6 (2017), published by Macalester College.For more information, please visit the Tapestries journal home page. Copyright 2017, Samuel Fleming

Post-Racial

This image was created by Sam Fleming for Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities, volume 6 (2017), published by Macalester College.For more information, please visit the Tapestries journal home page. Copyright 2017, Samuel Fleming

Unite or Die

This image was created by Sam Fleming for Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities, volume 6 (2017), published by Macalester College.For more information, please visit the Tapestries journal home page. Copyright 2017, Samuel Fleming

Carson

This image was created by Sam Fleming for Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities, volume 6 (2017), published by Macalester College.For more information, please visit the Tapestries journal home page. Copyright 2017, Samuel Fleming

The Latvian banking crisis : lessons learned

In the spring of 1995, Latvia experienced the largest banking crisis in the Former Soviet Union to date, involving the loss of about 40 percent of the banking system's assets and liabilities. The authors outline the Latvian authorities'strategy for developing the banking system and identify how and why it unraveled. They discuss the World Bank's role and the lessons to be learned from the crisis, including the following: 1) banking systems are exposed to stress in several major ways. Enterprises - the main borrowers - are subject to hard budget constraints and are privatized. Inflation declines so enterprises can't rely on rapidly increasing revenues to service bank debts. Economic reform tends to produce banking systems that are mainly privately owned - making them vulnerable to withdrawals, as the public does not assume that failing banks will be bailed out; 2) the government must protect against this vulnerability by establishing a proper legal framework for banking, developing effective bank supervision and regulation, and implementing solid accounting, disclosure, and auditing standards. It must also develop effective ways to handle problem banks and to close insolvent banks promptly; 3) for banks in the state sector to be a source of strength to the banking system, they must have strong effective management and be relatively free from political influence; 4)"outlier"banks - those expanding assets very quickly or offering particularly high deposit rates - should be subject to intense supervision; and 5) four things must be done to prevent fraud, incompetent management and excessive risk taking: 1) careful screen thosewho want to get into banking; 2) subject all banks to thorough, frequent onsite examinations and assign the best examiners to the largest banks; 3) require annual audits of all banks by reputable auditing firms; and 4) act decisively when fraud or bank difficulties are detected or suspected.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Banks&Banking Reform,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Financial Intermediation,Labor Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Financial Intermediation,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Municipal Financial Management,Settlement of Investment Disputes

An Investigation Into the Relative Importance of Civil Institutions on Subjective Well-Being

Poverty is not a material problem; in fact, it is a much greater problem, the problem of social, natural, and economic disconnect from the institutions of stability, wealth, justice, and well-being. When considering human flourishing, we must look beyond the material at “lives that are not necessarily morally good, but good for us” (Tiberius, 2006, p. 493). In the vein of Sen’s Capabilities Theory, this paper uses subjective well-being as a comprehensive measure of an individual’s life and circumstances examines how civil institutions impact an individual’s non-monetary welfare function. This paper conducts a series of regression models in an attempt to explore and identify the relative impact of the determinants of subjective well-being in the context of individual experience and historical dependency. Analyzing a panel survey in South Africa, this paper compares a fixed effects and autoregressive model to the baseline ordinary least squares (OLS) model in order to determine how civil institutions and path dependency play a role in determining subjective well-being. I find that the autoregressive model does not substantially improve parameter estimates, most likely due to the short structure of the panel. The autoregressive model does confirm the impact of religious involvement and family units, both positively significant in all models. The strength of religious importance directly correlates to increased life satisfaction, and individuals in family units (married or cohabitating) show increased levels of life satisfaction, although the anticipated effect of formal marriage does not show in the data. This analysis lays a foundation for understanding opportunities for governmental intervention with the purpose of maximizing subjective well-being

Artists\u27s Statement

Artist\u27s statement for art featured in Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities, volume 6

Wilis: Architectural Modeling of Wireless Systems

The performance of a wireless system depends on the wireless channel as well as the algorithms used in the transceiver pipelines. Because physical phenomena affect transceiver pipelines in difficult to predict ways, detailed simulation of the entire transceiver system is needed to evaluate even a single processing block. Further, some protocol validations require simulation of rare events (say, 1 bit error in 109 bits), which means the protocol must simulate for a long enough time for such events to materialize. This requirement coupled with the heavy computation typical of most physical-layer processing, rules out pure software solutions. In this paper we describe WiLIS, an FPGA-based hybrid hardware-software system designed to facilitate the development of wireless protocols. We then use WiLIS to evaluate several microarchitectures for measuring very low bit-error rates (BER). We demonstrate, for the first time, that the recently proposed SoftPHY can be implemented efficiently in hardware

Information Assurance; Small Business and the Basics

Business is increasingly dependent on information systems to allow decision makers to gather process and disseminate information. As the information landscape becomes more interconnected, the threats to computing resources also increase. While the Internet has allowed information to flow, it has also exposed businesses to vulnerabilities. Whereas large businesses have information technology (IT) departments to support their security, small businesses are at risk because they lack personnel dedicated to addressing, controlling and evaluating their information security efforts. Further complicating this situation, most small businesses IT capabilities have evolved in an ad hoc fashion where few employees understand the scope of the network and fewer if any sat down and envisioned a secure architecture as capabilities were added. This paper examines the problem from the perspective that IT professionals struggle to bring adequate Information Assurance (IA) to smaller organizations where the tools are well known, but the organizational intent of the information security stance lacks a cohesive structure for system development and enforcement. This paper focuses on a process that will allow IT professionals to rapidly improve their organizations\u27 security stance with few changes using tools already in place or available at little or no cost. Starting with an initial risk assessment research provides the groundwork for the introduction of a secure system development life cycle (SSLDC) where continual evaluation improves the security stance and operation of a networked computer system