Private Business Investment in Australia

The behaviour of aggregate Australian private business investment has attracted relatively little attention in the literature over the past decade or so, probably reflecting the well-known difficulties associated with modelling it. This paper reviews the main drivers of Australian business investment through a discussion of some long- and short-run trends and estimation of error-correction models for its main components. Two innovations are introduced in the modelling approach. The first is that investment in computing equipment is excluded from the models, recognising that it cannot be treated in the same way as other types of investment, particularly in light of the dramatic falls in its relative price over recent decades. The second is that standard techniques are used to exclude influential observations when modelling the short-run variation in the data as a means of accounting for the considerable volatility in these variables. This improves the robustness of the estimation. The different types of investment – equipment, building and engineering – are found to be influenced by their own idiosyncratic factors, though for each type of investment, an inverse relationship between the investment-to-output ratio and its corresponding measure of the cost of capital is found.Australian business investment; cost of capital; computing equipment

Introduction to stochastic error correction methods

We propose a method for eliminating the truncation error associated with any subspace diagonalization calculation. The new method, called stochastic error correction, uses Monte Carlo sampling to compute the contribution of the remaining basis vectors not included in the initial diagonalization. The method is part of a new approach to computational quantum physics which combines both diagonalization and Monte Carlo techniques.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figur

Topics in Quantum Computers

I provide an introduction to quantum computers, describing how they might be realized using language accessible to a solid state physicist. A listing of the minimal requirements for creating a quantum computer is given. I also discuss several recent developments in the area of quantum error correction, a subject of importance not only to quantum computation, but also to some aspects of the foundations of quantum theory.Comment: 22 pages, Latex, 1 eps figure, Paper to be published in "Mesoscopic Electron Transport", edited by L. Kowenhoven, G. Schoen and L. Sohn, NATO ASI Series E, Kluwer Ac. Publ., Dordrecht. v2: typos in refrences fixe

Effects of DUT mismatch on the noise figure characterization: A comparative analysis of two Y-factor techniques

Device mismatch seriously degrades accuracy in noise figure characterization. The suitability of corrections to the gain definitions for a more precise noise figure evaluation for mismatched devices is investigated and compared to classical techniques. The effects of device mismatch on the noise figure of the noise-meter receiver and its impact on the final accuracy are analyzed

Judicial Attention as a Scarce Resource: A Preliminary Defense of How Judges Allocate Time Across Cases in the Federal Courts of Appeals

Federal appellate judges no longer have the time to hear argument and draft opinions in all of their cases. The average annual filing per active judgeship now stands at 330 filed cases per year — more than four times what it was sixty years ago. In response, judges have adopted case management strategies that effectively involve spending significantly less time on certain classes of cases than on others. Various scholars have decried this state of affairs, suggesting that the courts have created a “bifurcated” system of justice with “separate and unequal tracks.” These reformers propose altering the relevant constraints of the courts, primarily by increasing the number of judges or decreasing the judiciary’s caseload. These approaches, however, have not gained political traction thus far and seem unlikely to in the foreseeable future. This Article takes a realist approach and argues that we should recognize judicial attention for what it is — a scarce resource — and assess whether there is evidence that the courts are allocating that resource improperly. Loosely borrowing the framework of resource allocation from the political science and economics literatures, this Article considers how to apply the concepts of inputs and outputs to the work of the federal appellate courts, suggesting judicial attention as the input and a combination of error correction and law development as the output. It then makes the preliminary case that the courts’ case management techniques in fact largely comport with an output-maximization approach, while still limiting inequality of outputs across cases. This Article concludes that the courts’ overall strategy nevertheless presents opportunities for enhancement. It suggests several improvements, focusing on the review structure of cases that receive the least amount of judicial attention, to help ensure that all federal cases receive an appropriate form of appellate review

μ\mu--PhotoZ: Photometric Redshifts by Inverting the Tolman Surface Brightness Test

Surface brightness is a fundamental observational parameter of galaxies. We show, for the first time in detail, how it can be used to obtain photometric redshifts for galaxies, the $\mu$-PhotoZ method. We demonstrate that the Tolman surface brightness relation, $\mu \propto (1+z)^{-4}$, is a powerful tool for determining galaxy redshifts from photometric data. We develop a model using $\mu$ and a color percentile (ranking) measure to demonstrate the $\mu$-PhotoZ method. We apply our method to a set of galaxies from the SHELS survey, and demonstrate that the photometric redshift accuracy achieved using the surface brightness method alone is comparable with the best color-based methods. We show that the $\mu$-PhotoZ method is very effective in determining the redshift for red galaxies using only two photometric bands. We discuss the properties of the small, skewed, non-gaussian component of the error distribution. We calibrate $\mu_r, (r-i)$ from the SDSS to redshift, and tabulate the result, providing a simple, but accurate look up table to estimate the redshift of distant red galaxies.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journa