Pegging To The Dollar And The Euro

The newly-launched euro is bound to attract some "trackers"- that is, countries that attempt to maintain exchange rate stability against the euro. In this paper, we ask whether the existence of trackers should be a matter of concern for the European Union. To gain some insight, we review the historical experience of the US with respect to dollar trackers. We identify and analyse the countries most likely to track the euro. Although the aggregate size of potential euro-trackers is small relative to the euro zone, we argue that this does not justify an attitude of benign neglect. Rather, we make recommendations for EU policy towards euro-trackers, arguing in favour of some limited and conditional support for stable bilateral exchange rates.

Global disease monitoring and forecasting with Wikipedia

Infectious disease is a leading threat to public health, economic stability, and other key social structures. Efforts to mitigate these impacts depend on accurate and timely monitoring to measure the risk and progress of disease. Traditional, biologically-focused monitoring techniques are accurate but costly and slow; in response, new techniques based on social internet data such as social media and search queries are emerging. These efforts are promising, but important challenges in the areas of scientific peer review, breadth of diseases and countries, and forecasting hamper their operational usefulness. We examine a freely available, open data source for this use: access logs from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Using linear models, language as a proxy for location, and a systematic yet simple article selection procedure, we tested 14 location-disease combinations and demonstrate that these data feasibly support an approach that overcomes these challenges. Specifically, our proof-of-concept yields models with $r^2$ up to 0.92, forecasting value up to the 28 days tested, and several pairs of models similar enough to suggest that transferring models from one location to another without re-training is feasible. Based on these preliminary results, we close with a research agenda designed to overcome these challenges and produce a disease monitoring and forecasting system that is significantly more effective, robust, and globally comprehensive than the current state of the art.Comment: 27 pages; 4 figures; 4 tables. Version 2: Cite McIver & Brownstein and adjust novelty claims accordingly; revise title; various revisions for clarit

Tangled String for Multi-Scale Explanation of Contextual Shifts in Stock Market

The original research question here is given by marketers in general, i.e., how to explain the changes in the desired timescale of the market. Tangled String, a sequence visualization tool based on the metaphor where contexts in a sequence are compared to tangled pills in a string, is here extended and diverted to detecting stocks that trigger changes in the market and to explaining the scenario of contextual shifts in the market. Here, the sequential data on the stocks of top 10 weekly increase rates in the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange for 12 years are visualized by Tangled String. The changing in the prices of stocks is a mixture of various timescales and can be explained in the time-scale set as desired by using TS. Also, it is found that the change points found by TS coincided by high precision with the real changes in each stock price. As TS has been created from the data-driven innovation platform called Innovators Marketplace on Data Jackets and is extended to satisfy data users, this paper is as evidence of the contribution of the market of data to data-driven innovations.Comment: 16 pages and 7 figures. The author started to write this paper as an extension of the paper [20] in the reference list, but the content came to be changed substantially, not by only minor extension but to a new pape

More Significance than Value: Explaining Developments in the Sino-Japanese Contest Over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands (August 2019)

The Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands are presently the focus of a dangerous contest between the People’s Republic of China and Japan, one that even now has the potential to spark a military conflict that could draw in the United States. How has this come about? Whether seen from a strategic, economic, or historical perspective, the value of the islands does not appear to merit the risks of such a contest. Consequently, what has driven the escalation is not anything particular to the islands themselves, but rather the increasing symbolic stakes attached to them, their role within the domestic politics of both sides, and the measures each side has taken to shore up its respective claims.LBJ School of Public Affair

Algorithmic Jim Crow

This Article contends that current immigration- and security-related vetting protocols risk promulgating an algorithmically driven form of Jim Crow. Under the “separate but equal” discrimination of a historic Jim Crow regime, state laws required mandatory separation and discrimination on the front end, while purportedly establishing equality on the back end. In contrast, an Algorithmic Jim Crow regime allows for “equal but separate” discrimination. Under Algorithmic Jim Crow, equal vetting and database screening of all citizens and noncitizens will make it appear that fairness and equality principles are preserved on the front end. Algorithmic Jim Crow, however, will enable discrimination on the back end in the form of designing, interpreting, and acting upon vetting and screening systems in ways that result in a disparate impact

Building National Forest and Land-Use Information Systems: Lessons from Cameroon, Indonesia, and Peru

This working paper examines the institutional, human resources, and financial capacities of three countries that have developed a forest and land-use information system, and highlights common enabling factors and challenges

Promoting Japan: One JET at a Time

There is broad recognition that the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program is an important project undertaken by the Government of Japan. Such assertions are based on raw numbers of participants, diplomatic and academic intuition, and collected anecdotes. There is, however, no publicly available research considering the JET Program as a public diplomacy endeavor evaluating what effects former participants attribute to the JET Program. This study presents a theory- and data-driven foundation on which to stake claims about JET as a public diplomacy program. Introducing original survey data collected by the author in 2011, this study evaluates the responses of more than 500 American JET Program alumni and begins shedding light on the value of JET as a long-term, government-sponsored, public diplomacy program