Do Fixed Exchange Rates Fetter Monetary Policy? A Credit View

The Bernanke-Blinder credit-view model is expanded to encompass a small, open economy with fixed exchange rates. In contrast to conventional wisdom and traditional models, monetary policy is resurrected as a stabilization tool. We show that various financial sector shocks have real aggregate demand effects. Further, we demonstrate that independent monetary policy actions can have substantive impacts on aggregate demand despite perfect capital mobility in bond markets and adherence to a fixed exchange rate regime as long as bank loans are imperfectly mobile.

Using “Evil” to Combat “Evil”: The Regulation of Prostitution in Renaissance Florence

In accordance with the general opinions towards women at the time, the establishment of the Office of Decency (known as the Onestá) in Florence, Italy during the Renaissance served to dehumanize the women participating in the profession. While many argue that the Florentine Onestá was established to preserve the city’s image, the ultimate intention of the ordinances was to use women as tools to regulate male behavior. Drawing on the remaining ordinances established by the Onestá as primary source material, this paper identifies the utilization of prostitutes to restrict the defiling of “virtuous” women by men through regulations on attire and residence, as well reduce homosexual behavior by encouraging the exploration of heterosexual desires through available prostitution. With the dissolution of the Onestá in the seventeenth century and the resulting criminalization of prostitution, the negative societal beliefs associated with prostitution have persisted into modern day

Recent simulation methods for resolving molecular details in thermodynamics and kinetics

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are increasingly powerful tools for augmented thinking about molecular-level phenomena and their links to macroscopic properties. Fundamentally, MD propagates atomic positions and velocities by numerical integration of equations of motion subject to forces representing interatomic interactions. Unfortunately, even with present day computational power, it is nearly impossible to directly observe phenomena that have natural timescales of greater than about a microsecond or length scales greater than a few tens of nanometers using MD. This is because the ceaseless thermal agitation resolved by MD only very rarely and unpredictably rectifies itself along productive directions in some more macroscopically meaningful variable space. Our group is devoted to overcoming this issue with novel methods that provide access to these “rare events” with the ultimate aim being a full description of the equilibrium distributions and transition rates in some state space of interest. In this talk, I will highlight the development and application of some of these modern MD techniques, including temperature-acceleration and Markovian milestoning. Applications to be touched on include ligand entry and exit kinetics in enzymes and transmembrane ion transport. I will close with some highlights of future directions in method developments that involve hybrid approaches

Expressiveness and Robustness of First-Price Position Auctions

Since economic mechanisms are often applied to very different instances of the same problem, it is desirable to identify mechanisms that work well in a wide range of circumstances. We pursue this goal for a position auction setting and specifically seek mechanisms that guarantee good outcomes under both complete and incomplete information. A variant of the generalized first-price mechanism with multi-dimensional bids turns out to be the only standard mechanism able to achieve this goal, even when types are one-dimensional. The fact that expressiveness beyond the type space is both necessary and sufficient for this kind of robustness provides an interesting counterpoint to previous work on position auctions that has highlighted the benefits of simplicity. From a technical perspective our results are interesting because they establish equilibrium existence for a multi-dimensional bid space, where standard techniques break down. The structure of the equilibrium bids moreover provides an intuitive explanation for why first-price payments may be able to support equilibria in a wider range of circumstances than second-price payments

A study of alteration associated with uranium occurrences in sandstone and its detection by remote sensing methods, volume 2

This document contains tabular and graphic data for volume 1

TM digital image products for applications

Computer compatible tapes (CCTs) of LANDSAT 4 thematic mapper (TM) digital image products are compared and reviewed. The following tape formats are discussed: (1) raw band-sequential data (CCT-BT); (2) calibrated data (CCT-AT); and (3) geometrically resampled data (CCT-PT). Each format represents different steps in the process of producing fully corrected TM data. The CCT-BT images are uncorrected radiometrically or geometrically, CCT-AT data are radiometrically calibrated, and CCT-PT images are both radiometrically and geometrically corrected

TM digital image products for applications

The image characteristics of digital data generated by LANDSAT 4 thematic mapper (TM) are discussed. Digital data from the TM resides in tape files at various stages of image processing. Within each image data file, the image lines are blocked by a factor of either 5 for a computer compatible tape CCT-BT, or 4 for a CCT-AT and CCT-PT; in each format, the image file has a different format. Nominal geometric corrections which provide proper geodetic relationships between different parts of the image are available only for the CCT-PT. It is concluded that detector 3 of band 5 on the TM does not respond; this channel of data needs replacement. The empty bin phenomenon in CCT-AT images results from integer truncations of mixed-mode arithmetric operations