The Ebb and Flow of Fiscal Activism

During the last quarter of the 20th Century, the conventional wisdom prevailing in academic, political and financial circles was definitely against government deficits. At the turn of the century, however, a substantial recourse to deficit spending practices in the United States reopened the debate on the usefulness of countercyclical fiscal policies. This essay discusses the main contents of this debate, reviewing the contributions to various symposiums held at a number of U.S. Federal Reserve Banks. A comparison with the views on this issue prevailing in Europe is also provided

Philosophy of Music Education

A philosophy of music education refers to the value of music, the value of teaching music, and how to practically utilize those values in the music classroom. This thesis explores the philosophies of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, Carl Orff, Zoltan Kodaly, Bennett Reimer, and David Elliott, and suggests practical applications or their philosophies in the orchestral classroom, especially in the context of ear training and improvisation. From these philosophies, the author develops their own personal philosophy of music education, most broadly defined by the claim that music is key to experiencing and understanding feelingful experiences

Top-Down Skiplists

We describe todolists (top-down skiplists), a variant of skiplists (Pugh 1990) that can execute searches using at most $\log_{2-\varepsilon} n + O(1)$ binary comparisons per search and that have amortized update time $O(\varepsilon^{-1}\log n)$. A variant of todolists, called working-todolists, can execute a search for any element $x$ using $\log_{2-\varepsilon} w(x) + o(\log w(x))$ binary comparisons and have amortized search time $O(\varepsilon^{-1}\log w(w))$. Here, $w(x)$ is the "working-set number" of $x$. No previous data structure is known to achieve a bound better than $4\log_2 w(x)$ comparisons. We show through experiments that, if implemented carefully, todolists are comparable to other common dictionary implementations in terms of insertion times and outperform them in terms of search times.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

Time-Space Trade-Offs for Computing Euclidean Minimum Spanning Trees

In the limited-workspace model, we assume that the input of size $n$ lies in a random access read-only memory. The output has to be reported sequentially, and it cannot be accessed or modified. In addition, there is a read-write workspace of $O(s)$ words, where $s \in \{1, \dots, n\}$ is a given parameter. In a time-space trade-off, we are interested in how the running time of an algorithm improves as $s$ varies from $1$ to $n$. We present a time-space trade-off for computing the Euclidean minimum spanning tree (EMST) of a set $V$ of $n$ sites in the plane. We present an algorithm that computes EMST$(V)$ using $O(n^3\log s /s^2)$ time and $O(s)$ words of workspace. Our algorithm uses the fact that EMST$(V)$ is a subgraph of the bounded-degree relative neighborhood graph of $V$, and applies Kruskal's MST algorithm on it. To achieve this with limited workspace, we introduce a compact representation of planar graphs, called an $s$-net which allows us to manipulate its component structure during the execution of the algorithm

Prosperity Threatened: Perspectives on Childhood Poverty in California

By the official measure, 6.1 million Californians are living in poverty -- more than at any point since the US Census started tracking state poverty. California has the highest sheer number of people living in poverty of any state in the nation and is ranked 20th among all states in terms of the percentage of its population living in official poverty. Yet, even more alarming, using the Supplementary Poverty Measure (SPM) developed by the Census Bureau, the poverty rate in California vaults to the first in the nation at 23.5 percent. Only Hawaii and the District of Columbia come close to matching the rate of poverty in the state. On closer inspection, the situation becomes grimmer: California's children are by far the biggest victims of increased poverty. More than one in five children in California lives in poverty; nearly half live either in poverty or perilously close to it. And, in a surprising twist, children live in poverty at twice the rate of seniors in the state. This is concerning not only due to the immediate effects of income deprivation, such as decreased health outcomes, but also because poverty is mobile across generations. According to a recent study from Columbia University's National Center for Children in poverty, 45 percent of people who spent half their childhoods in poverty were also poor as adults