Nominal GDP Targeting: A Policy Recommendation to Meet the Fed’s Dual Mandate

This paper was written in early December 2014 in response to the Federal Reserve Challenge Team’s argument for a regime change in the Federal Reserve to nominal GDP targeting as the appropriate policy to return the U.S. economy to long-term sustainable economic growth. After the 2007 recession, the FOMC took extraordinary measures to minimize the collateral damage caused by bank balance sheets weighed down with mortgage-backed securities and other below-investment grade assets. The periodic “stress tests” and use of emergency lending facilities were historically unprecedented, however, the economy six years later was still growing slowly in part due to market uncertainty with FOMC forward guidance policy. This paper argues that the Fed is justified in using a policy that risks short-term rapid inflation in order to meet the “dual mandate” of full employment and price stability, and to prevent cyclical unemployment in the economy from deteriorating into structural unemployment

Electronic instabilities in metal-insulator semiconductor devices

Electronic charge injection instability in silicon nitride metal-insulator-semiconductor device

Towards a relation extraction framework for cyber-security concepts

In order to assist security analysts in obtaining information pertaining to their network, such as novel vulnerabilities, exploits, or patches, information retrieval methods tailored to the security domain are needed. As labeled text data is scarce and expensive, we follow developments in semi-supervised Natural Language Processing and implement a bootstrapping algorithm for extracting security entities and their relationships from text. The algorithm requires little input data, specifically, a few relations or patterns (heuristics for identifying relations), and incorporates an active learning component which queries the user on the most important decisions to prevent drifting from the desired relations. Preliminary testing on a small corpus shows promising results, obtaining precision of .82.Comment: 4 pages in Cyber & Information Security Research Conference 2015, AC

Alien Registration- Bridges, Bessie R. (Mars Hill, Aroostook County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/34124/thumbnail.jp

Awareness, Education, and Prevention of Chronic Kidney Disease in the Older Adult

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) has become a major issue in our nation. Many of our neighbors, family, and friends have concerns and a call for our attention is necessary. CKD does not have a specific target, but individuals with diseases such as diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, and obesity are all at increased risk. Adults older than 65 years of age are especially at increased risk for developing CKD due to decrease in kidney function and other physiologic changes. In light of this, awareness, education, and prevention of CKD in the older adult population is important. The number of older individuals with a diagnosis from CKD is increasing, putting these older adults at risk for other chronic diseases and death. To address this issue, a sample of the older adults in central and northern Mississippi were given a survey to assess the number of older adults that were aware of CKD, its psychological and physical effects, and disease prevention. Approximately seventy older adults in central and northern Mississippi were given a survey to obtain data related to CKD awareness, education, and prevention

Delineating of the Utica Shale/Point Pleasant Formation Play System to Determine Influence of the Precambrian Basement in Northeastern Ohio

The Utica Shale/Point Pleasant Formation system has recently become a highly developed unconventional target for oil and natural gas production, leading to an increased desire for knowledge of the controls on deposition of this system. Precambrian basement features have long been known to affect deposition of older strata near these features across Ohio, but the effects of far field tectonics is not fully agreed upon. Precambrian faults and lineaments are known to exist and have been mapped, but are thought to have ceased their influence on deposition by the time of the Knox unconformity during the Cambrian. In the case of the Ordovician Utica Shale, Point Pleasant Formation, Trenton Limestone, and the Black River Group, many believe that the deposition of these strata were not affected by Precambrian faults/lineaments or other basement features, rather their main influence was changes in sea level due to basin loading, climatic changes, and localized uplift/subsidence. The objective of this study was to determine if the deposition of these younger strata were influenced by Precambrian faults and basement features. This was done by analyzing a group of oil and gas wells in Lorain, Cuyahoga Lake, Geauga, Ashtabula, Trumbull, Mahoning, Stark, Portage, Summit, Wayne, Ashland, and Medina counties in northeastern Ohio. Electric well logs from these wells were ii added to Petra, a geological mapping program, and the tops of the Utica Shale, Point Pleasant Formation, Trenton Limestone, and the Black River Group were picked. These tops were then contoured into four structure maps and 4 isopach thickness maps. These maps were analyzed with known Precambrian faults and lineaments, along with known Precambrian basement features, to determine if these Precambrian influences affected the deposition of these Ordovician strata. It is known that high spatial resolution structure maps show contour offsets across known and inferred structural features. It is also known that high spatial resolution isopach maps show thinning and thickening across known and inferred structural features. The purpose of this study was to take these methods and apply them to the Utica Shale/Point Pleasant Formation system in order to determine structural influence from the Precambrian basement on Ordovician strata in northeastern Ohio

A Coverage Study of the CMSSM Based on ATLAS Sensitivity Using Fast Neural Networks Techniques

We assess the coverage properties of confidence and credible intervals on the CMSSM parameter space inferred from a Bayesian posterior and the profile likelihood based on an ATLAS sensitivity study. In order to make those calculations feasible, we introduce a new method based on neural networks to approximate the mapping between CMSSM parameters and weak-scale particle masses. Our method reduces the computational effort needed to sample the CMSSM parameter space by a factor of ~ 10^4 with respect to conventional techniques. We find that both the Bayesian posterior and the profile likelihood intervals can significantly over-cover and identify the origin of this effect to physical boundaries in the parameter space. Finally, we point out that the effects intrinsic to the statistical procedure are conflated with simplifications to the likelihood functions from the experiments themselves.Comment: Further checks about accuracy of neural network approximation, fixed typos, added refs. Main results unchanged. Matches version accepted by JHE