Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of U.S. Consumer Identity

For most people in the United States, war is almost always elsewhere. Since the Civil War, declared wars have been engaged on terrains at a distance from the continental space of the nation. Until the attacks on the World Trade towers and the Pentagon in September 2001, many people in the United States perceived war to be conflicts between the standing armies of nation-states conducted at least a border—if not oceans and continents—away. Even the attacks of September 11 were localized in such a way as to feel as remote as they were immediate—watching cable news from elsewhere in the country, most U.S. residents were brought close to scenes of destruction and death by the media rather than by direct experience. Thus, in the United States, we could be said to be "consumers" of war, since our gaze is almost always fixed on representations of war that come from places perceived to be remote from the heartland

Stochastic Neural Networks with the Weighted Hebb Rule

Neural networks with synaptic weights constructed according to the weighted Hebb rule, a variant of the familiar Hebb rule, are studied in the presence of noise(finite temperature), when the number of stored patterns is finite and in the limit that the number of neurons $N\rightarrow \infty$. The fact that different patterns enter the synaptic rule with different weights changes the configuration of the free energy surface. For a general choice of weights not all of the patterns are stored as {\sl global} minima of the free energy function. However, as for the case of the usual Hebb rule, there exists a temperature range in which only the stored patterns are minima of the free energy. In particular, in the presence of a single extra pattern stored with an appropriate weight in the synaptic rule, the temperature at which the spurious minima of the free energy are eliminated is significantly lower than for a similar network without this extra pattern. The convergence time of the network, together with the overlaps of the equilibria of the network with the stored patterns, can thereby be improved considerably.Comment: 14 pages, OKHEP 93-00

Evaluating phonological status : significance of paradigm uniformity vs. prosodic group effects

A central concern of linguistic phonetics is to define criteria for determining the phonological status of sounds or sound properties observed in phonetic surface form. Based on acoustic measurements we show that the occurrence of syllabic sonorants vs. schwa-sonorant sequences in German is determined exclusively by segmental and prosodic structure, with no paradigm uniformity effects. We argue that these findings are consistent with a uniform representation of syllabic sonorants as schwa sonorant sequences in the lexicon. The stability of schwa in CVC-suffixes (e.g. the German diminutive suffix -chen), as opposed to its phonetic absence in a segmentally comparable underived context, is argued to be conditioned by the prosodic organisation of such suffixes external to the phonological word of the stem

Informative experimentation in intuitive science: Children select and learn from their own causal interventions.

We investigated whether children preferentially select informative actions and make accurate inferences from the outcome of their own interventions in a causal learning task. Four- to six-year-olds were presented with a novel system composed of gears that could operate according to two possible causal structures (single or multiple cause). Given the choice between interventions (i.e., removing one of the two gears to observe the remaining gear in isolation), children demonstrated a clear preference for the action that revealed the true causal structure, and made subsequent causal judgments that were consistent with the outcome observed. Experiment 2 addressed the possibility that performance was driven by children's tendency to select an intervention that would produce a desirable effect (i.e., spinning gears), rather than to disambiguate the causal structure. These results replicate our initial findings in a context in which the informative action was less likely to produce a positive outcome than the uninformative one. Experiment 3 serves as a control demonstrating that children's success in the previous experiments is not due to their use of low-level strategies. We discuss these findings in terms of their significance for understanding the development of scientific reasoning and the role of self-directed actions in early causal learning

Gender Equality in the US Labor Markets in the "Great Recession" of 2007-2010

The "Great Recession" of 2007-2009, the worst economic downturn faced by the U.S. economy since the Great Depression, has also come to be known as the "Great Man-cession" in that job loss hit males harder than females. By contrast, this paper argues that the "man-cession" story is far too simple. Using a broad range of indicators from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and taking a historical perspective, we show that several demographic groups have been especially hard hit by the recession, including African American males and females, Hispanic males and females, young females, and families maintained by single women. In addition, the gender gap in unemployment is much smaller once underemployed and marginally attached workers are counted. Data from the Current Employment Statistics cast further doubt on the man-cession story, indicating that women lost over 10 times more jobs in the current recession than in the previous two recessions compared to men, who lost 2.3 times more jobs. Following this review of the trends, the paper surveys federal and state government responses to the needs of workers hardest hit by the recession and concludes that "man-cession" label has led to misidentification of the most vulnerable groups who should be the explicit beneficiaries of economic recovery policies.Great Recession, men-cession, unemployment, gender, US labor market JEL Codes: J11, J16, J21

Income tax statistics analysis: A comparison of microsimulation versus group simulation

Microsimulation based on income tax statistics may be useful in tax reform discussions. Unfortunately, access to appropriate data is still rather restricted and expensive for ad-hoc analyses, and individual data is often even not available at all. In this paper we take Germany and its data situation as a proxy for many countries? restrictions in terms of tax data availability. Analyzing how much reliability and robustness of results we lose if we employ group simulation instead of microsimulation, we compare both methods. Investigating tax scale effects by the group model leads to very good results. Determining the financial effects of modified tax bases, the deviation from the microsimulation results increases, especially if tax base cuts vary between taxpayers. In addition, we take account of the class of taxpayers with a negative taxable income. Neglecting this class we identify a systematic underestimation of the financial consequences of a modified tax base with the group model assuming a progressive tax scale. If the group simulation data is not arranged according to the taxable income, but rather according to the total amount of income, we also find a tendency towards higher deviations from the microsimulation results. Quantifying the tax revenue effects of alternative tax settings the group simulation model represents a good compromise between the desire to capture the complex reality and the achievable accuracy when facing limited resources and data. Furthermore, for those cases in which group simulation is the appropriate tool, we provide a very simple method to interpolate a suitable income distribution and thereby the tax distribution within the classes. This interpolation makes future estimates of tax revenues a lot easier. We conclude that, although microsimulation in general is the superior approach, a group simulation model remains of interest, especially for analyses of rather old data and cross-country analyses, when sufficiently detailed data for micro analyses is missing.microsimulation; group simulation; tax revenue; personal income tax; tax statistics

Wealth tax as alternative minimum tax? The impact of a wealth tax on business structure and strategy

An alternative minimum tax (AMT) is often regarded as desirable. We analyze a wealth tax at corporate and personal level that is designed as an AMT as proposed by the German Green Party. This wealth tax is imputable to profit taxes and is hence intended to prevent multiple (multistage) taxation. Referring to data from annual reports and the German Central Bank we model enterprises of different structure, industry, size and legal status. We show that companies in the service sector which generally maintain rather high gearing rates are more frequently subjected to the wealth tax than capital intensive industries. This result runs counter to well-known effects of a common wealth tax. Capital intensive firms, e.g. in the metal industry, are levied with definitive wealth tax only if they have large loss carry-forwards or extremely volatile profits. Furthermore, partnerships often enjoy wealth tax privileges due to uniform taxation at individual level whereas corporations may suffer from the wealth tax at corporate and personal level caused by imputation backlogs. Obviously, the underlying AMT influences corporate dividend policy evoking a push-out effect. We prove that this kind of wealth taxation usually favors financial rather than real investment and encourages outbound investment. Consequently, introducing an AMT discriminates against many firms and investment projects, especially if economic income is lower than taxable income. This proves that whenever income is taxed correctly, AMT is dispensable. --alternative minimum tax,business strategy,investment decisions,wealth tax

Dual solid cryogens for spacecraft refrigeration Patent

Dual solid cryogens for spacecraft refrigeration insuring low temperature cooling for extended period