Monetary and Financial Integration in East Asia: The Relevance of European Experience

This report examines the process of economic and financial integration in East Asia in the light of Europe's experience. The report provides a comprehensive analysis of East Asian monetary and financial integration process (including a deep analysis of East Asia's response to the 1997-98 financial crisis), a comprehensive critical survey of the literature on monetary and financial integration in East Asia, and an assessment of the various initiatives undertaken in the region for financial cooperation and macroeconomic surveillance. Its aim is to evaluate the evolution of the last decade and to offer policy suggestions. The main policy recommendations concern essentially two areas: (i) how to promote the creation of a regional financial market in Asia and (ii) how to encourage cooperation and macroeconomic surveillance in the region. (Provisional version. The printed publication will be delayed until the final text is available).Regional Integration, Financial integration, Monetary cooperation, mutual surveillance, East Asia, European Monetary Union,Park, Wyplosz

Towards Assistive Feeding with a General-Purpose Mobile Manipulator

General-purpose mobile manipulators have the potential to serve as a versatile form of assistive technology. However, their complexity creates challenges, including the risk of being too difficult to use. We present a proof-of-concept robotic system for assistive feeding that consists of a Willow Garage PR2, a high-level web-based interface, and specialized autonomous behaviors for scooping and feeding yogurt. As a step towards use by people with disabilities, we evaluated our system with 5 able-bodied participants. All 5 successfully ate yogurt using the system and reported high rates of success for the system's autonomous behaviors. Also, Henry Evans, a person with severe quadriplegia, operated the system remotely to feed an able-bodied person. In general, people who operated the system reported that it was easy to use, including Henry. The feeding system also incorporates corrective actions designed to be triggered either autonomously or by the user. In an offline evaluation using data collected with the feeding system, a new version of our multimodal anomaly detection system outperformed prior versions.Comment: This short 4-page paper was accepted and presented as a poster on May. 16, 2016 in ICRA 2016 workshop on 'Human-Robot Interfaces for Enhanced Physical Interactions' organized by Arash Ajoudani, Barkan Ugurlu, Panagiotis Artemiadis, Jun Morimoto. It was peer reviewed by one reviewe

Effect of IRC Code 1031 on Texas Agricultural Land Price

In this paper, we examine the effect of Section 1031 tax deferred payment on Texas agricultural land price. To analyze the effects, we estimate the market equilibrium price function using the dynamic panel model and Texas agricultural land sales for 1965-2007. We argue that Section 1031 increases both demand and supply of agricultural land by its tax reducing effect. Our empirical estimation shows that Section 1031 decreases the market price which means the supply curve shifted to the right more than the demand curve.Land Economics/Use,

Plastic deformations in mechanically strained single-walled carbon nanotubes

Antiferromagnetic manipulation was used to controllably stretch individual metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNT's). We have found that SWNT's can sustain elongations as great as 30% without breaking. Scanned gate microscopy and transport measurements were used to probe the effects of the mechanical strain on the SWNT electronic properties, which revealed a strain-induced increase in intra-tube electronic scattering above a threshold strain of ~5–10 %. These findings are consistent with theoretical calculations predicting the onset of plastic deformation and defect formation in carbon nanotubes