Burst of Fall, A Painting by Alma Thomas

"Burst of Fall" is a 1968 painting by the Alma W. Thomas, and African-American woman painter of the Washington Color school. This brief note describes the circumstances of its origin and of its initial purchase. It includes as jpg image of the painting

Scientific Programming with Borland C++ Builder and Codegear's Turbo C++

This tutorial explains the use of Borland C++ Builder and Codegear Turbo C++ for writing Graphical User Interfaces for Windows for scientific, number-crunching applications. Drawing graphs and making help files are explained with examples

Velia and the Cilento, an Introduction

Material for students in a Study Abroad course beginning in Ascea, near Velia, in Southern Italy. It begins with the geological evolution of the Mediterranean and moves on to the prehistory of the area, the coming of the Greeks, the settlement of Elea = Velia, the Eleatic philosophers, the area in Roman times, and history up to the present, with special attention to the Consorzio Velia, which provides water to the area

Regress to Reveal

Assumptions for the validity of standard regression tests are often not met. The information contained in the test statistics, however, can often be transformed to give easily grasped, intuitively clear descriptive statistics whose usefulness is in no way dependent on those assumptions. Thus, valid marginal explanatory values (mexvals)can replace invalid t-statistics; valid loss limits can replace invalid standard errors. Regression can be usefully and honestly used to reveal relations in data instead of deceptively claiming to test hypotheses. Regress to reveal, not to test

A Brief Guide to C and C++ for Fortran or Basic Programmers

This paper introduces C and C++ programming for learners who already have some experience in another language such as Fortran or Basic. It explains basic syntax, dynamic space allocation, structures, classes, constructors and destructors, and overloading of operators. All concepts are illustrated with working programs

Inforum Models: Origin, Evolution, and By-ways Avoided

Inforum models combine input-output tables with econometric analysis in dynamic models in which the investment in each industry depends upon the growth of output in that industry. They have been built and used in a number of countries including the USA, Russia, Germany, Poland, Latvia, Austria, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Mexico, Colombia, China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam and perhaps others. They make extensive use of econometrics and input-output analysis to describe the functioning of an economy not only at a macroeconomic level but also at the level of individual products and industries. This paper records – somewhat autobiographically on the part of the author -- the beginnings of these models, outlines their evolution, defends them and other econometric models against the sweeping Lucas critique, and mentions some of the fads in economics and modeling which have been avoided for good reason

The Gwx Story

This is the story in tutorial form of the creation of a program, Gwx, for building economic models, both macroeconomic and multisectoral. The program closely resembles the G7 program. Like G7, it is written in C++ but it is built with free, open-source, cross-platform tools. There are many books about how to use some specific computer program but few about what was going on in the mind of the designer and programmer as the project evolved, as problems emerged and were solve. This is such a book. The program, Gwx, is designed to be used with the author's book, The Craft of Economic Modeling

The Craft of Economic Modeling

This book is a practical guide to building economic models, both macroeconomic and multisectoral. It uses free software available from the Internet together with regularly updated databanks including the quarterly national accounts of the United States. It does NOT deal with some recent fads in economic model building, such as Real Business Cycles, Computable General Equilibriium models, nor DSGE models, all of which are, in the author's opinion, "alternative reality" models at best