Fake News: Political Satire in the Age of President Trump

This thesis examines Donald Trump\u27s disruption of political satire. The history and format of the White House Correspondents\u27 Dinner provides a framework for understanding the shifting relationship between the president\u27s administration, the journalists who cover that administration, and political comedians. These three groups cross paths at the White House Correspondents\u27 Association\u27s annual dinner, which the president traditionally attends and where a headlining comedian entertains guests with a monologue. Trump\u27s decision to skip the Correspondents\u27 Dinner set the stage for a renegotiation of the traditional relationship between president, press, and performer. As President Trump continues to attack both journalists and late-night hosts, the two groups continue to discover common ground. The work of comedians looks increasingly like news reporting, and late-night shows have developed a format based on extensive research and journalistic storytelling. These comedians, however, insist they are only comedians, and dismiss the idea that they are responsible for any political outcomes. Controversy surrounding the 2018 Correspondents\u27 Dinner centered on this question of the role of comedy. Tracing the history of the 2006, 2011, and 2017 Correspondents\u27 Dinners provides a context for examining Michelle Wolfs consequential monologue at the 2018 Correspondents\u27 Dinner, which highlighted both the potential and the limitations of political satire in Donald Trump\u27s political world

Good versus Bad Deflation: Lessons from the Gold Standard Era

Deflation has had a bad rap, largely based on the experience of the 1930's when deflation was synonymous with depression. Recent experience with declining prices in Japan and China together with the concern over deflation in Europe and the United States has led to renewed attention to the topic of deflation. In this paper we focus our attention on the deflation experience of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany in the late nineteenth century during a period characterized by low deflation, rapid productivity growth, positive output growth, and where many nations had a credible nominal anchor based on gold: circumstances which have resonance with the world of today. We identify aggregate supply, aggregate demand, and money supply shocks using a structural panel vector autoregression. We then use historical decompositions to investigate the impact that these structural shocks had on output and prices. Our findings are that the deflation of the late nineteenth century reflected both positive aggregate supply shocks and negative money supply shocks. However, the negative money supply shocks had little effect on output. This we posit is because the aggregate supply curve was very steep in the short run during this period. This contrasts greatly with the deflation experience during the Great Depression. Thus our empirical evidence suggests that deflation in the nineteenth century was primarily good.

Distributed Queries for Quality Control Checks in Clinical Trials

Operational Quality Control (QC) checks are standard practice in clinical trials and ensure ongoing compliance with the study protocol, standard operating procedures (SOPs) and Good Clinical Practice (GCP). We present a method for defining QC checks as distributed queries over case report forms (CRF) and clinical imaging data- sources. Our distributed query system can integrate time-sensitive information in order to populate QC checks that can facilitate discrepancy resolution workflow in clinical trials

MIMO transmission equation

Journal ArticleMultiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) antenna systems such as the one depicted in Fig. 1 offer capacity benefits over their single-input, single-output (SISO) counterparts [1], thus attracting considerable current research. MIMO performance depends on a wide range of parameters [1] including radiation efficiency, correlation [2], mutual coupling [3], matching efficiency and polarization misalignment [4]. No single simulation method has been described that includes each of these effects so critical to handset array designs. This work synthesizes a comprehensive model to incorporate each of these effects. In order to manage the complexity of such a model, the MIMO Transmission Equation is introduced-similar to the well-known Friis Transmission Equation

Deviational simulation of phonon transport in graphene ribbons with ab initio scattering

We present a deviational Monte Carlo method for solving the Boltzmann-Peierls equation with ab initio 3-phonon scattering, for temporally and spatially dependent thermal transport problems in arbitrary geometries. Phonon dispersion relations and transition rates for graphene are obtained from density functional theory calculations. The ab initio scattering operator is simulated by an energy-conserving stochastic algorithm embedded within a deviational, low-variance Monte Carlo formulation. The deviational formulation ensures that simulations are computationally feasible for arbitrarily small temperature differences, while the stochastic treatment of the scattering operator is both efficient and exhibits no timestep error. The proposed method, in which geometry and phonon-boundary scattering are explicitly treated, is extensively validated by comparison to analytical results, previous numerical solutions and experiments. It is subsequently used to generate solutions for heat transport in graphene ribbons of various geometries and evaluate the validity of some common approximations found in the literature. Our results show that modeling transport in long ribbons of finite width using the homogeneous Boltzmann equation and approximating phonon-boundary scattering using an additional homogeneous scattering rate introduces an error on the order of 10% at room temperature, with the maximum deviation reaching 30% in the middle of the transition regime.Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and TechnologyAmerican Society for Engineering Education. National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate FellowshipNational Science Foundation (U.S.). Graduate Research Fellowshi

The Lessons from the Banking Panics in the United States in the 1930s for the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008

In this paper we revisit the debate over the role of the banking panics in 1930-33 in precipitating the Great Contraction. The issue hinges over whether the panics were illiquidity shocks and hence in support of Friedman and Schwartz (1963) greatly exacerbated the recession which had begun in 1929, or whether they largely reflected insolvency in response to the recession caused by other forces. Based on a VAR and new data on the sources of bank failures in the 1930s from Richardson (2007), we find that illiquidity shocks played a key role in explaining the bank failures during the Friedman and Schwartz banking panic windows. In the recent crisis the Federal Reserve learned the Friedman and Schwartz lesson from the banking panics of the 1930s of conducting expansionary open market policy to meet demands for liquidity. Unlike the 1930s the deepest problem of the recent crisis was not illiquidity but insolvency and especially the fear of insolvency of counterparties.

Lightweight distributed XML-based integration of translational data

A distributed XQuery engine sends sub queries to separate XML data sources, and then combines the results into a single XML composite result. The system is lightweight in that it is very simple to add a new data source. An illustrative example is given for integrating data from an electronic data capture (EDC) system and a separate specimen management system

Decoherence suppression via environment preparation

To protect a quantum system from decoherence due to interaction with its environment, we investigate the existence of initial states of the environment allowing for decoherence-free evolution of the system. For models in which a two-state system interacts with a dynamical environment, we prove that such states exist if and only if the interaction and self-evolution Hamiltonians share an eigenstate. If decoherence by state preparation is not possible, we show that initial states minimizing decoherence result from a delicate compromise between the environment and interaction dynamics.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Phased Array Feed Calibration, Beamforming and Imaging

Phased array feeds (PAFs) for reflector antennas offer the potential for increased reflector field of view and faster survey speeds. To address some of the development challenges that remain for scientifically useful PAFs, including calibration and beamforming algorithms, sensitivity optimization, and demonstration of wide field of view imaging, we report experimental results from a 19 element room temperature L-band PAF mounted on the Green Bank 20-Meter Telescope. Formed beams achieved an aperture efficiency of 69% and system noise temperature of 66 K. Radio camera images of several sky regions are presented. We investigate the noise performance and sensitivity of the system as a function of elevation angle with statistically optimal beamforming and demonstrate cancelation of radio frequency interference sources with adaptive spatial filtering.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figure