Securities Transaction Taxes for U.S. Financial Markets

This paper examines the viability of security transaction excise taxes (STETs) as one policy tool for promoting a more stable financial environment, specifically with respect to the U.S. economy. Contrary to a large recent critical literature, we show that a STET can be designed without creating large distortions between segments of the financial market. We also show that a modest STET for the U.S.—beginning with a 0.5 percent tax on equity trades and scaled appropriately for other financial instruments—would generate substantial new government revenues, on the order of $100 billion per year.Financial Market; Securities

Securities Transaction Taxes for U.S. Financial Markets

This paper examines the viability of security transaction excise taxes (STETs) as one policy tool for promoting a more stable financial environment, specifically with respect to the U.S. economy. Contrary to a large recent critical literature, we show that a STET can be designed without creating large distortions between segments of the financial market. We also show that a modest STET for the U.S.—beginning with a 0.5 percent tax on equity trades and scaled appropriately for other financial instruments—would generate substantial new government revenues, on the order of $100 billion per year.

Field Trials to Determine the Efficacy of an Oral Plague Vaccine for Prairie Dogs

North American prairie dogs (Cynomys spp.) and black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes) have been severely affected by plague, an exotic zoonotic disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis during the last 100 years.  Plague has contributed to population declines of prairie dogs, near extinction of black-footed ferrets, and has caused human illness and fatalities.  An oral sylvatic plague vaccine (SPV) developed and tested jointly by the U.S. Geological Survey, National Wildlife Health Center and University of Wisconsin (Madison, WI) shows great promise as an effective, pre-emptive method for controlling plague in prairie dogs.  Field trials to evaluate the efficacy of SPV were initiated in 2013 and include 4 species of prairie dogs on study areas in 7 states, including Montana.  This presentation is a status report after the second year of a planned 4 year study.  The primary objectives are to measure vaccine/bait uptake and to assess prairie dog survival rates at paired study sites, with and without vaccine application.  At the north-central Montana study site, about 8,000 baits, half with SPV and half placebos, were distributed across 5 pairs of study sites (totaling 81 ha) in 2013 and over 13,000 in 2014 on the same 5 pairs of study sites (totaling 107 ha).  In addition to ear tagging and microchip-marking each individual, flea, hair, whisker and blood samples were collected each year.  A total of 584 individual prairie dogs were marked during 929 capture events in 2013 and 814 individuals during 1,293 capture events in 2014

Lilly Endowment Annual Report 2020

While living through the challenges of two world wars and the Great Depression, Lilly Endowment founders, J.K. Lilly Sr. and his sons, Eli and J.K. Jr., dedicated themselves and their company to helping meet the immediate needs of their employees, community and country while they continued to plan and build for the future. During the past extraordinarily challenging year, the Endowment attempted to follow their example by working to help meet various urgent needs in our city, state and country arising from the COVID-19 pandemic while continuing to help build brighter futures for individuals, families, organizations and communities through our ongoing grantmaking in community development, education and religion, the areas of focus established by our founders when they created the Endowment in 1937.The Endowment's COVID-19-related grantmaking in 2020, which totaled nearly $208 million, supported the inspirational efforts of hundreds of organizations that worked diligently to help meet urgent needs in Indianapolis, throughout Indiana and across the nation. This grantmaking also included funding for several organizations to make pandemic-related adjustments needed to continue to operate their important programs safely.This annual report also highlights other grants the Endowment approved in 2020 that support promising endeavors to build brighter, more prosperous futures for young children and college students in Indiana and that enhance the future vitality of the community of Indianapolis and communities throughout the state, as well as congregations and seminaries around the country

The HR 4796A Debris System: Discovery of Extensive Exo-Ring Dust Material

The optically and IR bright, and starlight-scattering, HR 4796A ring-like debris disk is one of the most (and best) studied exoplanetary debris systems. The presence of a yet-undetected planet has been inferred (or suggested) from the narrow width and inner/outer truncation radii of its r = 1.05" (77 au) debris ring. We present new, highly sensitive, Hubble Space Telescope (HST) visible-light images of the HR 4796A circumstellar debris system and its environment over a very wide range of stellocentric angles from 0.32" (23 au) to ~ 15" (1100 au). These very high contrast images were obtained with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) using 6-roll PSF-template subtracted coronagraphy suppressing the primary light of HR 4796A and using three image plane occulters and simultaneously subtracting the background light from its close angular proximity M2.5V companion. The resulting images unambiguously reveal the debris ring embedded within a much larger, morphologically complex, and bi-axially asymmetric exoring scattering structure. These images at visible wavelengths are sensitive to, and map, the spatial distribution, brightness, and radial surface density of micron size particles over 5 dex in surface brightness. These particles in the exo-ring environment may be unbound from the system and interacting with the local ISM. Herein we present a new morphological and photometric view of the larger than prior seen HR 4796A exoplanetary debris system with sensitivity to small particles at stellocentric distances an order of magnitude greater than has previously been observed.Comment: 28 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal 21 December 201

Label-driven weakly-supervised learning for multimodal deformable image registration

Spatially aligning medical images from different modalities remains a challenging task, especially for intraoperative applications that require fast and robust algorithms. We propose a weakly-supervised, label-driven formulation for learning 3D voxel correspondence from higher-level label correspondence, thereby bypassing classical intensity-based image similarity measures. During training, a convolutional neural network is optimised by outputting a dense displacement field (DDF) that warps a set of available anatomical labels from the moving image to match their corresponding counterparts in the fixed image. These label pairs, including solid organs, ducts, vessels, point landmarks and other ad hoc structures, are only required at training time and can be spatially aligned by minimising a cross-entropy function of the warped moving label and the fixed label. During inference, the trained network takes a new image pair to predict an optimal DDF, resulting in a fully-automatic, label-free, real-time and deformable registration. For interventional applications where large global transformation prevails, we also propose a neural network architecture to jointly optimise the global- and local displacements. Experiment results are presented based on cross-validating registrations of 111 pairs of T2-weighted magnetic resonance images and 3D transrectal ultrasound images from prostate cancer patients with a total of over 4000 anatomical labels, yielding a median target registration error of 4.2 mm on landmark centroids and a median Dice of 0.88 on prostate glands.Comment: Accepted to ISBI 201

Lilly Endowment Annual Report 2018

Each year, we publish an annual report to share in-depth stories about the work of our grantees in religion, community development, and education and youth programs. The publication also offers a list of grants made that year and a thorough financial report

Degradation Studies of Cyanex 301

International audienceDespite the numerous studies found in the literature on CYANEX® 301, very few explain its degradation in depth. To the best of our knowledge none has explained the inconsistency between the “common knowledge” of “CYANEX® 301 degrades into CYANEX® 272” (dithiophosphinic acid degrading into the corresponding phosphinic acid) and the 31P spectrum obtained by NMR of the degradation compound. The 31P {1H} NMR analysis of a solution of CYANEX® 301 in prolonged contact with nitric acid shows a very complex spectrum, with resonances about 20 ppm downfield from what could have been expected.The degradation product giving those multiple resonances in a pattern that could be interpreted as a triplet of triplet is actually a dimer, where two molecules of CYANEX® 301 are linked by a disulfide bridge, corresponding to the condensation of the SH groups. The explanation of the complexity of the spectrum comes from the comparison with the spectrum obtained for the degradation of a stereoisomerically-purified CYANEX® 301. This purification led to the removal of the [R;S] and [S;R] isomers from the initial mixture, and yielded a white crystalline solid proven to comprise exclusively [R;R] and [S;S] isomers by XRD analysis. It was determined that the carbon chirality induced an asymmetry of the phosphorus atoms upon condensation, leading to a wide combination of magnetically non-equivalent P-31 nuclei, which can also exhibit coupling through the S-S bond The complete explanation of the NMR spectra was established and corroborated by elemental analysi