Money and Credit Factors

The authors introduce new measures of important underlying macroeconomic phenomena that affect the financial side of the economy. These measures are calculated using the time-series factor analysis (TSFA) methodology introduced in Gilbert and Meijer (2005). The measures appear to be both more interesting and more robust to the effects of financial innovations than traditional aggregates. The general ideas set out in Gilbert and Pichette (2003) are pursued, but the improved estimation methods of TSFA are used. Furthermore, four credit aggregates are added to the components of the monetary aggregates, resulting in the possibility of extracting more common factors.Credit and credit aggregates; Monetary aggregates; Econometric and statistical methods

The Dhow as cultural icon

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 258A person strolling through Zanzibar’s historic Stone Town would hardly be able to walk ten minutes without running into a dhow reference of some sort. There is a Dhow Palace Hotel that was, until the opening of the Serena, the island’s most posh hotel. There are “Dhow” restaurants. Shops catering to tourists sell dhow tee shirts and post cards and models of dhows exhibiting varying degrees of workmanship. One of the dive shops takes its customers out in a motor dhow. The new House of Wonders Museum has as its centerpiece a full size dhow, which is surrounded by numerous models of other vessels and displays about the history of maritime trade in East Africa. The biggest cultural event of the year in Zanzibar is the Dhow Countries Festival, a cultural event that includes music, dance, visual arts, and films that derive from the countries of the western Indian Ocean rim. Farther north in the Kenyan city of Mombassa, the Tamarind Restaurant runs a nightly cruise around the harbor in a dhow that has been fitted out as a floating restaurant. Tourists in Mombassa often visit the dhow harbor. On the island of Lamu the preferred way to get to the beach is to hire a small dhow to carry you across to the island of Manda, where you can have a drink at the Manda Beach Club whose bar (Fig. 1) is inside the hull of a dismasted dhow set in concrete. [TRUNCATED

The swell and crash of ska\u27s first wave : a historical analysis of reggae\u27s predecessors in the evolution of Jamaican music

This capstone explores the history of musical forms preceeding reggae in the evolution of Jamaican musical forms. The aim is to establish the historical and cultural factors that led to ska\u27s creation, rise and fall in popularity, and cultural significance through its first wave in Jamaica

Correction for Gonzalez et al., "Migraines Are Correlated with Higher Levels of Nitrate-, Nitrite-, and Nitric Oxide-Reducing Oral Microbes in the American Gut Project Cohort".

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1128/mSystems.00105-16.]

Wormwholes: a commentary on K. F. Schaffner's "Genes, behavior, and developmental emergentism

Journal ArticleAlthough Caenorhabditis elegans was chosen and modified to be an organism that would facilitate a reductionist program for neurogenetics, recent research has provided evidence for properties that are emergent from the neurons. While neurogenetic advances have been made using C elegans which may be useful in explaining human neurobiology, there are severe limitations on C. elegans to explain any significant human behavior

Migraines Are Correlated with Higher Levels of Nitrate-, Nitrite-, and Nitric Oxide-Reducing Oral Microbes in the American Gut Project Cohort.

Nitrates, such as cardiac therapeutics and food additives, are common headache triggers, with nitric oxide playing an important role. Facultative anaerobic bacteria in the oral cavity may contribute migraine-triggering levels of nitric oxide through the salivary nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide pathway. Using high-throughput sequencing technologies, we detected observable and significantly higher abundances of nitrate, nitrite, and nitric oxide reductase genes in migraineurs versus nonmigraineurs in samples collected from the oral cavity and a slight but significant difference in fecal samples. IMPORTANCE Recent work has demonstrated a potentially symbiotic relationship between oral commensal bacteria and humans through the salivary nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide pathway (C. Duncan et al., Nat Med 1:546-551, 1995, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nm0695-546). Oral nitrate-reducing bacteria contribute physiologically relevant levels of nitrite and nitric oxide to the human host that may have positive downstream effects on cardiovascular health (V. Kapil et al., Free Radic Biol Med 55:93-100, 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.freeradbiomed.2012.11.013). In the work presented here, we used 16S rRNA Illumina sequencing to determine whether a connection exists between oral nitrate-reducing bacteria, nitrates for cardiovascular disease, and migraines, which are a common side effect of nitrate medications (U. Thadani and T. Rodgers, Expert Opin Drug Saf 5:667-674, 2006, http://dx.doi.org/10.1517/14740338.5.5.667)

Scaling Ant Colony Optimization with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Partitioning

This paper merges hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) with ant colony optimization (ACO) to produce a HRL ACO algorithm capable of generating solutions for large domains. This paper describes two specific implementations of the new algorithm: the first a modification to Dietterich’s MAXQ-Q HRL algorithm, the second a hierarchical ant colony system algorithm. These implementations generate faster results, with little to no significant change in the quality of solutions for the tested problem domains. The application of ACO to the MAXQ-Q algorithm replaces the reinforcement learning, Q-learning, with the modified ant colony optimization method, Ant-Q. This algorithm, MAXQ-AntQ, converges to solutions not significantly different from MAXQ-Q in 88% of the time. This paper then transfers HRL techniques to the ACO domain and traveling salesman problem (TSP). To apply HRL to ACO, a hierarchy must be created for the TSP. A data clustering algorithm creates these subtasks, with an ACO algorithm to solve the individual and complete problems. This paper tests two clustering algorithms, k-means and G-means. The results demonstrate the algorithm with data clustering produces solutions 20 times faster with 5-10% decrease in solution quality due to the effects of clustering

Efficient Circuit-Level Implementation of Knuth-Based Balanced and Nearly-Balanced Codes

Coding schemes are often used in high-speed processor-processor or processor-memory busses in digital systems. In particular, we have introduced (in a 2012 DesignCon paper) a zero sum (ZS) signaling method which uses balanced or nearly-balanced coding to reduce simultaneous switching noise (SSN) in a single-ended bus to a level comparable to that of differential signaling. While several balanced coding schemes are known, few papers exist that describe the necessary digital hardware implementations of (known) balanced coding schemes, and no algorithms had previously been developed for nearly-balanced coding. In this work, we extend a known balanced coding scheme to accommodate nearly-balanced coding and demonstrate a range of coding and decoding circuits through synthesis in 65 nm CMOS. These hardware implementations have minimal impact on the energy efficiency and area when compared to current serializer/deserializers (SerDes) at clock rates which would support SerDes integration.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, DesignCon 201