Paintings and their implicit presuppositions: High Renaissance and Mannerism

All art historians who are interested in questions of "styles" or "schools" agree in identifying a High Renaissance school of Italian painting. There is, however, a disagreement, which has seemed nonterminating, regarding Mannerism: Is it another distinct school or is it merely a late development of the Renaissance school? We believe that this disagreement can be terminated by distinguishing questions of fact about paintings from questions about the definitions of schools. To this end we have had two representative subsets of paintings--one earlier, one later--rated on four of the dimensions of implicit presuppositions that we have introduced in other Working Papers. When the paintings are scaled in this way a very distinct profile emerges for the earlier, or Renaissance, paintings. In contrast, the later, or Mannerist, paintings are so heterogeneous that we conclude that they are best described as deviations from the Renaissance profile, rather than a separate school. These results are not unimportant--at least for art historians. But they are more important methodologically inasmuch as the procedures applied here can be used in classifying and distinguishing from one another all kind of cultural products

Paintings and their implicit presuppositions : a preliminary report

In a series of earlier papers (Social Science Working Papers 350, 355. 357) we have studied the ways in which differences in "implicit presupposi tions" (i. e •• differences in world views) cause scientists and historians to reach differing conclusions from a consideration of the same evidence. In this paper we show that paintings are characterized by implicit presuppositions similar to those that characterize the written materials -- essays, letters, scientific papers -- we have already studied

An investigation of co-movements among the growth rates of the G-7 countries

Early in 2000, after a decade of economic expansion, growth began to slow simultaneously in the large, advanced economies known as the Group of Seven (G-7)--Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The general slide in GDP growth fueled speculation that a period was emerging in which broad movements in the economies of the industrialized countries would be more closely linked. Proponents of this view argued that greater trade in goods and financial markets was leading to a greater synchronization of national economies. A rise in the co-movement of GDP among countries would have important implications for the making of national economic policies. Governments, for example, would need to take closer account of forecasts for conditions abroad in formulating forecasts for their domestic economies. The authors find, first, that the degree to which enhanced trade and financial linkages might be expected to increase the co-movement, or correlation, of economic growth among countries is far from clear. Then, examining the period from 1970 to the first quarter of 2002, the authors find that, indeed, the estimated correlation of growth across the G-7 has been higher in the current downturn than during the expansion of the 1990s. Rather than signaling a future of permanently higher synchronization, however, the rise is shown to be typical of business cycles over the past thirty years. Furthermore, estimates of correlation have not yet reached the peaks attained after earlier recessions. Overall, despite many changes in the international economy, the evidence does not reveal the arrival of a permanently higher correlation of growth rates among the G-7.Group of Seven countries ; Economic development

Unemployment and Absenteeism Pension Effects for Low Income Workers

This study investigated the effects that expected absenteeism and unemployment, based on BLS and Census data, would have on the income and thus retirement contributions made into the OAI Social Security Retirement plan, and also into a private account, by a low-income worker. Low-income-worker is defined as one earning half the average annual wages subject to FICA taxes, or $17, 449 in the year 2004. Low income workers are reported to have significantly higher absenteeism and unemployment rates than do high income workers. The conclusion is that absenteeism and unemployment have about equal impacts on Social Security Retirement benefits and on savings into a private account. Low income workers opting for a combination of a private account and a corresponding reduction in contribution to and benefits from, Social Security Retirement, end up slightly ahead of the worker who stayed totally with the Social Security retirement plan

Viking '75 spacecraft design and test summary. Volume 1: Lander design

The Viking Mars program is summarized. The design of the Viking lander spacecraft is described

Design of a low cost earth resources system

The author has identified the following significant results. Survey results indicated that users of remote sensing data in the Southeastern U.S. were increasingly turning to digital processing techniques. All the states surveyed have had some involvement in projects using digitally processed data. Even those states which do not yet have in-house capabilities for digital processing were extremely interested in and were planning to develop such capabilities

Viking '75 spacecraft design and test summary. Volume 3: Engineering test summary

The engineering test program for the lander and the orbiter are presented. The engineering program was developed to achieve confidence that the design was adequate to survive the expected mission environments and to accomplish the mission objective

Microwave cavity-enhanced transduction for plug and play nanomechanics at room temperature

Nanomechanical resonators with increasingly high quality factors are enabled following recent insights into energy storage and loss mechanisms in nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). Consequently, efficient, non-dissipative transduction schemes are required to avoid the dominating influence of coupling losses. We present an integrated NEMS transducer based on a microwave cavity dielectrically coupled to an array of doubly-clamped pre-stressed silicon nitride beam resonators. This cavity-enhanced detection scheme allows resolving the resonators' Brownian motion at room temperature while preserving their high mechanical quality factor of 290,000 at 6.6 MHz. Furthermore, our approach constitutes an "opto"mechanical system in which backaction effects of the microwave field are employed to alter the effective damping of the resonators. In particular, cavity-pumped self-oscillation yields a linewidth of only 5 Hz. Thereby, an adjustement-free, all-integrated and self-driven nanoelectromechanical resonator array interfaced by just two microwave connectors is realised, potentially useful for applications in sensing and signal processing