Reforming The Cold War State: Economic Thought, Internationalization, And The Politics Of Soviet Reform, 1955-1985.

This dissertation explains how, as the USSR’s narrative of the Cold War shifted from the military-industrial competition envisioned by Stalin to Khrushchev’s “peaceful socioeconomic competition of the two systems,” economics began to tackle the challenge of transforming the Soviet economy from one focused on mobilization and production to one that could deliver well-being and abundance. Soviet economics changed from a field that only justified the state’s actions to a “science” whose practitioners could use their “expertise” to propose and critique domestic government policy. This opening allowed Soviet theorists to engage with the emerging issues of global economic interdependence and post-industrialism, which also challenged the post-war economic consensus in the West in the 1970s and the 1980s. Economists and scientists from East, West, and South created a transnational community gathered around institutions such as the United Nations, the Club of Rome, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) to adapt the institutions of the postwar state to the conditions of nascent globalization. By documenting these engagements, I challenge the prevailing historiographical narrative that so-called Soviet “liberals” “learned from the West” and instead show that reform-minded economists became equal partners in trans-European intellectual communities that hoped to reconcile the institutions of national economic planning to the conditions of globalization. I argue that to understand the politics of the post-Stalin USSR, one must understand the “Cold War Paradigm” in Soviet economic thought and policy making and how it allowed for the consolidation of a conservative hegemony under Brezhnev. Further, I suggest that despite fraying between 1985 and 1993, the conservative direction in economic thought continues to structure contemporary Russian and Post-Soviet politics. This work is based on primary research in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Archive of the Russian Academy of Science, the Russian State Archive of the Economy, the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, the Central Archive of the City of Moscow, the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, the Rockefeller Archive Center and the MIT Institute Archives and the Harvard University Archives

Laminated Object Manufacturing (LOM): A Simpler Process

With Laminated Object Manufacturing (LQM) process, three dimensional objects are manufactured by sequentially laminating and cUtting two-dimensional cross-sections. The.rnediumused.inLOMprocess isaQhesive-coatedsheet• materials.. As seen in Figure 1, the sheetmateria.l carries the adhesive either on one sideQr both sides, or it cQntains the adhesive ill itself, like woven composite material impregnated with bonding agent. The adhesive,which can be pre-coatedonto>material or be deposited prior to bonding, enables layers of sheet material to be attached to each other so as to construct a three-dimensional object.Mechanical Engineerin

The relationships between state-level economic policies, child maltreatment, and suicidal behavior and mortality.

Suicide has proven to be difficult to predict and prevent at the individual level,1–3 so much so that a recent analysis of individual risk assessments found a maximal positive predictive value of 5.5% for suicide death,2 and suicide continues to be a leading cause of death among adolescents age 10-19 years.4 By targeting modifiable risk factors at the population level, policy has the potential to extend our reach to people and subgroups that are missed by individual level interventions. This ecological study of adolescent suicide rates, state policies, and child maltreatment in US states from 2005-2019 and Kentucky counties from 2010-2019, combines secondary data from multiple databases to implement a mediation analysis and investigate whether the incidence rate of child maltreatment is a mediator between state policies promoting socioeconomic stability and rates of suicidal behavior among youth. No evidence of mediation is found in this analysis to support our primary hypothesis that child maltreatment rates acted as a mediator between state policy and suicidal mortality rates at the national level, nor is there evidence of mediation when investigating access to these programs at the county-level in Kentucky. At the national level, a generous state minimum wage and an increase in TANF access are associated with decreases in adolescent suicide mortality rates. However, despite previous work implicating child maltreatment as a significant risk factor for suicide mortality, the rate of child maltreatment is not significantly associated with the adolescent suicide rate. The results of this study also indicate a significant role for a refundable state EITC in the decrease of the child maltreatment rate. Shifting the focus to a population level decrease in suicidal behavior and mortality among children and adolescents in addition to effective individual level supports may be a positive strategy toward overall population health. State governments aiming to decrease expenditures by reducing economic benefits and weakening policies that support socioeconomic stability in the population may be failing to take advantage of the upstream prevention benefits for many well-established public health risks of economic insecurity

Parallel Bayesian Optimization of Agent-based Transportation Simulation

MATSim (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation Toolkit) is an open source large-scale agent-based transportation planning project applied to various areas like road transport, public transport, freight transport, regional evacuation, etc. BEAM (Behavior, Energy, Autonomy, and Mobility) framework extends MATSim to enable powerful and scalable analysis of urban transportation systems. The agents from the BEAM simulation exhibit 'mode choice' behavior based on multinomial logit model. In our study, we consider eight mode choices viz. bike, car, walk, ride hail, driving to transit, walking to transit, ride hail to transit, and ride hail pooling. The 'alternative specific constants' for each mode choice are critical hyperparameters in a configuration file related to a particular scenario under experimentation. We use the 'Urbansim-10k' BEAM scenario (with 10,000 population size) for all our experiments. Since these hyperparameters affect the simulation in complex ways, manual calibration methods are time consuming. We present a parallel Bayesian optimization method with early stopping rule to achieve fast convergence for the given multi-in-multi-out problem to its optimal configurations. Our model is based on an open source HpBandSter package. This approach combines hierarchy of several 1D Kernel Density Estimators (KDE) with a cheap evaluator (Hyperband, a single multidimensional KDE). Our model has also incorporated extrapolation based early stopping rule. With our model, we could achieve a 25% L1 norm for a large-scale BEAM simulation in fully autonomous manner. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first of its kind applied to large-scale multi-agent transportation simulations. This work can be useful for surrogate modeling of scenarios with very large populations.Comment: LOD'2022 (Nature Springer Computer Science Proceedings - LNCS