Current Accounts and Exchange Rates: A New Look at the Evidence

This paper 'goes back to basics' in empirical analysis of the J-Curve. First, we document strong violations in the distributional assumptions that underlie nearly all previous work on this issue. Second, we employ distribution-free, non-parametric statistical tests to characterize the data and summarize the key relationships between real exchange rates, the current account, and real GDP. We find some (weak) evidence of a J-Curve in the data. Interestingly, however, we document that this evidence is not consistent with the standard theoretical explanation of the J-Curve. Consequently, our empirical results pose a strong challenge for international economic theory.

The AMT: What’s Wrong and How to Fix It

The alternative minimum tax (AMT) is a complex, unfair, and inefficient shadow tax system that threatens to affect 32 million taxpayers by 2010, many of them solidly middle class. Under current law, repealing the AMT without offsets would cost more than $850 billion through 2017. This paper summarizes the current and projected effects of the AMT and considers options to finance repeal. One attractive option we consider would be to combine AMT repeal with a four percent tax on AGI in excess of$200,000 for married couples and $100,000 for others

The AMT: What’s Wrong and How to Fix It

The alternative minimum tax (AMT) is a complex, unfair, and inefficient shadow tax system that threatens to affect 32 million taxpayers by 2010, many of them solidly middle class. Under current law, repealing the AMT without offsets would cost more than $850 billion through 2017. This paper summarizes the current and projected effects of the AMT and considers options to finance repeal. One attractive option we consider would be to combine AMT repeal with a four percent tax on AGI in excess of$200,000 for married couples and $100,000 for others

Neural probabilistic motor primitives for humanoid control

We focus on the problem of learning a single motor module that can flexibly express a range of behaviors for the control of high-dimensional physically simulated humanoids. To do this, we propose a motor architecture that has the general structure of an inverse model with a latent-variable bottleneck. We show that it is possible to train this model entirely offline to compress thousands of expert policies and learn a motor primitive embedding space. The trained neural probabilistic motor primitive system can perform one-shot imitation of whole-body humanoid behaviors, robustly mimicking unseen trajectories. Additionally, we demonstrate that it is also straightforward to train controllers to reuse the learned motor primitive space to solve tasks, and the resulting movements are relatively naturalistic. To support the training of our model, we compare two approaches for offline policy cloning, including an experience efficient method which we call linear feedback policy cloning. We encourage readers to view a supplementary video ( https://youtu.be/CaDEf-QcKwA ) summarizing our results.Comment: Accepted as a conference paper at ICLR 201

Ariel - Volume 9 Number 3

Executive Editor Emily Wofford Business Manager Fredric Jay Matlin University News John Patrick Welch World News George Robert Coar Editorials Editor Steve Levine Features Mark Rubin Brad Feldstein Photo Rick Spaide Circulation Victor Onufreiczuk Lee Wugofski Graphics and Art Steve Hulkower Commons Editor Brenda Peterso

2013-2014 Chamber Music Palm Beach No. 3

https://spiral.lynn.edu/conservatory_otherseasonalconcerts/1011/thumbnail.jp

Age-dependent human beta cell proliferation induced by glucagon-like peptide 1 and calcineurin signaling

Inadequate pancreatic beta cell function underlies type 1 and type 2 diabetes mellitus. Strategies to expand functional cells have focused on discovering and controlling mechanisms that limit the proliferation of human beta cells. Here, we developed an engraftment strategy to examine age-associated human islet cell replication competence and reveal mechanisms underlying age-dependent decline of beta cell proliferation in human islets. We found that exendin-4 (Ex-4), an agonist of the glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor (GLP-1R), stimulates human beta cell proliferation in juvenile but not adult islets. This age-dependent responsiveness does not reflect loss of GLP-1R signaling in adult islets, since Ex-4 treatment stimulated insulin secretion by both juvenile and adult human beta cells. We show that the mitogenic effect of Ex-4 requires calcineurin/nuclear factor of activated T cells (NFAT) signaling. In juvenile islets, Ex-4 induced expression of calcineurin/NFAT signaling components as well as target genes for proliferation-promoting factors, including NFATC1, FOXM1, and CCNA1. By contrast, expression of these factors in adult islet beta cells was not affected by Ex-4 exposure. These studies reveal age-dependent signaling mechanisms regulating human beta cell proliferation, and identify elements that could be adapted for therapeutic expansion of human beta cells

Improved Efficiency and Throttling Range of the VX-200 Magnetoplasma Thruster

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140438/1/1.b34801.pd