The Impact of the Federal Reserve Bank's Open Market Operations

The Federal Reserve Bank has the ability to change the money supply and to shape the expectations of market participants through their open market operations. These operations may amount to 20% of the day's volume and are concentrated during the half hour known as `Fed Time'. Using previously unavailable data on open market operations, our paper provides the first comprehensive examination of the impact of the Federal Reserve Bank's trading on both fixed income instruments and foreign currencies. Our results detail a dramatic increase in volatility during Fed Time. Surprisingly, the Fed Time volatility is higher on days when open market operations are absent. In addition, little systematic differences in market impact are observed for reserve-draining versus reserve-adding operations. These results suggest that the financial markets correctly anticipate the purpose of open market operations but are unable to forecast the timing of the operations.

The Charitable Contributions Deduction: Federal Tax Rules

This article provides a succinct overview of the main federal income tax law rules affecting charitable contributions. his Article covers all principal topics, including: eligibility to receive deductible contributions, eligible gifts, the amount allowed as a deduction, the specific rules for gifts of non-cash property, contributions to certain split-interest trusts, substantiation rules, and valuation. his Article also touches on the estate and gift tax charitable deduction and provides a survey of select policy issues, including the rationale and form of the tax benefit, concerns about efficiency, the ability to deduct the appreciation in value of property, a non-itemizer deduction, and simplification

Simulation of arbitrary shaped boundaries for hemodynamic studies

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The Charitable Contributions Deduction: Federal Tax Rules

This article provides a succinct overview of the main federal income tax law rules affecting charitable contributions. his Article covers all principal topics, including: eligibility to receive deductible contributions, eligible gifts, the amount allowed as a deduction, the specific rules for gifts of non-cash property, contributions to certain split-interest trusts, substantiation rules, and valuation. his Article also touches on the estate and gift tax charitable deduction and provides a survey of select policy issues, including the rationale and form of the tax benefit, concerns about efficiency, the ability to deduct the appreciation in value of property, a non-itemizer deduction, and simplification

Letterkenny Army Depot: Finance Innovations Support Lean Six Sigma Success

As a result of significant dollar savings to the Army and U.S. taxpayers, Letterkenny Army Depot received widespread public recognition in 2005. The depot received a public sector Shingo Prize for applying Lean principles and tools to its PATRIOT missile system recapitalization program. While Letterkenny was Leaning its production systems, the depot implemented two innovative and effective financial incentive systems: one to reward employees, the other to reward customers. The reward systems were innovative because they occurred in a not-for-profit organization and effective because they motivated customers, employees, and unions to embrace Lean. First, the commander of Letterkenny Army Depot introduced a mechanism for immediately recognizing surplus Net Operating Results (“NOR”) funds generated by Lean savings. Rather than following prescribed budgeting procedures, Letterkenny made sixty percent of auditable surplus NOR available to customers within the current fiscal year. With Lean savings immediately put “back in customers’ hands”, the customers usually chose to repurchase Letterkenny services with their Lean savings checks. The additional services performed by the depot at essentially no cost to the customer provided combat-ready weapon systems to the Warfighter, over and above the quantities planned for the current fiscal year. The depot reinvested the balance of its NOR surpluses in improvements to its facilities and equipment, helping to promote Lean buy-in among civilian employees and their unions. Second, Letterkenny negotiated a revised process for awarding NOR-related bonus checks to its employees. To further promote Lean buy-in, the depot established a “threshold” approach to determine the size of the employee payments. Letterkenny awarded payouts of $200/employee for each$1 million increase in NOR, up to a maximum of $5 million. By reaching annual Lean-enabled NOR of at least$5 million each year, Letterkenny employees could and did receive annual bonus checks of $1,000 in three successive years. The case describes the organizational conditions leading to these innovations and the responses to them among its customers, unions and headquarters

Letterkenny Army Depot: The Army Teaches Business a Lesson in Lean Six Sigma

Letterkenny Army Depot: The Army Teaches Business a Lesson in Lean Six Sigma is a case study of Letterkenny Army Depot, one of five Army maintenance depots. Letterkenny recapitalizes missiles, HMMWV's, generators, and other equipment for the United States Army. Recapitalizing equipment means completely disassembling the system, cleaning and/or replacing every component, subcomponent and part, and reassembling and testing the equipment. Col. William Guinn was assigned as depot commander in July 2002 only to find the depot was in deep financial and operational trouble. Letterkenny had experienced an operating loss of $31 million on revenues of$120 million, work flows that were dysfunctional and inefficient, the highest hourly wage rates among all the depots, and an infrastructure that was badly in need of repair. Additionally, the depot faced possible closing by the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission in 2005. This case documents Col. Guinn’s Lean Six Sigma deployment at Letterkenny Army Depot from 2002 to 2005. Using the principles and tools of Lean, Letterkenny’s commander, senior leaders, managers, and employees successfully transformed the depot from the Army’s worst to its best performing depot in terms of productivity and cost efficiency. Three years after the depot’s Lean journey began, the 2005 BRAC Commission not only recommended keeping Letterkenny open, but also assigned it additional programs. In the same year, Letterkenny won the public sector Shingo Prize for applying Lean to its Patriot Missile recapitalization program

Demographic assessment of the blue crab (Callinectes sapidus) in Chesapeake Bay using extractable lipofuscins as age markers

The blue crab (Callinectes sapidus) plays an important economic and ecological role in estuaries and coastal habitats from the Gulf of Mexico to the east coast of North America, but demographic assessments are limited by length-based methods. We applied an alternative aging method using biochemical measures of metabolic byproducts (lipofuscins) sequestered in the neural tissue of eyestalks to examine population age structure. From Chesapeake Bay, subsamples of animals collected from the 1998–99 (n=769) and 1999–2000 (n=367) winter dredge surveys were collected and lipofuscin was measured. Modal analysis of the lipofuscin index provided separation into three modes, whereas carapace-width data collected among the same individuals showed two broad modes. Lipofuscin modal analysis indicated that most adults (carapace width >120 mm) were <2 years old. The results indicate that use of extractable lipofuscin can provide a more accurate and better resolved estimation of demographic structure of blue crab populations in the field than size alone

The Effect of Channel Errors in the Differential Pulse-Code-Modulation Transmission of Sampled Imagery

This Paper Presents an Analysis, Simulation, and Discussion of the Effects of Communication Errors on Four-Bit Differential Pulse-Code Modulation (DPCM) Sampled Imagery. Simulations Are Presented that Describe the Effects of Inserting Periodic PCM Updates in Order to Correct Communication Errors in the DPCM Transmission of Photographic Scenes that Have Been Scanned and Sampled at the Nyquist Rate. Copyright © 1971 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc

Decline in an Atlantic Puffin population : evaluation of magnitude and mechanisms

Funding: This study was funded annually by Fair Isle Bird Observatory Trust (www.fairislebirdobs.co.uk) with contributions from the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (jncc.defra.gov.uk). Funding was received from these two sources by Fair Isle Bird Observatory from 1986 to 2013. The Joint Nature Conservation Committee and Fair Isle Bird Observatory Trust supplied guidance on study design, data collection, analyses, preparation of the manuscript and the decision to publish.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Evidence-based benchmarking framework for a distributed leadership approach to capacity building in learning and teaching

The intent of this project was to develop a systematic, evidence-based benchmarking framework for distributed leadership to build leadership capacity in learning and teaching. It built on the outcome of a previous Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) funded project that had identified the principles and practices for distributed leadership and synthesised these in the form of the Action Self Enabling Reflection Tool (ASERT)