The Miracle of Compound Interest: Does our Intuition Fail?

When it comes to estimating the benefits of long-term savings, many people rely on their intuition. Focusing on the domain of retirement savings, we use a randomized experiment to explore people’s intuition about how money accumulates over time. We ask half of our sample to estimate future consumption given savings (the forward perspective). The other half of the sample is asked to estimate savings given future consumption (the backward perspective). From an economic point of view, both subsamples are asked identical questions. However, we discover a large “direction bias”: the perceived benefits of long-term savings are substantially higher when individuals adopt a backward perspective. Our findings have important impli- cations for economic modeling, in general, and for structuring advice and financial literacy programs, in particular.Behavioral economics;financial intuition;financial literacy;com- pound interest;retirement saving

Passive geodetic satellite canister assemblies

Passive geodetic satellite /PAGEOS/ canister assemblie

Predictions of the emergence of vaccine-resistant hepatitis B in The Gambia using a mathematical model

Vaccine escape variants of hepatitis B virus (HBV) have been identified world-wide. A mathematical model of HBV transmission is used to investigate the potential pattern of emergence of such variants. Attention is focused on The Gambia as a country with high quality epidemiological data, universal infant immunization and in which escape mutants after childhood infections have been observed. We predict that a variant cannot become dominant for at least 20 years from the start of vaccination, even when using a vaccine which affords no cross protection. The dominant factor responsible for this long time scale is the low rate of infectious contacts between infected and susceptible individuals (we estimate the basic reproduction number of hepatitis B in The Gambia to be 1·7). A variant strain that achieves high prevalence will also take many years to control, and it is questionable whether emergence will be identifiable by sero-surveillance until of high prevalence. The sensitivity of the model predictions to epidemiological and demographic factors is explored

Plane strain fracture toughness and mechanical properties of 5Al-2.5Sn ELI titanium at room and cryogenic temperatures Final report

Plane strain fracture toughness and mechanical properties of titanium alloy at room and cryogenic temperature

Plane strain fracture toughness of 2219-T87 aluminum alloy at room and cryogenic temperatures

Tensile strength, yield strength, and plane strain fracture toughness of aluminum alloy at room and cryogenic temperature