Behind the Kitchen Door

[Excerpt] How do restaurant workers live on some of the lowest wages in America? And how do poor working conditions - discriminatory labor practices, exploitation, and unsanitary kitchens - affect the meals that arrive at our restaurant tables? Saru Jayaraman, who launched the national restaurant workers\u27 organization Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, sets out to answer these questions by following the lives of restaurant workers in New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Detroit, and New Orleans

Wind tunnel testing on underwater axisymmetric bodies at angle of attack Part III - Experimental investigation on an axisymmetric Body with Blunt Nose

This report, describes the details of the surface pressure measurements made on an axisymmetric body, of finness ratio 15, having blunt nose. The model was tested in the 0.9m dia Low Speed Tunnel at various incidences. The results are presented in this report in the forms of tables and figures

Critical Speed Analysis of a Turbine Rotor

Critical Speed Analysis was carried out for a given Turbine Rotor configuration. A computer program based on transfer matrix method has been used for the analysis. Only the first critical was found to occur in the speed range of interest. This critical was well below the rated operating speed with rigid body mode for the probable range of support stiffness

The impact of school lunches on school enrolment: Evidence from an exogenous policy change in India

Education is thought to be central to economic development. Yet, relatively little is known about how developing countries might advance school participation. In November, 2001 the Indian Supreme Court issued a remarkable interim order directing errant Indian states to other children in government primary schools a warm school lunch. This paper uses this exogenous policy change to evaluate the impact of school lunches on early primary school enrolment. It finds that the introduction of a school lunch is associated with a 25 per cent increase in class 1 enrolment. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that school lunches bridge the overall gender or caste gaps in enrolment. --education,school lunches,quasi-natural experiment

Monetary policy transmission mechanism in Samoa

In recent years, Samoa has emerged to be the most successful economy amongst all Pacific island countries. Its achievements of low inflation and high growth rates were due to sustained fiscal adjustment and appropriate monetary policy measures. This paper undertakes an empirical study of transmission mechanism of monetary policy by adopting a VAR approach and using quarterly data over a 17-year period (1990-2006). The study findings are that money and exchange rate channels are important channels in transmitting monetary impulses to Samoa’s real sector, followed by credit and interest rate channels

Learning to Look Around: Intelligently Exploring Unseen Environments for Unknown Tasks

It is common to implicitly assume access to intelligently captured inputs (e.g., photos from a human photographer), yet autonomously capturing good observations is itself a major challenge. We address the problem of learning to look around: if a visual agent has the ability to voluntarily acquire new views to observe its environment, how can it learn efficient exploratory behaviors to acquire informative observations? We propose a reinforcement learning solution, where the agent is rewarded for actions that reduce its uncertainty about the unobserved portions of its environment. Based on this principle, we develop a recurrent neural network-based approach to perform active completion of panoramic natural scenes and 3D object shapes. Crucially, the learned policies are not tied to any recognition task nor to the particular semantic content seen during training. As a result, 1) the learned "look around" behavior is relevant even for new tasks in unseen environments, and 2) training data acquisition involves no manual labeling. Through tests in diverse settings, we demonstrate that our approach learns useful generic policies that transfer to new unseen tasks and environments. Completion episodes are shown at https://goo.gl/BgWX3W

Slow and steady feature analysis: higher order temporal coherence in video

How can unlabeled video augment visual learning? Existing methods perform "slow" feature analysis, encouraging the representations of temporally close frames to exhibit only small differences. While this standard approach captures the fact that high-level visual signals change slowly over time, it fails to capture *how* the visual content changes. We propose to generalize slow feature analysis to "steady" feature analysis. The key idea is to impose a prior that higher order derivatives in the learned feature space must be small. To this end, we train a convolutional neural network with a regularizer on tuples of sequential frames from unlabeled video. It encourages feature changes over time to be smooth, i.e., similar to the most recent changes. Using five diverse datasets, including unlabeled YouTube and KITTI videos, we demonstrate our method's impact on object, scene, and action recognition tasks. We further show that our features learned from unlabeled video can even surpass a standard heavily supervised pretraining approach.Comment: in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2016, Las Vegas, NV, June 201