Book Review

Neither author devotes major attention to the vast array of practical problems that beset the developing world and impair all efforts for progress. This was not their purpose. Neither book attempts to catalog the problems or discuss proposed solutions, other than economic regionalism. Taking a broader view than these books and their treatment of economic regionalism, one finds that the problems of material circumstances and human condition appear to be more extensive and more powerful than regionalism can solve. The variety and seriousness of the problems faced by the developing countries explain the lack of success of regionalism and discourage the outlook for any theory, proposal, or combination thereof to achieve rapid economic development. Direct focus on the array of problems is discouraging, indeed. A short review here will help to indicate the limited ability of economic regionalism to have a major effect. The problems are well known, of course. Asante and Carl refer to many of them. Development theory does not suffer from lack of information about problems, but from lack of effective solutions

Eye hazards of laser 'pointers' in perspective

Eight years ago media coverage of incidents involving laser pointers in which individuals claimed to have suffered eye damage resulted in a perspective being published in this journal.1 The final sentence concluded ‘laser pointers, pens or key rings if used appropriately are not an eye hazard, and even if used inappropriately will not cause permanent eye damage’. This statement has been supported by the finding that until recently no irreversible eye injuries had been reported for a period of almost 15 years other than those caused by deliberate and prolonged viewing of laser beams.2 During this time period pointers have been freely available with an estimated 500 000 to c1.2 million laser pointers in circulation

Online, interactive user guidance for high-dimensional, constrained motion planning

We consider the problem of planning a collision-free path for a high-dimensional robot. Specifically, we suggest a planning framework where a motion-planning algorithm can obtain guidance from a user. In contrast to existing approaches that try to speed up planning by incorporating experiences or demonstrations ahead of planning, we suggest to seek user guidance only when the planner identifies that it ceases to make significant progress towards the goal. Guidance is provided in the form of an intermediate configuration $\hat{q}$, which is used to bias the planner to go through $\hat{q}$. We demonstrate our approach for the case where the planning algorithm is Multi-Heuristic A* (MHA*) and the robot is a 34-DOF humanoid. We show that our approach allows to compute highly-constrained paths with little domain knowledge. Without our approach, solving such problems requires carefully-crafting domain-dependent heuristics

Bostonia. Volume 12

Founded in 1900, Bostonia magazine is Boston University's main alumni publication, which covers alumni and student life, as well as university activities, events, and programs

Sourcing Substitution and Related Price Index Biases

intermediate input. We define a class of bias problems that arise when purchasers shift their expenditures among sellers charging different prices for units the purchasers view as the same product but that are not regarded as being the same for the purposes of price measurement. For businesses purchasing from other businesses, these sorts of shifts can cause sourcing substitution bias in the Producer Price Index (PPI) and the Import Price Index (MPI), as well as potentially in the proposed new true Input Price Index (IPI). Similarly, when consumers shift their expenditures for the same products temporally to take advantage of promotional sales or among retailers charging different per unit prices, this can cause a promotions bias problem in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) or a CPI outlet substitution bias. We provide a common framework for these bias problems. Ideal target indexes are defined and discussed that could greatly reduce these biases. We also address the challenges national statistics agencies must surmount to produce price index measures more like the specified target ones. 1

An Infrastructure to Support Data Integration and Curation for Higher Educational Research

The recent challenges for higher education call for research that can offer a comprehensive understanding about the performance and efficiency of higher education institutions in their three primary missions: research, education, and service. In other for this to happen, it is necessary for researchers to have access to a multitude of data sources.However, due to the nature of their academic training, many higher education practitioners do not have access to expertise in working with different data sources. In this work, we describe a design and implementation for an infrastructure that will bring together the tools and the data to provide access to researchers in the field of higher education institutional research. The infrastructure will include integration and curation for data from different sources, embedded statistical environment, high performance computational back-end, and extensibility for future Big Data and unstructured data

Generation of the millisecond electron beam at forevacuum

The possibility of generation of a quasicontinuous electron beam with pulse duration up to 4.2 ms from arc discharge plasma in the forevacuum pressure range is presented. It is shown, that the voltage-current characteristic of the forevacuum plasma electron source generating millisecond electron beam has a "classical" form for electron sources with a plasma cathode