A Day in the Life of a McIntosh Award Winner: Ambulances, Auto Thefts and Academics; Scholarship Brings New York\u27s Inner City Youths to UD

Feature leads for the media: Paul Armstrong, a recipient of the W.S. McIntosh Memorial Leadership Award, shares his experiences as a summer intern for the city of Dayton; a new scholarship established in memory of 1968 graduate John L. O\u27Grady will provide a full, four-year scholarship to an inner-city youth from New York City

Deep learning with convolutional neural networks for decoding and visualization of EEG pathology

We apply convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) to the task of distinguishing pathological from normal EEG recordings in the Temple University Hospital EEG Abnormal Corpus. We use two basic, shallow and deep ConvNet architectures recently shown to decode task-related information from EEG at least as well as established algorithms designed for this purpose. In decoding EEG pathology, both ConvNets reached substantially better accuracies (about 6% better, ~85% vs. ~79%) than the only published result for this dataset, and were still better when using only 1 minute of each recording for training and only six seconds of each recording for testing. We used automated methods to optimize architectural hyperparameters and found intriguingly different ConvNet architectures, e.g., with max pooling as the only nonlinearity. Visualizations of the ConvNet decoding behavior showed that they used spectral power changes in the delta (0-4 Hz) and theta (4-8 Hz) frequency range, possibly alongside other features, consistent with expectations derived from spectral analysis of the EEG data and from the textual medical reports. Analysis of the textual medical reports also highlighted the potential for accuracy increases by integrating contextual information, such as the age of subjects. In summary, the ConvNets and visualization techniques used in this study constitute a next step towards clinically useful automated EEG diagnosis and establish a new baseline for future work on this topic.Comment: Published at IEEE SPMB 2017 https://www.ieeespmb.org/2017

Government budget deficits in large open economies

Large and growing levels of public debt in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and the Euro Area raise new interest in the cross-country effects of a large open economy's deficits. We consider a dynamic optimising model with costly tax collection and exogenously given public spending and initial debt. We ask whether the externalities associated with an individual country's deficits are positive or negative. We characterise the path of taxes in the Nash equilibrium where policy makers act nationalistically and compare this outcome to the global optimal outcome

Government Budget Deficits in Large Open Economies

Large and growing levels of public debt in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and the Euro Area raise new interest in the cross-country effects of a large open economy’s deficits. We consider a dynamic optimising model with costly tax collection and exogenously given public spending and initial debt. We ask whether the externalities associated with an individual country’s deficits are positive or negative. We characterise the path of taxes in the Nash equilibrium where policy makers act nationalistically and compare this outcome to the global optimal outcome.fiscal policy, international policy coordination, optimal taxation

We the People : John Locke, Collective Constitutional Rights, and Standing to Challenge Government Action

The Article is presented in three Parts. Part I documents the enormous effect that Locke\u27s political philosophy had on the Constitution\u27s Framers and traces the idea of collective rights through Locke\u27s Second Treatise, showing how Locke viewed government as a trustee and society as the settlor-beneficiary that forms and gives legitimacy to the government. Part II reviews the development of the current doctrine of standing and demonstrates how the current standing model creates a class of cases where government may, with impunity, violate the Constitution. Part III demonstrates the anomaly of the Supreme Court\u27s current doctrine in a society founded on the ideas of John Locke. It then explores the constitutional provisions where collective rights have already been recognized by the courts, though not with respect to standing analysis. Finally, Part III proposes a revision of the current test for standing to ensure that vindication of society\u27s collective rights is possible without creating universal standing and thus threatening the courts with a tidal wave of litigation brought by “officious intermeddlers.

The hidden burden of the income tax: Compliance costs of German individuals

We analyze the compliance costs of individual taxpyers resulting from the German income tax. using survey data that has been raised between December 2008 and April 2009, we find evidence for a considerably higher cost burden of self-employed taxpaxers. Taxable income and the demand for external support are positively correlated with compliance costs, while the time effort of female taxpayers is significantly lower. We also find evidence for a positive correlation of education and tax knowledge with the compliance burden. By contrast, a joint assessment of a married couple seems to reduce the monetized time effort. The aggregated cost burden of German income taxpayers amounts to 6.1-7.2 billion €, respectively 3.2-3.7 % of the income tax revenue in 2007. This estimate is higher than latest projections in a number of other European countries like Spain and Sweden, but significantly lower than results for the United States and Australia. --tax complexity,tax compliance costs,compliance burden,red tape,personal income tax

Nickel-cadmium battery reconditioner

Automatic device for recharging of nickel-cadmium batter

KARL: A Knowledge-Assisted Retrieval Language

Data classification and storage are tasks typically performed by application specialists. In contrast, information users are primarily non-computer specialists who use information in their decision-making and other activities. Interaction efficiency between such users and the computer is often reduced by machine requirements and resulting user reluctance to use the system. This thesis examines the problems associated with information retrieval for non-computer specialist users, and proposes a method for communicating in restricted English that uses knowledge of the entities involved, relationships between entities, and basic English language syntax and semantics to translate the user requests into formal queries. The proposed method includes an intelligent dictionary, syntax and semantic verifiers, and a formal query generator. In addition, the proposed system has a learning capability that can improve portability and performance. With the increasing demand for efficient human-machine communication, the significance of this thesis becomes apparent. As human resources become more valuable, software systems that will assist in improving the human-machine interface will be needed and research addressing new solutions will be of utmost importance. This thesis presents an initial design and implementation as a foundation for further research and development into the emerging field of natural language database query systems