The Swiss National Bank's monetary policy concept - an example of a 'principles-based' policy framework

The practice of monetary policy has evolved a great deal since the early 1990s. This evolution was significantly influenced by rapid developments in the theory of monetary policy. A new consensus about 'principles-based' monetary policy appears to be emerging. It marries a firm long-term anchor for nominal stability, rooted in the original ideas behind inflation targeting, with short-term flexibility, based on a more discretionary and pragmatic approach to monetary policy. The SNB's monetary policy framework - with a firm nominal anchor but with an emphasis on the need for flexibility - reflects, to a considerable degree, the emerging academic consensus about best-practice monetary policy. With its successful seven-year track record, it may serve as an interesting case study for a policy aiming at an intermediate position between full discretion and rigidly defined short-term inflation targeting.Swiss National Bank, monetary policy, inflation targeting, rules, discretion

Positive-measure self-similar sets without interior

We recall the problem posed by Peres and Solomyak in Problems on self-similar and self-affine sets; an update. Progr. Prob. 46 (2000), 95–106: can one find examples of self-similar sets with positive Lebesgue measure, but with no interior? The method in Properties of measures supported on fat Sierpinski carpets, this issue, leads to families of examples of such sets

Reply to 'A Second Opinion on "Operational Earthquake Forecasting: Some Thoughts on Why and How," by Thomas H. Jordan and Lucile M. Jones,' by Stuart Crampin

In folklore, a "silver bullet" is an effective weapon against were-wolves and witches. In earthquake prediction, a silver bullet is a diagnostic precursor—a signal observed before an earthquake that indicates with high probability the location, time, and magnitude of the impending event (Jordan 2006). In his comment, Crampin (2010) claims that shear-wave splitting (SWS) observations provide a silver bullet. He asserts that seismology is thus capable of raising earthquake forecasting out of the low-probability environment to which we assigned it in our recent opinion piece (Jordan and Jones 2010)

Operational Earthquake Forecasting: Some Thoughts on Why and How

The goal of operational earthquake forecasting is to provide the public with authoritative information on the time dependence of regional seismic hazards

NASA Langley's AirSTAR Testbed: A Subscale Flight Test Capability for Flight Dynamics and Control System Experiments

As part of the Airborne Subscale Transport Aircraft Research (AirSTAR) project, NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) has developed a subscaled flying testbed in order to conduct research experiments in support of the goals of NASA s Aviation Safety Program. This research capability consists of three distinct components. The first of these is the research aircraft, of which there are several in the AirSTAR stable. These aircraft range from a dynamically-scaled, twin turbine vehicle to a propeller driven, off-the-shelf airframe. Each of these airframes carves out its own niche in the research test program. All of the airplanes have sophisticated on-board data acquisition and actuation systems, recording, telemetering, processing, and/or receiving data from research control systems. The second piece of the testbed is the ground facilities, which encompass the hardware and software infrastructure necessary to provide comprehensive support services for conducting flight research using the subscale aircraft, including: subsystem development, integrated testing, remote piloting of the subscale aircraft, telemetry processing, experimental flight control law implementation and evaluation, flight simulation, data recording/archiving, and communications. The ground facilities are comprised of two major components: (1) The Base Research Station (BRS), a LaRC laboratory facility for system development, testing and data analysis, and (2) The Mobile Operations Station (MOS), a self-contained, motorized vehicle serving as a mobile research command/operations center, functionally equivalent to the BRS, capable of deployment to remote sites for supporting flight tests. The third piece of the testbed is the test facility itself. Research flights carried out by the AirSTAR team are conducted at NASA Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The UAV Island runway is a 50 x 1500 paved runway that lies within restricted airspace at Wallops Flight Facility. The facility provides all the necessary infrastructure to conduct the research flights in a safe and efficient manner. This paper gives a comprehensive overview of the development of the AirSTAR testbed

Affine maps of density matrices

For quantum systems described by finite matrices, linear and affine maps of matrices are shown to provide equivalent descriptions of evolution of density matrices for a subsystem caused by unitary Hamiltonian evolution in a larger system; an affine map can be replaced by a linear map, and a linear map can be replaced by an affine map. There may be significant advantage in using an affine map. The linear map is generally not completely positive, but the linear part of an equivalent affine map can be chosen to be completely positive and related in the simplest possible way to the unitary Hamiltonian evolution in the larger system.Comment: 4 pages, title changed, sentence added, reference update

Lorentz transformations that entangle spins and entangle momenta

Simple examples are presented of Lorentz transformations that entangle the spins and momenta of two particles with positive mass and spin 1/2. They apply to indistinguishable particles, produce maximal entanglement from finite Lorentz transformations of states for finite momenta, and describe entanglement of spins produced together with entanglement of momenta. From the entanglements considered, no sum of entanglements is found to be unchanged.Comment: 5 Pages, 2 Figures, One new paragraph and reference adde

One qubit almost completely reveals the dynamics of two

From the time dependence of states of one of them, the dynamics of two interacting qubits is determined to be one of two possibilities that differ only by a change of signs of parameters in the Hamiltonian. The only exception is a simple particular case where several parameters in the Hamiltonian are zero and one of the remaining nonzero parameters has no effect on the time dependence of states of the one qubit. The mean values that describe the initial state of the other qubit and of the correlations between the two qubits also are generally determined to within a change of signs by the time dependence of states of the one qubit, but with many more exceptions. An example demonstrates all the results. Feedback in the equations of motion that allows time dependence in a subsystem to determine the dynamics of the larger system can occur in both classical and quantum mechanics. The role of quantum mechanics here is just to identify qubits as the simplest objects to consider and specify the form that equations of motion for two interacting qubits can take.Comment: 6 pages with new and updated materia