Currency depreciation and the monetary adjustment process: Reconsidering Lord King's contributions

© Oxford University Press 2018, All rights reserved. This paper investigates Lord King's contributions in light of the renewed debate on international monetary policy coordination. We argue that King's work contains refined bullionist insights concerning currency depreciation, exchange rate determination, and balance of payments adjustment. We show how King's analysis of the monetary process under different currency regimes can help elucidate the effects of unconventional monetary policy on a global scale, concerning monetary spillovers, currency wars, business cycles, and the distribution of wealth

Molecular mechanisms of cell death: recommendations of the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death 2018.

Over the past decade, the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death (NCCD) has formulated guidelines for the definition and interpretation of cell death from morphological, biochemical, and functional perspectives. Since the field continues to expand and novel mechanisms that orchestrate multiple cell death pathways are unveiled, we propose an updated classification of cell death subroutines focusing on mechanistic and essential (as opposed to correlative and dispensable) aspects of the process. As we provide molecularly oriented definitions of terms including intrinsic apoptosis, extrinsic apoptosis, mitochondrial permeability transition (MPT)-driven necrosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis, pyroptosis, parthanatos, entotic cell death, NETotic cell death, lysosome-dependent cell death, autophagy-dependent cell death, immunogenic cell death, cellular senescence, and mitotic catastrophe, we discuss the utility of neologisms that refer to highly specialized instances of these processes. The mission of the NCCD is to provide a widely accepted nomenclature on cell death in support of the continued development of the field

Quantum metrology with trapped ions

We present the results of an experiment that used the quantized motion of an ion trappedin a harmonic pseudopotential to test for nonlinear extensions of quantum mechanics. This test was motivated by the development of a recent, consistent theory of nonlinear quantum mechanics that, in contrast to previous frameworks, also preserves causality. This experiment represents the first test of this new theory in a fully quantum system and improved the bounds on potential nonlinear effects in quantum mechanics inferred from previous experimental results by an estimated eight orders of magnitude.We also present the results of an experiment that used two entangled ions to test for localviolations of Lorentz invariance and which tightened the bound on such hypothetical violations by about half of an order of magnitude. In particular, this experiment used a special entangled state of the ions, residing within a decoherence free subspace, which is immune to the dominant source of noise. By comparing our results against a similar experiment, performed with two non-entangled ions, we verify the expected factor-of-two improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio predicted by theory. This improvement can be directly attributed to the use of entanglement and, thus, this work provides a case study of how entanglement can be leveraged as a resource to fundamentally enhance the performance of spectroscopic measurement

Water source development for forage irrigation systems (2013)

"Agriculture."This guide is designed to help forage producers determine the feasibility of developing an irrigation system by evaluating water sources and exploring their capital costs."This material is based upon work supported by the USDA/NIFA under Award Number 2012-49200-20032."New 10/13/Web

Soft targets: A national survey of the preparedness of large retail malls to prevent and respond to terrorist attack after 9/11

In the last four decades, modernity has increasingly become equated with a globalized world risk society. In the same period, the private security sector has grown significantly in size and prominence for the maintenance of public safety. This article reports the results of a survey of large retail malls to prevent and respond to terrorist attack in the United States after 9/11. A national survey of security directors (n120) of large shopping malls over 250,000 square feet (n1,372) was conducted in two phases beginning in the Summer of 2004. Few concrete changes to security expenditures and measures have resulted since 9/11. Half of security directors believe their respective mall is unprepared for terrorist attack and fewer than a third have rehearsed for terrorist incidents with public agencies such as police, ambulance, and fire services. There has also reportedly been little direct support from the Department of Homeland Security. Nonetheless, most mall security directors report additional training for their officers, the implementation of policies regarding suspected terrorist activity and the creation of emergency response plans. The authors consider these results in light of public fear, the perceived risk of another terrorist attack, and the priorities of mall security directors surveyed

The European rescue of the Washington Consensus? EU and IMF lending to Central and Eastern European countries

The latest global financial crisis has allowed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) a spectacular comeback. But despite its notorious reputation as a staunch advocate of restrictive economic policies, the Fund has displayed less preference for austerity in recent crisis lending. Though widely welcomed as overdue, the IMF’s shift away from what John Williamson coined the ‘Washington Consensus’ was met with resistance from the European Union (EU) where it concerned Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. The situation of hard-hit Hungary, Latvia, and Romania propelled unprecedented cooperation between the IMF and the EU, in which the EU has very actively promoted orthodox measures in return for loans. We argue that this represents a European rescue of the Washington Consensus. The case of Latvia is paradigmatic for the profound disagreements between an austerity-demanding EU and a less austere IMF. The IMF’s stance contradicts conventional wisdom about the organization as the guardian of economic orthodoxy. To solve this puzzle, we shed light on three complementary factors of (non)learning that have shaped the EU’s relations vis-à-vis CEE borrowing countries in comparison to the IMF’s: (1) a disadvantageous institutional setting; (2) vociferous creditor coalitions; (3) the precarious eurozone project