Design of an intelligent information system for in-flight emergency assistance

The present research has as its goal the development of AI tools to help flight crews cope with in-flight malfunctions. The relevant tasks in such situations include diagnosis, prognosis, and recovery plan generation. Investigation of the information requirements of these tasks has shown that the determination of paths figures largely: what components or systems are connected to what others, how are they connected, whether connections satisfying certain criteria exist, and a number of related queries. The formulation of such queries frequently requires capabilities of the second-order predicate calculus. An information system is described that features second-order logic capabilities, and is oriented toward efficient formulation and execution of such queries

The use of multiple models in case-based diagnosis

The work described in this paper has as its goal the integration of a number of reasoning techniques into a unified intelligent information system that will aid flight crews with malfunction diagnosis and prognostication. One of these approaches involves using the extensive archive of information contained in aircraft accident reports along with various models of the aircraft as the basis for case-based reasoning about malfunctions. Case-based reasoning draws conclusions on the basis of similarities between the present situation and prior experience. We maintain that the ability of a CBR program to reason about physical systems is significantly enhanced by the addition to the CBR program of various models. This paper describes the diagnostic concepts implemented in a prototypical case based reasoner that operates in the domain of in-flight fault diagnosis, the various models used in conjunction with the reasoner's CBR component, and results from a preliminary evaluation

Federal reserve credibility and the market's response to the weekly M1 announcements

A presentation of new evidence on the issue of Federal Reserve System credibility, examining the response pattern of asset prices to the weekly M1 announcements under different operating procedures and monetary policy regimes.Money supply ; Monetary policy

Monetary policy and real interest rates: new evidence from the money stock announcements

This paper presents new evidence on how asset prices respond to new information about the money stock. It shows that the information content of money stock announcements and the response of asset prices to new information in the announcements vary with changes in the monetary policy regime, the Federal Reserve operating procedures, and the reserve accounting rules. While previous studies have examined how asset prices respond to the money stock announcements under the interest-rate targeting procedure and the nonborrowed reserve procedure, we have included new evidence from the borrowed reserve targeting procedure under both lagged and contemporaneous reserve accounting rules. Looking at how both forward exchange rates and other asset prices respond to the announcements, we distinguish between periods when the asset-price response reflected a change in the real interest rate and those when it reflected a change in the inflation premium. Finally, we show that the new contemporaneous reserve accounting rules have greatly reduced the information content of the money stock announcements.Monetary policy ; Money supply ; Bank reserves

Από τον “Πολυθεϊσμό” στον “Μονοθεϊσμό” και στην κυριαρχία στου Κράτους

The presence of religion in Greek history was determined by both the ancient Greek political thought, and the modern policy options for the creation of the modern Greek state. The "polytheism" of the ancient Greeks and the religious freedom wasn't only a personal choice, but it involved into a political commitment in established ceremonies for the cult of the city. On the other hand in modern Greece, the presence of the Christian "monotheism" strengthened its functional structures of the newly established Greek State in the name of an official "monotheistic" religion. This does not prevent the modern Greeks following this religion with the criterion of its adaptation to their specific impulses and needs. At the same time, they continued to see through this religion their politic and national identity, even its ancient Greek version

The reserve market and the information content of M1 announcements

An analysis of the effect that monetary control arrangements have on the information content of the money stock announcements in the market for bank reserves.Monetary policy ; Money supply ; Bank reserves

An integration of case-based and model-based reasoning and its application to physical system faults

Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) systems solve new problems by finding stored instances of problems similar to the current one, and by adapting previous solutions to fit the current problem, taking into consideration any differences between the current and previous situations. CBR has been proposed as a more robust and plausible model of expert reasoning than the better-known rule-based systems.;Current CBR systems have been used in planning, engineering design, and memory organization. There has been minimal work, however, in the area of reasoning about physical systems. This type of reasoning is a difficult task, and every attempt to automate the process must overcome the problems of modeling normal behavior, diagnosing faults, and predicting future behavior.;CBR systems are currently quite difficult to compare and evaluate, because there is currently no common mathematical framework in which the systems can be described. The only avenue available at present for comparison and evaluation of CBR systems requires an intellectual synthesis of the semantics of the program sources. Important constraints on the operation of a CBR system are often hidden in obscure programming tricks in the system\u27s source code.;This thesis presents a hybrid methodology for reasoning about physical systems in operation. This methodology is based on retrieval and adaptation of previously experienced problems similar to the problem at hand. In this methodology the ability of a CBR to reason about a physical system is significantly enhanced by the addition to the Case-Based Reasoner of a model of the physical system. The model describes the physical system\u27s structural, functional, and causal behavior.;Additionally, this thesis presents a mathematical formalization of the case-based reasoning paradigm and a formal specification of the interaction of the CBR component with the model-based component of a case-based system. to prove the feasibility and the merit of such methodology, a prototypical system for dealing with the faults of a physical system has been designed and implemented. Through testing has been proved that this hybrid methodology allows the generation of diagnoses and prognoses that are beyond the capabilities of current reasoning systems

A new effective exchange rate index for the dollar and its implications for U.S. merchandise trade

An introduction to a new exchange-rate index to measure the foreign-exchange value of the dollar. The authors develop a model of U.S. merchandise trade, featuring the new index.Foreign exchange rates ; Dollar, American

Positive linear regression between left ventricular contraction duration and plasma aldosterone levels in healthy anesthetized rabbits. A hypothesis generating relationship for a new action of aldostrerone

Introduction: Aldosterone (Aldo), besides its genomic renal and cardiac effects [cardiac fibrosis and left ventricular (LV) enlargement], elicits also various rapid nongenomically mediated effects such as increase of myocardial monophasic action potential duration within minutes after intravenous application.Methods: Investigating the effects of endogenous vasoactive substances on cardiovascular and hormonal parameters in 25 healthy anesthetized New Zealand White male rabbits, a serendipitous positive correlation between LV contraction duration and plasma Aldo levels came to our attention. From LV pressure (LVP) tracings (taken invasively), maximal and minimal change over time in LVP (LVmaxdp/dt and LVmindp/dt) and Δd (time interval between LVmaxdp/dt and LVmindp/dt = LV contraction duration) were estimated.Results: A positive linear regression was found between Aldo (measured by RIA) and Δd (Δd = 0.1126 + 0.00019, r = 0.47, p = 0.018). Stepwise regression analysis demonstrated that peripheral blood pressure and Aldo were the most important determinants of Δd and that the effect of Aldo was independent of confounding factors.Conclusion: Since electrical and mechanical events in cardiac muscle overlap in time, it may be speculated that the nongenomically-mediated increase in monophasic action potential duration by Aldo could result in increase of myocardial contraction duration, a hypothesis supported indirectly by the found regression

A path-oriented knowledge representation system: Defusing the combinatorial system

LIMAP is a programming system oriented toward efficient information manipulation over fixed finite domains, and quantification over paths and predicates. A generalization of Warshall's Algorithm to precompute paths in a sparse matrix representation of semantic nets is employed to allow questions involving paths between components to be posed and answered easily. LIMAP's ability to cache all paths between two components in a matrix cell proved to be a computational obstacle, however, when the semantic net grew to realistic size. The present paper describes a means of mitigating this combinatorial explosion to an extent that makes the use of the LIMAP representation feasible for problems of significant size. The technique we describe radically reduces the size of the search space in which LIMAP must operate; semantic nets of more than 500 nodes have been attacked successfully. Furthermore, it appears that the procedure described is applicable not only to LIMAP, but to a number of other combinatorially explosive search space problems found in AI as well