Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years

This paper compares the performance of the Mexican economy with that of the rest of the region over the past 20 years, based on the available economic and social indicators, and with its own past economic performance. Among the results it finds that Mexico ranks 18th out of 20 Latin American countries in growth of real GDP per person, the most basic economic measure of living standards; Mexico's poverty rate of in 2012 was almost identical to the poverty rate of 1994; real (inflation-adjusted) wages for Mexico were almost the same in 2012 as in 1994; and unemployment has increased significantly. It also notes that if NAFTA had been successful in restoring Mexico's pre-1980 growth rate -- when developmentalist economic policies were the norm -- Mexico today would be a relatively high income country, with income per person significantly higher than that of Portugal or Greece. It is unlikely that immigration reform would be a major political issue in the United States, since relatively few Mexicans would seek to cross the border

Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Update After 23 Years

This paper compares the performance of the Mexican economy with that of the rest of the region and with its own economic performance, over the 23 years since NAFTA took effect, based on the available economic and social indicators. Among the results, it finds that Mexico ranks 15th out of 20 Latin American countries in growth of real GDP per person, the most basic economic measure of living standards; Mexico's poverty rate in 2014 was higher than the poverty rate of 1994; and real (inflation-adjusted) wages were almost the same in 2014 as in 1994. It also notes that if NAFTA had been successful in restoring Mexico's pre-1980 growth rate -- when developmentalist economic policies were the norm -- Mexico today would be a high-income country, with income per person comparable to Western European countries. If not for Mexico's long-term economic failure, including the 23 years since NAFTA, it is unlikely that immigration from Mexico would have become a major political issue in the United States, since relatively few Mexicans would seek to cross the border. This report updates a version released in February 2014

Similarity Maximization of a Scaled Aeroelastic Flight Demonstrator via Multidisciplinary Optimization

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143025/1/6.2017-0573.pd

An adaptive optimization strategy based on mixture of experts for wing aerodynamic design optimization

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143084/1/6.2017-4433.pd

‘Speak at this’: An approach to the completion of speech acts during interactive Shakespeare performances in schools

It is 2014 in a secondary school in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. A performance of Romeo and Juliet is taking place in the school hall. An audience of teenagers are sitting on plastic blue chairs arranged in-the-round. During the ‘balcony scene’ the performer playing Romeo asks a member of the audience, ‘Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?’, this audience member urges him to ‘hear more’. This article interrogates this moment in performance, the process that was required to achieve it and the validity of it as a successfully completed Speech Act. Speech Act Theory has been used as a valuable method for Shakespearean textual analysis but this article investigates the merits of its application as a rehearsal technique: What training methods augment the performative nature of audience address? How can current theoretical concerns in audience studies temper the application of Speech Act Theory in this context to provide an open and interactive Shakespeare performance atmosphere for young people? In order to address these questions, the argument will draw upon media and data from a large scale PaR project based produced by Hull University and the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Yorkshire in 2014

Chronicles of Oklahoma

Article depicts the period of time Will Rogers, "Oklahoma's Favorite Son", spent performing in a Wild West Show in South Africa and how his experiences there impacted his future career

Aeroelastic scaling of flying demonstrators: mode tracking technique

Aeroelastic scaling theory shows that the design problem of aeroelastically equivalent scaled aircraft can be treated as a structural-only design problem if the aerodynamic shape and airflow properties of the full scale aircraft are preserved. In that case, the theory shows that it is sufficient to match the scaled natural mode shapes, frequencies and mass of the reference aircraft. In this paper, we present a new method for the dynamic scaling of flexible structures where the objective function is based on the modal assurance criterion (MAC). This criterion is used for a mode tracking strategy during the optimization process. Finally, we apply this method to a scaled version (1:5) of the uCRM wing, achieving an agreement greater than 99% on the average MAC value of the first 5 modes

Tracking the reflexivity of the (dis)engaged citizen: some methodological reflections

The relationship between governments and citizens in many contemporary democracies is haunted by uncertainty and sociologists face the task of listening effectively to citizens’ own reflections on this uncertain relationship. This article reflects on the qualitative methodology of a recently completed UK project which used a combination of diary and multiple interviews/ focus groups to track over a fieldwork period of up to a year citizens’ reflections on their relationship to a public world and the contribution to this of their media consumption. In particular, the article considers how the project’s multiple methods enabled multiple angles on the inevitable artificiality and performative dimension of the diary process, resulting in rich data on people’s complex reflections on the uncertain position of the contemporary citizen

SMT 2.0: A Surrogate Modeling Toolbox with a focus on Hierarchical and Mixed Variables Gaussian Processes

The Surrogate Modeling Toolbox (SMT) is an open-source Python package that offers a collection of surrogate modeling methods, sampling techniques, and a set of sample problems. This paper presents SMT 2.0, a major new release of SMT that introduces significant upgrades and new features to the toolbox. This release adds the capability to handle mixed-variable surrogate models and hierarchical variables. These types of variables are becoming increasingly important in several surrogate modeling applications. SMT 2.0 also improves SMT by extending sampling methods, adding new surrogate models, and computing variance and kernel derivatives for Kriging. This release also includes new functions to handle noisy and use multifidelity data. To the best of our knowledge, SMT 2.0 is the first open-source surrogate library to propose surrogate models for hierarchical and mixed inputs. This open-source software is distributed under the New BSD license.Comment: version

Aeroelastic scaling of flying demonstrator: flutter matching

The traditional approach for the design of aeroelastically scaled models assumes that either there exists flow similarity between the full-size aircraft and the model, or that flow non-similarities have a negligible effect. However, when trying to reproduce the behavior of an airliner that flies at transonic conditions using a scaled model that flies at nearly-incompressible flow conditions, this assumption is no longer valid and both flutter speed and static aerodynamic loading are subject to large discrepancies. To address this issue, we present an optimization-based approach for wing planform design that matches the scaled flutter speeds and modes of the reference aircraft when the Mach number cannot be matched. This is achieved by minimizing the squared error between the full-size and scaled aerodynamic models. This method is validated using the Common Research Model wing at the reference aircraft Mach number. The error in flutter speed is computed using the same wing at model conditions, which are in the nearly-incompressible regime. Starting from the baseline wing, its planform is optimized to match the reference response despite different conditions, achieving a reduction of the error in the predicted flutter speed from 7.79% to 2.13%