The age of Professor Narmadeshwar Jha

Professor Narmadeshwar Jha was a noted scholar on History of Economic Thought that took its shape under the influence of Alfred Marshall. His widely referred book - The Age of Marshall: Aspects of British Economic Thought, 1890-1915 – was written under the supervision of Professor A.J. Brown of Leeds (UK) and published with a commendatory foreword written by Sir Dennis H. Robertson. Professor Jha devised a methodology to conduct research in the history of economic ideas. This brief paper presents Professor Jha as a teacher, economist and scholar.History of Economic Thought; Bhagalpur University; Bihar; India; Alfred Marshall; Institutional Economics; Will to economize; Rabindranath Tagore; Dennis H. Robertson; A. J. Brown; University of Leeds (UK)

A note on least squares fitting of signal waveforms

Signal waveforms are very fast dampening oscillatory time series composed of exponential functions. The regular least squares fitting techniques are often unstable when used to fit exponential functions to such signal waveforms since such functions are highly correlated. Of late, some attempts have been made to estimate the parameters of such functions by Monte Carlo based search/random walk algorithms. In this study we use the Differential Evaluation based method of least squares to fit the exponential functions and obtain much more accurate results.Signal waveform; exponential functions; Differential Evolution; Global optimization; Nonlinear Least Squares; Monte Carlo; Curve fitting; parameter estimation; Random Walk; Search methods; Fortran

Possibilities of quality enhancement in higher education by intensive use of information technology

Quality of higher education is a multi-dimensional concept. It lies in effectiveness of transmitting knowledge and skill; the authenticity, content, coverage and depth of information; availability of reading/teaching materials; help in removing obstacles to learning; applicability of knowledge in solving the real life problems; fruitfulness of knowledge in personal and social domains; convergence of content and variety of knowledge over space (countries and regions) and different sections of the people; cost-effectiveness and administrative efficiency. Information technology has progressed very fast in the last three decades; it has produced equipments at affordable cost and it has now made their wider application feasible. This technology has made search, gathering, dissemination, storing, retrieval, transmission and reception of knowledge easier, cheaper and faster. Side by side, a vast virtual library vying with the library in prints has emerged and continues growing rapidly. One may hold that the e-libraries are the libraries of tomorrow when the libraries in prints will be the antiques or the archival objects of the past. This paper discusses in details how information technology can be applied to enhance the quality of higher education at affordable cost. It also discusses the major obstacles to optimal utilization of information technology and measures to remove them.Information Technology; Quality in Higher Education; e-library; e-book; e-journal

Performance of Differential Evolution and Particle Swarm Methods on Some Relatively Harder Multi-modal Benchmark Functions

This paper aims at comparing the performance of the Differential Evolution (DE) and the Repulsive Particle Swarm (RPS) methods of global optimization. To this end, some relatively difficult test functions have been chosen. Among these test functions, some are new while others are well known in the literature. We use DE method with the exponential crossover scheme as well as with no crossover (only probabilistic replacement). Our findings suggest that DE (with the exponential crossover scheme) mostly fails to find the optimum in case of the functions under study. Of course, it succeeds in case of some functions (perm#2, zero-sum) for very small dimension, but begins to falter as soon as the dimension is increased. In case of DCS function, it works well up to dimension = 5. When we use no crossover (only probabilistic replacement) we obtain better results in case of several of the functions under study. In case of Perm#1, Perm#2, Zero-sum, Kowalik, Hougen and Power-sum functions, a remarkable advantage is there. Whether crossover or no crossover, DE falters when the optimand function has some element of randomness. This is indicated by the functions: Yao-Liu#7, Fletcher-Powell, and “New function#2”. DE has no problems in optimizing the “New function #1”. But the “New function #2” proves to be a hard nut. However, RPS performs much better for such stochastic functions. When the Fletcher-Powell function is optimized with non-stochastic c vector, DE works fine. But as soon as c is stochastic, it becomes unstable. Thus, it may be observed that an introduction of stochasticity into the decision variables (or simply added to the function as in Yao-Liu#7) interferes with the fundamentals of DE, which works through attainment of better and better (in the sense of Pareto improvement) population at each successive iteration. The paper concludes: (1) for different types of problems, different schemes of crossover (including none) may be suitable or unsuitable, (2) Stochasticity entering into the optimand function may make DE unstable, but RPS may function well.Differential Evolution; Repulsive Particle Swarm; Global optimization; non-convex functions; Fortran; computer program; benchmark; test; Stochastic functions; Fletcher-Powell; Kowalik; Hougen; Power-sum; Perm; Zero-sum; New functions; Bukin function

A Brief History of Production Functions

This paper gives an outline of evolution of the concept and econometrics of production function, which was one of the central apparatus of neo-classical economics. It shows how the famous Cobb-Douglas production function was indeed invented by von Thunen and Wicksell, how the CES production function was formulated, how the elasticity of substitution was made a variable and finally how Sato’s function incorporated biased technical changes. It covers almost all specifications proposed during 1950-1975, and further the LINEX production functions and incorporation of energy as an input. The paper in divided into (1) single product functions, (2) joint product functions, and (3) aggregate production functions. It also discusses the ‘capital controversy’ and its impacts.Production function; Cobb-Douglas; CES; Transcendental; translog; Zellner-Revankar; VES; Bruno; Kadiyala; Diewert; Kummel; Mundlak; Engineering production function; Multi-output; joint product; Data Envelopment; Household production function; Humbug production function; capital controversy; Cambridge controversy

NLINLS: a Differential Evolution based nonlinear least squares Fortran 77 program

This paper provides the list of Fortran 77 codes of nonlinear least squares using Differential Evolution as the minimizer algorithm. It has been tested on a number of difficult nonlinear least squares problems (taken from NIST, USA including CPC-X Software challenge problems). Help on how to use the program also is provided.Nonlinear least squares; Differential Evolution; Fortran 77

An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Deception and Telling Lies

A lie is an expression at deviance with the truth known or honestly believed by someone with an intention to deceive others for certain purpose, social or personal. An ability to lie might be evolutionary in nature possibly to help in survival, since it is found in the non-human world also. In the biological perspective, each individual is at war against all others. Thus viewed, lies are the cardinal virtues for survival and, by implication, the carriers of evolution. In the human world, lying is morally blameworthy in a relatively un-obscure way. There may be cases of lying to which it may be difficult to take up a definite moral attitude. Certain types of lies might be morally acceptable and socially beneficial since they may block the otherwise (most damaging) global optimum solution of a negative sum game, while other types of lies are ethically and socially deplorable as they might block the optimal solution of a cooperative game. This must be judged pragmatically with the overall social welfare that they entail or produce.Lies; morality; economics of lies; Taxonomy; survival; evolution; information asymmetry; gender and lies

Performance of the Barter, the Differential Evolution and the Simulated Annealing Methods of Global Optimization on Some New and Some Old Test Functions

In this paper we compare the performance of the Barter method, a newly introduced population-based (stochastic) heuristic to search the global optimum of a (continuous) multi-modal function, with that of two other well-established and very powerful methods, namely, the Simulated Annealing (SA) and the Differential Evolution (DE) methods of global optimization. In all, 87 benchmark functions have been optimized 89 times. The DE succeeds in 82 cases, the Barter succeeds in 63 cases, while the Simulated Annealing method succeeds for a modest number of 51 cases. The DE as well as Barter methods are unstable for stochastic functions (Yao-Liu#7 and Fletcher-Powell functions). In particular, Bukin-6, Perm-2 and Mishra-2 functions have been hard for all the three methods. Seen as such, the barter method is much inferior to the DE, but it performs better than SA. A comparison of the Barter method with the Repulsive Particle Swarm method has indicated elsewhere that they are more or less comparable. The convergence rate of the Barter method is slower than the DE as well as the SA. This is because of the difficulty of ‘double coincidence’ in bartering. Barter activity takes place successfully in less than one percent trials. It may be noted that the DE and the SA have a longer history behind them and they have been improved many times. In the present exercise, the DE version used here employs the latest (available) schemes of crossover, mutation and recombination. In comparison to this, the Barter method is a nascent one. We need a thorough investigation into the nature and performance of the Barter method. We have found that when the DE optimizes, the terminal population is homogenous while in case of the Barter method it is not so. This property of the Barter method has several implications with respect to the Agent-Based Computational Economics

Median as a weighted arithmetic mean of all sample observations

It is generally held that median does not use all sample observations. However, median may be expressed as a weighted arithmetic mean of all sample observations. Some Monte Carlo studies have been conducted to show that the method works perfectly well.

Structural changes in economics during the last fifty years

This essay portrays the major currents in recent economic thinking against the orthodoxy and dogmatism of neoclassical economics. It places behavioral economics, experimental economics, evolutionary economics, ecological economics, new institutional economics, agent-based computational economics and post-autistic economics vis-à-vis the classical and the neoclassical economics. It concludes that we may expect a synthesis of all these strands of economic thinking in the near future that will replace neoclassical economics from the citadel of mainstream. Teaching of these strands of new economics has already begun in many universities, although in an un-integrated manner. However, until the neoclassical microeconomics and macroeconomics are replaced by their alternatives and necessary as well as convincing tools of economic analysis are developed, neoclassicism would not give way to modern economics.Behavioral; experimental; evolutionary; ecological; new institutional; agent-based computational; post-autistic; classical; neoclassical, economics; bounded rationality; heterodox; individualism; pluralism