WORKSHOP EXPECTATIONS AND GPRA EVALUATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Because of a health-related problem, Dr. Otto was unable to attend the workshop; therefore, an overview of his suggested comments was presented by Jim Miller as follows: Our expectations for this Eighth National Extension Wildlife and Fisheries Specialists Workshop are that it will provide an opportunity for the professionals in attendance to assess current programs and capabilities; address changing audiences and their need for educational programs; evaluate changes in the land grant university system and in their agency; and proactively make needed changes to ensure that their educational programs continue to be relevant to Society\u27s needs now and in the future. Among these expectations, of course, are that this workshop will serve a part of the requirement for continuing education that all of us need periodically. On behalf of USDA-Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service and particularly our Natural Resources and Environment Unit (NREU), we congratulate your Planning Committee, your hosts John Munn and Dan Edge, and those of you participating for developing what appears to be an outstanding array of presentations, workshop activities, and programs. Your invited guests include some outstanding professionals I have had the pleasure of working with and a number of others I haven\u27t met but have heard nothing but positive feedback about. I regret not being able to attend but certainly extend my best wishes for a successful workshop and hope possibly to be able to attend your ninth workshop

Mortgage Timing

The fraction of newly-originated mortgages that are of the adjustable-rate (ARM) versus the fixed-rate (FRM) type exhibits a surprising amount of time variation. A simple utility framework of mortgage choice points to the bond risk premium as theoretical determinant: when the bond risk premium is high, FRM payments are high, making ARMs more attractive. We confirm empirically that the bulk of the time variation in household mortgage choice can be explained by time variation in the bond risk premium. This is true regardless of whether bond risk premia are measured using forecasters' data, a VAR term structure model, or a simple rule-of-thumb based on adaptive expectations. This simple rule-of-thumb moves in lock-step with mortgage choice, thereby lending further credibility to a theory of strategic mortgage timing by households.

Semi-supervised identification of rarely appearing persons in video by correcting weak labels

Some recent approaches for character identification in movies and TV broadcasts are realized in a semi-supervised manner by assigning transcripts and/or subtitles to the speakers. However, the labels obtained in this way achieve only an accuracy of 80% - 90% and the number of training examples for the different actors is unevenly distributed. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for person identification in video by correcting and extending the training data with reliable predictions to reduce the number of annotation errors. Furthermore, the intra-class diversity of rarely speaking characters is enhanced. To address the imbalance of training data per person, we suggest two complementary prediction scores. These scores are also used to recognize whether or not a face track belongs to a (supporting) character whose identity does not appear in the transcript etc. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, outperforming the current state of the art

Sollte die Unternehmensbesteuerung innerhalb der EU harmonisiert werden?

Die zum 1. Mai 2004 der Europäischen Union beigetretenen mittel- und osteuropäischen Staaten weisen Steuerbelastungen der Unternehmen aus, die meist weit unter dem Niveau liegen, welches die 15 bisherigen Mitgliedsländer einfordern. Vor diesem Hintergrund forderten Deutschland und Frankreich die EU-Kommission auf, die Bemessungsgrundlage der Körperschaftsteuer zu vereinheitlichen und europaweit gültige Mindeststeuersätze festzulegen, die von den einzelnen Mitgliedstaaten nicht unterschritten werden dürfen. Ralph Brügelmann, Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft, Köln, plädiert dafür, dass eine Vereinheitlichung unterbleiben und bestehende steuerliche Hemmnisse auf dem Weg der bilateralen Verhandlungen beseitigt werden sollten. Prof. Dr. Otto H. Jacobs, Universität Mannheim, sieht vor allem die Notwendigkeit einer Unternehmenssteuerreform in Deutschland. Und Prof. Dr. Alfons J. Weichenrieder, Universität Frankfurt am Main, unterstreicht, dass, wenn eine europäische Kooperation bei der Besteuerung von Unternehmenserträgen tatsächlich möglich werden soll, auf die nationale Steuerautonomie zu achten sei

A Persistent Simulation Environment for Autonomous Systems

The age of Autonomous Unmanned Aircraft Systems (AUAS) is creating new challenges for the accreditation and certification requiring new standards, policies and procedures that sanction whether a UAS is safe to fly. Establishing a basis for certification of autonomous systems via research into trust and trustworthiness is the focus of Autonomy Teaming and TRAjectories for Complex Trusted Operational Reliability (ATTRACTOR), a new NASA Convergent Aeronautics Solution (CAS) project. Simulation Environments to test and evaluate AUAS decision making may be a low-cost solution to help certify that various AUAS systems are trustworthy enough to be allowed to fly in current general and commercial aviation airspace. NASA is working to build a peer-to-peer persistent simulation (P3 Sim) environment. The P3 Sim will be a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) environment were AUAS avatars can interact with a complex dynamic environment and each other. The focus of the effort is to provide AUAS researchers a low-cost intuitive testing environment that will aid training for and assessment of decisions made by autonomous systems such as AUAS. This presentation focuses on the design approach and challenges faced in development of the P3 Sim Environment is support of investigating trustworthiness of autonomous systems

Mortgage Timing

Mortgages can be broadly classified into adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) and fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs). We document a surprising amount of time variation in the fraction of newly-originated mortgages that are of either type in the US and UK. A simple utility framework points to the importance of term structure variables in explaining this variation. In particular, the inflation risk premium, real interest rate risk premium and both the real rate and expected inflation volatility arise as potential determinants. We use a flexible VAR-model to measure these four term structure variables and show that they account for the bulk of variation in the ARM share. Risk premia alone explain sixty percent of the time variation in mortgage choice. Other term structure variables, such as the yield spread, seem only weakly related to the ARM share. We uncover interesting differences between the US and the UK. In the US, the inflation risk premium is most strongly related to the ARM share, while in the UK it is the real rate risk premium. In the US, FRMs contain a prepayment option. We analyze the impact of the prepayment option on optimal mortgage choice

Sollte die Unternehmensbesteuerung innerhalb der EU harmonisiert werden?

Die zum 1. Mai 2004 der Europäischen Union beigetretenen mittel- und osteuropäischen Staaten weisen Steuerbelastungen der Unternehmen aus, die meist weit unter dem Niveau liegen, welches die 15 bisherigen Mitgliedsländer einfordern. Vor diesem Hintergrund forderten Deutschland und Frankreich die EU-Kommission auf, die Bemessungsgrundlage der Körperschaftsteuer zu vereinheitlichen und europaweit gültige Mindeststeuersätze festzulegen, die von den einzelnen Mitgliedstaaten nicht unterschritten werden dürfen. Ralph Brügelmann, Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft, Köln, plädiert dafür, dass eine Vereinheitlichung unterbleiben und bestehende steuerliche Hemmnisse auf dem Weg der bilateralen Verhandlungen beseitigt werden sollten. Prof. Dr. Otto H. Jacobs, Universität Mannheim, sieht vor allem die Notwendigkeit einer Unternehmenssteuerreform in Deutschland. Und Prof. Dr. Alfons J. Weichenrieder, Universität Frankfurt am Main, unterstreicht, dass, wenn eine europäische Kooperation bei der Besteuerung von Unternehmenserträgen tatsächlich möglich werden soll, auf die nationale Steuerautonomie zu achten sei.Unternehmensbesteuerung, Steuerharmoisierung, Steuerbelastung, Standortwettbewerb, Körperschaftsteuer, Steuerreform, EU-Staaten, EU-Erweiterung

Mortgage Timing

We study how the term structure of interest rates relates to mortgage choice, both at the household and the aggregate level. A simple utility framework of mortgage choice points to the long-term bond risk premium as theoretical determinant: when the bond risk premium is high, fixed-rate mortgage payments are high, making adjustable-rate mortgages more attractive. This long-term bond risk premium is markedly different from other term structure variables that have been proposed, including the yield spread and the long yield. We confirm empirically that the bulk of the time variation in both aggregate and loan-level mortgage choice can be explained by time variation in the bond risk premium. This is true whether bond risk premia are measured using forecasters' data, a VAR term structure model, or from a simple household decision rule based on adaptive expectations. This simple rule moves in lock-step with mortgage choice, lending credibility to a theory of strategic mortgage timing by households

Investigating Correlations of Automatically Extracted Multimodal Features and Lecture Video Quality

Ranking and recommendation of multimedia content such as videos is usually realized with respect to the relevance to a user query. However, for lecture videos and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) it is not only required to retrieve relevant videos, but particularly to find lecture videos of high quality that facilitate learning, for instance, independent of the video's or speaker's popularity. Thus, metadata about a lecture video's quality are crucial features for learning contexts, e.g., lecture video recommendation in search as learning scenarios. In this paper, we investigate whether automatically extracted features are correlated to quality aspects of a video. A set of scholarly videos from a Mass Open Online Course (MOOC) is analyzed regarding audio, linguistic, and visual features. Furthermore, a set of cross-modal features is proposed which are derived by combining transcripts, audio, video, and slide content. A user study is conducted to investigate the correlations between the automatically collected features and human ratings of quality aspects of a lecture video. Finally, the impact of our features on the knowledge gain of the participants is discussed