Population ageing and public pension reforms in a small open economy

This paper aims to address the issue of public pension reforms under demographic ageing that is likely to occur in Europe over the next 50 years. Three possible scenarios are analysed in a Blanchard OLG framework. These include: i) a decrease both in public pensions and the lump sum labour income tax, ii) a decrease both in public pensions and the distortionary corporate tax, iii) an increase in the retirement age. The analysis focuses on the effects of these fiscal policies on key economic variables such as consumption, private and public debt, output and wages. Quantitative experiments assess the impact of different fiscal policies in terms of public debt sustainability but most importantly suggest policies that smooth the transition of the economy to the new equilibrium. The main results suggest that the adverse effects of pension reforms on consumption are moderated when they are accompanied by appropriate taxation policies. In particular, when the tax response is rapid most of the adverse movement in consumption is avoided while public and national debt reach lower equilibrium levels

Restoring James Agee: a Textual Analysis of the Original and Restored Versions of James Agee\u27s a Death in the Family

James Agee\u27s A Death in the Family, the semiautobiographical book chronicling the death of a young boy\u27s father in 1916, was published postumously in 1957, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Literature the following year. The book was nearly complete at the time of the author\u27s death in 1955, and for nearly half a century editor David McDowell\u27s version of the book was the accepted one. Throughout the intervening years, critics took note of the myriad shortcomings of this edition. Mcdowell\u27s edition utilizes a previously published sketch, Knoxville: Summer 1915, as the prologue and presents events out of sequence in a truncated form reliant upon earlier versions of the manuscript. Written clues left by Agee clearly indicate this is not what he intended, and in 2007, Michael A. Lofaro, after several years of extensive effort, published the expanded and chronologically ordered version of A Death in the Family utilizing a piece entitled Dream Sequence as its prologue. This version of the text is much more in line with Agee\u27s desires for his book and remedies issues of cohesion and thematic/character development problematic in the earlier text. A Death in the Family is the culmination of James Agee\u27s writings, much of which dealt with the death of his father, and although subjective in nature, is the most effective in assisting Agee in coming to terms with his loss and providing a lasting memorial to his fathe

Restoring James Agee: a Textual Analysis of the Original and Restored Versions of James Agee\u27s a Death in the Family

James Agee\u27s A Death in the Family, the semiautobiographical book chronicling the death of a young boy\u27s father in 1916, was published postumously in 1957, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Literature the following year. The book was nearly complete at the time of the author\u27s death in 1955, and for nearly half a century editor David McDowell\u27s version of the book was the accepted one. Throughout the intervening years, critics took note of the myriad shortcomings of this edition. Mcdowell\u27s edition utilizes a previously published sketch, Knoxville: Summer 1915, as the prologue and presents events out of sequence in a truncated form reliant upon earlier versions of the manuscript. Written clues left by Agee clearly indicate this is not what he intended, and in 2007, Michael A. Lofaro, after several years of extensive effort, published the expanded and chronologically ordered version of A Death in the Family utilizing a piece entitled Dream Sequence as its prologue. This version of the text is much more in line with Agee\u27s desires for his book and remedies issues of cohesion and thematic/character development problematic in the earlier text. A Death in the Family is the culmination of James Agee\u27s writings, much of which dealt with the death of his father, and although subjective in nature, is the most effective in assisting Agee in coming to terms with his loss and providing a lasting memorial to his fathe

Restoring James Agee: a Textual Analysis of the Original and Restored Versions of James Agee\u27s a Death in the Family

James Agee\u27s A Death in the Family, the semiautobiographical book chronicling the death of a young boy\u27s father in 1916, was published postumously in 1957, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Literature the following year. The book was nearly complete at the time of the author\u27s death in 1955, and for nearly half a century editor David McDowell\u27s version of the book was the accepted one. Throughout the intervening years, critics took note of the myriad shortcomings of this edition. Mcdowell\u27s edition utilizes a previously published sketch, Knoxville: Summer 1915, as the prologue and presents events out of sequence in a truncated form reliant upon earlier versions of the manuscript. Written clues left by Agee clearly indicate this is not what he intended, and in 2007, Michael A. Lofaro, after several years of extensive effort, published the expanded and chronologically ordered version of A Death in the Family utilizing a piece entitled Dream Sequence as its prologue. This version of the text is much more in line with Agee\u27s desires for his book and remedies issues of cohesion and thematic/character development problematic in the earlier text. A Death in the Family is the culmination of James Agee\u27s writings, much of which dealt with the death of his father, and although subjective in nature, is the most effective in assisting Agee in coming to terms with his loss and providing a lasting memorial to his fathe

Short- and long-run determinants of sovereign debt credit ratings

We study the determinants of sovereign debt ratings from the three main international rating agencies, for the period 1995-2005. Using linear and ordered response models we employ a specification that allows us to distinguish between short and long-run effects, on a country’s rating, of macroeconomic and fiscal variables. The results point to a good performance of the models in explaining a country’s rating, both across agencies and time. Changes in GDP per capita, GDP growth, government debt, and government balance have a short-run impact on a country’s credit rating, while government effectiveness, external debt, foreign reserves and default history are important long-run determinants

Electronic compressibility and charge imbalance relaxation in cuprate superconductors

In the material SmLa$_{1-x}$Sr$_x$CuO$_{4-\delta}$ with alternating intrinsic Josephson junctions we explain theoretically the relative amplitude of the two plasma peaks in transmission by taking into account the spatial dispersion of the Josephson Plasma Resonance in $c$ direction due to charge coupling. From this and the magnetic field dependence of the plasma peaks in the vortex solid and liquid states it is shown that the electronic compressibility of the CuO$_2$ layers is consistent with a free electron value. Also the London penetration depth $\lambda_{ab} \approx 1100 {\rm \AA}$ near $T_c$ can be determined. The voltage response in the $IV$-curve of a Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_8$ mesa due to microwave irradiation or current injection in a second mesa is related to the nonequilibrium charge imbalance of quasiparticles and Cooper pairs and from our experimental data the relaxation time $\sim 100 {\rm ps}$ is obtained.Comment: 2 pages, 2 figures, phc-proc4-auth.cls, to be published in Physica C as a proceeding of M2S-HTSC Rio 200

Xtru3D: Single-View 3D Object Reconstruction from Color and Depth Data

D object reconstruction from single image has been a noticeable research trend in recent years. The most common method is to rely on symmetries of real-life objects, but these are hard to compute in practice. However, a large class of everyday objects, especially when manufactured, can be generated by extruding a 2D shape through an extrusion axis. This paper proposes to exploit this property to acquire 3D object models using a single RGB+Depth image, such as those provided by available low-cost range cameras. It estimates the hidden parts by exploiting the geometrical properties of everyday objects, and both depth and color information are combined to refine the model of the object of interest. Experimental results on a set of 12 common objects are shown to demonstrate not only the effectiveness and simplicity of our approach, but also its applicability for tasks such as robotic grasping.The research leading to these results has been funded by the HANDLE European project (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement ICT 231640-http://www.handle-project.eu.Publicad

Intrinsic Tunneling in Cuprates and Manganites

The most anisotropic high temperature superconductors like Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8, as well as the recently discovered layered manganite La1.4Sr1.6Mn2O7 are layered metallic systems where the interlayer current transport occurs via sequential tunneling of charge carriers. As a consequence, in Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8 adjacent CuO2 double layers form an intrinsic Josephson tunnel junction while in in La1.4Sr1.6Mn2O7 tunneling of spin polarized charge carriers between adjacent MnO2 layers leads to an intrinsic spin valve effect. We present and discuss interlayer transport experiments for both systems. To perform the experiments small sized mesa structures were patterned on top of single crystals of the above materials defining stacks of a small number of intrinsic Josephson junctions and intrinsic spin valves, respectively.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figure

Artificial-intelligence-driven scanning probe microscopy

Scanning probe microscopy (SPM) has revolutionized the fields of materials, nano-science, chemistry, and biology, by enabling mapping of surface properties and surface manipulation with atomic precision. However, these achievements require constant human supervision; fully automated SPM has not been accomplished yet. Here we demonstrate an artificial intelligence framework based on machine learning for autonomous SPM operation (DeepSPM). DeepSPM includes an algorithmic search of good sample regions, a convolutional neural network to assess the quality of acquired images, and a deep reinforcement learning agent to reliably condition the state of the probe. DeepSPM is able to acquire and classify data continuously in multi-day scanning tunneling microscopy experiments, managing the probe quality in response to varying experimental conditions. Our approach paves the way for advanced methods hardly feasible by human operation (e.g., large dataset acquisition and SPM-based nanolithography). DeepSPM can be generalized to most SPM techniques, with the source code publicly available

Deep Learning for Vanishing Point Detection Using an Inverse Gnomonic Projection

We present a novel approach for vanishing point detection from uncalibrated monocular images. In contrast to state-of-the-art, we make no a priori assumptions about the observed scene. Our method is based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) which does not use natural images, but a Gaussian sphere representation arising from an inverse gnomonic projection of lines detected in an image. This allows us to rely on synthetic data for training, eliminating the need for labelled images. Our method achieves competitive performance on three horizon estimation benchmark datasets. We further highlight some additional use cases for which our vanishing point detection algorithm can be used.Comment: Accepted for publication at German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR) 2017. This research was supported by German Research Foundation DFG within Priority Research Programme 1894 "Volunteered Geographic Information: Interpretation, Visualisation and Social Computing