The Uses and Abuses of the Euro in the Canadian Currency Debate. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series, Vol. 3 No. 3, August 2003

(From the introduction). In the late 1990s, some prominent Canadian economists – notably Thomas Courchene, Herbert Grubel, Richard Harris, and Robert Mundell – began arguing that a North American common currency would solve the problems underlying the growing gap between U.S. and Canadian real GDP per capita.1 They succeeded in provoking a lively economic policy debate that occurred in parallel with the launch of the euro. The purpose of this paper is to examine the uses – and abuses – of European parallels by both sides in the economic policy debate that peaked in the 1999-2001 period. The body of the paper begins by providing an understanding of the European case. Hence, the second section outlines our interpretation of the major developments in the birth of the euro. The third section, the core of the paper, examines in detail the use of European parallels in the Canadian currency debate. We start by providing a brief overview of the protagonists in the debate. We then continue by arguing that the euro provided a “temporal spur” for the Canadian discussion but that it was only one among several important factors. We argue further that the proponents of a North American common currency relied very little on the European experience to support their case for the need for a common currency. Where they did use the European experience, however, was in their analysis of the institutional form that a common currency in North America might take. We argue that the opponents of a North American common currency were correct in viewing this as an abuse of the European parallel. In the concluding fourth section, we summarize our findings and argue that the most important parallel between the European and North American forces for a common currency is that both were driven primarily by politics

Transply crack density detection by acousto-ultrasonics

The acousto-ultrasonic method was applied to a PMR-15 8-harness, satin Celion 3000 fabric composite to determine the extent of transply cracking. A six-ply 0/90 laminate was also subjected to mechanical loading, which induced transply cracking. The stress wave factor (SWF) is defined as the energy contained in the received signal from a 2.25-MHz center frequency transducer. The correlation of the SWF with transply crack density is shown

Globalization and the Welfare State: Four Hypotheses and Some Empirical Evidence

This paper examines some implications of the 'new globalism' for the welfare state. We examine four hypotheses about globalization and their implications for welfare state spending: the 'downward harmonization', 'upward convergence', 'convergence clubs' and 'globalization irrelevance' hypotheses. We provide evidence concerning these hypotheses by examining changes in the levels of welfare state spending for a subset of OECD countries. We find some evidence for a convergence of welfare state spending, not universally, but among countries with similar political institutions. Domestic political institutions, therefore, may affect the way in which countries respond to globalization pressures.Globalism; Globalization

Behavior of oceanic crustal magnetization at high temperatures: Viscous magnetization and the marine magnetic anomaly source layer

Although the source layer for marine magnetic anomalies has been assumed to be the extrusive basalts of uppermost ocean crust, recent studies indicate that lower crustal rocks may also contribute. Because the temperature at which magnetization of crustal rocks achieves long-term stability is crucial to any source layer contribution, we undertook high-temperature VRM (viscous remanent magnetization) experiments on samples of basalt, dike and gabbroic sections. Samples were heated at temperature intervals up to Tc, while a magnetic field was applied for periods between 6 hours and 28 days. Results show that the dike and gabbro samples achieve maximum VRM acquisition near 250°C, well below the Tc of 580°C. The basalt sample shows a peak at 68°C, also well below Tc. Results of this pilot study indicate that the critical isotherm for stable magnetization acquisition is defined by the VRM behavior of the specific crustal section

An Application of the Utah State University Watershed Simulation Model to the Entiat Experimental Watershed, Washington State

To study the effects of a forest fire on runoff characteristics, the Utah State University Watershed Simulation Model (USUWSM) has been applied to three small drainage areas in the Entiat Experimental Watershed which is located within the Wenatchee National Forest of central Washington. Each component of the USUWSM has been described in the report, including structural changes to the model that were necessary to achieve reasonable agreement between observed and simulated runoff hydrographs. Lack of information on the spatial distribution and precipitation due to the absence of an adequate precipitation gaging network on or close to the study area was a severe handicap to the simulation study. Only a very short period of post-fire streamflow record was available and thus it was possible to make only qualative conclusions regarding the effects of the forest fire on runoff characteristics

GAN Augmentation: Augmenting Training Data using Generative Adversarial Networks

One of the biggest issues facing the use of machine learning in medical imaging is the lack of availability of large, labelled datasets. The annotation of medical images is not only expensive and time consuming but also highly dependent on the availability of expert observers. The limited amount of training data can inhibit the performance of supervised machine learning algorithms which often need very large quantities of data on which to train to avoid overfitting. So far, much effort has been directed at extracting as much information as possible from what data is available. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) offer a novel way to unlock additional information from a dataset by generating synthetic samples with the appearance of real images. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of introducing GAN derived synthetic data to the training datasets in two brain segmentation tasks, leading to improvements in Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of between 1 and 5 percentage points under different conditions, with the strongest effects seen fewer than ten training image stacks are available