New England Overview: A Guide to Large-Scale Energy Infrastructure Issues in 2015

The report outlines how regional electricity and natural gas infrastructure decisions are made. It examines the current proposals to expand electricity transmission lines and natural gas pipelines into New England, as solutions to electricity and gas price and reliability issues, and briefly discusses the major implications of both

The theory and practice of school choice

Education

What Next for School Vouchers?

Voucher, Schule, Schulfinanzierung, Schulpolitik, Bildungsverhalten, Vereinigte Staaten, School, School finance, School policy, Education behaviour, United states

USING MECHANICAL TRADING SYSTEMS TO EVALUATE THE WEAK FORM EFFICIENCY OF FUTURES MARKETS

Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Principal Perceptions of the Relevancy of the K-12 Minnesota Principal Competencies

This dissertation examines the relevancy of the K-12 Minnesota Principal Competencies as perceived by practicing Minnesota principals. Two research strategies were used in this mixed-methods study. First, a quantitative survey was administered to Minnesota principals. The survey asked respondents to consider the relevance of each of the 16 Minnesota principal competencies. Based on the results of the survey, principal focus groups were held to gather additional input, including recommended changes to principal preparation programs within the state. While affirming the competencies currently in place, this dissertation provides policymakers with practitioner perspective and recommendations for improving principal preparation within the state of Minnesota

WHAT IS "THE BASIS," HOW IS IT MEASURED, AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Basis behavior is generally considered to be the major determinant of hedging success or failure. In the course of our work as contract designers for Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc., we have come to the conclusion that there are many misconceptions and incorrect statements made about "the basis" among practitioners and academics alike. Our work suggests that basis values, how they are measured, what they represent and how they are interpreted may differ widely from one commodity contract to another due to differences in the specifications of the underlying futures market, as well as differences in the structure of the underlying cash market.Marketing,

Old Norse Nicknames: Origins and Terminology

Nicknames, which occur in all cultures and time periods, play a unique role in highlighting identity. The pool of first names has always been relatively limited, thus most people were identified by their nicknames, especially before surnames became commonplace. The quantity of nicknames in Old Norse literature is large, and recurring nicknames provide a tool for understanding narrative transmission, cultural history, and etymology. Medieval explanations for giving nicknames are suspect, but they provide a glimpse into the possible reasons for so many of them coming down to us. An overview on nickname terminology is provided, as well as literary examples showing the fluidity of medieval terminology in nickname narrative explanations. The overall approach is therefore to explore the ways in which nicknames are described in the literature and how this information aids in understanding medieval Norse society and culture through its naming customs

Learning Hierarchical Visual Representations in Deep Neural Networks Using Hierarchical Linguistic Labels

Modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are able to achieve human-level object classification accuracy on specific tasks, and currently outperform competing models in explaining complex human visual representations. However, the categorization problem is posed differently for these networks than for humans: the accuracy of these networks is evaluated by their ability to identify single labels assigned to each image. These labels often cut arbitrarily across natural psychological taxonomies (e.g., dogs are separated into breeds, but never jointly categorized as "dogs"), and bias the resulting representations. By contrast, it is common for children to hear both "dog" and "Dalmatian" to describe the same stimulus, helping to group perceptually disparate objects (e.g., breeds) into a common mental class. In this work, we train CNN classifiers with multiple labels for each image that correspond to different levels of abstraction, and use this framework to reproduce classic patterns that appear in human generalization behavior.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Accepted as a paper to the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018

Devolution\u27s Price

The current political pressures on the welfare state, induced both by fiscal pressures and a Republican majority in Congress, have prompted some of its defenders to look for solutions at state and local levels. They point out that the American federal system is open, complex, and pluralist. Problems that cannot be addressed at one level are often resolved at another. Interests that cannot gain representation in Washington get heard in Albany, Springfield, and Sacramento. They remind us that state and local governments filled in many programmatic gaps opened up by the Reagan Administration. Such optimism, however, is misguided. Current proposals for devolution differ markedly from those of the 1980s. While the Reagan devolution was mainly limited to the developmental or productivity policy arena, the Gingrich devolution promises to shape redistributive policy. This distinction is important because the impact of devolution varies greatly depending on the policy arena in which it occurs