New York's HealthPass Purchasing Alliance: Making Coverage Easier for Small Businesses

Provides an understanding of how a public-private partnership for health insurance functions. Evaluates which program features and strategies have worked and which have not. Measures the impact on participating employers, employees, and insurers

The Decline and Fall of the Dollar: Some Policy Issues

macroeconomics, dollars, decline, account balance, GNP, domestic demand

Are there bubbles in the art market? The detection of bubbles when fair value is unobservable

The purpose of this paper is to look for bubbles in the Art Market using a structure based on steady state results for TAR models and appropriate definitions of bubbles recently put forward by Knight, Satchell and Srivastava (2011). The usual method for investigating bubbles is to measure prices as deviations from fair value. We assess whether it is meaningful to define a fair value of art and conclude that it is very challenging empirically to implement any definition. We then treat fair value as zero in one instance and unobservable in the other case and in both cases provide evidence of bubbles in the art market

Conceptual Analysis in Metaethics

A critical survey of various positions on the nature, use, possession, and analysis of normative concepts. We frame our treatment around G.E. Moore’s Open Question Argument, and the ways metaethicists have responded by departing from a Classical Theory of concepts. In addition to the Classical Theory, we discuss synthetic naturalism, noncognitivism (expressivist and inferentialist), prototype theory, network theory, and empirical linguistic approaches. Although written for a general philosophical audience, we attempt to provide a new perspective and highlight some underappreciated problems about normative concepts

Analytic measures and Bochner measurability

Let $\Sigma$ be a $\sigma$-algebra over $\Omega$, and let $M(\Sigma)$ denote the Banach space of complex measures. Consider a representation $T_t$ for $t\in\Bbb R$ acting on $M(\Sigma)$. We show that under certain, very weak hypotheses, that if for a given $\mu \in M(\Sigma)$ and all $A \in \Sigma$ the map $t \mapsto T_t \mu(A)$ is in $H^\infty(\Bbb R)$, then it follows that the map $t \mapsto T_t \mu$ is Bochner measurable. The proof is based upon the idea of the Analytic Radon Nikod\'ym Property. Straightforward applications yield a new and simpler proof of Forelli's main result concerning analytic measures ({\it Analytic and quasi-invariant measures}, Acta Math., {\bf 118} (1967), 33--59)

Increased oxidative stress, inflammation, and glutamate: Potential preventive and therapeutic targets for hearing disorders.

Hearing disorders constitute one of the major health concerns in the USA. Decades of basic and clinical studies have identified numerous ototoxic agents and investigated their modes of action on the inner ear, utilizing tissue culture as well as animal and human models. Current preventive and therapeutic approaches are considered unsatisfactory. Therefore, additional modalities should be developed. Many studies suggest that increased levels of oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, and glutamate play an important role in the initiation and progression of damage to the inner ear leading to hearing impairments. To prevent these cellular deficits, antioxidants, anti-inflammatory agents, and antagonists of glutamate receptor have been used individually or in combination with limited success. It is essential, therefore, to simultaneously enhance the levels of antioxidant enzymes by activating the Nrf2 (a nuclear transcriptional factor) pathway, dietary and endogenous antioxidant compounds, and B12-vitamins in order to reduce the levels of oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, and glutamate at the same time. This review presents evidence to show that increased levels of these cellular metabolites, biochemical or factors are involved in the pathogenesis of cochlea leading to hearing impairments. It presents scientific rationale for the use of a mixture of micronutrients that may decrease the levels of oxidative damage, chronic inflammation, and glutamate at the same time. The benefits for using oral administration of proposed micronutrient mixture in humans are presented. Animal and limited human studies indirectly suggest that orally administered micronutrients can accumulate in the inner ear. Therefore, this route of administration may be useful in prevention, and in combination with standard care, in improved management of hearing problems following exposure to well-recognized and studied ototoxic agents, such as noise, cisplatin, aminoglycoside antibiotics, and advanced age

Input window size and neural network predictors

Neural network approaches to time series prediction are briefly discussed, and the need to specify an appropriately sized input window identified. Relevant theoretical results from dynamic systems theory are briefly introduced, and heuristics for finding the correct embedding dimension, and hence window size, are discussed. The method is applied to two time series and the resulting generalisation performance of the trained feedforward neural network predictors is analysed. It is shown that the heuristics can provide useful information in defining the appropriate network architectur