George Woods and the World Bank

PREFACE. George David Woods became the fourth president of the World Bank on January 1, 1963. John F. Kennedy, personally, urged Woods to accept. In August, 1962, Eugene Black invited Woods to the White House where Kennedy told Woods, in effect: Everything we in the United States have done since the end of the war, including the Marshall Plan, to try to build a peaceful and stable world is threatened by the growing gap between the poor and the rich countries. If that is not solved, it is going to cause the collapse of all our policies, including American foreign policy. We have to do something about this, and I think the World Bank, of the institutions available, is the most promising. This is our chosen instrument, and I want you, George Woods, to be the one to make the Bank a bridge between the poor and the rich countries. 1 Born in poverty, raised in Brooklyn by his adoring mother after the early death of his father, John Woods, and lacking a college education, George Woods, nonetheless, brought an impressive background to the task. At age 17, he became a messenger boy for Harris, Forbes and Company; at age 50, he was Chairman of the Board of the First Boston Corporation, an investment-banking firm which "was raising more money for more corporations than any other investment-banking house in the world. ,,2 As a young man in his twenties, accompanied by the young Arthur Dean who later served as chief negotiator to end the Korean War and, incidentally, was Woods's "best man", Woods won the account of the Nippon Light and Power Company. As a Broadway Angel, he made a small fortune in the theater by backing Sailor Beware, Dead End and Outward Bound. During the dark days of the depression, Woods successfully marketed the bonds of the Southern California Edison Company. He "saved" Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey and the New York Times. He had a distinguished career in Washington during World War II as a Colonel in the General Staff Corp under Generals Somervell and Clay. Through a merger with Mellon Securities Corporation after World War II, George Woods made First Boston, at that time, the largest publicly-owned investment banking firm in the United States. In 1952, First Boston, together with Morgan Stanley, began to manage the new World Bank bonds. That same year, Woods headed a World Bank mission to investigate the possibility of expanding and amalgamating two steel companies in India. Later, he helped to organize development banks in India, Pakistan and the Philippines. He played an important role in settling the compensation for the previous shareholders of the Suez Canal Company after its nationalization. Woods, in New York, was in almost daily contact with Black, in Washington. Woods knew more about the World Bank than anyone nominated to be president, with the possible exception of Eugene Black himself, who had already been the United States Executive Director for two years before becoming president. Woods was a banker. In the words of Woods's wife, Louise, "He never suffered fools gladly." He was very bright, however; his was probably the keenest intellect of any president of the World Bank, and he presided over a significant transition in the Bank's history: from Eugene Black, who firmly established the Bank and sold its bonds to the world, to Robert McNamara, who greatly expanded the Bank and increased its lending, perhaps excessively. 1. Robert W. Oliver, "A Conversation with Irving Friedman, I," Conversations About George Woods and the World Bank, Washington, D.C., March 1974, pp. 26-7. 2. "The Biggest Underwriter Finds the Big Money." Business Week, March 6,1971, p. 64. 2 Woods emphasized education and agriculture. He expanded the economics staff. He looked outward to the international organizations which could assist development. He took in the newly independent nations of Africa. He tried greatly to increase the lending of the International Development Association. In 1935, Woods married the vivacious Louise Teraldson. They were a marvelous team. Louise accompanied George as he flew hither and yon on missions for the World Bank. She didn't seek entry to Woods's world of finance, nor he to her world of assisting young people from the Institute for International Education or the World Bank's Young Professional's Program. They had no children, but they were together in the evening dining, more likely than not, at the Twenty One Club in New York or entertaining in Washington. This is the story of a remarkable man who rose from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to a position of preeminence in the investment banking business. From the pinnacle of that vantage point, he was able increasingly to turn his attention to public affairs until, in 1963, he became President of the World Bank. He succeeded because of hard work, a brilliant mind, and attention to detail. His path was not without pitfalls, but he persevered; he left the Bank with the dream of greatly increased economic assistance based on "a Grand Assize." He was the right man in the right place for his time

Debt and development

The external indebtedness of many developing countries -Mexico, Brazil and Argentina in particular -- has been of considerable international concern. The debts arose partly because of changes in international banking practices and partly because of unwise short-term borrowing by governments accustomed to continuing international inflation. The problem has been made worse by high world-wide interest rates caused in part by the historically high domestic deficits of the United States government. There are signs that the crisis may be easing, however, and that moderate growth may Boon resume in Latin America

A neural model of border-ownership from kinetic occlusion

Camouflaged animals that have very similar textures to their surroundings are difficult to detect when stationary. However, when an animal moves, humans readily see a figure at a different depth than the background. How do humans perceive a figure breaking camouflage, even though the texture of the figure and its background may be statistically identical in luminance? We present a model that demonstrates how the primate visual system performs figure–ground segregation in extreme cases of breaking camouflage based on motion alone. Border-ownership signals develop as an emergent property in model V2 units whose receptive fields are nearby kinetically defined borders that separate the figure and background. Model simulations support border-ownership as a general mechanism by which the visual system performs figure–ground segregation, despite whether figure–ground boundaries are defined by luminance or motion contrast. The gradient of motion- and luminance-related border-ownership signals explains the perceived depth ordering of the foreground and background surfaces. Our model predicts that V2 neurons, which are sensitive to kinetic edges, are selective to border-ownership (magnocellular B cells). A distinct population of model V2 neurons is selective to border-ownership in figures defined by luminance contrast (parvocellular B cells). B cells in model V2 receive feedback from neurons in V4 and MT with larger receptive fields to bias border-ownership signals toward the figure. We predict that neurons in V4 and MT sensitive to kinetically defined figures play a crucial role in determining whether the foreground surface accretes, deletes, or produces a shearing motion with respect to the background.This work was supported in part by CELEST (NSF SBE-0354378 and OMA-0835976), the Office of Naval Research (ONR N00014-11-1-0535) and Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR FA9550-12-1-0436). (NSF SBE-0354378 - CELEST; OMA-0835976 - CELEST; ONR N00014-11-1-0535 - Office of Naval Research; AFOSR FA9550-12-1-0436 - Air Force Office of Scientific Research)Published versio

Constructing Reference Metrics on Multicube Representations of Arbitrary Manifolds

Reference metrics are used to define the differential structure on multicube representations of manifolds, i.e., they provide a simple and practical way to define what it means globally for tensor fields and their derivatives to be continuous. This paper introduces a general procedure for constructing reference metrics automatically on multicube representations of manifolds with arbitrary topologies. The method is tested here by constructing reference metrics for compact, orientable two-dimensional manifolds with genera between zero and five. These metrics are shown to satisfy the Gauss-Bonnet identity numerically to the level of truncation error (which converges toward zero as the numerical resolution is increased). These reference metrics can be made smoother and more uniform by evolving them with Ricci flow. This smoothing procedure is tested on the two-dimensional reference metrics constructed here. These smoothing evolutions (using volume-normalized Ricci flow with DeTurck gauge fixing) are all shown to produce reference metrics with constant scalar curvatures (at the level of numerical truncation error).Comment: 37 pages, 16 figures; additional introductory material added in version accepted for publicatio

Electroweak and Bottom Quark Contributions to Higgs Boson plus Jet Production

This paper presents predictions for jet pseudorapidity (eta) and transverse momentum (p_T) distributions for the production of the Standard Model Higgs boson in association with a high-p_T hadronic jet. We discuss the contributions of electroweak loops and of bottom-quark parton processes to the cross section. The latter arise in the five-flavour scheme. Predictions for the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider with 10 TeV collision energy are presented. For Higgs boson masses of 120 GeV, 160 GeV and 200 GeV, we find the maximal effects of the electroweak contributions to the Higgs plus jet p_T and eta distribution to be -14 % and -5.3 %, respectively, for the Tevatron, and -3 % and -2 %, respectively, for the LHC. For the maximal contribution of bottom-quark parton processes to the p_T and eta distribution, we find +3 % and + 2.5 %, respectively, for the Tevatron, and +3.5 % and +3 %, respectively, for the LHC. A separate study of the Higgs + b-jet cross section demonstrates that a calculational approach which respects the hierarchies of Yukawa couplings yields a leading order cross section prediction which is more accurate in the high-p_T regime than conventional approaches.Comment: 25 pages, 14 figure

Neural dynamics of feedforward and feedback processing in figure-ground segregation

Determining whether a region belongs to the interior or exterior of a shape (figure-ground segregation) is a core competency of the primate brain, yet the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. Many models assume that figure-ground segregation occurs by assembling progressively more complex representations through feedforward connections, with feedback playing only a modulatory role. We present a dynamical model of figure-ground segregation in the primate ventral stream wherein feedback plays a crucial role in disambiguating a figure's interior and exterior. We introduce a processing strategy whereby jitter in RF center locations and variation in RF sizes is exploited to enhance and suppress neural activity inside and outside of figures, respectively. Feedforward projections emanate from units that model cells in V4 known to respond to the curvature of boundary contours (curved contour cells), and feedback projections from units predicted to exist in IT that strategically group neurons with different RF sizes and RF center locations (teardrop cells). Neurons (convex cells) that preferentially respond when centered on a figure dynamically balance feedforward (bottom-up) information and feedback from higher visual areas. The activation is enhanced when an interior portion of a figure is in the RF via feedback from units that detect closure in the boundary contours of a figure. Our model produces maximal activity along the medial axis of well-known figures with and without concavities, and inside algorithmically generated shapes. Our results suggest that the dynamic balancing of feedforward signals with the specific feedback mechanisms proposed by the model is crucial for figure-ground segregation