6,794 research outputs found
New information on lending to small businesses and small farms: the 1996 CRA data
As a consequence of recent revisions to the regulations that implement the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), new information is now publicly available on the geographic distribution of small loans to businesses and farms and on community development lending. Because small businesses and small farms are more likely than larger ones to borrow small amounts, the CRA data on small loans are likely to provide a reasonable measure of the extension of credit to such businesses. Thus, the CRA data provide new opportunities to gauge the flow of credit to communities with differing economic and demographic characteristics. This article presents an initial assessment of the new CRA data on originations and purchases of small business and small farm loans during 1996. The focus of the analysis is on the broad patterns that emerge when the data are reviewed from a national perspective rather than on the lending activities of any individual institution.Small business ; Bank loans ; Agricultural credit
Enriched Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Network for Facial Micro-Expression Recognition
Facial micro-expression (ME) recognition has posed a huge challenge to
researchers for its subtlety in motion and limited databases. Recently,
handcrafted techniques have achieved superior performance in micro-expression
recognition but at the cost of domain specificity and cumbersome parametric
tunings. In this paper, we propose an Enriched Long-term Recurrent
Convolutional Network (ELRCN) that first encodes each micro-expression frame
into a feature vector through CNN module(s), then predicts the micro-expression
by passing the feature vector through a Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) module.
The framework contains two different network variants: (1) Channel-wise
stacking of input data for spatial enrichment, (2) Feature-wise stacking of
features for temporal enrichment. We demonstrate that the proposed approach is
able to achieve reasonably good performance, without data augmentation. In
addition, we also present ablation studies conducted on the framework and
visualizations of what CNN "sees" when predicting the micro-expression classes.Comment: Published in Micro-Expression Grand Challenge 2018, Workshop of 13th
IEEE Facial & Gesture 201
Should Sociology Care About Theories of Human Nature?: Some Durkheimian Considerations on the ‘Social’ Individual
Theories of human nature underlie major positions not only in social science but also in the public sphere and its relationship to inequality. When it comes to Durkheim, his theory of human nature is often confused with his critiques of intellectual individualism and his historical argument concerning moral individualism. This paper proposes to analytically separate Durkheim’s apparently intertwined positions to show Durkheim’s concept of the ‘social individual’ as found within his theory of human nature. This is the difference between society as the object of analysis where the individual is slowly expressed historically in regard to the transition from mechanical to organic solidarity and the conception of the relation between a human being and the manner in which social solidarity is generally realized in a human being, considered philosophically. It is with this evidence, this paper will show Durkheim’s concept of the ‘social’ individual helps illuminate how social life itself is possible
Silicon Burning II: Quasi-Equilibrium and Explosive Burning
Having examined the application of quasi-equilibrium to hydrostatic silicon
burning in Paper I of this series, Hix & Thielemann (1996), we now turn our
attention to explosive silicon burning. Previous authors have shown that for
material which is heated to high temperature by a passing shock and then cooled
by adiabatic expansion, the results can be divided into three broad categories;
\emph{incomplete burning}, \emph{normal freezeout} and \emph{-rich
freezeout}, with the outcome depending on the temperature, density and cooling
timescale. In all three cases, we find that the important abundances obey
quasi-equilibrium for temperatures greater than approximately 3 GK, with
relatively little nucleosynthesis occurring following the breakdown of
quasi-equilibrium. We will show that quasi-equilibrium provides better
abundance estimates than global nuclear statistical equilibrium, even for
normal freezeout and particularly for -rich freezeout. We will also
examine the accuracy with which the final nuclear abundances can be estimated
from quasi-equilibrium.Comment: 27 pages, including 15 inline figures. LaTeX 2e with aaspp4 and
graphicx packages. Accepted to Ap
New Scale Factor Measure
The computation of probabilities in an eternally inflating universe requires
a regulator or "measure". The scale factor time measure truncates the universe
when a congruence of timelike geodesics has expanded by a fixed volume factor.
This definition breaks down if the generating congruence is contracting---a
serious limitation that excludes from consideration gravitationally bound
regions such as our own. Here we propose a closely related regulator which is
well-defined in the entire spacetime. The New Scale Factor Cutoff restricts to
events with scale factor below a given value. Since the scale factor vanishes
at caustics and crunches, this cutoff always includes an infinite number of
disconnected future regions. We show that this does not lead to divergences.
The resulting measure combines desirable features of the old scale factor
cutoff and of the light-cone time cutoff, while eliminating some of the
disadvantages of each.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figure; v2: references adde
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