Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson Effect in Selected Countries of Central and Eastern Europe

This study investigates the HBS effect in a panel of nine CEECs during 1993:Q1-2003:Q4 (unbalanced panel). Prior to estimating the model, we analyze several key assumptions of the model (e.g. wage equalisation, PPP and sectoral division) and elaborate on possible consequences of their failure to hold. In the empirical part of the paper, we check the level of integration of the variables in our panel using the Pedroni panel-stationarity tests. We then investigate the internal and external version of the HBS effect with the Pedroni panel-cointegration tests as well as by means of group-mean FMOLS and PMGE estimations to conclude that there is a strong evidence in support of the internal HBS and ambiguous evidence regarding the external HBS. Our estimates of the size of inflation and real appreciation consistent with the HBS effect turned out generally within the range of previous estimates in the literature (0-3 % per annum). However, we warn against drawing automatic policy conclusions based on these figures due to very strong assumptions on which they rest (which may not be met in near future). Finally, following the hypotheses put forward in the literature, we elaborate and attempt to evaluate empirically the potential impact of exchange rate regimes on the magnitude of the HBS effect.Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson effect, Real Exchange Rate, Central and Eastern Europe, EMU

LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo

Autonomous global sky surveillance with real-time robotic follow-up: Night Sky Awareness through Thinking Telescopes Technology

Abstract We discuss the development of prototypes for a global grid of advanced "thinking" sky sentinels and robotic followup telescopes that observe the full night sky to provide real-time monitoring of the night sky by autonomously recognizing anomalous behavior, selecting targets for detailed investigation, and making real-time, follow-up observations. The layered, fault-tolerant, network uses relatively inexpensive robotic EO sensors to provide persistent autonomous monitoring and real-time anomaly detection to enable rapid recognition and a swift response to transients as they emerge. This T3 global EO grid avoids the limitations imposed by geography and weather to provide persistent monitoring of the night sky

iPTF14yb: THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF A GAMMA-RAY BURST AFTERGLOW INDEPENDENT OF A HIGH-ENERGY TRIGGER

We report here the discovery by the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) of iPTF14yb, a luminous(Mr ≈ -27.8 mag), cosmological (redshift 1.9733), rapidly fading optical transient. We demonstrate, based onprobabilistic arguments and a comparison with the broader population, that iPTF14yb is the optical afterglow ofthe long-duration gamma-ray burst GRB 140226A. This marks the first unambiguous discovery of a GRBafterglow prior to (and thus entirely independent of) an associated high-energy trigger. We estimate the rate ofiPTF14yb-like sources (i.e., cosmologically distant relativistic explosions) based on iPTF observations, inferringan all-sky value of Rrel = 610 yr?1 (68% confidence interval of 1102000 yr?1). Our derived rate is consistent(within the large uncertainty) with the all-sky rate of on-axis GRBs derived by the Swift satellite. Finally, webriefly discuss the implications of the nondetection to date of bona fide orphan afterglows (i.e., those lackingdetectable high-energy emission) on GRB beaming and the degree of baryon loading in these relativistic jets

PSF Estimation in Crowded Astronomical Imagery as a Convolutional Dictionary Learning Problem

We present a new algorithm for estimating the Point Spread Function (PSF) in wide-field astronomical images with extreme source crowding. Robust and accurate PSF estimation in crowded astronomical images dramatically improves the fidelity of astrometric and photometric measurements extracted from wide-field sky monitoring imagery. Our radically new approach utilizes convolutional sparse representations to model the continuous functions involved in the image formation. This approach avoids the need to detect and precisely localize individual point sources that is shared by existing methods. In experiments involving simulated astronomical imagery, it significantly outperforms the recent alternative method with which it is compared