Optimal Inflation Targets, Inflation Contracts and Political Cycles

It has been widely accepted that politically induced variance can be generated when the wage contract is written before an election. In this paper, we show that inflation contracts and inflation targets can eliminate both the inflation bias and politically induced variance, if electoral uncertainty is merely due to different preferences. In contrast to the independent central bank that is based on cooperation between competing parties prior to the target can be delegated by the winning party after election. Concern for reputation can lead to the convergence of the inflation targets assigned by different parties. We also consider the case where uncertsinty is caused not only by different preferences, but also by different desired rates inflation. We show that it is quite possible to reduce inflation but increase the variances of inflation and output by adopting the inflation target regime.central bank independence; inflation contract; inflation target; and electoral uncertainty.

Y(4143) is probably a molecular partner of Y(3930)

After discussing the various possible interpretations of the Y(4143) signal observed by the CDF collaboration in the $J/\psi \phi$ mode, we tend to conclude that Y(4143) is probably a $D_s^\ast {\bar D}_s^\ast$ molecular state with $J^{PC}=0^{++}$ or $2^{++}$ while Y(3930) is its $D^\ast {\bar D}^\ast$ molecular partner as predicted in our previous work (arXiv:0808.0073). Both the hidden-charm and open charm two-body decays occur through the rescattering of the vector components within the molecular states while the three- and four-body open charm decay modes are forbidden kinematically. Hence their widths are narrow naturally. CDF, Babar and Belle collaborations may have discovered heavy molecular states already. We urge experimentalists to measure their quantum numbers and explore their radiative decay modes in the future.Comment: 6 pages, 1 table, 4 figure

System Identification with Applications in Speech Enhancement

As the increasing popularity of integrating hands-free telephony on mobile portable devices and the rapid development of voice over internet protocol, identification of acoustic systems has become desirable for compensating distortions introduced to speech signals during transmission, and hence enhancing the speech quality. The objective of this research is to develop system identification algorithms for speech enhancement applications including network echo cancellation and speech dereverberation. A supervised adaptive algorithm for sparse system identification is developed for network echo cancellation. Based on the framework of selective-tap updating scheme on the normalized least mean squares algorithm, the MMax and sparse partial update tap-selection strategies are exploited in the frequency domain to achieve fast convergence performance with low computational complexity. Through demonstrating how the sparseness of the network impulse response varies in the transformed domain, the multidelay filtering structure is incorporated to reduce the algorithmic delay. Blind identification of SIMO acoustic systems for speech dereverberation in the presence of common zeros is then investigated. First, the problem of common zeros is defined and extended to include the presence of near-common zeros. Two clustering algorithms are developed to quantify the number of these zeros so as to facilitate the study of their effect on blind system identification and speech dereverberation. To mitigate such effect, two algorithms are developed where the two-stage algorithm based on channel decomposition identifies common and non-common zeros sequentially; and the forced spectral diversity approach combines spectral shaping filters and channel undermodelling for deriving a modified system that leads to an improved dereverberation performance. Additionally, a solution to the scale factor ambiguity problem in subband-based blind system identification is developed, which motivates further research on subbandbased dereverberation techniques. Comprehensive simulations and discussions demonstrate the effectiveness of the aforementioned algorithms. A discussion on possible directions of prospective research on system identification techniques concludes this thesis