313 research outputs found
Exchange Rate Misalignments: Historical Experience of Japan, Germany, Singapore and Taiwan Compared to China Today
This is a comparative study on the historical experience of real effective exchange rate (REER) misalignment of Japanese yen, Deutsche mark, Singapore dollar and Taiwan dollar, with regard to the recent dispute over the Renminbi (RMB) valuation. Panel-based misalignment estimates of the four economies show that net foreign asset build-up does not necessarily result in currency misalignment, and the recent misalignment of RMB is not unprecedented in terms of magnitude, duration or currency coverage, whereas volatility in REER misalignment is likely to propagate to inflation of the home economy concerned. The assertion of 'RMB rate manipulation' thus lacks empirical support.REER misalignment, RMB, Yen, D-mark, Singapore dollar, Taiwan dollar
Exchange rate misalignments: A comparison of China today against recent historical experiences of Japan, Germany, Singapore and Taiwan
The familiar claim of Chinese currency manipulation is generally asserted without reference to empirical evidence. To investigate the legitimacy of the claim, we ask if the undervalued misalignment found in the real effective exchange rate (REER) of the Chinese renminbi (RMB) over the past decade has any recent historical precedents. Four cases are examined: the Japanese yen, the Deutsche mark, the Singapore dollar and the Taiwan dollar. Panel-based misalignment estimates of the REER of the four currencies are obtained using quarterly data from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. Our estimates suggest that there are precedents to the recent misalignment of the RMB in terms of magnitude, duration or breadth of currency coverage, and that a net build-up in foreign asset does not necessarily result in currency misalignment. In addition to finding little empirical justification for the claim of Chinese currency manipulation, we note that REER misalignment runs a risk of propagating inflation in the home economy.REER misalignment; RMB; yen; D-mark; Singapore dollar; Taiwan dollar
Human Development in East and Southeast Asian Economies: 1990-2010
This report reviews patterns and trends in human development (HD) in East and Southeast Asia (ESA) since 1990, analyzes causes and consequences of this development, highlighting both structural and institutional factors, and identifies the basic principles for durable enhancements in HD. The basic arguments are that most ESA economies have experienced rapid socioeconomic structural changes through industrialization and urbanization in the last two decades. From a HD perspective, these processes offer enormous room for expanding people's capabilities. However, to successfully seize such opportunities, appropriate institutions and public policies are needed, and so is public participation in policy making and implementation. Public policies are also important for equitable distribution of the expanded opportunities, which in turn contribute to the legitimacy of institutions and social cohesion. And while industrialization does often cause more environmental pollution, technological advances also offer the means to reduce such pollution, so long as appropriate environmental policies are implemented to ensure the use of such cleaner technologies. Subject to such appropriate public policies, in net terms industrialization and urbanization should expand people's capabilities and ensure sustainable HD. Six principles are critical to a successful HD strategy-agricultural and rural development to facilitate structural transformation and to increase employment; human capital accumulation to promote continued economic and income growth; inclusive urbanization to reduce dualism and enhance social integration; cleaner industrialization to ensure sustainability; people's participation and empowerment to improve decision making and governance; closer regional and international cooperation to ensure a better future for all on our fragile planet.Human Development, Structural Factors, Public Policy, East and Southeast Asia
A Comparison of Regression Methods in Data Subject to Detection Limits: An Application to Lung Fiber Analysis Among Brake Workers
Objective: This thesis aims to apply and compare selected regression methods with a lung fiber analysis dataset. Final results based on 19 cases will be compared to 2011 Marsh et al.’s analysis based on the first 15 cases.
Methods: Two research questions for the lung fiber dataset are: (1) is there a relationship between the lung fiber concentration of TAA and lung fiber concentration of AC? and (2) is there a relationship between the lung fiber concentration of TAA and duration of employment as a brake worker? Besides the substitution method, bivariate normal regression was used in the doubly left-censored situation in question 1, while the censored normal regression and regression modeling with count data were used in the situation with only the dependent variable subject to detection limits in question 2.
Result: (1) The estimate of the slopes between the log-scale of two lung concentrations (TAA vs AC) were 0.59, 0.57, 0.59 and 0.54 in the simple linear regression with substitution (DL, 0.5DL, DL/√2) and the bivariate normal regression, respectively. All of the slope estimates were statistically significant different from zero (p-value = 0.001, 0.003, 0.002 and 0.003). (2) The estimate of the slopes between the log-scale of the TAA lung fiber concentrations and DOE were 0.001, 0.014, 0.008, 0.020 and 0.030 in the simple linear regression with substitution (DL, 0.5DL, and DL/√2), censored normal regression and the negative binomial regression, respectively. All of the slope estimates were not statistically significant different from zero (p-value = 0.933, 0.486, 0.675, 0.390 and 0.439).
Conclusions: The consistent results from the substitution and other methods provide support for both a positive relationship between the lung concentration of TAA and AC and for no relationship between the lung concentration of TAA and DOE among 19 brake workers with mesothelioma. These findings are consistent with Marsh et al.’s findings in 2011 based on the first 15 cases. The public health significance is that the study results provide additional support for the conclusion that exposure to non-commercial amphibole asbestos, and not chrysotile, is related to the observed mesothelioma in brake workers. However, these conclusions need to be verified with a larger sample size
ALP-KD: Attention-Based Layer Projection for Knowledge Distillation
Knowledge distillation is considered as a training and compression strategy
in which two neural networks, namely a teacher and a student, are coupled
together during training. The teacher network is supposed to be a trustworthy
predictor and the student tries to mimic its predictions. Usually, a student
with a lighter architecture is selected so we can achieve compression and yet
deliver high-quality results. In such a setting, distillation only happens for
final predictions whereas the student could also benefit from teacher's
supervision for internal components.
Motivated by this, we studied the problem of distillation for intermediate
layers. Since there might not be a one-to-one alignment between student and
teacher layers, existing techniques skip some teacher layers and only distill
from a subset of them. This shortcoming directly impacts quality, so we instead
propose a combinatorial technique which relies on attention. Our model fuses
teacher-side information and takes each layer's significance into
consideration, then performs distillation between combined teacher layers and
those of the student. Using our technique, we distilled a 12-layer BERT (Devlin
et al. 2019) into 6-, 4-, and 2-layer counterparts and evaluated them on GLUE
tasks (Wang et al. 2018). Experimental results show that our combinatorial
approach is able to outperform other existing techniques.Comment: AAAI 2021. This work has been done while Peyman Passban was at Huawe
CRC-based Reliable WiFi Backscatter Communiation for Supply Chain Management
Supply chain management is aimed to keep going long-term performance of the
supply chain and minimize the costs. Backscatter technology provides a more
efficient way of being able to identify items and real-time monitoring. Among
the backscatter systems, the ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) system
provides a prospect of ultra-low energy consumption and does not require
controlled excitation devices. In this paper, we introduce CRCScatter, a CRC
reverse algorithm-based AmBC system using a single access point (AP). A CRC
reverse decoder is applied to reverse the ambient data from CRC32 sequence in
the backscatter packet and realize single-AP decoding. Based on the nature of
DBPSK modulation in WiFi signal, the CRCScatter system obtains the tag data by
XOR and Differential decoder. Our simulation results verify the effectiveness
of our proposed system in the low SNR regime. The average decoding time of
CRCScatter system is independent of the length of tag data. Furthermore, our
system can append redundant bits in the tag data to improve the decoding
accuracy while not increasing the decoding time
mixiTUI:A Tangible Sequencer for Electronic Live Performances
With the rise of crowdsourcing and mobile crowdsensing techniques, a large
number of crowdsourcing applications or platforms (CAP) have appeared. In the
mean time, CAP-related models and frameworks based on different research
hypotheses are rapidly emerging, and they usually address specific issues from
a certain perspective. Due to different settings and conditions, different
models are not compatible with each other. However, CAP urgently needs to
combine these techniques to form a unified framework. In addition, these models
needs to be learned and updated online with the extension of crowdsourced data
and task types, thus requiring a unified architecture that integrates lifelong
learning concepts and breaks down the barriers between different modules. This
paper draws on the idea of ubiquitous operating systems and proposes a novel OS
(CrowdOS), which is an abstract software layer running between native OS and
application layer. In particular, based on an in-depth analysis of the complex
crowd environment and diverse characteristics of heterogeneous tasks, we
construct the OS kernel and three core frameworks including Task Resolution and
Assignment Framework (TRAF), Integrated Resource Management (IRM), and Task
Result quality Optimization (TRO). In addition, we validate the usability of
CrowdOS, module correctness and development efficiency. Our evaluation further
reveals TRO brings enormous improvement in efficiency and a reduction in energy
consumption
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