Purchasing Power Parity and Country Characteristics: Evidence from Time Series Analysis

This paper investigates the relationships between country characteristics and the validity of PPP. We use three alternative time series methods to test for the stationarity of real exchange rates for each of the 72 countries over the period from 1976 to 2005. Our result shows that the evidence of PPP exhibits geographic difference. It is most likely to find stationary real exchange rates for European countries, whereas it is least likely to obtain the result of supporting PPP for Asian countries. We then use a probit regression model to examine if county characteristics are related to the validity of PPP. The probit regression result reveals that the validity of PPP decreases with inflation rate and increases with nominal exchange rate volatility.Purchasing power parity, Country characteristics, Unit root tests

Momentum analyticity of the holographic electric polarizability in 2+1 dimensions

The static electric polarization of a holographic field theory dual to the Einstein-Maxwell theory in the background of $AdS_4$ with a Reissner-Nordst\"{o}m (AdS-RN) black hole is investigated. We prove that the holographic polarization is a meromorphic functions in complex momentum plane and locate analytically the asymptotic distribution of the poles along two straight lines parallel to the imaginary axis for a large momentum magnitude. The results are compared with the numerical result on Friedel-like poles of the same holographic model reported in the literature and with the momentum singularities of the one-loop polarization in weak-coupling spinor QED$_3$ and scalar QED$_3$ with the similarities and differences discussed.Comment: 31 pages, 2 figure

Public perspective towards social impact of chang e lunar probe program

The present article is based on the MA thesis of Hou Bowen (Ph.D candidate) and on the presentation made at the ISA World Congress of Sociology held in Yokohama (Japan) on July 2014 at the Session on “Assessing Technologies: Global Patterns of Trust and Distrust” of RC23-Sociology of Science and Technology.During the past decades, assessing the impact of technological project and related engineering has long been paid attention. The objective of this research is to investigate technological project and related engineering’s social impact through public perspective. The present article investigated the social impact of China’s Chang E Lunar Probe project by using Social Impact Assessment (SIA) methods, resulting from a research study conducted in 2012. SIA is a collective of the systematic methods used to investigate the influence of engineering, project or policy and to present their potential social impacts. A survey from public respondents indicated that public spoke highly of Chang E Probe on the whole. Furthermore, a factor analysis of the perspective of public perspective towards Chang E Lunar Probe project has discovered such impact were mainly assessed in four dimensions by public, these impacts were military impact, political impact, public support and educational impact. From the results obtained so far, it revealed that public perspective towards the political impact of the Chang E Probe varies from each other but unified when they assess Chang E’s military impact, meanwhile student’s perspective towards the educational impact of Chang E Probe was largely different from other publics.The MA thesis has the supervision of Prof. Yin Haijie (professor in Harbin Institute of Technology)

The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation

In this paper we provide an extensive evaluation of fixation prediction and salient object segmentation algorithms as well as statistics of major datasets. Our analysis identifies serious design flaws of existing salient object benchmarks, called the dataset design bias, by over emphasizing the stereotypical concepts of saliency. The dataset design bias does not only create the discomforting disconnection between fixations and salient object segmentation, but also misleads the algorithm designing. Based on our analysis, we propose a new high quality dataset that offers both fixation and salient object segmentation ground-truth. With fixations and salient object being presented simultaneously, we are able to bridge the gap between fixations and salient objects, and propose a novel method for salient object segmentation. Finally, we report significant benchmark progress on three existing datasets of segmenting salient objectsComment: 15 pages, 8 figures. Conference version was accepted by CVPR 201