Dendrobates leucomelas

Number of Pages: 6Integrative BiologyGeological Science

Forecasting and Conditional Projection Using Realistic Prior Distributions

This paper develops a forecasting procedure based on a Bayesian method for estimating vector autoregressions. The procedure is applied to ten macroeconomic variables and is shown to improve out-of-sample forecasts relative to univariate equations. Although cross-variables responses are damped by the prior, considerable interaction among the variables is shown to be captured by the estimates.We provide unconditional forecasts as of 1982:12 and 1983:3.We also describe how a model such as this can be used to make conditional projections and to analyze policy alternatives. As an example, we analyze a Congressional Budget Office forecast made in 1982:12.While no automatic causal interpretations arise from models like ours, they provide a detailed characterization of the dynamic statistical interdependence of a set of economic variables, which may help inevaluating causal hypotheses, without containing any such hypotheses themselves.

Evaluation of Reading Achievement for Students of The Carroll County Public School System’s 2006 Summer Enrichment Program

The purpose of this study was to examine the efficacy of guided reading interventions with regard to individual reading achievement for elementary aged students who participated in a five-week summer enrichment program. Using a baseline and intervention design, a curriculum-based measure model of assessment was administered to each student. The analysis of data from the curriculum based measurement allowed for the implementation of guided reading interventions, which targeted increased student reading abilities for the chronological time period of July 5, 2006 through August 3, 2006. The results indicated that student academic deficits were not sufficiently impacted to normalize students to grade level expectation. The curriculum based measurement model of assessment procedures and guided reading interventions are described in detail and practical implications are discussed

Equivariant Brill-Noether theory for elliptic operators and superrigidity of J-holomorphic maps

The space of Fredholm operators of fixed index is stratified by submanifolds according to the dimension of the kernel. Geometric considerations often lead to questions about the intersections of concrete families of elliptic operators with these submanifolds: Are the intersections nonempty? Are they smooth? What are their codimensions? The purpose of this article is to develop tools to address these questions in equivariant situations. An important motivation for this work are transversality questions for multiple covers of J-holomorphic maps. As an application, we use our framework to give a concise exposition of Wendl's proof of the superrigidity conjecture

Low-Energy Polymeric Phases of Alanates

Low-energy structures of alanates are currently known to be described by patterns of isolated, nearly ideal tetrahedral [AlH$_4$] anions and metal cations. We discover that the novel polymeric motif recently proposed for LiAlH$_4$ plays a dominant role in a series of alanates, including LiAlH$_4$, NaAlH$_4$, KAlH$_4$, Mg(AlH$_4$)$_2$, Ca(AlH$_4$)$_2$ and Sr(AlH$_4$)$_2$. In particular, most of the low-energy structures discovered for the whole series are characterized by networks of corner-sharing [AlH$_6$] octahedra, forming wires and/or planes throughout the materials. Finally, for Mg(AlH$_4$)$_2$ and Sr(AlH$_4$)$_2$, we identify two polymeric phases to be lowest in energy at low temperatures.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables, including supplemental materia