Studying China’s International Finance and Policy: A Speech Given at the University of Richmond School of Law

Chinese international finance may sound to many of you like a daunting subject. It really is not, but I have to admit it’s not quite intuitive. International finance is a lot like accounting; you have to learn the rules. And on top of that, in this case we have to add the never intuitive issue of Chinese policy-making. I didn’t learn anything about these topics in graduate school but rather in my first job as a CIA economist, over thirty years ago. At that time China published no economic data; it was just sort of a black hole in the world of data. My first assignment was to work with other economists and create an estimate of China’s balance of payments accounts using something of a mirror image approach

THE USE OF REGRESSION MODELS FOR DETECTING DIGITAL FINGERPRINTS IN SYNTHETIC AUDIO

Modern advancements in text to speech and voice conversion techniques make it increasingly difficult to distinguish an authentic voice from a synthetically generated voice. These techniques, though complex, are relatively easy to use, even for non-technical users. It is important to develop mechanisms for detecting false content that easily scale to the size of the monitoring requirement. Current approaches for detecting spoofed audio are difficult to scale because of their processing requirements. Individually analyzing spectrograms for aberrations at higher frequencies relies too much on independent verification and is more resource intensive. Our method addresses the resource consideration by only looking at the residual differences between an audio file’s smoothed signal and its actual signal. We conjecture that natural audio has greater variance than spoofed audio because spoofed audio’s generation is conditioned on trying to mimic an existing pattern. To test this, we develop a classifier that distinguishes between spoofed and real audio by analyzing the differences in residual patterns between audio files.Outstanding ThesisMajor, United States ArmyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Equivalence of the Beta-function of the Variational Approach to that of QCD

The variational ansatz for the ground state wavefunctional of QCD is found to capture the anti-screening behaviour that contributes the dominant `-4' to the beta-function and leads to asymptotic freedom. By considering an SU(N) purely gauge theory in the Hamiltonian formalism and choosing the Coulomb gauge, the origins of all screening and anti-screening contributions in gluon processes are found in terms of the physical degrees of freedom. The overwhelming anti- screening contribution of `-4' is seen to originate in the renormalisation of a Coulomb interaction by a transverse gluon. The lesser screening contribution of `1/3' is seen to originate in processes involving transverse gluon interactions. It is thus apparent how the variational ansatz must be developed to capture the full running of the QCD coupling constant.Comment: 35 pages, 11 figures, LaTe

Methods for preparing dry, partially articulated skeletons of osteichthyans, with notes on making ridewood dissections of the cranial skeleton

Journal ArticleWe describe methods for preparing dry skeletons of virtually any osteichthyan species with a well-ossified skeleton, including very large specimens (e.g., > 1 m Megalops atlanticus). Our approach differs from those conventionally used to prepare skeletons of tetrapods in that (1) fairly complete dissection of the specimen is required at the outset of processing; and (2) we use an alcohol dehydration step to rapidly dry the specimen. Similar techniques can be used to prepare well-calcified chondrichthyan skeletons. We also outline the steps for making Ridewood dissections of the skull. Dry, partially articulated skeletons prepared by these methods can be stored indefinitely in acid-free containers in an environmentally controlled space (21 ± 6 3 ±; Rh = 40% ± 5%) in pest-proof specimen cases. Although a truism of anatomical research is that you cannot learn everything from studying one specimen or one type of preparation, partially articulated dry skeletons are useful for research ranging from phylogenetic investigations to age and growth analyses to functional morphology, making them of great and lasting value to any collection

Quantum Seismology

We propose a quantum mechanical method of detecting weak vibrational disturbances inspired by the protocol of entanglement farming. We consider a setup where pairs of atoms in their ground state are successively sent through an optical cavity. It is known that in this way it is possible to drive that cavity toward a stable fixed-point state. Here we study how that fixed-point state depends on the time interval between pairs of atoms and on the distance between the cavity's mirrors. Taking advantage of an extremely precise resonance effect, we find that there are special values of these parameters where the fixed-point state is highly sensitive to perturbations, even harmonic vibrations with frequencies several orders of magnitude below the cavity's natural frequency. We propose that this sensitivity may be useful for high precision metrology.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. RevTeX 4.

From War Zones to Jail: Veteran Reintegration Problems

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