Writing an Escalation Contract Using the Consumer Price Index

[Excerpt] Each year thousands of people write contracts with escalation clauses that are tied to the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Escalation contracts call for an increase in some type of payment in the event of an increase in prices. These contracts are used in a wide variety of ways, from adjusting rent prices to adding cost-of-living adjustments to alimony payments and wage contracts. Unfortunately, many escalation contracts tied to the CPI are vague. For example, a contract may stipulate that “the Consumer Price Index (CPI) be used to escalate an apartment rent, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes thousands of CPIs each month, so a more carefully worded contract could minimize ambiguity and the likelihood of future disputes. This issue of BEYOND THE NUMBERS can help those who use the CPI to write escalation clauses to create a more comprehensive contract

Machine learned boundary definitions for an expert's tracing assistant in image processing

Department Head: Anton Willem Bohm.Includes bibliographical references (pages 178-184).Most image processing work addressing boundary definition tasks embeds the assumption that an edge in an image corresponds to the boundary of interest in the world. In straightforward imagery this is true, however it is not always the case. There are images in which edges are indistinct or obscure, and these images can only be segmented by a human expert. The work in this dissertation addresses the range of imagery between the two extremes of those straightforward images and those requiring human guidance to appropriately segment. By freeing systems of a priori edge definitions and building in a mechanism to learn the boundary definitions needed, systems can do better and be more broadly applicable. This dissertation presents the construction of such a boundary-learning system and demonstrates the validity of this premise on real data. A framework was created for the task in which expert-provided boundary exemplars are used to create training data, which in turn are used by a neural network to learn the task and replicate the expert's boundary tracing behavior. This is the framework for the Expert's Tracing Assistant (ETA) system. For a representative set of nine structures in the Visible Human imagery, ETA was compared and contrasted to two state-of-the-art, user guided methods--Intelligent Scissors (IS) and Active Contour Models (ACM). Each method was used to define a boundary, and the distances between these boundaries and an expert's ground truth were compared. Across independent trials, there will be a natural variation in an expert's boundary tracing, and this degree of variation served as a benchmark against which these three methods were compared. For simple structural boundaries, all the methods were equivalent. However, in more difficult cases, ETA was shown to significantly better replicate the expert's boundary than either IS or ACM. In these cases, where the expert's judgement was most called into play to bound the structure, ACM and IS could not adapt to the boundary character used by the expert while ETA could

Introduction to British DiGRA issue

This special issue of ToDiGRA collects some of the best articles presented at the British DiGRA conference which took place at The University of Salford at MediaCityUK in May 2017. For this issue we invited the authors of the full papers presented at the conference to submit a revised document. The manuscripts were then sent to a group of selected peer-reviewers, three for each submission. The reviewers, experts in the field of study of the assigned papers, provided their feedback and evaluation. The five accepted papers were then sent back to their authors who implemented the required changes and re-submitted their final work. Each one of the articles in this issue is the result of a process of research and revision that took almost one year of work from the time of their original presentation at the 2017 British DiGRA conference

British digital game studies

This paper provides a short and potted recent history of digital games research in Great Britain. We begin this story in 2001. Though a substantial amount of research and writing on digital games was taking in Britain since at least the 1980s, for us the turn of the new millennium makes a logical starting point for our recent history. This is because this was not only the year that Aarseth (2001) marked as 'year one' for 'computer game research', but it was also the year that the first major international conference on digital games took place in the UK (in Bristol), and the first time a major British government grant was awarded to undertake research on digital gaming. The paper then charts the significant role Britain played in hosting major early international gatherings of (now leading) games researchers, such as those in Bristol and also Manchester. As well as the important crop of early British authored (text)books that helped shape the direction of this new emerging discipline. What we then see is a significant growth in British digital games studies focused around a number of key events, research clusters, and publications, and the development of a particular framing of digital games within a wider social, cultural, and political context. It is this, we would suggest, which has given British digital game studies its particular flavour and also its important global role in pushing forward research, theory, and key debates

Ida Crawford Stewart Papers - Accession 487

This collection consists of personal, professional, genealogical and reference files of art-educator, beautician and business woman Ida Crawford Stewart. The collection contains correspondence, newspaper articles, citations, photographs, and church bulletins. Also included are family business papers from the time of Ida’s Irish immigrant great-great-grandfather, John Crawford (1750-1826) to the time of her father James Roy Crawford (1891-1980). The papers and correspondence which includes original deeds, wills, and other primary documents that reference the sale of slaves, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction of the South. There are many records that genealogists interested in the Crawford Family, Stewart Family, Nilson Family, and Wade Family will find useful.https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/manuscriptcollection_findingaids/1097/thumbnail.jp

The Flotation Remains: A Preliminary Report

Authored section of Heshbon Expedition report

Sensor designand feedback motor control for two dimensional linear motors

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (p. 172-174).by Douglas Stewart Crawford.M.S

The Formation of the Collisional Family around the Dwarf Planet Haumea

Haumea, a rapidly rotating elongated dwarf planet (~ 1500 km in diameter), has two satellites and is associated with a "family" of several smaller Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) in similar orbits. All members of the Haumea system share a water ice spectral feature that is distinct from all other KBOs. The relative velocities between the Haumea family members are too small to have formed by catastrophic disruption of a large precursor body, which is the process that formed families around much smaller asteroids in the Main Belt. Here we show that all of the unusual characteristics of the Haumea system are explained by a novel type of giant collision: a graze-and-merge impact between two comparably sized bodies. The grazing encounter imparted the high angular momentum that spun off fragments from the icy crust of the elongated merged body. The fragments became satellites and family members. Giant collision outcomes are extremely sensitive to the impact parameters. Compared to the Main Belt, the largest bodies in the Kuiper Belt are more massive and experience slower velocity collisions; hence, outcomes of giant collisions are dramatically different between the inner and outer solar system. The dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt record an unexpectedly large number of giant collisions, requiring a special dynamical event at the end of solar system formation.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ, 12 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables

Repetitive mild traumatic brain injury in a mouse model produces learning and memory deficits accompanied by histological changes

Concussion or mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) represents the most common type of brain injury. However, in contrast with moderate or severe injury, there are currently few non-invasive experimental studies that investigate the cumulative effects of repetitive mTBI using rodent models. Here we describe and compare the behavioral and pathological consequences in a mouse model of single (s-mTBI) or repetitive injury (r-mTBI, five injuries given at 48 h intervals) administered by an electromagnetic controlled impactor. Our results reveal that a single mTBI is associated with transient motor and cognitive deficits as demonstrated by rotarod and the Barnes Maze respectively, whereas r-mTBI results in more significant deficits in both paradigms. Histology revealed no overt cell loss in the hippocampus, although a reactive gliosis did emerge in hippocampal sector CA1 and in the deeper cortical layers beneath the injury site in repetitively injured animals, where evidence of focal injury also was observed in the brainstem and cerebellum. Axonal injury, manifest as amyloid precursor protein immunoreactive axonal profiles, was present in the corpus callosum of both injury groups, though more evident in the r-mTBI animals. Our data demonstrate that this mouse model of mTBI is reproducible, simple, and noninvasive, with behavioral impairment after a single injury and increasing deficits after multiple injuries accompanied by increased focal and diffuse pathology. As such, this model may serve as a suitable platform with which to explore repetitive mTBI relevant to human brain injury

To Link or Not to Link? Multiple Team Membership and Unit Performance

Multiple team membership is common in today’s team-based organizations, but little is known about its relationship with collective effectiveness across teams. We adopted a microfoundations framework utilizing existing individual- and team-level research to develop a higher-level perspective on multiple team membership’s relationship with performance of entire units of teams. We tested our predictions with data collected from 849 primary care units of the Veterans Health Administration serving over 4.2 million patients. In this context, we found multiple team membership is negatively associated with unit performance, and this negative relationship is exacerbated by task complexity