Thermodynamic Alerter for Microbursts (TAMP)

The following subject areas are covered: microburst detection, location and measurement; thermal alerter for microbursts prototypes (TAMP); sensor-transmitters (Senstrans) design; TAMP installation; and DAPAD software

A non-cooperative foundation for the continuous Raiffa solution

This paper provides a non-cooperative foundation for (asymmetric generalizations of) the continuous Raiffa solution. Specifically, we consider a continuous-time variation of the classic Ståhl–Rubinstein bargaining model, in which there is a finite deadline that ends the negotiations, and in which each player’s opportunity to make proposals is governed by a player-specific Poisson process, in that the rejecter of a proposal becomes proposer at the first next arrival of her process. Under the assumption that future payoffs are not discounted, it is shown that the expected payoffs players realize in subgame perfect equilibrium converge to the continuous Raiffa solution outcome as the deadline tends to infinity. The weights reflecting the asymmetries among the players correspond to the Poisson arrival rates of their respective proposal processes

Double point self-intersection surfaces of immersions

A self-transverse immersion of a smooth manifold M^{k+2} in R^{2k+2} has a double point self-intersection set which is the image of an immersion of a smooth surface, the double point self-intersection surface. We prove that this surface may have odd Euler characteristic if and only if k is congruent to 1 modulo 4 or k+1 is a power of 2. This corrects a previously published result by Andras Szucs. The method of proof is to evaluate the Stiefel-Whitney numbers of the double point self-intersection surface. By earier work of the authors these numbers can be read off from the Hurewicz image h(\alpha ) in H_{2k+2}\Omega ^{\infty }\Sigma ^{\infty }MO(k) of the element \alpha in \pi _{2k+2}\Omega ^{\infty }\Sigma ^{\infty }MO(k) corresponding to the immersion under the Pontrjagin-Thom construction.Comment: 22 pages. Published copy, also available at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTVol4/paper4.abs.htm

Bordism Groups of Immersions and Classes Represented by Self-Intersections

We prove a geometrical version of Herbert's theorem by considering the self-intersection immersions of a self-transverse immersion up to bordism. This generalises Herbert's theorem to additional cohomology theories and gives a commutative diagram in the homotopy of Thom complexes. The proof uses Koschorke and Sanderson's operations and the fact that bordism of immersions gives a functor on the category of smooth manifolds and immersions.Comment: 16 page

The Case for Banning Payday Lending: Snapshots from Four Key States

For years, community groups and advocates around the country have waged pitched battles to eliminate payday lending in their respective states. Notwithstanding extensive documentation of the payday lending debt trap and the billions of dollars payday lenders have systematically stripped from low-income families and communities, especially those of color, the payday lending industry has cannily built and exerted its political power in state capitols throughout the U.S. As a result, many states permit usurious payday lending, with often dire consequences for millions of payday loan borrowers already struggling to make ends meet. A key move in the industry's playbook is to convince states that the best way to address predatory payday lending is to regulate the industry. But regulations in states that authorize payday loans are too often written by industry and porous at best, and across the board fail to eliminate the hooks that trap people in these usurious and harmful loans. Other less subtle strategies the industry employs are to co-opt state legislators through generous campaign contributions, and to lobby aggressively against any and all attempts to prohibit or curtail payday lending. This report presents snapshots on payday loan regulation in four key states -- California, Illinois, New York, and North Carolina. The snapshots are intended to provide helpful lessons and serve as a useful basis for comparison. Although New York has long prohibited payday lending altogether through its strong usury law, North Carolina opened the door to payday lending for five years before restoring its previous ban in 2001. Illinois, by contrast, has attempted to restrict payday lending through a series of legislative and regulatory reforms adopted over the past 12 years, many of which the industry immediately circumvented. California, for its part, has few payday loan regulations on the books. While some cities and counties in California have sought to curb payday lending by passing local ordinances, the industry has to date successfully thwarted all efforts to pass meaningful state-level protections.The four organizations that prepared the snapshots -- California Reinvestment Coalition, New Economy Project (formerly NEDAP), Reinvestment Partners, and Woodstock Institute -- offer their perspective as financial justice advocates that have been in the thick of payday lending battles in their home states. Their direct experience with a range of regulatory frameworks has shown that strong usury caps have proven the single most effective means of banning payday lending.The report comes at an exciting time. Advocates have spent years refuting and defending against the payday lending industry's shameless and aggressive lobbying, and there is now a clear turning of the tide. Last month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau published a comprehensive study on storefront and bank payday loans, which showed how payday loans lead many borrowers to a long-term cycle of indebtedness. That same week, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued strong proposed guidance that would effectively rein in predatory payday lending by banks. There is an emerging chorus at local, state, and federal levels calling for an end to payday lending -- whether by banks, storefront payday lenders, or over the internet -- and the squeeze is now squarely on the industry. The changing dynamic will likely increase pressure in battleground states, such as California and Illinois, and we hope soon to see strong federal action that ends payday lending once and for all

Early Adolescents' Development of Academic Self‐Concept and Intrinsic Task Value: The Role of Contextual Feedback

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112276/1/jora12140.pd

Essays in microeconomic theory

My thesis considers various aspects of microeconomic theory and focuses on the different types of uncertainty that players can encounter. Each chapter studies a setting with a different type of uncertainty and draws conclusions about how players are likely to behave in such a situation. The first chapter focuses on games of incomplete information and is joint work with Peter Eccles. We provide conditions to allow modelling situations of asymmetric information in a tractable manner. In addition we show a novel relationship between certain games of asymmetric information and corresponding games of symmetric information. This framework establishes links between certain games separately studied in the literature. The class of games considered is defined by scalable preference relations and a scalable information structure. We show that this framework can be used to solve asymmetric contests and auctions with loss aversion. In the second chapter I move to situations in which information is almost complete. In joint work with Peter Eccles, we consider the robustness of subgame perfect implementation in situations when the preferences of players are almost perfectly known. More precisely we consider a class of information perturbations where in each state of the world players know their own preferences with certainty and receive almost perfectly informative signals about the preferences of other players. We show that implementations using two-stage sequential move mechanisms are always robust under this class of restricted perturbations, while those using more stages are often not. The third chapter deals with a case of complete information and is joint work with Peter Eccles. We introduce the family of weighted Raiffa solutions. An individual solution is characterised by two parameters representing the bargaining weight of each player and the speed at which agreement is reached. First we provide a cooperative foundation for this family of solutions, by appealing to two of the original axioms used by Nash and a simple monotonicity axiom. Using similar axioms we give a new axiomatization for a family of weighted Kalai-Smorodinsky solutions. Secondly we provide a non-cooperative foundation for weighted Raiffa solutions, showing how they can be implemented using simple bargaining models where offers are intermittent or the identity of the proposer is persistent. This shows that weighted Raiffa solutions have cooperative foundations closely related to those of the Kalai-Smorodinksy solution, and non-cooperative foundations closely related to those of the Nash solution. The fourth chapter is closely related to the third chapter and is joint work with Bram Driesen and Peter Eccles. It provides a non-cooperative foundation for asymmetric generalizations of the continuous Raiffa solution. Specifically, we consider a continuous-time variation of the classic Stahl-Rubinstein bargaining model, in which each player's opportunity to make proposals is produced by an independent Poisson process, and a definite deadline ends the negotiations. Under the assumption that future payoffs are not discounted, it is shown that the payoffs realized in the unique subgame perfect equilibrium of this game approach the continuous Raiffa solution as the time horizon tends to infinity. The weights reflecting the asymmetries among the players, correspond with the Poisson arrival rates of their respective proposal processesScalable games: modelling games of incomplete information / Nora Wegner and Peter Eccles. -- Robustness of Subgame Perfect Implementation / Nora Wegner and Peter Eccles. -- Generalised weighted Raiffa Solutions / Nora Wegner and Peter Eccles. -- A non-cooperative foundation for the continuous Raiffa solution / Nora Wegner, Bram Driesen and Peter EcclesPrograma Oficial de Doctorado en EconomíaPresidente: Christopher Wallace; Secretario: Miltiadis Makris; Vocal: Ludovic Reno

DNNShifter: An Efficient DNN Pruning System for Edge Computing

Deep neural networks (DNNs) underpin many machine learning applications. Production quality DNN models achieve high inference accuracy by training millions of DNN parameters which has a significant resource footprint. This presents a challenge for resources operating at the extreme edge of the network, such as mobile and embedded devices that have limited computational and memory resources. To address this, models are pruned to create lightweight, more suitable variants for these devices. Existing pruning methods are unable to provide similar quality models compared to their unpruned counterparts without significant time costs and overheads or are limited to offline use cases. Our work rapidly derives suitable model variants while maintaining the accuracy of the original model. The model variants can be swapped quickly when system and network conditions change to match workload demand. This paper presents DNNShifter, an end-to-end DNN training, spatial pruning, and model switching system that addresses the challenges mentioned above. At the heart of DNNShifter is a novel methodology that prunes sparse models using structured pruning. The pruned model variants generated by DNNShifter are smaller in size and thus faster than dense and sparse model predecessors, making them suitable for inference at the edge while retaining near similar accuracy as of the original dense model. DNNShifter generates a portfolio of model variants that can be swiftly interchanged depending on operational conditions. DNNShifter produces pruned model variants up to 93x faster than conventional training methods. Compared to sparse models, the pruned model variants are up to 5.14x smaller and have a 1.67x inference latency speedup, with no compromise to sparse model accuracy. In addition, DNNShifter has up to 11.9x lower overhead for switching models and up to 3.8x lower memory utilisation than existing approaches.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 5 table