Who Builds the Motherland?

I was born in 2002 into a middle-class Jewish family, in a very Jewish town. The town was our Zion, our Mini-Israel, our bubble. It prided itself on being a sleepy town where any American can feel safe and comfortable. At the best of times, the town felt like a family; everyone knew your name and many children born in the town decided to live the rest of their adult lives there. It was a place where the support of Israel was of utmost importance. Although everyone prided themselves on the security, there was always this unease that our human rights could be taken away by those others that outnumbered us. After all, it only took two years from Hitler\u27s rise to power to his passing of the Nuremberg laws. With this fear of history repeating itself, every Jew in the bubble, whether they be Reform or Orthodox, Ashkenazi or Sephardic, talked of the grandeur of the Israeli state. Because no matter how slim the odds may seem that the worst-case scenario could happen, any chance that it could happen again was unacceptable for the descendants of the victims of the Holocaust. [excerpt

Terror Attacks and Bond Yields in the European Union: An Autogressive Transfer Function Approach

This article seeks a connection between the rate at which governments can borrow money and terrorist activity within their country. Government borrowing habits can play a large role in economic growth, and understanding the determinants of the rate at which money can be borrowed is valuable. The traditional bond yield study includes various macroeconomic indicators and estimates the role that they play in the borrow- ing rate. A straightforward theory to connect utility theory of consumer choice to risk preferences and the decision to invest in a bond is derived. Using data from the Inter- national Monetary Fund and University of Maryland\u27s Global Terrorism Database, this study will attempt a new approach. Instead of controlling for complicated and often endogenous macroeconomic indicators, an autoregressive estimation technique will be employed. A dual bond estimation structure (standard bonds as the dependent vari- able regressed on lagged values of the demeaned series) yields strong results to suggest that governments do pay a price in the rate at which they can borrow as a result of terrorist attacks. Homogenous estimation structures provide less convincing results

Do Expected Marginal Revenue Products for National Hockey League Players Equal Their Price in Daily Fantasy Games?

The equality between wages and marginal revenue products is a backbone of competitive labor markets. This study will seek to test the congruity between the two in the market for players in daily fantasy hockey games. Any observed and statistically significant incongruity would lead to the conclusion that an individual can earn long run profit playing daily fantasy games. Both fixed effects and pooled regressions are employed to isolate inequalities between prices and expected marginal revenue products for players in daily fantasy hockey games. Any deviation of such could potentially be explained by utility maximizing gamblers or incomplete information. Robust results suggest that players playing at home and players playing against weak opponents relative to their own team strength are undervalued. Players who have performed above their average performance in recent games are overvalued. Although it is clear expected marginal revenue products and prices do not equate, performance is still largely random and hard to predict

In a Strange Place

My work is about stress and strain in our modern times. I am using self portraiture as a way to discuss the world around me and hope that the viewer will relate to my experiences. Drawing, painting and video are used to convey different aspects of my observations, and old techniques are mixed with new technologies. Personal observations, artistic and scientific influences, and the art-making process have shaped this body of work

Pluto Hop, Skip, and Jump

This is the Final Report from Global Aerospace Corporation on this NIAC effort (Grant Nos.: NNX17AJ71G and 80NSSC18K0062) to develop the Pluto Hop, Skip, and Jump mission concept. We sought out to establish the feasibility of using a large inflatable drag device to decelerate and land on Pluto from interplanetary speed (~14 km/s) using only the Pluto atmosphere and just a few kilograms of propellant. The design and analysis efforts in Phase I indicated that this is feasible. Aerodynamic heating and loads were found to be orders of magnitude less than typical planetary entries due to the ultra-low ballistic coefficient craft and the low density and large scale height of the Pluto atmosphere. The deceleration system is capable of delivering a 200-kg lander-hopper to the surface or inserting an orbiter of a similar mass using aerocapture. Mission analysis work led to a reference mission with Earth launch in 2029, Jupiter assist in 2030, and Pluto arrival in 2040

Polyzwitterionic biomaterials for improving tribological properties of articular cartilage: injectable treatments for early-stage osteoarthritis

Mechanical properties of articular cartilage, including stiffness, biolubrication, and wear-resistance, undergo deterioration during progression of diseases such as osteoarthritis. When the tissue becomes softened and wear-prone, resulting from biochemical alterations within the cartilage matrix, osteoarthritis patients experience painful joint degeneration and erosion of the bone-protective cartilage. Moreover, the synovial fluid bathing the cartilage also experiences a reduction in lubricating capacity as osteoarthritis advances, further hastening wear. An existing treatment paradigm known as viscosupplementation, designed to restore a viscous and lubricating nature to the synovial fluid, involves intraarticular injection of hyaluronic acid into affected joints. While this technique relieves pain for some individuals, the majority of patients experience neither pain relief nor protection of the cartilage from further damage. To address the unmet need of patients requiring chondroprotective thera-pies, this dissertation describes two potential intraarticular strategies based on the application of polymer chemistry principles to bodily tissues and interfaces. One strategy involves the synthesis of a non-hyaluronic-acid synovial fluid sup-plement, based on a phosphorylcholine-containing polyacrylate network, de-signed to functionally mimic the lubricity of the glycoprotein lubricin, phospho-lipid macromolecular assemblies, and high molecular weight hyaluronic acid. The second strategy involves the in situ photopolymerization of a related polyacrylate within cartilage bulk tissue to strengthen, prevent wear, and in-crease the proportion of compressive load supported by the tissue’s interstitial fluid rather than solid matrix. In this strategy, the branched polymer network functionally mimics the glycosaminoglycans that are found in healthy cartilage but depleted in osteoarthritic cartilage. For both potential therapies, chemical and physical properties of the respective fluid and tissue are analyzed, and ex vivo cartilage mechanical testing involving axial and shear deformation reveal the biotribological and compressive reinforcement conferred by the zwitterionic polymer. The synovial fluid supplement significantly decreases cartilage friction through a variety of lubrication mechanisms depending upon tissue fluid flow state and articulation conditions, and the cartilage-reinforcing supplement pro-tects cartilage during accelerated wear testing while also improving synovial flu-id’s ability to lubricate polymer-impregnated cartilage. The fundamental tissue—biomaterial tribological interactions investigated in this dissertation will inform the rational design of therapeutic, friction-reducing polymers for diverse applications.2019-04-04T00:00:00

Learning Curve Management in Educational Programming Environments

Beginning programmers are best served by integrateddevelopment environments that adapt to their growingsophistication as programmers. To this end, we propose fourdesign goals for learning curve management in educationalprogramming environments. We provide pedagogicaljustification for each goal, describe possible supporting featuresets, and discuss the extent to which these goals have beenachieved in some current environments, particularly JPie, ourinteractive environment for live construction of Java applications

Analysis of the N-Card Version of the Game Le Her

We present a complete solution to a card game with historical origins. Our analysis exploits the convexity properties in the payoff matrix, allowing this discrete game to be resolved by continuous methods

The (1+(λ,λ))(1+(\lambda,\lambda)) Genetic Algorithm for Permutations

The $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$ genetic algorithm is a bright example of an evolutionary algorithm which was developed based on the insights from theoretical findings. This algorithm uses crossover, and it was shown to asymptotically outperform all mutation-based evolutionary algorithms even on simple problems like OneMax. Subsequently it was studied on a number of other problems, but all of these were pseudo-Boolean. We aim at improving this situation by proposing an adaptation of the $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$ genetic algorithm to permutation-based problems. Such an adaptation is required, because permutations are noticeably different from bit strings in some key aspects, such as the number of possible mutations and their mutual dependence. We also present the first runtime analysis of this algorithm on a permutation-based problem called Ham whose properties resemble those of OneMax. On this problem, where the simple mutation-based algorithms have the running time of $\Theta(n^2 \log n)$ for problem size $n$, the $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$ genetic algorithm finds the optimum in $O(n^2)$ fitness queries. We augment this analysis with experiments, which show that this algorithm is also fast in practice.Comment: This contribution is a slightly extended version of the paper accepted to the GECCO 2020 workshop on permutation-based problem