Money and the international monetary system

International finance ; Money ; Heller, H. Robert

Improving America's competitiveness

Go metric and remove barriers to nationwide branch banking: these are the best ways to improve U.S. export performance in world markets.Balance of trade ; Competition ; Dollar

Dynamical Effects of Nuclear Rings in Disk Galaxies

We investigate the dynamical response of stellar orbits in a rotating barred galaxy potential to the perturbation by a nuclear gaseous ring. The change in 3D periodic orbit families is examined as the gas accumulates between the inner Lindblad resonances. It is found that the phase space allowable to the x2 family of orbits is substantially increased and a vertical instability strip appears with the growing mass of the ring. A significant distortion of the x1 orbits is observed in the vicinity of the ring, which leads to the intersection between orbits with different values of the Jacobi integral. We also examine the dependence of the orbital response to the eccentricity and alignment of the ring with the bar. Misalignment between an oval ring and a bar can leave observational footprints in the form of twisted near-infrared isophotes in the vicinity of the ring. It is inferred that a massive nuclear ring acts to weaken and dissolve the stellar bar exterior to the ring, whereas only weakly affecting the orbits interior to the inner Lindblad resonances. Consequences for gas evolution in the circumnuclear regions of barred galaxies are discussed as well.Comment: 27 pages, 11 postscript figures included, latex using aastex 4.0, uuencoded compressed tar file, to appear in Ap

Wilson chiral perturbation theory, Wilson-Dirac operator eigenvalues and clover improvement

Chiral perturbation theory for eigenvalue distributions, and equivalently random matrix theory, has recently been extended to include lattice effects for Wilson fermions. We test the predictions by comparison to eigenvalue distributions of the Hermitian Wilson-Dirac operator from pure gauge (quenched) ensembles. We show that the lattice effects are diminished when using clover improvement for the Dirac operator. We demonstrate that the leading Wilson low-energy constants associated with Wilson (clover) fermions can be determined using spectral information of the respective Dirac operator at finite volume.Comment: Presented at "Xth Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum," October 2012, Garching, Germany. To appear as PoS (Confinement X) 07

Measurements of farfield sound generation from a flow-excited cavity

Results of 1/3-octave-band spectral measurements of internal pressures and the external acoustic field of a tangentially blown rectangular cavity are compared. Proposed mechanisms for sound generation are reviewed, and spectra and directivity plots of cavity noise are presented. Directivity plots show a slightly modified monopole pattern. Frequencies of cavity response are calculated using existing predictions and are compared with those obtained experimentally. The effect of modifying the upstream boundary layer on the noise was investigated, and its effectiveness was found to be a function of cavity geometry and flow velocity

Impact of a process improvement program in a production software environment: Are we any better?

For the past 15 years, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) has participated in a process improvement program as a member of the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL), which is sponsored by GSFC. The benefits CSC has derived from involvement in this program are analyzed. In the environment studied, it shows that improvements were indeed achieved, as evidenced by a decrease in error rates and costs over a period in which both the size and the complexity of the developed systems increased substantially. The principles and mechanics of the process improvement program, the lessons CSC has learned, and how CSC has capitalized on these lessons are also discussed

Framework for non-perturbative analysis of a Z(3)-symmetric effective theory of finite temperature QCD

We study a three dimensional Z(3)-symmetric effective theory of high temperature QCD. The exact lattice-continuum relations, needed in order to perform lattice simulations with physical parameters, are computed to order O(a^0) in lattice perturbation theory. Lattice simulations are performed to determine the phase structure of a subset of the parameter space.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figures; v3: references rearranged, typos corrected, figs changed, published versio