Quantifying the Effects on Lending of Increased Capital Requirements

Examines how higher capital requirements, as part of financial reform, would affect loan volumes, costs, and interest rates, as well as the ability of the U.S. banking industry to raise new equity. Analyzes case scenarios of how banks would respond

A Concept for Exploring Western Music Tonality in Physical Space

Musical theory about the structure and morphology of Western tonality is quite difficult to teach to young children, due to the relatively complex mathematical concepts behind tonality. Children usually grasp the concepts of musical harmony intuitively through listening to music examples. Placing the 12 notes of the well-tempered scale into a spatial arrangement, in which the proximity of these notes represents their mutual harmonic relationship, would allow to link physical motion through a spatial area with the exploration of music tonality. Music theorists have postulated the Circle of Fifth, the “Spiral Array”, and the “Tonnetz” as paradigms for spatial arrangements of music notes which allow mapping the distance between notes onto their “mutual consonance”. These approaches mostly have been of qualitative nature, leaving the actual numeric parameters of the spatial description undetermined. In this paper, these parameters have been determined, leading to a concrete numerical description of the planar Tonnetz. This allows the design of a physical space in which the music notes are distributed in space according to their musical consonance. Set up in an outdoor area, handheld devices (e.g. PDA) with integrated Global Positioning System can be used to play these notes at their actual physical location. This makes it possible for children to explore this musical space by moving through the real spatial area and experience the relationships of the notes through their proximity. Defining a range for each note as a circular area around each note location, consonant chords can be produced in those areas where those circles overlap. Using this concept, games can be developed in which the listeners have to perform certain tasks related to this musical space. This appears to be a promising approach for the music education of young children who can intuitively learn about music morphology without being explicitly taught about the complex theoretical mathematical background

An Apology for Confederate Poetry

This paper explores the reasons why poetry written in the Confederate states during the Civil War is rarely included in the American literary canon. Historians and literary critics have dismissed Confederate poetry as nothing more than jingoistic and sentimental trash in rhyme. Nevertheless, poems buried in the mountains of Southern literary magazines and journals from the period tell a more nuanced story. Covering a wide and fascinating range of subjects, both good and bad Confederate poems aptly reflected how the Southern popular mind reacted to and dealt with the events of the war

Digital program analyzes supersonic flow field within bell-shaped rocket nozzles

Digital computer program computes and analyzes supersonic flow field in axisymmetric rocket nozzle for specified gas properties, nozzle geometry, and input or starting line. Method of characteristics is used for solution of set of hyperbolic partial differential equations

On the importance of the plumber : the intersection of theory and practice in policymaking for federal financial institutions

The federal government's role as lender and insurer is very important, with over $1.4 trillion of loans and guarantees and at least$7 trillion of insured risk. Tens of millions of Americans benefit from housing loans, student loans, flood insurance, etc. Yet the federal financial institutions established to run these activities are often created almost as an afterthought, with little focus on their structure. This paper emphasizes the crucial importance of ending this neglect and recognizing how proper structure can help avoid major failures, such as the current problems at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, and enhance successes. The author also challenges the economics profession to provide more guidance on a range of specific analytical issues with real-world implications, because economists have often failed to extend analyses derived from the private sector into useful formulations for public sector practitioners.Bank supervision ; Financial institutions