Slow oil shocks and the “weakening of the oil price macroeconomy relationship”

Many papers have been documenting and analysing the asymmetry and the weakening of the oil price – macroeconomy relationship as off the early eighties. While there seems to be a consensus about the factors causing the asymmetry, namely adjustment costs which offset the benefits of low energy prices, the debate about the weakening of the relationship is not over yet. Moreover, the alternative oil price specifications which have been proposed by Mork (1989), Lee et al. (1995), and Hamilton (1996) to restore the stability of the relationship fail to Granger cause output or unemployment in post-1980 data. By using the concept of accelerations of the oil price, we show that the weakening of this relationship corresponds to the appearance of slow oil price increases, which have less impact on the economy. When filtering out these slow oil price variations from the sample, we manage to rehabilitate the causality running from the oil price to the macroeconomy and show that far from weakening, the oil price accelerations – GDP relationship has even been growing stronger since the early eighties.Oil prices, Gross Domestic Product, recursive causality tests.

Physical Simulation of Inarticulate Robots

In this note we study the structure and the behavior of inarticulate robots. We introduce a robot that moves by successive revolvings. The robot's structure is analyzed, simulated and discussed in detail

Operand Folding Hardware Multipliers

This paper describes a new accumulate-and-add multiplication algorithm. The method partitions one of the operands and re-combines the results of computations done with each of the partitions. The resulting design turns-out to be both compact and fast. When the operands' bit-length $m$ is 1024, the new algorithm requires only $0.194m+56$ additions (on average), this is about half the number of additions required by the classical accumulate-and-add multiplication algorithm ($\frac{m}2$)

Factors Related to Student Performance in Statistics Courses in Lebanon

The purpose of the present study was to identify factors that may contribute to business students in Lebanese universities having difficulty in introductory and advanced statistics courses. Two statistics courses are required for business majors at Lebanese universities. Students are not obliged to be enrolled in any math courses prior to taking statistics courses. Drawing on recent educational research, this dissertation attempted to identify the relationship between (1) students’ scores on Lebanese university math admissions tests; (2) students’ scores on a test of very basic mathematical concepts; (3) students’ scores on the survey of attitude toward statistics (SATS); (4) course performance as measured by students’ final scores in the course; and (5) their scores on the final exam. Data were collected from 561 students enrolled in multiple sections of two courses: 307 students in the introductory statistics course and 260 in the advanced statistics course in seven campuses across Lebanon over one semester. The multiple regressions results revealed four significant relationships at the introductory level: between students’ scores on the math quiz with their (1) final exam scores; (2) their final averages; (3) the Cognitive subscale of the SATS with their final exam scores; and (4) their final averages. These four significant relationships were also found at the advanced level. In addition, two more significant relationships were found between students’ final average and the two subscales of Effort (5) and Affect (6). No relationship was found between students’ scores on the admission math tests and both their final exam scores and their final averages in both the introductory and advanced level courses. On the other hand, there was no relationship between students’ scores on Lebanese admissions tests and their final achievement. Although these results were consistent across course formats and instructors, they may encourage Lebanese universities to assess the effectiveness of prerequisite math courses. Moreover, these findings may lead the Lebanese Ministry of Education to make changes to the admissions exams, course prerequisites, and course content. Finally, to enhance the attitude of students, new learning techniques, such as group work during class meetings can be helpful, and future research should aim to test the effectiveness of these pedagogical techniques on students’ attitudes toward statistics

Information Security Theory and Practice: Securing the Internet of Things: 8th IFIP WG 11.2 InternationalWorkshop, WISTP 2014, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, June 30-July 2, 2014

International audienceBook Front Matter of LNCS 850

The Balkans Continued Fraction

In a previous article we gave a collection of continued fractions involving Catalan's constant. This paper provides more general formulae governing those continued fractions. Having distinguished different cases associated to regions in the plan, we nickname those continued fractions \enquote{The Balkans} as they divide into areas which are related but still different in nature. Because we do not provide formal proofs of those machine-constructed formulae we do not claim them to be theorems. Still, each and every proposed formula was extensively tested numerically