A Multilateral Approach to Bridging the Global Skills Gap

[Excerpt] In 2012, McKinsey & Company forecasted a troubling outlook on the labor market through the year 2020. The report highlighted three talent shortages across the globe: nearly 40 million too few college educated workers in the global labor market; a 45 million shortfall of workers with secondary and vocational education in developing countries; and up to 95 million workers that lack the skills needed for employment in advanced economies. This global crisis is known as the skills gap. It impacts nearly every industry, job and employer. Simply put, critical talent supply will fail to meet employment demand in the coming decade. Such an imbalance can be crippling to economic progress, put strain on governments, and leave millions unemploye

Provisions and Potential Impacts of the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) Program

Replaced with revised version of paper 11/24/08.Agricultural and Food Policy, Crop Production/Industries,

Estimates of Minnesota Farm-Level Crop Commodity Payments under New House Framework

The objective of this study is to compare commodity payments under current Federal farm policy with the previous Senate and Administration proposals and the recently released “2008 Farm Bill Conference: House Agriculture Committee-Developed Concept for a Farm Bill Spending Framework.” Projections of crop revenue and government payments are made using historical yield data for each example farm, the county, and the nation; historical price data; and statistical distributions and relationships of these yields and prices. Using 2007 FAPRI price projections (which are closer to the prices expected in the next few years when a new farm bill will be in force), expected Total Government Payments (TGP) are almost entirely attributed to the fixed direct payments under all these proposals. Since commodity prices are so far above their “target levels” the possibility of a counter cyclical price or revenue payment or a loan deficiency payment is highly unlikely. TGP under the alternative policies follows a similar pattern on the example corn and soybean farms and a slightly different but fairly consistent pattern for the example wheat and soybean farms. For the corn and soybean example farms in southern Minnesota, the HB-RCCP and USDA proposals generate very similar levels of TGPs compared to current policy. HB-RCCP provides a slightly higher expected TGP than CP for all example farms except for one and higher TGP than USDA for all farms. ACR is estimated to provide lower TGP for all example corn and soybean farms. For the example wheat and soybean farms in northwest Minnesota, the results are mixed. Compared to the other three proposals, ACR provides higher TGP for 2 of the 6 example farms. Each of the proposals does reduce risk as measured by CV. We note ACR is not quite as efficient at risk reduction except for two wheat/soybean farms in northwest Minnesota.Farm Management,

Alternative Farm Bills: Impacts on Minnesota Farms

With the current federal farm bill set to expire at the end of September this year, many proposals have been made to redesign the next bill. The objectives of this study are to compare the current policy with major proposed alternatives and estimate the potential payments of farmers under each of the alternatives. The alternative policies are compared in two ways. First a historical comparison of crop revenue and estimated government payments for individual farms are made under each proposal from 2002-2005. In a second comparison, projections of crop revenue and government payments are made using historical yields for each farm, county, and nation; historical price data; statistical distributions of the yields and prices including averages, standard deviations, and correlations; and each proposal's rules for calculating payments. For yields, deviations from the yield trend are used. In three of the four years and on average, the American Soybean Association (ASA) proposal has higher payments and thus higher total gross revenue compared to current policy and the other three proposals. Since the ASA proposal raises both loan rates and target prices, the higher payments should be expected. The proposed USDA policy is estimated to have a slightly higher average government payment and total gross revenue compared to current policy, but it is not higher than current policy in each year. Lower total payments under the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) proposal are due to higher than average revenues during 2002-05. The revenue insurance proposal does not create any indemnity payments in 2002-05 again due to the higher revenues in these years. Projections of potential revenue also show the ASA proposal to have higher estimated payments. Average government payments are estimated to be slightly higher under current policy compared to USDA's and NCGA's proposals. Since federal budget concerns may not allow the higher payments under the ASA proposal, the choice between the USDA and NCGA proposal may hinge on the level of administrative costs which would appear to be lower with the USDA proposal since it is based on one national estimate of revenue versus many county and individual calculations under the NCGA proposal. The potential use of multi-commodity revenue insurance will hinge on either the ability to provide additional support in fixed direct payments and green payments and larger federal budget concerns.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Scaling properties of noise-induced switching in a bistable tunnel diode circuit

Noise-induced switching between coexisting metastable states occurs in a wide range of far-from-equilibrium systems including micro-mechanical oscillators, epidemiological and climate change models, and nonlinear electronic transport in tunneling structures such as semiconductor superlattices and tunnel diodes. In the case of tunnel diode circuits, noise-induced switching behavior is associated with negative differential resistance in the static current-voltage characteristics and bistability, i.e., the existence of two macroscopic current states for a given applied voltage. Noise effects are particularly strong near the onset and offset of bistable current behavior, corresponding to bifurcation points in the associated dynamical system. In this paper, we show that the tunnel diode system provides an excellent experimental platform for the precision measurement of scaling properties of mean switching times versus applied voltage near bifurcation points. More specifically, experimental data confirm that the mean switching time scales logarithmically as the 3/2 power of voltage difference over an exceptionally wide range of time scales and noise intensities.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, accepted manuscript for publication in the European Physical Journal B, Topical Issue: Non-Linear and Complex Dynamics in Semiconductors and Related Material

In support of the Tinker v. Des Moines Decision

The following position outlines a case for the Tinker v. Des Moines decision, including a historical and modern perspective. With freedom of speech and protest being a regular part of the discussion about U.S. society and schools, now is a good time to look back

Essays On Random Forest Ensembles

A random forest is a popular machine learning ensemble method that has proven successful in solving a wide range of classification problems. While other successful classifiers, such as boosting algorithms or neural networks, admit natural interpretations as maximum likelihood, a suitable statistical interpretation is much more elusive for a random forest. In the first part of this thesis, we demonstrate that a random forest is a fruitful framework in which to study AdaBoost and deep neural networks. We explore the concept and utility of interpolation, the ability of a classifier to perfectly fit its training data. In the second part of this thesis, we place a random forest on more sound statistical footing by framing it as kernel regression with the proximity kernel. We then analyze the parameters that control the bandwidth of this kernel and discuss useful generalizations

Heat Transport in Reduced Order Convection Models

Reduced order models (ROMs) are finite systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) that approximate the dynamics of the governing partial differential equations. This work considers ROMs for Rayleigh's 1916 mathematical model of thermal convection. A hierarchy of reduced models is developed that satisfy energy, temperature, and vorticity balance laws to promote agreement with the physics of thermal convection. These balance laws are generalized from idealized versions considered by previous authors, and new criteria are established for the vorticity balance in the general case. Each model in the hierarchy is an extension of the Lorenz equations and includes Fourier modes capable of producing zonal flow---horizontal mean flow that vertically shears the fluid. Upper bounds on time-averaged heat transport are obtained for several models in the hierarchy. Bounds for the ODE models are derived by constructing auxiliary functions such that certain polynomial expressions are nonnegative. Nonnegativity is enforced by requiring these polynomial expressions to admit sum-of-squares representations. Polynomial auxiliary functions subject to such constraints can be optimized computationally with semidefinite programming, minimizing the resulting bound. Upper bounds are compared to particular solutions to the ODEs obtained using bifurcation analysis and numerical integration. An eight-ODE model in the hierarchy is explored in detail, revealing sharp or nearly sharp bounds on mean heat transport for numerous values of the model parameters, the Rayleigh and Prandtl numbers and the domain aspect ratio. In all cases where the Rayleigh number is small enough for the ODE models to closely approximate the physics of the governing equations, mean heat transport is maximized by the steady states that emerge from the first instability of the static state. These equilibria do not exhibit zonal flow, suggesting that this type of flow does not enhance heat transport. Analytical parameter-dependent bounds are derived for the eight-ODE model with quadratic auxiliary functions, and they are sharp for sufficiently small Rayleigh numbers.PHDApplied and Interdisciplinary MathematicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162943/1/mlolson_1.pd