Reverse mortgages and the liquidity of housing wealth

The article is organized as follows: Section I briefly describes the features of various types of reverse mortgages offered in the private and public sectors. Section II surveys the ~elevant literature that has focused on the savings patterns of the elderly and their demand for reverse mortgage products. Section III describes the sample of the elderly drawn from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Section IV analyzes the potential demand for reverse mortgages on the basis of age, fertility history, income, housing wealth, liquid wealth, and debt. Section V discusses the difficulties in developing an established market for reverse mortgages, including legal and regulatory barriers, as well as issues of appropriate pricing and risk. Section VI concludes the paper.Mortgages

Interactive evolutionary computing in early lifecycle software engineering design

Design is fundamental to software development. Indeed, early lifecycle software engineering design is crucial and has significant impact of subsequent development activities. Inferior designs can result in deleterious down-stream consequences. Therefore improving the traceability, structural integrity and elegance of software design has significant potential for enhancing software development productivity. However, early lifecycle software design is a demanding and non-trivial task for software engineers to perform and current computational tool support for software engineers is limited. Thus to address this limitation, this thesis investigates the potential of interactive evolutionary search and complementary computational intelligence to enable the exploration and discovery of useful and interesting software designs relating to the design problem at hand. To enable evolutionary search and exploration of possible design solutions, a novel, discrete, object-based representation of both design problem and design solution is proposed. Associated genetic operators including self-adapting mutation are also proposed. Experiments show that this novel representation enables highly effective search and exploration of the software design solution space. Next, software agents are introduced to facilitate an interactive framework for natural collaborative designer / computer interaction. Empirical investigations reveal that colourful visualisation of software designs engages the designer. Furthermore, with enhanced generation of multiple candidate designs, opportunities for periods of designer reflection are presented thus enabling sudden design discovery.Design elegance is an important but complex factor in software design. Four novel quantitative elegance measures are proposed which enhance the interactive design experience by selecting elegant software designs for designer evaluation. Using designer elegance evaluation as reward, reward-based machine learning is exploited to steer a dynamic, multi-objective search according to designer elegance intentions. Designer interactivity is further enhanced by a dynamic, fitness-proportionate interactive interval, which judiciously varies the number of evolutionary generations between interactions to promote search and exploration and further reduce use fatigue. The integration of interactive, dynamic evolutionary search with software agents and reward-based learning is found to produce an engaging, compelling interactive experience for software designers, successfully enabling the search, exploration and discovery of fruitful, interesting and useful early lifecycle software designs

Measurement of Radio-Frequency Radiation Pressure

We perform measurements of the radiation pressure of a radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic field which may lead to a new SI-traceable power calibration. There are several groups around the world investigating methods to perform more direct SI traceable measurement of RF power (where RF is defined to range from 100s of MHz to THz). A measurement of radiation pressure offers the possibility for a power measure traceable to the kilogram and to Planck's constant through the redefined SI. Towards this goal, we demonstrate the ability to measure the radiation pressure/force carried in a field at 15~GHz.Comment: 2 pages 4 figure

Chemical and sensory analysis of commercial Navel oranges in California.

Seven lots of commercially available Navel oranges grown in California were evaluated with flavoromic, metabolomic, sensory descriptive analysis, and consumer testing techniques to identify sensory and chemical drivers of liking. Eight identified chemical clusters related to numerous sensory attributes and consumer preferences. Differences in adult and child preferences led to the discovery of six consumer clusters (four adult and two child). Sweetness, overall flavor, sourness, fruity flavor, and juiciness were identified as the main sensory drivers of liking for the consumers. Fructose, glucose, and proline were among the compounds that best explained perceived sweetness while sourness was correlated with citrate and ascorbate. Perceived fruity flavor increased with higher concentrations of ethanol. We conclude that consumers differ in their preferences for Navel oranges and desire fruit that is higher in both sweetness and sourness

Foot-Loose and Fancy-Free: Song and Dance as Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare’s Fairy Plays

　本稿はジェンダー・セクシュアリティの近世の解釈の文脈において、シェイクスピアの2つの妖精劇、「夏の夜の夢」「テンペスト」における妖精の歌・踊り・見世物の言葉を読み解くものである。本稿では、両劇における妖精の歌と踊りのイメージと言葉が、家父長制の権威とヘテロノーマティヴな性的振舞いを掘り下げることによって、どのようにエリザベス朝とジャコビアン時代のジェンダー・セクシュアリティ規範に異議を唱えているか、あるいは転覆させようとしているかを論証する。また本稿では、Regina Buccola のようなイギリスにおける妖精の伝統の歴史と伝承についての、近年の重要な学説に着目する。そこではアングロ-サクソン文学における" 妖精"という言葉の起源から、" 妖精"という言葉の意味の中にあるジェンダーの不確かさ・多義性が探求され、イギリスの妖精伝承におけるジェンダーとセクシュアリティとの関係についての広範な背景が提示されている。またそこでは、妖精文学が近世イングランドにおける政治的・社会的・経済的なうつろいやすさ表象可能にしているか、ということについていくつかの例をあげて論評されている。「テンペスト」においては、妖精の歌と踊りと見世物は、ジェンダーを覆うプロスペローの権力の拡張として作用する。すなわち男性・女性という規範的な性的役割の強要である。だがしかし、「夏の夜の夢」「テンペスト」どちらにおいても、妖精の歌や見世物の言葉におけるジェンダーや性的なあいまいさ、多義性は、近世の性的規範を転覆させるものである