Revealing the Secrets of the Temple: The Value of Publishing Central Bank Interest Rate Projections

The modern view of monetary policy stresses its role in shaping the entire yield curve of interest rates in order to achieve various macroeconomic objectives. A crucial element of this process involves guiding financial market expectations of future central bank actions. Recently, a few central banks have started to explicitly signal their future policy intentions to the public, and two of these banks have even begun publishing their internal interest rate projections. We examine the macroeconomic effects of direct revelation of a central bank's expectations about the future path of the policy rate. We show that, in an economy where private agents have imperfect information about the determination of monetary policy, central bank communication of interest rate projections can help shape financial market expectations and may improve macroeconomic performance.

Revealing the secrets of the temple: the value of publishing central bank interest rate projections

The modern view of monetary policy stresses its role in shaping the entire yield curve of interest rates in order to achieve various macroeconomic objectives. A crucial element of this process involves guiding financial market expectations of future central bank actions. Recently, a few central banks have started to explicitly signal their future policy intentions to the public, and two of these banks have even begun publishing their internal interest rate projections. We examine the macroeconomic effects of direct revelation of a central bank's expectations about the future path of the policy rate. We show that, in an economy where private agents have imperfect information about the determination of monetary policy, central bank communication of interest rate projections can help shape financial market expectations and may improve macroeconomic performance.Monetary policy

Video event trigger and tracking system using fuzzy comparators

A video observation method and apparatus, the apparatus having a frame storage mechanism, a dividing mechanism, a plurality of fuzzy comparators and a trigger signal mechanism. The frame storage mechanism stores at least one non-current video frame of a viewing field. The dividing mechanism divides a current video frame of the viewing field and the at least one non-current video frame into a plurality of corresponding trigger sections. The plurality of fuzzy comparators each compare and detect a fuzzy logic difference between one trigger section of the current video frame and the corresponding trigger sections of the at least one non-current video frame, the number of fuzzy comparators being selected so that every trigger section of the current video frame is compared. The trigger signal mechanism provides a trigger signal when a fuzzy logic difference is detected between any of the corresponding current and non-current trigger sections. A video observation mechanism and data reducing mechanism may be included with the above apparatus or alone with only a frame storage mechanism, a single generic comparator and a trigger signal mechanism. The video observation mechanism provides a video data stream, wherein each pixel of each frame of a viewing field is provided as multiple bits of data. The data reducing mechanism reduces each set of multiple bits of data which correspond to each pixel to one bit of binary data based on whether the pixel has a level of grey which is above or below a threshold level of grey

Conspicuous Publicity: How the White House and the Army used the Medal of Honor in the Korean War

During the Korean War the White House and the Army publicized the Medal of Honor to achieve three outcomes. First, they hoped it would have a positive influence on public opinion. Truman committed to limited goals at the start of the war and chose not to create an official propaganda agency, which led to partisan criticism and realistic reporting. Medal of Honor publicity celebrated individual actions removed from their wider context in a familiar, heroic mold to alter memory of the past. Second, the Army publicized the Medal of Honor internally to inspire and reinforce desired soldier behavior. Early reports indicated a serious lack of discipline on the front lines and the Army hoped to build psychological resilience in the men by exposing them to the heroic actions of other soldiers. Finally, the Cold War spawned a great fear of communist subterfuge in the United States, which was exacerbated by the brainwashing of prisoners of war. The White House and the Army reached out to marginalized elements of American society through the Medal of Honor to counter communist propaganda. The Korean War remains an understudied era of American history, yet it was incredibly important to the United States and the world. The war influenced the United States to maintain a large standing military prepositioned around the world to protect its interests. Achieving the status quo antebellum validated the containment strategy against communism, which heavily influenced the decision to intervene in Vietnam. The United Nations, ostensibly in charge of allied forces in the Korean War, gained credibility from preventing the loss of South Korea. Despite these important effects of the war on world history, scholars continue to focus on World War II and Vietnam. This study seeks to build on the relative dearth of scholarly material on the Korean War by examining in historical context the manipulation of a symbol that intersected both the military and the home-front to influence behavior

The Development Of Project Grade-Up

The university classroom has greatly evolved from a simple syllabus and in class discussion to the modern online documentation and virtual classrooms. These developments have changed the way students review their grades and balance their workloads. With the plethora of new technologies, students are often burdened with a full school schedule, work, and social events, with few tools to help them effectively understand their grades or manage their time. Current solutions addressing this issue do not present data in an organized way that allows the student to easily comprehend their past performance or up coming work load. Our solution builds upon the Moodle system by adding visual, progress-specific information that is comprehensible at a glance. This in turn allows the student to answer the following questions: 1. What have I completed, and what do I have left to complete? 2. What is my current grade and projected grade at my current pace? 3. Given what I’ve done so far what is the best possible grade I could get if I ace the remaining work? 4. What if I stopped now, what would my grade be? 5. How am I doing compared to the average in this class? 6. If I got a particular grade(s) on a specific assignment(s) how would that change the answers to the preceding questions? 7. Where is the work left concentrated in the temporal domain? I.e. when should I start working on the items left to complete in my course(s)

Carrier Modulation Via Waveform Probability Density Function

Beyond the classic modes of carrier modulation by varying amplitude (AM), phase (PM), or frequency (FM), we extend the modulation domain of an analog carrier signal to include a class of general modulations which are distinguished by their probability density function histogram. Separate waveform states are easily created by varying the pdf of the transmitted waveform. Individual waveform states are assignable as proxies for digital ONEs or ZEROs. At the receiver, these states are easily detected by accumulating sampled waveform statistics and performing periodic pattern matching, correlation, or statistical filtering. No fundamental natural laws are broken in the detection process. We show how a typical modulation scheme would work in the digital domain and suggest how to build an analog version. We propose that clever variations of the modulating waveform (and thus the histogram) can provide simple steganographic encoding