Leveraging Social Networks in Direct Services: Are Foundations Doing All They Can?

· Social networks are critical to physical and mental health, and they shape how people see themselves and their possible futures. · Social networks represent an under-leveraged resource in social services’ efforts to alleviate poverty and other social challenges. · Foundations may be unintentionally creating barriers to practice that leverages social networks by incentivizing individually-focused, highly specific services delivered in standardized, replicable ways. · “Network-oriented” practice can help craft a new way forward that threads the needle between everything-is-different-for-everyone and everything- is-the-same-for-everyone. · By focusing funding on efforts that build and support social networks, foundations can deepen and sustain the impact of their funding

On the Construction of Simply Connected Solvable Lie Groups

Let $\omega_\mathfrak{g}$ be a Lie algebra valued differential $1$-form on a manifold $M$ satisfying the structure equations $d \omega_\mathfrak{g} + \frac{1}{2} \omega_\mathfrak{g}\wedge \omega_\mathfrak{g}=0$ where $\mathfrak{g}$ is solvable. We show that the problem of finding a smooth map $\rho:M\to G$, where $G$ is an $n$-dimensional solvable Lie group with Lie algebra $\mathfrak{g}$ and left invariant Maurer-Cartan form $\tau$, such that $\rho^* \tau= \omega_\mathfrak{g}$ can be solved by quadratures and the matrix exponential. In the process we give a closed form formula for the vector fields in Lie's third theorem for solvable Lie algebras. A further application produces the multiplication map for a simply connected $n$-dimensional solvable Lie group using only the matrix exponential and $n$ quadratures. Applications to finding first integrals for completely integrable Pfaffian systems with solvable symmetry algebras are also given.Comment: 22 pages. Fixed typos from version 1, and added more details in the example

Flexible exchange rates and insulation: A reexamination

Will a country embedded in an integrated world economy be able to completely insulate its economy from foreign economic disturbances by letting its currency float freely in the foreign exchange market? Both theoretical considerations and the actual experience after the movement to flexible exchange rates among the major currencies in 1973 suggest that the answer is no. According to conventional wisdom, however, the early advocates of flexible exchange rates in the 1950s and 1960s believed in the ability of floating rates to completely insulate an economy from disturbances originating abroad. This statement is frequently cited to show that the case for flexible exchange rates may not be as strong as it originally seemed to be, since part of the case appears to have rested on an erroneous belief. It is one purpose of this paper to point out that, contrary to a widespread view, the outstanding early advocates of flexible exchange rates like Milton Friedman (1953), Egon Sohmen (1961; 1969) and Harry Johnson (1969) never promised complete and automatic insulation from all kinds of foreign economic disturbances. In fact, their argument was more refined. The main purpose of the paper is to contrast Sohmen's true promise, as well as that of other theorists', with the empirical evidence from the period of floating exchange rates since 197 3 and to discuss several explanations for some remaining discrepancies between predictions and outcome.

Assistance to industry in West Germany

This paper has four aims: First, it surveys the assistance given to individual sectors and industries in West Germany and makes an attempt to estimate its magnitude in terms of nominal and effective rates of protection; in contrast to the previous calculations the estimates presented here deal with protection in a wider context by including all measures of non-tariff assistance and by relating industrial protection to protection given to other parts of the economy. The second section of the paper discusses the objectives of assistance policy from a national and an international welfare point of view. The third section proceeds with a comparative analysis of the impact assistance measures have had on factor incomes and resource allocation among industries. Fourth and finally, some conclusions are drawn with respect to restructuring assistance policy.

Hierarchical Deep Feature Learning For Decoding Imagined Speech From EEG

We propose a mixed deep neural network strategy, incorporating parallel combination of Convolutional (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), cascaded with deep autoencoders and fully connected layers towards automatic identification of imagined speech from EEG. Instead of utilizing raw EEG channel data, we compute the joint variability of the channels in the form of a covariance matrix that provide spatio-temporal representations of EEG. The networks are trained hierarchically and the extracted features are passed onto the next network hierarchy until the final classification. Using a publicly available EEG based speech imagery database we demonstrate around 23.45% improvement of accuracy over the baseline method. Our approach demonstrates the promise of a mixed DNN approach for complex spatial-temporal classification problems.Comment: Accepted in AAAI 2019 under Student Abstract and Poster Progra