Pension Funding and the Economy: Would Proper Funding Cost Jobs?

There is an ongoing debate in policy circles about the appropriate accounting standards for public sector pension funds. There are major differences between the standard practice of most pension funds and the policies that are advocated by many academic economists, most notably Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh (NM&R). In several papers they argue that most public sector pension funds are severely underfunded.In order to get a sense of the plausible size of this impact, this paper calculates the impact on the economy of adopting NM&R funding rules during the last recession. Specifically, it calculates the impact on GDP and employment if state governments had decided to fill the funding gap calculated by NM&R over a 15-year time horizon, as they advocate

Navigating large foundational classes: Providing scalable infrastructure for next generation blended learning classrooms to enhance student learning outcomes, access and choice

Universities across the Province and around the world are struggling to meet the challenges of supporting a rapidly expanding, diverse, digitally literate, and time - poor student population who view education as a service for which they are paying (Garrison & Kanuka, 2004). As class sizes continue to grow and public funds available for expansion of physical campuses decline, there is an urgent need for universities to seek innovative and efficient approaches to utilisation of their existing spaces, leveraging technological and pedagogical advances to continue to provide high quality learning experiences for increasing numbers of students (Bates and Sangra, 2011; Owston, 2013).https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ctlreports/1001/thumbnail.jp

Innate talent in sport: Separating myth from reality

Twenty years ago, Howe, Davidson and Sloboda (1998) provided a state of the science review of innate talent. This paper was extremely influential although much has changed in the two decades since it was published. In this review, we revisit Howe et al’s assessment and discuss current research on innate talent in sport, a domain that was largely ignored in the original review. After re-evaluating Howe et al’s criteria for innate talent we conclude that with the exception of criterion 5 (i.e., talent is domain specific), these criteria are still useful in the context of existing evidence in sport. We subsequently examine two complementary issues: Is the concept of innate talent valid? Does the concept have any utility? We conclude the concept of innate talent is valid but currently has limited utility to those working in high performance sport. We highlight several areas of future research that will ultimately inform the value of innate talent to those working at the frontlines of athlete development

Simultaneous On-State Voltage and Bond-Wire Resistance Monitoring of Silicon Carbide MOSFETs

In fast switching power semiconductors, the use of a fourth terminal to provide the reference potential for the gate signal—known as a kelvin-source terminal—is becoming common. The introduction of this terminal presents opportunities for condition monitoring systems. This article demonstrates how the voltage between the kelvin-source and power-source can be used to specifically monitor bond-wire degradation. Meanwhile, the drain to kelvin-source voltage can be monitored to track defects in the semiconductor die or gate driver. Through an accelerated aging test on 20 A Silicon Carbide Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor-Field-Effect Transistors (MOSFETs), it is shown that there are opposing trends in the evolution of the on-state resistances of both the bond-wires and the MOSFET die. In summary, after 50,000 temperature cycles, the resistance of the bond-wires increased by up to 2 mΩ, while the on-state resistance of the MOSFET dies decreased by approximately 1 mΩ. The conventional failure precursor (monitoring a single forward voltage) cannot distinguish between semiconductor die or bond-wire degradation. Therefore, the ability to monitor both these parameters due to the presence of an auxiliary-source terminal can provide more detailed information regarding the aging process of a device