A comparison between tests for changes in the adjustment coefficients in cointegrated systems

In this paper we examine several approaches to detecting changes in the adjustment coefficients in cointegrated VARs. We adopt recursive and rolling techniques as mis-specification tests for the detection of non-constancy and the estimation of the breakpoints. We find that inspection of the recursive eigenvalues is not useful to detect a break in the adjustment coefficients, whilst recursive estimation of the coefficients can only indicate non-constancy, but not the exact breakpoint. Rolling estimation is found to perform better in detecting non-constancy in the parameters and their true value after the breakpoint. However, it only detects a region where the break is likely to occur. To overcome the drawbacks of these techniques, we use an OLS-based sequential test. To assess its performance, we derive its critical values for different sample sizes. Monte Carlo evidence shows that the test has reasonably good power even in moderately sized samples and that it can be used as a graphical device, as it shows a kink at the breakpoint. As a benchmark we use the Kalman filter, of which we analyse the performance on the same data generating processes (DGP)

Lightweight Multilingual Software Analysis

Developer preferences, language capabilities and the persistence of older languages contribute to the trend that large software codebases are often multilingual, that is, written in more than one computer language. While developers can leverage monolingual software development tools to build software components, companies are faced with the problem of managing the resultant large, multilingual codebases to address issues with security, efficiency, and quality metrics. The key challenge is to address the opaque nature of the language interoperability interface: one language calling procedures in a second (which may call a third, or even back to the first), resulting in a potentially tangled, inefficient and insecure codebase. An architecture is proposed for lightweight static analysis of large multilingual codebases: the MLSA architecture. Its modular and table-oriented structure addresses the open-ended nature of multiple languages and language interoperability APIs. We focus here as an application on the construction of call-graphs that capture both inter-language and intra-language calls. The algorithms for extracting multilingual call-graphs from codebases are presented, and several examples of multilingual software engineering analysis are discussed. The state of the implementation and testing of MLSA is presented, and the implications for future work are discussed.Comment: 15 page

Using Taint Analysis and Reinforcement Learning (TARL) to Repair Autonomous Robot Software

It is important to be able to establish formal performance bounds for autonomous systems. However, formal verification techniques require a model of the environment in which the system operates; a challenge for autonomous systems, especially those expected to operate over longer timescales. This paper describes work in progress to automate the monitor and repair of ROS-based autonomous robot software written for an a-priori partially known and possibly incorrect environment model. A taint analysis method is used to automatically extract the data-flow sequence from input topic to publish topic, and instrument that code. A unique reinforcement learning approximation of MDP utility is calculated, an empirical and non-invasive characterization of the inherent objectives of the software designers. By comparing off-line (a-priori) utility with on-line (deployed system) utility, we show, using a small but real ROS example, that it's possible to monitor a performance criterion and relate violations of the criterion to parts of the software. The software is then patched using automated software repair techniques and evaluated against the original off-line utility.Comment: IEEE Workshop on Assured IEEE Workshop on Assured Autonomous Systems, May, 202

Lightweight Call-Graph Construction for Multilingual Software Analysis

Analysis of multilingual codebases is a topic of increasing importance. In prior work, we have proposed the MLSA (MultiLingual Software Analysis) architecture, an approach to the lightweight analysis of multilingual codebases, and have shown how it can be used to address the challenge of constructing a single call graph from multilingual software with mutual calls. This paper addresses the challenge of constructing monolingual call graphs in a lightweight manner (consistent with the objective of MLSA) which nonetheless yields sufficient information for resolving language interoperability calls. A novel approach is proposed which leverages information from a compiler-generated AST to provide the quality of call graph necessary, while the program itself is written using an Island Grammar that parses the AST providing the lightweight aspect necessary. Performance results are presented for a C/C++ implementation of the approach, PAIGE (Parsing AST using Island Grammar Call Graph Emitter) showing that despite its lightweight nature, it outperforms Doxgen, is robust to changes in the (Clang) AST, and is not restricted to C/C++.Comment: 10 page

Leveraging Technology toward Family Supports for and Development of Middle Schoolers

This Practitioner Perspective discusses how sharing a learning space with their parents, college students, and other adult members in a community-based technology program influenced middle school students’ familial support, their own technology knowledge and social capital, sense of membership in a learning community, and identity development. The program’s structure used technology as a starting point to develop skills, but also to aid Latino immigrant families to navigate their children’s schooling experiences

Angels, the Space of Time, and Apocalyptic Blindness: On Günther Anders’ Endzeit–Endtime

Anders was a preeminent critic of technology and critic of the atomic bomb as he saw this hermeneutico-phenomenologically in the visceral sense of being and time: the sheer that of its having been used (where the Nietzschean dialectic of the ‘having been’ reflects the essence of modern technology) as well as the bland politics of nuclear proliferation functions as programmatic aggression advanced in the name of defense and deterrence. The tactic of sheerly technological, automatic, mechanical, aggression is carried out in good conscience. The preemptive strike is, as Baudrillard observed, the opponent’s fault: such are the wages of evil. Violence in good conscience characterizes the postwar, cold war era and the present day with its mushrooming effects of neo-fascism under the titles of national security and anti-terrorism. Karl Krauss’ 1913 bon mot regarding psychoanalysis as the very insanity it claims to cure [Psychoanalyse ist jene Geisteskrankheit, für deren Therapie sie sich halt] has never been more apt for political translation — straight into the heart of what Lacan called the Real which has ‘always been’ the political register. Where Habermas and heirs have tended to disregard Anders (as they also sidestep Heidegger and Nietzsche), just as most philosophers of technology (and indeed philosophers of science) have ignored the political as well as the ethical in their eagerness to avoid suspicion of technophobia, we continue to require both critical theory and a critical philosophy of technology, a conjunction incorporating Ander’s complicated dialectic less of art in Benjamin’s prescient but still innocent age of technological reproduction but and much rather “on the devastation of life in the age of the third industrial revolution.” Thus rather than reading Anders’ critique of the bomb as limited to a time we call the Atomic Age — as Anders himself varied Samuel Beckett’s 1957 Endgame (Fin de partie) as Endzeit that is “Endtime,” here invoking the eschatological language of Jacob Taubes as Anders does — this essay connects his reflections on the bomb with his critique of technology and the obsolescence of humanity as of a piece with our dedication to hurling ourselves against our own mortality. This concern with the violence of technology, this hatred of the vulnerability of having been born and having been set on a path unto death (the mortal path that is the path of life) inspires Anders’ engagement with the sons of Eichmann — the heirs of those who designed and executed the Nazi death camps and extermination chambers of the Holocaust — and the sons of Claude Eatherly — the heirs of both those who designed and those who as pilots (banality of banality) deployed the bombings that exploded nothing the stuff of the sun itself against the Empire of the Sun in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We, embroiled as we are in wartime after wartime,suppressing public protest on a scale like never before, in country after country across the globe, cannot dispense with Anders today

Why do banks promise to pay par on demand?

We survey the theories of why banks promise to pay par on demand and examine evidence about the conditions under which banks have promised to pay the par value of deposits and banknotes on demand when holding only fractional reserves. The theoretical literature can be broadly divided into four strands: liquidity provision, asymmetric information, legal restrictions, and a medium of exchange. We assume that it is not zero cost to make a promise to redeem a liability at par value on demand. If so, then the conditions in the theories that result in par redemption are possible explanations of why banks promise to pay par on demand. If the explanation based on customers’ demand for liquidity is correct, payment of deposits at par will be promised when banks hold assets that are illiquid in the short run. If the asymmetric-information explanation based on the difficulty of valuing assets is correct, the marketability of banks’ assets determines whether banks promise to pay par. If the legal restrictions explanation of par redemption is correct, banks will not promise to pay par if they are not required to do so. If the transaction explanation is correct, banks will promise to pay par value only if the deposits are used in transactions. After the survey of the theoretical literature, we examine the history of banking in several countries in different eras: fourth-century Athens, medieval Italy, Japan, and free banking and money market mutual funds in the United States. We find that all of the theories can explain some of the observed banking arrangements, and none explain all of them

Corporate Governance: The Revival of an Academic, Professional and Policy Field

This paper explores the basic concepts of corporate governance in relation to its intellectual foundations and historical development. The basic assumption relies on the fact that the reinforcement of corporate governance as an academic, professional, and policy field is a consequence of the many corporate failures that have occurred in recent years, mainly since 2002. Most theoretical developments for this new moment in history have been borrowed from the same academics and practitioners that reflected and worked on the field after the 1929 economic crash, with deep origin on general social scientific research. In addition, corporate governance is growing as a distinctive business function as well as a set of global prescriptions that impact business activities across industries and cultures. The role of the board of directors and the ideas on power and accountability remain critical issues in the new 21st century corporate governance debates

"The substance of the virtues": Deification according to Maximos the Confessor and the transformation of Aristotelian ethics

This dissertation investigates the relationship between virtue and deification in the thought of Maximos the Confessor (580–662) by re-contextualizing his work in an Aristotelian trajectory of development characteristic of the Alexandrian philosophers. The dissertation exposes colonial prejudices in modern historiography that first divided Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy into two neatly defined schools of thought and interrogates the validity of holding that Aristotelian philosophy had all but disappeared from late antiquity in the Greek tradition. I contend, instead, that multilateral interest in Aristotelian philosophy had peaked around the time of Maximos. By repositioning Maximos in Alexandria, in a radical revision of the two prevailing theories—that he was from Constantinople or Palestine—the dissertation seeks to draw attention to Alexandrian nuances of his thought, particularly with regard to Aristotle’s philosophy, that have been neglected. Thus reframed, the dissertation examines a tension at the heart of Maximos’ teaching of virtue and deification: if the virtues are natural to humans and they are instrumental in humanity’s deification, why does Maximos hold that deification is not the result of the actualization of potentialities of the human substance? The dissertation moves to show, instead, that Maximos had appropriated Aristotle’s ethics and metaphysics to explain this tension. The creation of habitual dispositions in the human psychosomatic compound through actions does not invalidate the non-contingency of God’s gift of deification; rather, these dispositions are the necessary condition for human susceptibility to God’s gift of deification. The dissertation thus seeks to affirm both poles: the necessity of human striving and non-contingency of God’s gift of deification

Carbon dioxide fixation in the brain / Soll Berl, Genkichiro Takagaki, Donald D Clarke, and Heinrich Waelsch From the New York Psychiatric Institute and the Colleg eof Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York, New York

Carbon dioxide fixation in brain was studied in cats to which NaHC14O3, with and without ammonia, was administered by intracarotid infusion. Glutamic and aspartic acids, glutamine, glutathione, and γ-aminobutyric acid were isolated from blood, brain, and liver, and their specific activities were determined. The data indicate a significant incorporation of CO2 into the amino acids of the cerebral cortex, presumably by way of the citric acid cycle. Without simultaneous ammonia infusion, the specific activity of aspartic acid is 3 times that of glutamine, whereas in the presence of ammonia the ratios of specific activity of both compounds are closer to unity or reversed. The data suggest that in the presence of ammonia the oxaloacetic acid is channeled into glutamine formation. γ-Aminobutyric acid isolated from the tissue, as well as that obtained after decarboxylation of glutamic acid or glutamine, has less than 5% of the counts of the precursor. These findings give additional support to the assumption that the operation of a CO2 fixation mechanism in brain is similar to that in liver. Additional data on the compartmentation of glutamic acid and glutamine synthesis are presented. The significance of the findings for an interpretation of ammonia metabolism in brain is pointed ou