3,207 research outputs found
Has US Monetary Policy Changed? Evidence from Drifting Coefficients and Real-Time Data
No full textDespite the large amount of empirical research on monetary policy rules, there is surprisingly little consensus on the nature or even the existence of changes in the conduct of U.S. monetary policy. Three issues appear central to this disagreement: 1) the specific type of changes in the policy coefficients, 2) the treatment of heteroskedasticity, and 3) the real-time nature of the data used. This paper addresses these issues in the context of forward-looking Taylor rules with drifting coefficients. The estimation is based on real-time data and accounts for the presence of heteroskedasticity in the policy shock. The findings suggest important but gradual changes in the rule coefficients, not adequately captured by the usual split-sample estimation. In contrast to Orphanides (2002, 2003), I find that the Fed's response to the real-time forecast of inflation was weak in the second half of the 1970's, perhaps not satisfying Taylor's principle as suggested by Clarida, Galìì and Gertler (2000). However, the response to inflation was strong before 1973 and gradually regained strength from the early 1980's onward. Moreover, as in Orphanides (2003), the Fed's response to real activity fell substantially and lastingly during the 1970's.
Chronic High Fructose Intake Reduces Serum 1,25(OH)<sub>2</sub>D<sub>3</sub>Levels in Calcium-Sufficient Rodents
No full textExcessive fructose consumption inhibits adaptive increases in intestinal Ca2+transport in lactating and weanling rats with increased Ca2+requirements by preventing the increase in serum levels of 1,25(OH)2D3. Here we tested the hypothesis that chronic fructose intake decreases 1,25(OH)2D3 levels independent of increases in Ca2+ requirements. Adult mice fed for five wk a high glucose-low Ca2+ diet displayed expected compensatory increases in intestinal and renal Ca2+ transporter expression and activity, in renal CYP27B1 (coding for 1α-hydroxylase) expression as well as in serum 1,25(OH)2D3 levels, compared with mice fed isocaloric glucose- or fructose-normal Ca2+ diets. Replacing glucose with fructose prevented these increases in Ca2+ transporter, CYP27B1, and 1,25(OH)2D3 levels induced by a low Ca2+ diet. In adult mice fed for three mo a normal Ca2+ diet, renal expression of CYP27B1 and of CYP24A1 (24-hydroxylase) decreased and increased, respectively, when the carbohydrate source was fructose instead of glucose or starch. Intestinal and renal Ca2+ transporter activity and expression did not vary with dietary carbohydrate. To determine the time course of fructose effects, a high fructose or glucose diet with normal Ca2+ levels was fed to adult rats for three mo. Serum levels of 1,25(OH)2 D3 decreased and of FGF23 increased significantly over time. Renal expression of CYP27B1 and serum levels of 1,25(OH)2D3 still decreased in fructose- compared to those in glucose-fed rats after three mo. Serum parathyroid hormone, Ca2+ and phosphate levels were normal and independent of dietary sugar as well as time of feeding. Thus, chronically high fructose intakes can decrease serum levels of 1,25(OH)2D3 in adult rodents experiencing no Ca2+ stress and fed sufficient levels of dietary Ca2+. This finding is highly significant because fructose constitutes a substantial portion of the average diet of Americans already deficient in vitamin D.Peer reviewe
Brand Borges: A Computer-Assisted Analysis of the Works of Jorge Luis Borges (1923-1955)
No full textThere is a particular idea about the Argentine author, Jorge Luis Borges, that has proliferated over time and has continued to maintain popularity in both the scholarly literature and in popular culture until the present. The general sentiment of this idea—referred to as “Brand Borges” in this dissertation—presumes that Borges is disconnected from Argentina and from reality in general. He is deemed to be more concerned with that which is not real, and when he does engage with the real world, he is thought to be more focused on international affairs rather than the events and traditions of his own country.
This study uses a variety of digital tools, such as methods of computer-assisted text analysis and those developed in geographic information systems, to analyze the first thirteen major works of Borges and challenge the idea of Brand Borges. By interpreting the results of digital analyses of Borges’s oeuvre, and assessing the people, places, and other elements explicitly mentioned, it is argued that he in fact does appear to be connected to both reality and Argentina.
For that which is implicit in Borges’s work, this dissertation then uses traditional methods of literary interpretation to examine a selection of texts and reveal that even when a story is set in a foreign land with international characters, it is often described in such a way as to relate the events, setting, or characters back to Argentina and reality
Correction: Fabrication of asymmetrical diffusion dialysis membranes for rapid acid recovery with high purity
No full textDr Christopher D. Easton made a signicant contribution to the work published in Journal of Materials Chemistry A (titled “Fabrication of asymmetrical diffusion dialysis membranes for rapid acid recovery with high purity”, DOI: 10.1039/C5TA05185A), which included conducting the XPS experiments on the membrane samples, processing the XPS data, and interpreting the results in the context of the work. Therefore, Dr Easton should be added as a co-author. The new author list is Xiaocheng Lin, Ezzatollah Shamsaei, Biao Kong, Jefferson Zhe Liu, Tongwen Xu, Christopher D. Easton and Huanting Wang. We apologize to the readers forany inconvenience this may cause.The Royal Society of Chemistry apologises for these errors and any consequent inconvenience to authors and readers
"The Federalist" and the classical foundations of the American Republic
No full textThis paper examines the classical themes and ancient historical examples presented through the Federalist Papers of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers represent a lucid sample of early American political theory, and the ideologies of three prominent founders. The study focuses on the Greco-Roman states within those essays that were deemed analogous or relevant to the American Confederacy under the Articles of Confederation, or were used to promote a new federal union under the Constitution. This paper also analyzes the formation of mixed governance constitutions, a vital construction for the creation of modern nations, as the idea progressed through the classical writers Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero. Through this analysis, the influences of the Greek and Roman classics are shown to be a formative element in the formation of the American Republic. By reestablishing and reasserting the Classics into the political ideology of that time, insight into the creation of a new Constitution through the combined insight of the Federalist becomes readily apparent. The first section presents an introduction to the Federalist, and the ratification debates of 1787-88. Section two covers the classical influences to American history. The third section is a brief overview of five current works relating to this scholarship. Section four comprises the analysis of the five sections of the Federalist Papers as outlined by Alexander Hamilton. The final section of this paper investigates the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius and Cicero to discover the evolution and creation of theories of mixed constitutions.M.A.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Christopher M. Broschar
The Empirics of International Monetary Transmission: Identification and the Impossible Trinity
No full textThe transmission of monetary policy across borders is central to many open economy models. Research has tried to evaluate the “impossible trinity” through estimating international interest rate linkages under alternative exchange rate regimes using realized base country interest rates. Such interest rates include anticipated and endogenous elements, which need not propagate internationally. We compare international interest rate responses under pegged and non-pegged regimes to identified, unanticipated and exogenous U.S. interest rate changes and realized U.S. interest rate changes. We find important differences in estimated transmission from the two sets of measures – identified interest rate changes demonstrate a greater concordance with the impossible trinity than realized rate change
Supporting Data for “Why So Slow? Mechanistic Insights from Studies of a Poor Catalyst for Polymerization of ε-Caprolactone”
No full textThese files contain data along with associated output from instrumentation supporting all results reported in Stasiw, D. E.; Mandal, M.; Neisen, B. D.; Mitchell, L. A.; Cramer, C. J.; Tolman, W. B. Why so slow? Mechanistic insights from studies of a poor catalyst for polymerization of ε-caprolactone. Inorg. Chem., 2016, 56, 725–728. Polymerization of ε-caprolactone (CL) using an aluminum alkoxide catalyst (1) designed to prevent unproductive trans binding was monitored at 110 °C in toluene-d8 by 1H NMR and the concentration versus time data fit to a first-order rate expression. A comparison of t1/2 for 1 to values for many other aluminum alkyl and alkoxide complexes shows much lower activity of 1 toward polymerization of CL. Density functional theory calculations were used to understand the basis for the slow kinetics. The optimized geometry of the ligand framework of 1 was found indeed to make CL trans binding difficult: no trans-bound intermediate could be identified as a local minimum. Nor were local minima for cis-bound precomplexes found, suggesting a concerted coordination–insertion for polymer initiation and propagation. The sluggish performance of 1 is attributed to a high-framework distortion energy required to deform the “resting” ligand geometry to that providing optimal catalysis in the corresponding transition-state structure geometry, thus suggesting a need to incorporate ligand flexibility in the design of efficient polymerization catalysts..
Corresponding author for experimental data is William B. Tolman ([email protected]).
Corresponding author for computational data is Christopher J. Cramer ([email protected]).Funding for this project was provided by the Center for Sustainable Polymers at the University of Minnesota, a National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported Center for Chemical Innovation (Grant CHE-1413862). The X-ray diffraction experiments were performed using a crystal diffractometer acquired through NSF-MRI Award CHE-1229400. The authors acknowledge the MSI at the University of Minnesota for providing resources that contributed to the research results.Tolman, William, B; Cramer, Christopher, J; Stasiw, Daniel E; Mandal, Mukunda; Neisen, Benjamin D; Mitchell, Lauren A. (2017). Supporting Data for “Why So Slow? Mechanistic Insights from Studies of a Poor Catalyst for Polymerization of ε-Caprolactone”. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://doi.org/10.13020/D6F60H
Modeling Visual Rhetoric and Semantics in Multimedia
No full textRecent advances in machine learning have enabled computer vision algorithms to model complicated visual phenomena with accuracies unthinkable a mere decade ago. Their high-performance on a plethora of vision-related tasks has enabled computer vision researchers to begin to move beyond traditional visual recognition problems to tasks requiring higher-level image understanding. However, most computer vision research still focuses on describing what images, text, or other media literally portrays. In contrast, in this dissertation we focus on learning how and why such content is portrayed. Rather than viewing media for its content, we recast the problem as understanding visual communication and visual rhetoric. For example, the same content may be portrayed in different ways in order to present the story the author wishes to convey. We thus seek to model not only the content of the media, but its authorial intent and latent messaging. Understanding how and why visual content is portrayed a certain way requires understanding higher level abstract semantic concepts which are themselves latent within visual media. By latent, we mean the concept is not readily visually accessible within a single image (e.g. right vs left political bias), in contrast to explicit visual semantic concepts such as objects.
Specifically, we study the problems of modeling photographic style (how professional photographers portray their subjects), understanding visual persuasion in image advertisements, modeling political bias in multimedia (image and text) news articles, and learning cross-modal semantic representations. While most past research in vision and natural language processing studies the case where visual content and paired text are highly aligned (as in the case of image captions), we target the case where each modality conveys complementary information to tell a larger story. We particularly focus on the problem of learning cross-modal representations from multimedia exhibiting weak alignment between the image and text modalities. A variety of techniques are presented which improve modeling of multimedia rhetoric in real-world data and enable more robust artificially intelligent systems
Source lithology of the Galápagos plume
No full textWe have measured the contents of Ni, Ca, and Mn in olivine phenocrysts from volcanoes in the Galápagos archipelago to infer the mantle source lithologies. Results show that peridotite is the dominant source lithology for Fernandina, Floreana, Genovesa, Marchena, Pinta, Wolf Island, and Darwin Island. These volcanoes largely characterize the PLUME, WD, FLO and DUM Nd, Sr, and Pb isotopic endmembers of Harpp and White (2001). Only a minor pyroxenite component contributes to Fernandina and Floreana. Peridotite is also the dominant source lithology for Volcan Wolf, Alcedo, and Cerro Azul, and that these have isotopic compositions that can be defined by mixing of the 4 endmembers. Peridotite is therefore the dominant source lithology of the Galápagos plume. However, pyroxenite melting is significant in two spatially separated domains which are also isotopically distinct: Roca Redonda, Volcan Ecuador, Sierra Negra in the enriched western part of the archipelago and Volcan Darwin, Santiago, Santa Cruz, and Santa Fe in the depleted east. An implication is that the western and eastern pyroxenite domains likely represent two separate bodies of recycled crust within the Galápagos mantle plume. Isotopically enriched and depleted domains of the archipelago melted from both peridotite and pyroxenite, and there is no relationship between source lithology and its isotopic characteristics. The identification of peridotite source melting in volcanoes with isotopic characteristics that have been attributed to recycled crust points to the importance of mixing in OIB genesis, in agreement with studies on the Canary Islands.M.S.Includes bibliographical referencesby Christopher Allen Vidit
Why don\u27t you hit me? (or men of color versus white women: anatomy of a dilemma)
No full textChristopher Gallegos presents CSP readers with a very personal account on heterosexual attraction, and the levels of complexity that gender and ethnicity bring to this all too human experience. The piece is portrayed by the author as a man of color\u27s manifesto against the marketing of the white woman as the sole example of female beauty. It is unfair to everyone: men and women of color and the white women themselves
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