cometadata/datacite-rtg-text-other-reclassification-records huggingface dataset:
Competition and Monopoly in the U.S. Economy: What do Industrial Concentration Data Tell?
Creators: name: Davis, Leila
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2019

description: 



A recent series of academic studies, think-tank reports, and news articles shows widespread attention to rising industrial concentration and market power in the U.S. economy. In this paper, we focus on concentration in the U.S. nonfinancial corporate sector to make three contributions to this literature. First, we trace the theoretical origins of the debate on industrial concentration, and show that there is a certain degree of ambiguity surrounding the expected consequences of concentration and monopolization for nonfinancial firms. Second, we use industry- level concentration data to describe recent trends in average concentration. We show that, while concentration increases across the majority of U.S. industries after the late 1990s, the retail and information-services sectors are particularly key for understanding recent trends in average industrial concentration. Third, we link our industry-level analysis with firm-level data to describe the relationship between industrial concentration and nonfinancial corporations’ profitability, markups, and investment. Consistent with the ambiguities in the theoretical literature, we find that these relationships are not uniform: while some highly-concentrated industries confirm standard expectations with high markups, high profitability, and low investment rates, other highly-concentrated industries earn lower-than-average markups and profits, suggesting that – in some industries – increased concentration and intensified competition may go hand in hand.
Industry Concentration and Technological Progress in U.S. Industries
Creators: name: Gezici, Armağan
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2019

description: 



This paper analyzes the impact of increasing concentration on the pace of technological progress in the U.S. economy. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the U.S. economy has been in a period of slower capital accumulation marked by lower aggregate productivity growth, while concentration ratio in most industries has increased. Studies analyzing the consequences of increasing concentration provide firm-level evidence that new-technology-induced productivity gains are an important driver behind increasing market power. Motivated by the lack of macro- level evidence for such productivity gains, this paper investigates the relation between new technologies and increasing concentration by focusing on industry-level measures of technological progress: labor and capital productivity, intangible asset intensity, and skilled labor ratio. The results show the impact of concentration on labor and capital productivity to be positive from the late 1990s and early 2000s, yet gradually turning negative through 2000s. While there is a significantly negative relationship between changes in skilled labor use and concentration, there does not seem to be any evidence that industries with increasing concentration are those with higher intangible capital ratio.
Enhancing octree-based context models for point cloud geometry compression with attention-based child node number prediction
Creators: name: Sun, Chang
name: Yuan, Hui
name: Mao, Xiaolong
name: Lu, Xin
name: Hamzaoui, Raouf
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Image and Video Processing (eess.IV)
subject: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
subject: Multimedia (cs.MM)
subject: FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: In point cloud geometry compression, most octreebased context models use the cross-entropy between the onehot encoding of node occupancy and the probability distribution predicted by the context model as the loss. This approach converts the problem of predicting the number (a regression problem) and the position (a classification problem) of occupied child nodes into a 255-dimensional classification problem. As a result, it fails to accurately measure the difference between the one-hot encoding and the predicted probability distribution. We first analyze why the cross-entropy loss function fails to accurately measure the difference between the one-hot encoding and the predicted probability distribution. Then, we propose an attention-based child node number prediction (ACNP) module to enhance the context models. The proposed module can predict the number of occupied child nodes and map it into an 8- dimensional vector to assist the context model in predicting the probability distribution of the occupancy of the current node for efficient entropy coding. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed module enhances the coding efficiency of octree-based context models.
description: 2 figures and 2 tables
Unpaid Family Caregiving and Retirement Savings
Creators: name: Weller, Christian E.
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2019

description: 



Workers face regular economic challenges from caring for children and adult relatives and friends. These challenges pose additional demand on their time and finances. As a result, many caregivers, especially women could end up with fewer retirement savings. They earn less, work fewer hours, and face greater emotional and physical demands from care. All of these factors can translate into a lower likelihood of participating in a 401(k) plan, contributing to such a plan and saving for one’s own retirement. We use nationally representative data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances to estimate the impact of potentially caring for children, parents and sick spouses on 401(k) participation. Our results suggest that caregiving risk – both related to child care and adult care – lower 401(k) participation and contributions for women. Among single women and men, caregiving risk widens the savings gap by more than 10 percent.
Why Do Firms Impose Vertical Restraints? Evidence from Franchise Contracts
Creators: name: Callaci, Brian
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2019

description: 



Franchising is a business form in which one firm (the “franchisor”) licenses an- other firm or individual (the “franchisee”) to operate businesses using the franchisor’s trademarks and proprietary business methods. Vertical restraints—contractual controls imposed by an upstream firm on the operations of a downstream firm, such as price, supplier and customer restrictions—are the essential features of franchise contracts. The presence or absence of particular vertical restraints determine which business decisions the franchisor seeks to control, and which it seeks to delegate to local managers. There are several theories seeking to explain why firms impose vertical restraints. One explanation focuses on agency costs and the role of vertical restraints in restraining franchisee opportunistic behavior. Another emphasizes the role of risk and uncertainty and the need for brand owners to delegate authority to local managers with superior information. Finally, some explanations point to the role of vertical restraints in labor discipline, arguing that firms deploy vertical restraints to target a vulnerable (low-skill, high-turnover, low-wage) workforce for downstream employment. By removing non-labor variables from the franchisee’s profit-maximizing choice set, vertical restraints compel franchisees to focus on minimizing labor costs and extracting labor effort for their profit margins, to the exclusion of alternative profit-maximizing strategies like charging higher prices, substituting cheaper inputs, investing in training, or motivating employees with efficiency wages. Using a data set created from 530 franchise contracts, I examine which franchisor characteristics predict the likelihood of imposing vertical restraints. I find that agency cost, risk, and worker characteristic variables are significantly associated with the likelihood of imposing vertical restraints, but that much of the variation in the likelihood of imposing vertical restraints remains unexplained.
MPEC 2024-P56 : DAILY ORBIT UPDATE (2024 August 4)
Creators: name: Minor Planet Center Staff
Publisher: name: The Minor Planet Center
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Small Solar System bodies
valueUri: http://astrothesaurus.org/uat/1469

description: The Minor Planet Electronic Circulars contain information on unusual minor planets, routine data on comets and natural satellites, and occasional editorial announcements.  They are published on behalf of Division F of the International Astronomical Union by the Minor Planet Center, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Structured Conflict: Changes in Federal and State Labor Laws and Strike Activity, 1950 to 2017
Creators: name: Stelzner, Mark
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2019

description: 



Through looking at state adoption of right-to-work laws, state embrace of social equity between employees of different racial and ethnic groups, and federal adjudication and administration of the National Labor Relations Act, we seek to better understand how state and federal intervention in labor-management relations have contributed to income inequality across regions and overtime in the United States. As we will see, both state and federal support of employers’ prerogatives and of racially biased institutions are associated with weaker worker power. For example, change in adjudication and administration of the National Labor Relations Board to the benefit of the employer starting in the 1980s is associated with around a 90 percent decrease in strike activity across states. And state embrace of Jim Crow in the midcentury and the New Jim Crow since the 1980s explains a significant portion of the variation in worker power, and thus wages between states.
Modern Money Theory (MMT) in the Tropics: Functional Finance in Developing Countries
Creators: name: Vernengo, Matías
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2019

description: 


Functional finance is only one of the elements of Modern Money
Theory (MMT). Chartal money, endogenous money and an Employer of
Last Resort Program (ELR) or Job Guarantee (JG) are often the
other elements. We are here interested fundamentally with the
functional finance aspects which are central for any discussion
of fiscal policy and have received more attention recently. We
discuss both the limitations of functional finance for
developing countries that have a sovereign currency, but are
forced to borrow in foreign currency and that might face a
balance of payments (BOP) constraint. We also analyze the limits
to borrowing in its own currency, and does not formally face the
possibility of default, since it can always print money or issue
debt. We note that the balance of payments constraint might
still be relevant and limit fiscal expansion. We note that
flexible rates do not necessarily create more space for fiscal
policy, and that should not be in general preferred to managed
exchange rate regimes with capital controls. We suggest that MMT
needs to be complemented with Structuralist ideas to provide a
more coherent understanding of fiscal policy in developing
countries.
The Revised U.S. Treasury Securities Standard System
Creators: name: Tokunaga, Junji
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2019

description: 



Michael Hudson has suggested that the global financial system since the post-Bretton Woods system could be regarded as the ‘US Treasury bill standard’ system, in the sense that monetary authorities in developed countries were, effectively, forced to buy US Treasury securities in the 1970s. Analogous to his view, the global financial system in the 2000s, characterized by emerging Asian official ownership of US Treasuries, could be called by ‘the revised US Treasury securities standard system’. The revised US Treasury securities standard system in the 2000s depends on not only foreign official demand for US Treasuries, but also, most importantly, a new type of market-driven demand for US Treasuries as ‘the globally accepted collateral’ in the unregulated shadow banking system. How are the official and private demands for US Treasuries fundamentally linked? In order to consider the question, the paper proposes the development of ‘the US Treasury securities-repo market nexus’ in the 2000s. The notion captures the role of US Treasury securities, whose market value and creditworthiness are sustained by emerging Asian official ownership, serving as the globally accepted collateral for creating new type of USD-denominated short-term liabilities, that is repo liabilities, to non-US residents. Importantly, the procyclical leverage during the US housing bubble intensified the market-driven demand for US Treasuries as globally accepted collateral, which induced large broker-dealers in the US and Europe, the center of the shadow banking system, to develop new financial instruments and financial innovations in the creation and intermediation of the globally accepted collateral. This development amplified the volatility in the issuance of USD-denominated repo liabilities by the broker-dealers vis-à- vis offshore financial centers (OFCs) such as the UK and the Caribbean, contributing to the explosion of USD-denominated financialization in the global context in the 2000s prior to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). However, since the GFC, the lack of dynamics in the procyclical leverage led to the structural stagnation in USD-denominated financialization in the global context in the 2010s.
Monkeypox virus: A concern for the whole world!
Creators: name: Dr. Pubaleem Deka1 and Dr. Gunajit Das2
Publisher: name: The Science world a Monthly e magazine
Year: 2024

description: The likelihood of successive viral pandemics has become a major source of worry. Even though MPXV has been there for more than 50 years and has resurfaced numerous times, little is known about its virological makeup and the features of the disease it produces. The monkeypox virus is a member of the subfamily Chordopoxvirinae of the family Poxviridae and the genus Orthopoxvirus and resembles other orthopoxviruses in its morphology. MPXVs are oval or brick-shaped with a lipoprotein-based outer membrane. The MPV genome is a double-stranded linear DNA (197 kb). The virus was first identified in 1958 in monkeys in a Danish laboratory hence the name “monkey pox”. Since the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) reported the first human case of monkeypox in 1970 in a 9-month-old boy, the disease has spread to other parts of Africa, mainly West and Central Africa, with cases confirmed outside of Africa recently. The global MPXV outbreak commenced in May 2022 and was labelled a public health emergency of international concern on July 23, 2022.
International Trade and Capital Flight From Africa: Challenges for Governance
Creators: name: Ayogu, Melvin D.
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2019

description: Capital flight constitutes a major constraint to Africa’s efforts to fill the large and growing financing gaps that hold back its progress towards achieving sustainable development goals. The mounting evidence on the unrecorded outflows of capital from Africa has spurred calls for strategies to curb the financial hemorrhage that is afflicting the continent.   The existing evidence is still inadequate, however, on four fronts. First, the quantitative evidence is predominantly aggregate and does not furnish adequate country-specific information on the mechanisms of capital flight, its institutional contexts, and the role of domestic and foreign players in facilitating it. Second, the literature has not paid adequate attention to the destinations of wealth accumulated through capital flight and the roles of the banking sector and public institutions in destination jurisdictions. Third, much of the literature conflates the capital flight with the broader concept of illicit financial flows. While all capital flight is illicit owing to its unrecorded transfer – and often, as well, by virtue of the illegal origins of the wealth, and the failure to declare the assets and pay tax on the associated income – not all illicit financial flows are capital flight; for example, payments for smuggled imports are an illicit flow but distinct from capital flight. Fourth, the existing literature has not sufficiently explored the two-way relationship between capital flight and governance in national and international institutions. To help fill these gaps in the literature, the African Development Policy Program at the Political Economy Research Institute has initiated detailed analyses in a project generously supported by the Open Society Foundations and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. This Working Paper series presents the project’s outputs. Our goal in issuing these reports is to engender informed public participation in decision making on financial regulation. Key findings will be distilled and published in the coming year in an edited volume that is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Distributed Edge Analytics in Edge-Fog-Cloud Continuum
Creators: name: Srirama, Satish Narayana
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: To address the increased latency, network load and compromised privacy issues associated with the Cloud-centric IoT applications, fog computing has emerged. Fog computing utilizes the proximal computational and storage devices, for sensor data analytics. The edge-fog-cloud continuum thus provides significant edge analytics capabilities for realizing interesting IoT applications. While edge analytics tasks are usually performed on a single node, distributed edge analytics proposes utilizing multiple nodes from the continuum, concurrently. This paper discusses and demonstrates distributed edge analytics from three different perspectives; serverless data pipelines (SDP), distributed computing and edge analytics, and federated learning, with our frameworks, MQTT based SDP, CANTO and FIDEL, respectively. The results produced in the paper, through different case studies, show the feasibility of performing distributed edge analytics following the three approaches, across the continuum.
Mapping of legal, technical and procedural tools
Creators: name: Toli, Eleni
name: Liatas, Christos
name: Papadopoulou, Elli
name: Electra Sifakaki
name: Marović, Branko
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2020
Subjects: ORDM, FAIR, tools, guidelines, models, decision making, support, certification, stakeholder types

description: The purpose of this deliverable is to analyse and categorise contemporary existing tools supporting FAIR and ORDM, and thereby provide a scanning of the landscape. This will help to identify potential gaps in the literature and current best practices applied, either on the strategic, operational or technical level and to create a tools catalogue for NI4OS-Europe stakeholders to consult from. Ultimately, a major aim of this work is determined to support the production of tools that move away from duplicating efforts in areas that have already been extensively explored and/or have triggered the creation of a plethora of equivalent products.
Magnitudes and Mechanisms of Capital Flight from Angola, Côte d'Ivoire and South Africa
Creators: name: Ndikumana, Léonce
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2019

description: 



This paper presents an updated methodology for estimation of capital flight, which is applied to the cases of Angola, Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa. The results indicate that the three countries have experienced substantial capital flight over the past four decades, amounting to $103 billion in constant 2018 dollars for Angola (over 1986-2018), $55 billion for Côte d’Ivoire (over 1970- 2018), and $329 billion for South Africa (over 1970-2018). An important mechanism of capital flight is misinvoicing of exports and imports, especially in primary commodities. The fact that these outflows have persisted over a long period indicates that they are driven by fundamental structural and institutional factors pertaining to both the source countries and the global financial system. These outflows have led to the accumulation of massive offshore wealth belonging to the economic and political elites from these countries, even as their populations continue to face deprivation in access to basic services. Capital flight is clearly a major obstacle to development financing that needs to be tackled through coordinated strategies at national and international level.
Experiences with Occupancy Based Building Management Systems
Creators: name: Batra, Nipun
name: Pandarasamy Arjunan
name: Singh, Amarjeet
name: Pushpendra Singh
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2013
Subjects: Computer Engineering
Applied Computer Science

description: —Buildings are one of the largest consumers of electricity. Dominant electricity consumption within the buildings,
contributed by plug loads, lighting and air conditioning, can be
signiﬁcantly improved using Occupancy-based Building Management Systems (Ob-BMS). In this paper, we address three critical
aspects of Ob-BMS i.e. 1) Modular sensor node design to support
diverse deployment scenarios; 2) Building architecture to support
and scale ﬁne resolution monitoring; and 3) Detailed analysis of
the collected data for smarter actuation. We present key learning
across these three aspects evolved over more than one year of
design and deployment experiences.
The sensor node design evolved over a period of time to
address speciﬁc deployment requirements. With an opportunity
at the host institute where two dorm buildings were getting
constructed, we planned for the support infrastructure required
for ﬁne resolution monitoring embedded in the design phase
and share our preliminary experiences and key learning thereof.
Prototype deployment of the sensing system as per the planned
support infrastructure was performed at two faculty ofﬁces with
effective data collection worth 45 days. Collected data is analyzed
accounting for efﬁcient switching of appliances, in addition to
energy conservation and user comfort as performed in the earlier
occupancy based frameworks. Our analysis shows that occupancy
prediction using simple heuristic based modeling can achieve
similar performance as more complex Hidden Markov Models,
thus simplifying the analytic framework.
Revisiting India's Growth Transitions
Creators: name: Basu, Deepankar
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2019

description: 



This paper reconsiders two questions relating to India’s economic growth: structural breaks in growth and the impact of equipment investment on aggregate economic growth. First, statistical tests of structural change show that economic growth in post-independence India has witnessed four structural breaks: in 1964-65, in 1978-79, in 1990-91, and in 2004-05. However, substantial growth accelerations, i.e. increase of more than 1.0% per annum in the growth rate of per capita real GDP, occurred only at two points: 1978-79 and 2004-05. Second, to analyze the impact of equipment investment on growth, I use an ARDL bounds testing methodology. I find a positive and statistically significant long run positive impact of private investment in equipment and machinery on the growth rate of real GDP.
Dominance of Majoritarian Politics and Hate Crimes Against Religious Minorities in India, 2009-2018
Creators: name: Basu, Deepankar
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2019

description: 

Using a novel state-level panel data set for the period 2009-18 on the incidence of hate crimes in India, and a difference in difference (DD) approach, this paper investigates the causal impact of the right-wing, Hindu nationalist BJP’s win in the 2014 national elections on hate crimes against religious minorities. Using 2009-13 (pre-election) and 2014-18 (post-election) as the before and after periods, I estimate a standard DD model, where the treatment group consists of states where BJP won the largest share of popular votes in 2014, to get an initial estimate of the causal impact. I strengthen this result with a treatment intensity approach where BJP’s vote share in 2014 functions as the treatment intensity. I instrument it with BJP’s vote share in the previous national elections in 2009 to estimate the causal impact. I supplement the linear models with quasi-Poisson regressions to take account of the count data nature of the incidence of hate crimes. All approaches show that BJP’s electoral victory in 2014 caused an increase in the incidence of hate crimes against religious minorities. I investigate three plausible mechanisms that might generate the result: laxity of state-level law enforcement; economic competition between religious groups; role of social media. I find evidence that weakening of state-level law enforcement is the key mechanism driving the rise in anti-minority hate crimes. This paper contributes to contemporary studies of the adverse impact of rising ethno-nationalist populism on marginalized social groups by investigating the case of India.
Incorporating Large Language Models into Production Systems for Enhanced Task Automation and Flexibility
Creators: name: Xia, Yuchen
name: Zhang, Jize
name: Jazdi, Nasser
name: Weyrich, Michael
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
subject: Emerging Technologies (cs.ET)
subject: Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)
subject: Robotics (cs.RO)
subject: Systems and Control (eess.SY)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences
subject: FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

description: This paper introduces a novel approach to integrating large language model (LLM) agents into automated production systems, aimed at enhancing task automation and flexibility. We organize production operations within a hierarchical framework based on the automation pyramid. Atomic operation functionalities are modeled as microservices, which are executed through interface invocation within a dedicated digital twin system. This allows for a scalable and flexible foundation for orchestrating production processes. In this digital twin system, low-level, hardware-specific data is semantically enriched and made interpretable for LLMs for production planning and control tasks. Large language model agents are systematically prompted to interpret these production-specific data and knowledge. Upon receiving a user request or identifying a triggering event, the LLM agents generate a process plan. This plan is then decomposed into a series of atomic operations, executed as microservices within the real-world automation system. We implement this overall approach on an automated modular production facility at our laboratory, demonstrating how the LLMs can handle production planning and control tasks through a concrete case study. This results in an intuitive production facility with higher levels of task automation and flexibility. Finally, we reveal the several limitations in realizing the full potential of the large language models in autonomous systems and point out promising benefits. Demos of this series of ongoing research series can be accessed at: https://github.com/YuchenXia/GPT4IndustrialAutomation
Intra-City Inequalities, Neighborhoods and Economic Development
Creators: name: Motiram, Sripad
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2020

description: 



How do neighborhood characteristics influence economic development? How do social cleavages operate within cities in developing countries? This study is among the first of its kind to be conducted in the developing world, and focuses on India to provide answers. Given the limitations of publicly available sources of secondary data, we rely on a spatially representative household survey that we designed and conducted in the cities of Hyderabad and Mumbai. We conduct an inequality decomposition exercise to show that a substantial portion of intra-city income inequality is explained by social cleavages such as classes and social groups (caste and religion). While urban inequalities are stark, we show that spatial co-existence of classes and social groups (a phenomenon that we term as “Grayness”) is pronounced. At the neighborhood level, Grayness has a strong and positive impact on development outcomes. We establish this result by using an instrument that captures intra-city variations in the history of industrialization in these two cities. We discuss the policy implications of our findings.
Municipal Solid Waste Management Options in India: Insights from Exergy Analysis
Creators: name: Proc. ISSST
name: Jadhao, Sachin B.
name: Shingade, Sunil G.
name: Bhavik R. Bakshi
name: Aniruddha B. Pandit
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2013
Subjects: Environmental Science

description: Like most developing economies, India is starting to generate increasing quantities of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW), particularly in its urban areas. The city of Mumbai generates about 7,500 tons of MSW/day. Most of the MSW generated, is usually disposed off in open dumps and landfills, due to lack of space for landfill and overload of the municipal corporations. In addition to serious air pollution, it also contaminates ground water with increased concentrations of heavy metals and toxic elements. Huge generation rate of MSW, very slow rate of decomposition in landfills, land scarcity, social and environmental problems associated with waste managed create an urgent need for treatment processes that can treat the waste quickly and in an economically feasible and environmentally and socially sustainable manner. Exergy analysis has been found to be an appropriate method for material resource accounting, identifying and reducing losses and improving efficiency, and process optimization [1][2]. This work compares the waste management practices of incineration, plasma gasification, and landfilling based on their exergy loss and efficiency, and emissions. The focus of this study is on evaluating the exergetic efficiency of these technologies in the Indian context, considering the facts that the composition, climate, segregation practices, moisture content of MSW, etc. in a developing tropical country like India differ significantly from those of developed societies, which have been the location of previous such studies.
Is Imperialism Passé in the 21st Century?
Creators: name: Azad, Rohit
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2020

description: 



Hardt and Negri in Empire argue that ”Imperialism is over.” On the contrary, others argue that not only is imperialism not dead, but its machinations have amplified during the phase of globalisation (Patnaik’s The Value of Money, Patnaik and Patnaik’s A Theory of Imperialism, John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, among others). The reason for this sharp division among progressives is because of the current world scenario. On the one hand, some countries in the periphery (emerging economies) are growing faster than those in the core. On the other hand, the terms of trade has started moving in favour of the primary commodities over the last two decades. This paper argues that imperialism exists not in spite of but because of the globalisation of capital.


Mature capitalism in the core needs to deal with three instabilities: accumulation, price and political (Patnaik), the first because of expectations in investment decisions (Luxemburg), the second because of the wage-price spiral (Rowthorn) and the third because of the social unacceptability of high rates of unemployment. We argue that globalisation solves the first two problems but, in the process, aggravates the third instability.


The world is no longer divided into two camps of a capitalist core and non-capitalist periphery. Today, we have a tripartite division of the world with a capitalist core (G-8), predominantly capitalist periphery (China, Taiwan among others) and a pre-capitalist periphery (the African subcontinent and the rest). The capitalist periphery, through its low wage costs, keeps the wage shares in the capitalist core under check, thereby providing price, and hence, financial stability to the US dollar. The same low wage costs induce a shift in the site of accumulation to the capitalist periphery even as the capitalist core retains the surplus generated through the IPRs. Due to increased accumulation, the raw material requirements create debilitating conditions for the pre-capitalist periphery in effect forming a pyramidal structure of imperialism.


However, a significant contradiction develops in this process. While globalisation provides the core with price and output stability, it comes at the cost of political instability because a declining wage share and outsourcing creates unemployment or declining income for the workers in the US resulting in a rightward shift (election of Trump and others) in the polity in the core.
Monetizing Public Debt in Japan: An Empirical Critique of Modern Money Theory
Creators: name: Tokunaga, Junji
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2020

description: 



Is Japan really a ‘success’ case that supports the Modern Money Theory (MMT) framework? The Bank of Japan (BOJ), the country’s central bank, has conducted more aggressive monetary quantitative easing since April 2013, which could effectively allow the Japanese government to monetize its cheaper public borrowing. This paper argues that the economic and financial situations in Japan have provided little support for the MMT view, for these reasons: (i) The huge issuance of public debt by the government and the large-scale supply of monetary base by the BOJ did not create enough new money required to revive the economy as a whole, contrary to the MMT view that the issuance of sovereign currency can easily achieve full employment. (ii) It is difficult for Japan’s monetary authority to manage the government bonds market under the multicurrency-based shadow banking system, opposed to the MMT hypothesis that purchasing government bonds is discretionally determined by monetary authorities without a financial constraint. (iii) The monetization of public debt backed by the BOJ, which MMT regards as an example of success, could lead to a perverse outcome--the buildup of financial fragility in the real estate market. In conclusion, the monetization of Japan’s public debt, applauded by MMT advocates, would leave the burden of the vast costs of its failure to our children in the future.
Government Policy’s Influence on Shadow Banking in China
Creators: name: Hsu, Sara
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2020

description:
Shadow banking in China has been viewed by government officials and industry experts as illegitimate finance, but as a key means of financing by others. For the former, the industry has been seen as overly risky, potentially undermining the formal financial system. The latter see shadow banking as an increasingly important part of the financial system, filling a gap in the provision of finance to particular sectors and smaller firms.


In this paper, we seek to understand the effect of government views on shadow banking by analyzing the impact of government regulation on the shadow banking and non-shadow banking financial sector (i.e., the stock market). Using a unique data set based on data collected from various sources, we find that shadow banking regulation plays a strong role in China’s financial sector. We also discuss ways in which China’s shadow banking sector has not gone far enough in deepening Chinese finance, and make suggestions as to how regulators could lead the way in improving direct and market-based finance.
Hearing Loss and Families Hearing Loss and Indigenous Child Protection
Creators: name: Howard, Damien
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2019
Subjects: Child protection
Hearing loss
Indigenous

description: Hearing loss is widespread among Indigenous people, especially children. Indigenous children are also disproportionally involved in the child protections system. Recent research has identified that 80% of children who have child protection reports made in remote areas of the NT have a hearing loss. This presentation discusses processes through which hearing loss can contribute to family function. For example, family punishing children for not listening or following directions, when they cannot hear what has been said to them.
Re-Making of the Turkish Crisis
Creators: name: Orhangazi, Özgür
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2020

description: 



Turkey entered a new phase of recession-cum-real economy crisis starting in the last quarter of 2018. In contrast to the previous crisis episodes of 1994, 2001 or 2009, when the economy has abruptly shrunk with a spectacular collapse of asset values and a severe contraction of output, the 2018- crisis is characterized by a prolonged recession with persistent low (negative) rates of growth, dwindling investment performance, debt repayment problems, secularly rising open unemployment, a spiraling currency depreciation and high inflation. Popular explanations from the mainstream tradition attribute this dismal performance to a lack of “structural reforms” and/or exogenous factors. Per contra, our analysis shows that the underlying sources of the crisis are to be found not in the conjunctural cycles of reform fatigue, but rather in the post-2001 neoliberal speculative-led growth model with excessive reliance on hot money flows and foreign debt accumulation. We argue that following the post-2001 orthodox reforms, a foreign-capital-inflow-dependent, debt-led, and construction-centered economic growth model dominated the economy and caused a long buildup of imbalances and increased fragilities.
A Three Class Predator-Prey Model with Financial Super Predators: The Financial Profit Squeeze
Creators: name: Goldstein, Jonathan
Publisher: name: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Year: 2020

description: The primary purpose of this paper is to: 1) introduce a three-class predator-prey model with class interactions consistent with the NL era into the literature; 2) analyze the spectrum of different qualitative macroeconomic behaviors associated with the model; 3) focus on two particular outcomes – FK PS and a double reserve army (RA) – FK PS –both capable of producing cyclical and chaotic outcomes; and 4) use the FK PS to explain key stylized facts associated with the NL period. Given a sparing behavioral structure for the model where financial markets are not explicitly specified3, a full-on calibration exercise is not attempted.
Considering decoupled phenotypic diversification between ontogenetic phases in macroevolution: An example using Triggerfishes (Balistidae)
Creators: name: Frédérich, Bruno
name: Dornburg, Alex
name: Zapfe, Katerina
name: Williams, Rachel
name: Alfaro, Michael
name: Morris, Richard
name: Adachi, Haruka
name: Santini, Francesco
name: Near, Thomas
name: Flores, Joseph
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: adaptive radiation
subject: Functional morphology
subject: Ecology
subject: FOS: Biological sciences
subject: Nursery habitat
subject: ontogeny

description: Across the Tree of Life, most studies of phenotypic disparity and diversification have been restricted to adult organisms. However, many lineages have distinct ontogenetic phases that differ from their adult forms in morphology and ecology. Focusing disproportionately on the evolution of adult forms unnecessarily hinders our understanding of the pressures shaping evolution over time. Non-adult disparity patterns are particularly important to consider for coastal ray-finned fishes, which often have juvenile phases with distinct phenotypes. These juvenile forms are often associated with sheltered nursery environments, with phenotypic shifts between adults and juvenile stages that are readily apparent in locomotor morphology. Whether this ontogenetic variation in locomotor morphology reflects a decoupling of diversification dynamics between life stages remains unknown. Here we investigate the evolutionary dynamics of locomotor morphology between adult and juvenile triggerfishes. We integrate a time-calibrated phylogenetic framework with geometric morphometric approaches and measurement data of fin aspect ratio and incidence and reveal a mismatch between morphospace occupancy, the evolution of morphological disparity, and the tempo of trait evolution between life stages. Collectively, our results illuminate how the heterogeneity of morpho-functional adaptations can decouple the mode and tempo of morphological diversification between ontogenetic stages.
description: Funding provided by: National Science FoundationROR ID: https://ror.org/021nxhr62Award Number: 0000-0002-5159-641X
description: Collection of images for morphometric analyses: A total of 724 images of triggerfishes (juvenile and adult fishes) were taken from online repositories and digitized specimens from different museums (North Carolina Museum of Natural Science, Burke Museum, Bishop Museum, Philadelphia Academy of Science, LA County Museum, Yale Peabody Museum, Filed Museum and Museum of Comparative Zoology). 

Phylogenetic hypotheses were produced by using available DNA sequence data. The dataset included DNA sequence data from 11 genes (12S, 16S, RAG1, RAG2, rhod, Tmo-4c4, Bmp4, COI, CytB, Glyt, MYH6, RAG2).

Locations of specimens examined (images) and GenBank accession numbers are provided in Table S1 and Table S3 from the supplementary materials.
OMR-NET: a two-stage octave multi-scale residual network for screen content image compression
Creators: name: Jiang, Shiqi
name: Ren, Ting
name: Fu, Congrui
name: Li, Shuai
name: Yuan, Hui
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Image and Video Processing (eess.IV)
subject: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
subject: FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: Screen content (SC) differs from natural scene (NS) with unique characteristics such as noise-free, repetitive patterns, and high contrast. Aiming at addressing the inadequacies of current learned image compression (LIC) methods for SC, we propose an improved two-stage octave convolutional residual blocks (IToRB) for high and low-frequency feature extraction and a cascaded two-stage multi-scale residual blocks (CTMSRB) for improved multi-scale learning and nonlinearity in SC. Additionally, we employ a window-based attention module (WAM) to capture pixel correlations, especially for high contrast regions in the image. We also construct a diverse SC image compression dataset (SDU-SCICD2K) for training, including text, charts, graphics, animation, movie, game and mixture of SC images and NS images. Experimental results show our method, more suited for SC than NS data, outperforms existing LIC methods in rate-distortion performance on SC images. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/SunshineSki/OMR Net.git.
description: 7 figures, 2 tables
Automotive Transition to Sustainable Technology Mix, a Response to CAFE Standards
Creators: name: Proc. ISSST
name: Jenn, Alan
name: Blanco, Christian
name: Chernicoff, William
name: Azevedo, Inês
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2013
Subjects: Environmental Science

description: Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards were recently passed as a joint effort between the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to increase fuel efficiency and reduce carbon emissions of passenger cars and light trucks. I examine the effects of this policy on the future vehicle fleet mix, broken down by vehicle class and vehicle type, specifically improving on earlier works by capturing consumer behavior in the model. Using a non-linear programming
(NLP) optimization model to minimize costs, the lowest cost solution to meeting policy mandates through vehicle sales and adjustments to fuel efficiency are investigated from the perspective of a social planner. Results indicate that the optimal allocation of vehicles is significantly lower than expected growth due to higher prices. Specific aspects of the CAFE regulation have a strong effect on the outcomes, particularly weighting incentives for flex fuel vehicles which result in high adoption of this technology in 2012 through 2015. While overall gasoline consumption and emissions are reduced from the mandated standards, CAFE imposes relatively large costs on consumers and producers.
Streamlined Life Cycle Assessment Through Materials Classification and Under-Specification
Creators: name: Proc. ISSST
name: Reis, Lynn
name: Olivetti, Elsa
name: Kirchain, Randolph
name: Pietrzykowski, Matthew
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2013
Subjects: Environmental Science

description: Data gaps in life cycle assessment (LCA) lead to a reliance on proxy data and introduce uncertainty into assessments. This work shows how data mining techniques can be used to quantitatively understand the important characteristics driving environmental impacts of materials when more than one impact is considered. The results can subsequently be used to fill data gaps and predict a material’s environmental performance. This paper explores the use of clustering and principal component analysis to identify potential material classifications, and then the use of regression trees and other statistical methods to evaluate the classifications and develop a material taxonomy. This method is applied to a life cycle inventory dataset for several metals, and the TRACI 2.0 impact assessment method is used to illustrate the observed reduction in uncertainty as more information is specified across the hierarchy using this proposed classification. The analysis indicates that function, price, and recycled content are significant classifiers for metals. Applying these factors to create taxonomies demonstrates both an effective and efficient reduction in uncertainty. This is represented by a 68-78% reduction in the sum of squares error within (SSW) of the worst case groups from level 1 to level 2 of the taxonomy and an 84-91% overall reduction in SSW of the worst case groups from level 1 to level 3. Using this materials taxonomy reduces the amount of information required to specify a product, therefore enabling one component of streamlined life cycle assessment.
Asymmetrical Information Market Failure Triggered by the Chicago School’s Profit Motive Paradigm: A Case Study of Virginia’s Public Higher Education Market and Media Identification of Public Value Failure
Creators: name: Davis, Robert
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2013
Subjects: Economics
Education

description: This paper presents a case study examination of theCommonwealthofVirginia’s public higher education market and the use of asymmetrical information flows between providers and consumers by college and university institutions to intentionally create market failures to maximize brand building through increased revenue collections via profit maximization behaviors. Existing economic research in the financial services market hold that asymmetry of information generates inefficient allocation of goods and subsequent identification of market failure conditions. Market failures can lead to tipping points which may result in public values failures as threats to human subsistence (i.e. food, clothing, education) and imperfect public information. Market failures resulting in public values failures warrant government intervention to correct market inefficiency and ensure pareto efficiency in the allocation of goods. Mandatory non-educational fees increase the cost to attend a post-secondary institution which subsequently aid in increased student debt and reduced access and affordability for low income classification groups thus exacerbating societal cleavages identified as public values failures. This research identifies the application of economic and public administration theory to construct a policy recommendation to mitigate asymmetrical information and improve pareto efficiency involving transactions in the public higher education market.