Fearless Friday: Taylor Bury

This week, SURGE is pleased to feature Taylor Bury ’16 as Gettysburg’s Fearless Leader! Taylor is a senior at Gettysburg College. She is a Biology Major from York, Pennsylvania. She has been involved with Student Senate since her first year on campus, rising through the ranks to serve as its President. [excerpt

Ideal MHD Ballooning modes, shear flow and the stable continuum

There is a well established theory of Ballooning modes in a toroidal plasma. The cornerstone of this is a local eigenvalue lambda on each magnetic surface - which also depends on the ballooning phase angle k. In stationary plasmas lambda(k) is required only near its maximum, but in rotating plasmas its average over k is required. Unfortunately in many case lambda(k) does not exist for some range of k, because the spectrum there contains only a stable continuum. This limits the application of the theory, and raises the important question of whether this "stable interval" gives rise to significant damping. This question is re-examined using a new, simplified, model - which leads to the conclusion that there is no appreciable damping at small shear flow. In particular, therefore, a small shear flow should not affect Ballooning mode stability boundaries

SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol: Letting applications talk to each other

SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol, is a hub-based communication standard for the exchange of data and control between participating client applications. It has been developed within the context of the Virtual Observatory with the aim of enabling specialised data analysis tools to cooperate as a loosely integrated suite, and is now in use by many and varied desktop and web-based applications dealing with astronomical data. This paper reviews the requirements and design principles that led to SAMP's specification, provides a high-level description of the protocol, and discusses some of its common and possible future usage patterns, with particular attention to those factors that have aided its success in practice.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for Virtual Observatory special issue of Astronomy and Computin

The Robustness and Efficiency of Monetary Policy Rules as Guidelines for Interest Rate Setting by the European Central Bank

This paper examines the implications of recent research on monetary policy rules for practical monetary policy making, with special emphasis on strategies for setting interest rates by the new European Central Bank (ECB). The paper draws on recent research and new simulations of a large open economy model to assess the efficiency of a simple benchmark rule in comparison with other proposed rules. The paper stresses new results on the robustness of monetary policy rules in which each rule that is optimal or good according to one model or researcher is tested for robustness by other researchers using different models. Because of the large increase in the number of economists focussing on econometric evaluation of monetary policy rules for the interest rate instrument and because of the parallel increase in the variety of models being developed for this purpose, much more evidence is becoming available on the robustness of simle monetary policy rules for the interest rate than ever before.monetary policy rules; interest rate; efficiency; robustness; European Central Bank;

The Mayekawa Lecture: The Way Back to Stability and Growth in the Global Economy

This paper was presented at the 2008 International Conference, gFrontiers in Monetary Theory and Policy,h held by the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan, in Tokyo on May 28-29, 2008.