Estimating Distributional Impacts of an Innovation Across Sectors in an Industry: A case study of the Australian wool industry

In this paper an approach that can be used to determine the distribution of a productivity gain on an industry is detailed. In particular, the model developed in this paper extends earlier evaluations by emphasising the crucial role of substitution between inputs across different participants in the supply chain. Crucial to any analysis of an industry are the estimates of the elasticity's of derived demand at each stage and how it changes, as the product is further refined. The wool industry is used to illustrate the effects of an innovation across sectors.Agribusiness, Production Economics,

Electron spin-phonon interaction symmetries and tunable spin relaxation in silicon and germanium

Compared with direct-gap semiconductors, the valley degeneracy of silicon and germanium opens up new channels for spin relaxation that counteract the spin degeneracy of the inversion-symmetric system. Here the symmetries of the electron-phonon interaction for silicon and germanium are identified and the resulting spin lifetimes are calculated. Room-temperature spin lifetimes of electrons in silicon are found to be comparable to those in gallium arsenide, however, the spin lifetimes in silicon or germanium can be tuned by reducing the valley degeneracy through strain or quantum confinement. The tunable range is limited to slightly over an order of magnitude by intravalley processes.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 13 table

President Trump's first State of the Union: LSE experts react

On Tuesday January 30th, President Donald Trump gave his first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. We asked LSE experts to give their rapid reaction to the speech. Read the State of the Union address here

Adding Substance to the Debate: Descartes on Freedom of the Will

It is widely accepted by commentators that Descartes believed in freedom of the will, but it is fiercely debated whether he accepted a libertarian or compatibilist notion of freedom. With this paper I argue that an examination of Descartes’ conception of ‘substance,’ specifically his distinction between divine substance and created substance, is a fruitful source for the debate regarding Descartes on freedom of the will. I argue that the commentators who read Descartes as a libertarian are forced to focus on passages that emphasize the similarity between God and humans. This is problematic because Descartes is clear that there is a non-univocality between God and humans concerning ‘substance.’ This non-univocality between God and humans puts a strain on the libertarian’s focus. During the course of this argument I examine the passages frequently cited by commentators concerning Cartesian freedom and I make explicit the analogy between Descartes’ view on substance and freedom. The upshot is that Descartes’ considered account of substance is further evidence for the compatibilist reading

The Geographic Distribution of Bowhead Whales, Balaena mysticetus, in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas: Evidence from Whaleship Records, 1849–1914

We have extracted, digitized, and analyzed information about bowhead whales, Balaena mysticetus, contained in records of whaling cruises that were undertaken in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas from 1849 to 1914. Our database consists of 65,000 days of observations which provide insights into whether this bowhead stock may comprise more than one population

Disaster education in the UK

The seminar series brought together emergency management specialists and educationalists to explore how disaster management knowledge, innovation and education can contribute to building a culture of safety and resilience in the UK. The series was primarily focussed on ways of understanding UK disaster reduction contexts, though informed by contributions from other parts of the world. The strengthening of debate on practical and policy developments for disaster education helped exchange experiences and ideas about dealing with changing hazards and vulnerabilities. This contributed to wider and strengthened interest in disaster risk reduction engagement through associated educational needs. The series analysed conceptual, practical and policy issues surrounding UK disaster education. Institutional partners were The universities of Northumbria (lead), Glamorgan, UCL and Kyoto served as partners with significant inputs from practice institutions, including in hosting of seminars. This facilitated a rich mix of learning cultures from within and without the academy for open debate and awareness building regards learning and education in disaster reduction. There are consequent developments for further activities beyond the life of this grant, such as ongoing additional conference sessions on disaster education, an EU project, and a DFID funded disaster education and community resilience programme in Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. These also feed back into the UK context. The series exposed a deeply held interest in disaster education from within the UK emergency management sector. Key conclusions were the need to develop in depth grounded learning processes, integrated institutional development and mixed qualitative and quantitative tools for the job

Fragmentation with a Cut on Thrust: Predictions for B-factories

When high-energy single-hadron production takes place inside an identified jet, there are important correlations between the fragmentation and phase-space cuts. For example, when one-hadron yields are measured in on-resonance B-factory data, a cut on the thrust event shape T is required to remove the large b-quark contribution. This leads to a dijet final state restriction for the light-quark fragmentation process. Here we complete our analysis of unpolarized fragmentation of (light) quarks and gluons to a light hadron h with energy fraction z in e+ e- -> dijet + h at the center-of-mass energy Q=10.58 GeV. In addition to the next-to-next-to-leading order resummation of logarithms of 1-T, we include the next-to-leading order (NLO) nonsingular O(1-T) contribution to the cross section, the resummation of threshold logarithms of 1-z, and the leading nonperturbative contribution to the soft function. Our results for the correlations between fragmentation and the thrust cut are presented in a way that can be directly tested against B-factory data. These correlations are also observed in Pythia, but are surprisingly smaller at NLO.Comment: 10 pages + appendices, 13 figures, v2:updated discussion, journal versio

Cryogenic Propellant Feed System Analytical Tool Development

The Propulsion Systems Branch at NASA s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) has developed a parametric analytical tool to address the need to rapidly predict heat leak into propellant distribution lines based on insulation type, installation technique, line supports, penetrations, and instrumentation. The Propellant Feed System Analytical Tool (PFSAT) will also determine the optimum orifice diameter for an optional thermodynamic vent system (TVS) to counteract heat leak into the feed line and ensure temperature constraints at the end of the feed line are met. PFSAT was developed primarily using Fortran 90 code because of its number crunching power and the capability to directly access real fluid property subroutines in the Reference Fluid Thermodynamic and Transport Properties (REFPROP) Database developed by NIST. A Microsoft Excel front end user interface was implemented to provide convenient portability of PFSAT among a wide variety of potential users and its ability to utilize a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) developed in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The focus of PFSAT is on-orbit reaction control systems and orbital maneuvering systems, but it may be used to predict heat leak into ground-based transfer lines as well. PFSAT is expected to be used for rapid initial design of cryogenic propellant distribution lines and thermodynamic vent systems. Once validated, PFSAT will support concept trades for a variety of cryogenic fluid transfer systems on spacecraft, including planetary landers, transfer vehicles, and propellant depots, as well as surface-based transfer systems. The details of the development of PFSAT, its user interface, and the program structure will be presented

A Comparison between Deep Neural Nets and Kernel Acoustic Models for Speech Recognition

We study large-scale kernel methods for acoustic modeling and compare to DNNs on performance metrics related to both acoustic modeling and recognition. Measuring perplexity and frame-level classification accuracy, kernel-based acoustic models are as effective as their DNN counterparts. However, on token-error-rates DNN models can be significantly better. We have discovered that this might be attributed to DNN's unique strength in reducing both the perplexity and the entropy of the predicted posterior probabilities. Motivated by our findings, we propose a new technique, entropy regularized perplexity, for model selection. This technique can noticeably improve the recognition performance of both types of models, and reduces the gap between them. While effective on Broadcast News, this technique could be also applicable to other tasks.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1411.400