Hamiltonian Composite Dynamics Can Almost Always Lead To Negative Reduced Dynamics

Complete positivity is a ubiquitous assumption in the study of quantum systems interacting with the environment, despite repeated efforts to point out that the assumption is not empirically justified. It will be shown that Hamiltonian evolution of a quantum system and its environment can be negative (i.e.\ not completely positive) in the energy basis, by showing that such evolution is {\it almost always} negative for given initial conditions. Ignoring or "correcting" experimental data that is not completely positive may cause the loss of important information regarding system-environment correlations and coupling. A relationship between the negativity of an evolution and the eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian will be shown, and experimental verification of negative reduced dynamics will be proposed.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures; Added a discussion of discord and proposed experimental observations of negativit

INFLATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

Financial Economics,

Disagreement at the FOMC: the dissenting votes are just part of the story

Recently released data on economic forecasts made by voting and nonvoting members of the FOMC suggest that there is more disagreement than the voting record indicates.Federal Open Market Committee ; Monetary policy

Using stock market liquidity to forecast recessions

Market participants rebalance their portfolios in advance of a recession.Recessions ; Economic indicators

Uncertainty about when the Fed will raise interest rates

It's hard to make a firm prediction as to when the Fed will raise interest rates.Interest rates ; Monetary policy - United States

Housing's role in a recovery

Housing tends to contribute significantly to an economic recovery.Housing - Finance ; Economic conditions

Should food be excluded from core CPI?

The greater a component’s SNR, the more useful the component should be in forecasting headline CPI.Consumer price indexes ; Food prices

How accurate are forecasts in a recession?

Recessions ; Economic forecasting

The use of near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) for prediction of the nutritive value of barley for growing pigs

peer-reviewedThere is a need in the feed industry for a rapid means of evaluating the nutritive value of feeds and feed ingredients. Chemical analysis provides only basic information and most of the laboratory techniques take too long for this information to be of use in feed formulation at the feed mill. Near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) has been proposed as an alternative means of predicting nutritive value. In this study, NIRS was used to predict the digestible energy (DE) concentration and in vitro ileal digestibility of crude protein (CP) and total-tract digestibility of energy of locally produced barley. The calibration and validation statistics were developed using modified partial least squares (MPLS). Derivatisation and scatter correction procedures were carried out to reduce interference from external effects. The correlations between actual and predicted DE values, based on both calibration (R2 0.93) and validation (R2 0.69), were strong with corresponding low standard errors of calibration (SEC) and cross validation (SECV) (SEC 0.128, SECV 0.279). Strong correlations were also observed between predicted and actual in vitro digestibility values for both calibration and validation exercises. It was noted that validation weakened the correlations (R2 0.73 vs. 0.50 for in vitro ileal digestibility of CP and 0.80 vs. 0.68 for in vitro total tract digestibility of energy) and fractionally increased the standard errors (0.016 vs. 0.020 for in vitro ileal digestibility of CP and 0.018 vs. 0.024 for in vitro total tract digestibility of energy). The correlations obtained by cross validation of the lowest SECV equations were not significantly different to those obtained by the scatter correction treatments. The strong relationships and low standard errors obtained between the actual and predicted values indicates that NIRS may be of use in predicting the nutritive value of barley for growing pigs, although more research is required to include larger sample sets

The choice of commodity tax base in the presence of horizontal foreign direct investment

We analyse the choice of commodity tax base, when countries set their taxes non-cooperatively in a reciprocal dumping model of homogeneous goods trade with horizontal foreign direct investment (FDI). We show that the consumption base (destination principle) weakly welfare-dominates the production base (origin principle) for a large range of plant fixed costs. When integration is complete, the destination principle dominates the origin principle for all levels of plant fixed costs below which FDI occurs under the origin principle. This contrasts with much of the existing literature which has tended to support the origin principle under imperfect competition with a fixed market structure