The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) have completed an estimate of the direct spending and revenue effects of an amendment in the nature of a substitute to H.R. 4872, the Reconciliation Act of 2010. The amendment discussed in this letter (hereafter called “the reconciliation proposal”) is the one that was made public on March 18, 2010, as ...

In this paper, we present a novel pseudo sequence based 2-D hierarchical reference structure for light-field image compression. In the proposed scheme, we first decompose the lightfield image into multiple views and organize them into a 2-D coding structure according to the spatial coordinates of the corresponding microlens. Then we mainly develop three technologies to optimize the 2-D coding s...

Using a most general model, without most of the traditional assumptions employed in the screening literature, we show that supplementing any usage-based pricing with a ‡at-fee option is pro…t improving when the savings from transactions costs and/or from eliminating deadweight loss from using ‡at fee exceed the additional production costs. Further, whenever it is pro…t-improving, it is also Par...

We study a dynamic game in which all players initially possess the same information and coordinate on a high level of activity. Eventually, players with a long string of bad experiences become inactive. This prospect can cause a coordination avalanche in which all activity in the population stops. Coordination avalanches are part of Pareto-efficient equilibria; they can occur at any point in th...

This paper describes the details and the results of the subjective quality evaluation performed at EPFL, as a contribution to the effort of the joint collaborative team on video coding (JCT-VC) for the definition of the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard. The performance of twenty-seven coding technologies has been evaluated with respect to two H.264/MPEG-4 AVC anchors, for high defin...

A heat-driven thermoacoustic refrigerator has been designed and tested. A detailed thermal model of the device is presented. Energy balances within the system are discussed using external, heat exchanger, and stack control volumes in order to clarify the relationships of work and heat fluxes below and above onset. Thermal modeling is discussed as a tool for performance analysis as well as for d...