Believed to be all but absent from United States, the Leishmania parasite has infected more than 1000 hunting dogs in 21 U.S. states and the Canadian province of Ontario. Nobody is claiming that the disease is about to run riot among the U.S. population. But the widespread outbreak in dogs has experts wondering whether visceral leishmaniasis--which sickens over half a million people yearly in S...

The purpose of this article is to examine the status of a well known argument for a positive rate of steady state inflation. The original argument, by Vickrey (1954) and Phelps (1972), suggests that the economy is more able to dampen shocks, such as fluctuations in the real rate of return on risky capital investment, when inflation rates are positive. The notion is that the conditions required ...

We examine whether the U.S. rate of price inflation has become harder to forecast and, to the extent that it has, what changes in the inflation process have made it so. The main finding is that the univariate inflation process is well described by an unobserved component trend-cycle model with stochastic volatility or, equivalently, an integrated moving average process with time-varying paramet...

With the majority of chip real estate being filled with re-used IP blocks, the process of block assembly has significantly grown in importance. Marketing literature seems to suggest that assembling a chip from IP is as easy as browsing a library of blocks, assembling them in a block diagram and then pushing a button. Are we there yet? Is it like the assembly of LEGO blocks? In parallel, the evo...

I use the neoclassical growth model to study financial intermediation in the U.S. over the past 140 years. I measure the cost of intermediation on the one hand, and the production of assets and liquidity services on the other. Surprisingly, the model suggests that the finance industry has become less efficient: the unit cost of intermediation is higher today than it was a century ago. Improveme...

Cloud computing is a new discussion in enterprise IT. It has already become popular in terms of distributed technology in some companies. It enables managers to setup and run the intended businesses by avoiding excessive spending on computers, software and hiring expert staff, which proves to be cost effective. Cloud computing also helps users pay for the IT services without spending massive am...

Restructuring of power system has faced this industry with numerous uncertainties. As a result, transmission expansion planning (TEP) like many other problems has become a very challenging problem in such systems. Due to these changes, various approaches have been proposed for TEP in the new environment. In this paper a new algorithm for TEP is presented. The method is based on probabilisti...