These notes describe a version of the model presented by Comin and Gertler (2006) which integrates a theory of cycles and growth. The cycles they have in mind are ‘intermediate cycles’, which are frequencies of oscillation in the data that are lower than the 8 to 32 quarter frequencies conventionally associated with business cycles. In some respects, the model resembles the model of Romer that ...

Moving from some reflections on the empirical practice of measurement and on the nature of visual perception, we present a constructivist approach to objects. At the basis of such approach there is the idea that all we may know about what is out there is always mediated by some sort of apparatus, being it a measurement instrument or our perceptual system. Given this perspective, some questions ...

In the summers of 2005 and 2006, members of the King Island Native Community and approximately ten scientists will conduct research for a project called “Documenting the Cultural Geography, Biogeography, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge of King Island, Alaska.” This project was funded in Fall 2003 by the Arctic Social Sciences Program, Office of Polar Programs, National Science Foundation. ...

A few months ago I was introducing some research students to the mysteries and delights or ordinal numbers, particularly ordinal iteration. To do that I was using the Cantor-Bendixson rank of closed subsets of various simple spaces. I needed some examoples to show that in the reals R these ranks exhaust the countable ordinals. I realized that I didn’t have any such examples to hand. (It is some...

Search engines are among the most useful and popular services on the Web. Users are eager to know how they compare. Which one has the largest coverage? Have they indexed the same portion of the Web? How many pages are out there? Although these questions have been debated in the popular and technical press, no objective evaluation methodology has been proposed and few clear answers have emerged....

To what extent are mental disorders things-in-themselves; that is, entities determined by their intrinsic nature? How far are those disorders shaped by the very concepts physicians employ to define and classify them? To some, such questioning will seem madness itself, a recursive doubt about the validity of clinical observation, one that can only undermine the pragmatics of practice. To others,...

Software process improvement (SPI) has been around for decades: frameworks are proposed, success factors are studied, and experiences have been reported.However, the sheermass of concepts, approaches, and standards published over the years overwhelms practitioners as well as researchers. What is out there? Are there new trends and emerging approaches?What are open issues? Still, we struggle to ...

Among recent philosophers of science, a trend has emerged that has been described elsewhere as a movement beyond objectivism and relativism, Within the field of family therapy, a parallel movement can be observed that has been promoted by the constructivist implications of contemporary cybernetics. Together, these trends have called into question traditional notions of objectivity. In this pape...

Road systems 1 , railway systems 2 , air traffic systems 3 , and, for example, container vessel shipping 4 , all share underlying abstractions such as transportation nets with hubs (road intersections , train stations, airports and harbours) and links (road segments, train tracks, air and sea lanes) and their states of being open or closed for certain flows of traffic across hubs and along link...

This paper presents an overview of many possible types of graph visualization, and also detailed descriptions of the most popular algorithms. Its primal goal is, to help a user, with some relational data on his hands and a need to visualizing it, with the choice of what to use, and what is out there that can be used. However, it can be also viewed as historical overview of graph drawing algorit...