Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Michael Nitabach spent his childhood growing up in northern New Jersey and attending the Pingry School. Nitabach has lived in New York City since 1990, when he entered the PhD program in the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. He received his scientific training at the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ma...

In this paper two fundamental myths and the related rituals from archaic India and old Japan are compared. Exploring their close mutual relationship offers the chance of taking another look at comparative mythology in a wholly new way. This is not done in the old Frazerian way, certainly not in the manner of the diffusionists such as Frobenius and Baumann, nor with the Indo-European-centered me...

This paper examines the role of habit persistence in consumption in explaining persistent responses of inflation and output to money growth shocks. A monetary stochastic dynamic general equilibrium (DGE) model with a money-in-the-utility-function (MIU-) setup is augmented by habit formation in consumption and evaluated for both Taylor and Calvo price staggering. It is shown that in the benchmar...

The cerebellum has an important role in control and coordination of movements, but in some species, notably weakly electric fish of the family Mormyridae, anatomical, electrophysiological and behavioural evidence indicates that parts of cerebellar cortex are concerned with tracking movements of objects around the animal, rather than with controlling movements of the animal itself. The existence...

The following essay examines the roles of Sherlock Holmes and his colleague, Watson, in the social construction of masculine norms in Arthur Conan Doyle‟s The Sign of Four. This novel includes a description of the courtship and marriage of Watson to Holmes‟s client, Mary Morstan—an act of masculine fulfillment that reinforces hegemonic patriarchal ideals of the time. The novel also supports pat...

In this paper, we consider approximations of probability distributions over ZZ p . We present an approach to estimate the quality of approximations of probability distributions towards the construction of small probability spaces. These are used to derandomize algorithms. In contrast to results by Even, Goldreich, Luby, Nisan and Veli ckovi c [EGLNV], our methods are simple, and for reasonably ...

Action languages serve for describing changes that are caused by performing actions. We define a new action language g, based on the theory of causal explanation proposed recently by McCain and Turner, and illustrate its expressive power by applying it to a number of examples. The mathematical results presented in the paper relate C to the Baral--Gelfond theory of concurrent actions.

A result of Ben-Or, Coppersmith, Luby and Rubinfeld on testing whether a map between two groups is close to a homomorphism implies a tight lower bound on the distance between the multiplication tables of two non-isomorphic groups. In [2] Drápal showed that if ◦ and ∗ are two binary operations on the finite set G such that (G,◦) and (G,∗) are non-isomorphic groups then the Hamming distance betwe...