While presidents are often credited with agenda-setting powers over the public, empirical support is limited. Important exceptions to this limited evidence were provided by Cohen (1995, 1997) and Hill (1998). They found a link between the content of State of the Union addresses and subsequent pub lic concern about policy problems for the period 1953-1989. Recently Baum and Kernell (1999) demons...

This paper investigates the performance of hidden Markov models (HMMs) for handwriting recognition. The Segmental K-Means algorithm is used for updating the transition and observation probabilities, instead of the Baum-Welch algorithm. Observation probabilities are modelled as multi-variate Gaussian mixture distributions. A deterministic clustering technique is used to estimate the initial para...

Discriminative learning techniques for sequential data have proven to be more effective than generative models for named entity recognition, information extraction, and other tasks of discrimination. However, semi-supervised learning mechanisms that utilize inexpensive unlabeled sequences in addition to few labeled sequences – such as the Baum-Welch algorithm – are available only for generative...

A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a bivariate Markov chain which encodes information about the evolution of a time series. HMMs can faithfully represent workloads for discrete time processes and therefore be used as portable benchmarks to explain and predict the complex behaviour of these processes. This project introduces the main concepts of HMMs for discrete time series including a summary of H...

Several scholars, most notably Matt Baum, have recently argued that soft news formats contribute to democratic discourse, because they attract viewers who would otherwise not be exposed to news at all. I extend Baum’s approach in two ways. First, Baum’s theory postulates that people’s appreciation of entertainment is one of the factors determining news exposure and, by extension, attention to p...

We indicate which symmetrizable locally compact affine or hyperbolic Kac-Moody groups satisfy Kazhdan’s Property (T), and those that satisfy its strong negation, the Haagerup property. This reveals a new class of hyperbolic Kac-Moody groups satisfying the Haagerup property, namely symmetrizable locally compact Kac-Moody groups of rank 2 or of rank 3 noncompact hyperbolic type. These groups thus...

We present a proof for certain cases of extended Borsuk-Ulam conjectures by Baum, D ‘ abrowski, and Hajac. When a unital C-algebra A admits a free action of Z/kZ, k ≥ 2, we show that there is no equivariant map from A to the C-algebraic join of A and the compact “quantum” group C(Z/kZ). This also resolves D ‘ abrowski’s conjecture on unreduced suspensions of C-algebras and has implications in t...

The random wire bundle is an important factor resulting in the randomness of the interferences. This paper studies the effect of random wire positions due to the bundle rotation on the coupling with external fields and presents an efficient method to estimate the averages and standard deviations of the voltages and powers induced on the loads. Three configurations of a four-wire bundle under ex...

In earlier work the authors introduced dynamic asymptotic dimension, a notion of dimension for topological dynamical systems that applies to many interesting examples. In this paper, we use finiteness of dynamic asymptotic dimension to get information on the K-theory of the associated crossed product C ̊algebras: specifically, we give a new proof of the Baum-Connes conjecture for such actions. T...

Nonlinear Effects of Exchange Rate Volatility on the Volume of Bilateral Exports Christopher F. Baum Department of Economics Boston College Mustafa Caglayan Department of Economics and Accounting University of Liverpool, UK Neslihan Ozkan Department of Economics and Accounting University of Liverpool, UK In this paper, we empirically investigate the impact of exchange rate volatility on real in...