This project started many years ago in a kitchen sink. The sink has changed, but the activity endures. Stamps have been a source of fascination and enjoyment for many children and adults alike, including the elite and powerful, presidents and kings. These tokens of payment for the service of communication between people have evolved over the last 150 years from drab bits of paper into sometimes...

Theory and case-study evidence suggest that non-linearities are pervasive in the growth process. Growth empirics have attempted to characterize these non-linearities with regression trees, additively separable non-parametric estimates, or simple interaction terms. Each method requires specific assumptions about functional form which we demonstrate may not be defensible. We provide two alternate...

L ittle Jimmy Caine, a pug-nosed third-generation Irish American, is an emotionless, guiltless, walking id, all 5’ 5” and 130 pounds of him. By the time he was 26, Jimmy had accumulated one of the worst criminal records the police in Toledo, Ohio, had ever seen: burglary, aggravated assault, robbery, rape—name it, Jimmy had probably done it. This little tearaway had been arrested for the brutal...

It is known that many older people have difficulties in performing daily living activities such as cooking. These are due to the demands of the tasks and the changes in functional capabilities of the older people. This study examines cooking tasks performed by the aged that includes preparing and cooking meals, and storing kitchen tools in the kitchen. The objectives are to investigate the cook...

Any strategy of water demand management needs the collaboration of the population involved and so it is important to know how characteristics as residence area, number of residents, presence/absence of children/elders, income level, and educational level, among others, may influence the use of water. Empirical studies that quantify relationship between socio-demographic factors and the water en...

This paper explores the relevance of unknown nonlinearities for growth empirics. Recent theoretical contributions and case-study evidence suggest that nonlinearities are pervasive in the growth process. I show that the postwar data provide strong evidence in favor of generalized non-linearities. I provide two alternative mechanisms for making inference about the effects of production-function s...

We investigate the degree to which privacy preserving technologies (PPT) are able to protect an organization against a variety of attacks aimed at undermining their privacy. We studied a PPT at a United States based organization and executed multiple attacks associated with network monitoring, phishing, and online social networks (OSNs). To begin, we received written authorization to conduct th...

A drama manager is an omniscient background agent responsible for guiding players through the story space and delivering an enjoyable and coherent experience. Most previous drama managers only consider the designer’s intent. We present a drama manager that uses data-driven techniques to model players and provides personalized guidance in the story space without removing player agency. In order ...