Text as Resistance in Holocaust Literature: Struggles for Personhood in Wiesel, Levi, and Delbo

This thesis is an examination of the memoirs of three core Holocaust writers, Elie Wiesel (Night and Day), Primo Levi (If This is A Man), and Charlotte Delbo (Auschwitz and After), exploring the ways in which each of the three authors uses his or her memoir to simultaneously document and resist the dehumanizing influence of the concentration camp experience.

Position Errors Caused by GPS Height of Instrument Blunders

Height of instrument (HI) blunders in GPS measurements cause position errors. These errors can be pure vertical, pure horizontal, or a mixture of both. There are different error regimes depending on whether both the base and the rover both have HI blunders, if just the base has an HI blunder, or just the rover has an HI blunder. The resulting errors are on the order of 30 cm for receiver separations of 1000 km for an HI blunder of 2 m. Given the complicated nature of the errors, we believe it would be difficult, if not impossible, to detect such errors by visual inspection. This serves to underline the necessity to enter GPS HI's correctly.

Position Errors Caused by GPS HI Blunders

Height of instrument (HI) blunders in GPS measurements cause position errors. These errors can be pure vertical, pure horizontal, or a mixture of both. There are different error regimes depending on whether both the base and the rover both have HI blunders, if just the base has an HI blunder, or just the rover has an HI blunder. The resulting errors are on the order of 30 cm for receiver separations of 1000 km for an HI blunder of 2 m. Given the complicated nature of the errors, we believe it would be difficult, if not impossible, to detect such errors by visual inspection. This serves to underline the necessity to enter GPS HIs correctly.

Predicting the Fed

Predicting the federal funds rate and beating the federal funds futures market: mission impossible? Not so. We employ a Markov transition process and show that this model outperforms the federal funds futures market in predicting the target federal funds rate. Thus, by using purely historical data we are able to better explain future monetary policy than a forward looking measure like the federal funds futures rate. The fact that the federal funds futures market can be beaten by a statistical model, suggests that the federal funds futures market lacks eciency. The mar- ket allocates too much weight to current Federal Reserve communication and other real-time macro events, and allocates too little weight to past monetary policy behavior.

Shirking and Motivation in Firms: Survey Evidence on Worker Attitudes

In an extensive national survey, 82.7% of the respondents report that they are very likely to keep an agreement to work hard if they agreed to, even if it was almost impossible for their employer to monitor them. Based on mean responses, the rank order of motivations in descending importance is: moral, intrinsic, peer-pressure, and positive incentives. Respondents also report that fairness considerations are important and that they are especially likely to keep agreements to do a good job with honest employers. Logit analysis indicates that increases in moral and intrinsic motivations increase the likelihood of keeping agreements to provide effort. The evidence suggests that we need to re-examine a foundational assumption underlying the theory of the firm.

Is Altruism Feasible? Interdependent Preferences Provide the Answer

Is it possible to be altruistic in the face of altruism? With a naive definition of altruism, the answer is no. If an altruistic consumer is defined to be one whose preferences over allocations satisfy an appropriate interdependence condition, then the answer is yes. However, altruism in the face of malice is impossible. One of our findings is that if two consumers are mutually altruistic, exactly one of them should adopt selfish preferences over allocations.