Smooth Operator

With 250 million migrants globally, remittances are one of the major sources of income in many developing countries. While there is abundant evidence that remittances facilitate consumption smoothing in receving countries, the literature has not considered whether this effect varies with the fiscal stance and during fiscal shocks. Therefore, we investigate the impact of remittances on the stability of household consumption, using both cross-country and household-level datasets. Our focus is on whether the consumption-smoothing effect changes with fiscal policy phases and whether remittances and government support are substitutes or complements in stabilizing household consumption. We find that remittances help smooth consumption, and hence improve welfare, more during fiscal consolidation episodes, while this impact is insignificant during fiscal expansions. The results also indicate that the effect is more pronounced in countries with greater reliance on remittances.

The streets of Detroit become a maze of terror as the killer zeroes in on unknowing victims and escalates more tension as the public loses fate in their Police Department. With time ticking till the next kill, a detective is called back on duty to add five detectives in the hunt for a serial killer, who has been killing girls and leaving them in the public to be found. With the pressure on, one of the media alerts the public, the detectives find themselves all over the city until the case turns even more deadly for them. As the killer set his eyes on a new target, with the city griped in fear Detective Avenue uses all his skills to stop the killer before he completes his mission.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Stone Barrington series comes the first novel in an extraordinary series starring an old fan favorite: Teddy Fay. When President Kate Lee calls Stone Barrington to Washington on an urgent matter, it’s soon clear that a potentially disastrous situation requires the kind of help more delicate than even he can provide...and he knows just the right man for the job. Teddy Fay: ex-CIA, master of disguise, and a gentleman not known for abiding by legal niceties in the pursuit of his own brand of justice.

Smooth operator is the story of four women that was conned by a playboy. Now they get together to try to come up with a plan to turn the tables on the millionaire playboy who gets close to widows, then take their money and run. With it’s many unexpected twist and turns. Smooth Operator is sure to keep you wandering what’s going to happen next. Author/Poet Rodney Allan Blackmon Pick up Wild Flower, also by Rodney Allan Blackmon

She’s a 50-year-old divorcée with an empty nest and a lonely heart. He’s a truck driver who’s in it for the long haul. Rose Chambers is a divorcée with an empty nest, two businesses, and a lonely heart. At least she doesn’t have to talk to herself. Her 1-900-HOT-TALK clients are happy to converse—among many other imaginary oral activities—to help her pay the bills her small-town lumberyard can’t cover. When she hires a new delivery driver, her life gets even more interesting. Harley-riding Barton Holloway is happy to trade driving a big rig for delivering building materials, especially when he discovers his new boss is an old flame. Overhearing her risqué phone calls brings the spark back to life, but a little challenge from her friends adds fuel to the no-longer-dormant attraction. He’ll have to convince her to ride off into the sunset with him on his motorcycle built for two.

From a humble background in Barry, where his father was a butcher and local politician in the formative years of the new town, Cyril Lakin studied at Oxford, survived the First World War, and went on to become a Fleet Street editor, radio presenter and war-time member of parliament. As literary editor of both the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times, Lakin was at the centre of a vibrant and radical generation of writers, poets and critics, many of whom he recruited as reviewers. He gained a parliamentary seat and served in the National Government during World War II. The different worlds he inhabited, from Wales to Westminster, and across class, profession and party, were facilitated by his relaxed disposition, convivial company, and ability to cultivate influential contacts. An effective talent-spotter and catalyst for new projects, he preferred pragmatism over ideology and non-partisanship in politics: a moderate Conservative for modern times.

In his Retiring Presidential address, delivered before the Annual Meeting of The American Mathematical Society on December, 1948, the late Professor Einar Hille spoke on his recent results on the Lie theory of semigroups of linear transformations, . . • "So far only commutative operators have been considered and the product law . . . is the simplest possible. The non-commutative case has resisted numerous attacks in the past and it is only a few months ago that any headway was made with this problem. I shall have the pleasure of outlining the new theory here; it is a blend of the classical theory of Lie groups with the recent theory of one-parameter semigroups. " The list of references in the subsequent publication of Hille's address (Bull. Amer. Math •. Soc. 56 (1950)) includes pioneering papers of I. E. Segal, I. M. Gelfand, and K. Yosida. In the following three decades the subject grew tremendously in vitality, incorporating a number of different fields of mathematical analysis. Early papers of V. Bargmann, I. E. Segal, L. G~ding, Harish-Chandra, I. M. Singer, R. Langlands, B. Konstant, and E. Nelson developed the theoretical basis for later work in a variety of different applications: Mathematical physics, astronomy, partial differential equations, operator algebras, dynamical systems, geometry, and, most recently, stochastic filtering theory. As it turned out, of course, the Lie groups, rather than the semigroups, provided the focus of attention.

This title was first published in 2001. The examples cited in this study of sabotage in the working environment range from sophisticated tricks played in Western factories to natural reactions to inferior or unhealthy working practices in, for example, Malaysia and India. The book contains articles from various contributors which cover numerous topics within the subject including crime and punishment in the factory, employee and organizational sabotage, and management techniques to prevent sabotage.

Approach your problems from the It isn't that they can't see the solution. right end and begin with the answers. It is that they can't see the problem. Then one day, perhaps you will find the final question. G. K. Chesterton. The Scandal of Father Brown 'The point of a Pin'. 'The Hermit Clad in Crane Feathers' in R. van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders. Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textbooks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the 'tree' of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not grow only by putting forth new branches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thought to be completely disparate are suddenly seen to be related. Further, the kind and level of sophistication of mathematics applied in various sciences has changed drastically in recent years: measure theory is used (non trivially) in regional and theoretical economics; algebraic geometry interacts with physics; the Minkowsky lemma, coding theory and the structure of water meet one another in packing and covering theory; quantum fields, crystal defects and mathematical programming profit from homotopy theory; Lie algebras are relevant to filtering; and prediction and electrical engineering can use Stein spaces. And in addition to this there are such new emerging subdisciplines as 'experimental mathematics', 'CFD', 'completely integrable systems', 'chaos, synergetics and large-scale order', which are almost impossible to fit into the existing classification schemes. They draw upon widely different sections of mathematics.

In this paper, the authors study the direct and inverse scattering theory at fixed energy for massless charged Dirac fields evolving in the exterior region of a Kerr-Newman-de Sitter black hole. In the first part, they establish the existence and asymptotic completeness of time-dependent wave operators associated to our Dirac fields. This leads to the definition of the time-dependent scattering operator that encodes the far-field behavior (with respect to a stationary observer) in the asymptotic regions of the black hole: the event and cosmological horizons. The authors also use the miraculous property (quoting Chandrasekhar)—that the Dirac equation can be separated into radial and angular ordinary differential equations—to make the link between the time-dependent scattering operator and its stationary counterpart. This leads to a nice expression of the scattering matrix at fixed energy in terms of stationary solutions of the system of separated equations. In a second part, the authors use this expression of the scattering matrix to study the uniqueness property in the associated inverse scattering problem at fixed energy. Using essentially the particular form of the angular equation (that can be solved explicitly by Frobenius method) and the Complex Angular Momentum technique on the radial equation, the authors are finally able to determine uniquely the metric of the black hole from the knowledge of the scattering matrix at a fixed energy.

"Fixed-Point Algorithms for Inverse Problems in Science and Engineering" presents some of the most recent work from top-notch researchers studying projection and other first-order fixed-point algorithms in several areas of mathematics and the applied sciences. The material presented provides a survey of the state-of-the-art theory and practice in fixed-point algorithms, identifying emerging problems driven by applications, and discussing new approaches for solving these problems. This book incorporates diverse perspectives from broad-ranging areas of research including, variational analysis, numerical linear algebra, biotechnology, materials science, computational solid-state physics, and chemistry. Topics presented include: Theory of Fixed-point algorithms: convex analysis, convex optimization, subdifferential calculus, nonsmooth analysis, proximal point methods, projection methods, resolvent and related fixed-point theoretic methods, and monotone operator theory. Numerical analysis of fixed-point algorithms: choice of step lengths, of weights, of blocks for block-iterative and parallel methods, and of relaxation parameters; regularization of ill-posed problems; numerical comparison of various methods. Areas of Applications: engineering (image and signal reconstruction and decompression problems), computer tomography and radiation treatment planning (convex feasibility problems), astronomy (adaptive optics), crystallography (molecular structure reconstruction), computational chemistry (molecular structure simulation) and other areas. Because of the variety of applications presented, this book can easily serve as a basis for new and innovated research and collaboration.

Iterative Methods without Inversion presents the iterative methods for solving operator equations f(x) = 0 in Banach and/or Hilbert spaces. It covers methods that do not require inversions of f (or solving linearized subproblems). The typical representatives of the class of methods discussed are Ulm’s and Broyden’s methods. Convergence analyses of the methods considered are based on Kantorovich’s majorization principle which avoids unnecessary simplifying assumptions like differentiability of the operator or solvability of the equation. These analyses are carried out under a more general assumption about degree of continuity of the operator than traditional Lipschitz continuity: regular continuity. Key Features The methods discussed are analyzed under the assumption of regular continuity of divided difference operator, which is more general and more flexible than the traditional Lipschitz continuity. An attention is given to criterions for comparison of merits of various methods and to the related concept of optimality of a method of certain class. Many publications on methods for solving nonlinear operator equations discuss methods that involve inversion of linearization of the operator, which task is highly problematic in infinite dimensions. Accessible for anyone with minimal exposure to nonlinear functional analysis.

In the first edition of this book, simple proofs of the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem for Dirac operators on compact Riemannian manifolds and its generalizations (due to the authors and J.-M. Bismut) were presented, using an explicit geometric construction of the heat kernel of a generalized Dirac operator; the new edition makes this popular book available to students and researchers in an attractive paperback.

The book is very different from other books devoted to quantum field theory, both in the style of exposition and in the choice of topics. Written for both mathematicians and physicists, the author explains the theoretical formulation with a mixture of rigorous proofs and heuristic arguments; references are given for those who are looking for more details. The author is also careful to avoid ambiguous definitions and statements that can be found in some physics textbooks.In terms of topics, almost all other books are devoted to relativistic quantum field theory, conversely this book is concentrated on the material that does not depend on the assumptions of Lorentz-invariance and/or locality. It contains also a chapter discussing application of methods of quantum field theory to statistical physics, in particular to the derivation of the diagram techniques that appear in thermo-field dynamics and Keldysh formalism. It is not assumed that the reader is familiar with quantum mechanics; the book contains a short introduction to quantum mechanics for mathematicians and an appendix devoted to some mathematical facts used in the book.

An important new study of the social meaning of sociolinguistic variation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st British National Conference on Databases, BNCOD 2004, held in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK in July 2004. The 21 revised full papers presented together with an invited paper and the abstract of an invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 70 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on data streams, integration and heterogeneity, data analytics and manipulation, XML, interfaces and visualization, spatial data, and TLAD workshop papers.

The theory of Toeplitz operators has come to resemble more and more in recent years the classical theory of pseudodifferential operators. For instance, Toeplitz operators possess a symbolic calculus analogous to the usual symbolic calculus, and by symbolic means one can construct parametrices for Toeplitz operators and create new Toeplitz operators out of old ones by functional operations. If P is a self-adjoint pseudodifferential operator on a compact manifold with an elliptic symbol that is of order greater than zero, then it has a discrete spectrum. Also, it is well known that the asymptotic behavior of its eigenvalues is closely related to the behavior of the bicharacteristic flow generated by its symbol. It is natural to ask if similar results are true for Toeplitz operators. In the course of answering this question, the authors explore in depth the analogies between Toeplitz operators and pseudodifferential operators and show that both can be viewed as the "quantized" objects associated with functions on compact contact manifolds.

This volume provides a comprehensive treatment of strongly irreducible operators acting on a complex separable infinite dimensional Hilbert space, and to expose and reflect the internal structure of operators by analyzing and studying irreducibility of operators. Much of the material presented here appears in book form for the first time.