Puzzles and Essays from 'The Exchange'

Puzzles and Essays from 'The Exchange'
Author: Charles R Anderson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2018-10-24
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 1317956125

Who said that? When did that happen? Where the heck does that thing come from? Was that French, or what? What's that supposed to mean? For 35 years, librarians in the United States and other countries sent puzzles they could not solve locally to “The Exchange,” a column for reference librarians appearing in RQ (and later, RUSQ), the official journal of the Reference and User Services Division of the ALA. Other readers often furnished the answers--sometimes years or even decades later! Puzzles and Essays from “The Exchange” organizes those perplexing questions and answers into a reader-friendly reference format, embellished with essays that appeared in the column over the last fifteen years of its publication. This unique collection of questions and answers that stumped librarians on four continents over a 35-year period comes complete with authoritative bibliographic citations. It also contains an extensive subject, person, and keyword index, providing easy access to the material. Packed with fascinating information, little-known trivia, and hard-to-find facts, Puzzles and Essays from “The Exchange” is a wonderful reference source, answering difficult questions about: the origins of common--and not-so-common-customs, like giving engagement rings, driving on the right or left side of the road, tying yellow ribbons around trees in memory of captives, leg shaving, visits from the “Tooth Fairy,” and much, much more! the origins of words, phrases, and terms that don’t, when taken literally, make much sense the origins of popular sayings--The grass is always greener; The whole nine yards; It ain't over until the fat lady sings; Close but no cigar; Going down the tube; Light at the end of the tunnel; Katy, bar the door; Goodbye, cruel world; etc. the sources of famous quotations--both spurious and real! the sources of poetry fragments and bits of verse that have become part of the popular lexicon hard-to-find biographical information-from George Washington Carver's many uses for the peanut and the sweet potato to the name of Paul Revere's horse to the truth about the “let them eat cake” story attributed to Marie Antoinette trivia and miscellany--how lullabies began; why a yawn is contagious when a sneeze is not; what the names of the monkeys in The Wizard of Oz were; why pigeons bob their heads when they walk; what the vital statistics of the Venus de Milo are; and much more! the history of “The Exchange” itself! Puzzles and Essays from “The Exchange” will also challenge you with a list of so-far unanswered questions, unidentified quotations, and popular sayings whose origins are still generally unknown. Perhaps you’ll be the one to answer the riddles that stumped the editors and readers of “The Exchange!”

Ground Up

Ground Up
Author: Michael Idov
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2009-07-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429939443

Light streams through the windows as the espresso machine roars; a gorgeous, rich scent fills the air; and witty conversation unspools over the porcelain cups. That's the café dream. Mark and Nina are about to experience the reality. Determined to re-create the perfect Viennese coffeehouse, they descend on New York's gritty but hip Lower East Side to educate the locals on authentic café culture. Soon Mark and Nina are in a downward spiral that will strip them of money, friends, sex life, status, shelter, and, finally, sanity—and offer salvation through something they have never experienced: disaster. Inspired by the author's own coffeehouse hell, Ground Up is a sharp and funny portrait of a New York constantly reinventing itself, and a surprisingly tender story of falling out of love and back in it again.

Beyond Katrina

Beyond Katrina
Author: Natasha Trethewey
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2015-08-01
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 082034902X

Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey’s very personal profile of her natal Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Trethewey’s attempt to understand and document the damage to Gulfport started as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia that were subsequently published as essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review. For Beyond Katrina, Trethewey expanded this work into a narrative that incorporates personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home. In this new edition, Trethewey looks back on the ten years that have passed since Katrina in a new epilogue, outlining progress that has been made and the challenges that still exist.

Essays on the Puzzles in International Finance

Essays on the Puzzles in International Finance
Author: Seojin Lee
Publisher:
Total Pages: 93
Release: 2015
Genre:
ISBN:

The overall theme of this dissertation is the explanation of puzzles in international finance. Empirically, exchange rates seem to be disconnected to the economic fundamentals, and it is referred to as the exchange rate disconnect puzzle. Another puzzling feature in foreign exchange market is that high interest rate currency tends to appreciate, and it is called as ``uncovered interest rate parity puzzle.'' Chapter 1 and 3 of this dissertation examine the exchange rate disconnect puzzle, while chapter 2 investigates the explanation for the UIP puzzle. The first chapter, ``Imperfect Proxies for Market Expectations and the Exchange Rate Disconnect Puzzle'', develop an econometric framework which can capture the relation between exchange rate and economic variables. Conventional empirical studies assume the linear relation between exchange rate and its determinants implied by the theory. I show that this linear modeling strategy leads to the spurious instance of the exchange rate disconnect puzzle and propose the new model which allows imperfectness of the macro variables as a predictor for market expectation. The proposed model provides empirical evidence that the domestic currency appreciates in response to an unanticipated increase in domestic output growth or inflation. Furthermore, results for out-of-sample predictability tests suggest that the proposed model outperforms the random walk model over various horizons less than two years, for most of the countries under investigation. The second chapter of my dissertation, ``Is It Risk or Expectational Error? Explaining Deviation from Uncovered Interest Parity'' explores the behavior of ex-ante excess return to explain the UIP puzzle. Implementing empirical models of ex-ante excess return has proven to be very difficult and previous attempts have not been successful in explaining what makes ex-ante excess return. In this chapter, I propose the new framework which estimates the ex-ante excess return more efficiently by incorporating information in economic variables. The extracted series show that high inflation or output in the foreign country raises the ex-ante excess return for holding foreign currency, while high inflation or high output in home country lowers it. Moreover, using the survey-based forecast of exchange rate data, I find that ex-ante excess return is strongly connected with the market's systematic forecast error instead of with the implied risk premium. These empirical findings suggest that the market's expectation is not fully rational, and this systematic expectational error results in the UIP puzzle. Lastly, the third chapter, ``Commodity Currency Predictions: the Role of Expectations'', examines the dynamic linkage between commodity prices and exchange rate. Even though exchange rates and commodity prices are highly correlated contemporaneously, commodity prices are not shown to have predictive power for exchange rates. With several time-series techniques and alternative data, such as survey-based forecast of exchange rate and foreign exchange option prices, I show that commodity price is linked to the future exchange rate through the market expectation: markets consider aggregate commodity prices when they form expectations of the exchange rates. These empirical findings suggest that commodity price movements are incorporated into the nominal exchange rate with lasting impact beyond one quarter.

Digital Reference Services

Digital Reference Services
Author: William A. Katz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2003
Genre: Computers
ISBN:

Digital Reference Services provides an overview of electronic reference services and software, and explores the opportunities that real-time digital reference services can offer in a variety of library settings. Experts in the field offer numerous reports and theory about the evolution of this new approach to answering reference questions. This well-referenced volume contains case examples, figures, useful Web sites, and case histories to show how the basic principles of digital reference services work. Librarians and students of information and library science will find this book helpful to enhance their library and electronic reference expertise.

The Puzzle of Twenty-First-Century Globalization

The Puzzle of Twenty-First-Century Globalization
Author: Patrice Franko
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1538100266

The Puzzle of Twenty-First-Century Globalization explores the opportunities and challenges of our international economic system. Patrice Franko and Stephen Stamos clearly trace how the ways we produce, finance, and trade goods and services are profoundly shaped by technologies of communication, transportation, and trade. Globalization encourages hyper-specialization—lavishly rewarding those with the skill sets to serve the global marketplace and punishing those poorly positioned to compete. Globalized systems have created great prosperity—along with instability, vulnerability, and backlash. Few genuinely understand the complex underpinnings of our international economic system—and these specialists tend to operate in isolated silos of finance, trade, and production. But without appreciating how systems come together, we cannot explain political reactions against the costs of globalization such as the Brexit vote or the rise of Donald Trump. We don’t value the changing geo-economic importance of the developing world nor the deep threat to ecosystems. This book is the first to emphasize the interrelated economic aspects of globalization from an interdisciplinary perspective. By placing an introduction to trade, finance, and multinational production in the same text that discusses the changing role of developing countries and the challenges to the environment, the authors provide the novice with the basics to understand the global economy while also challenging advanced students to appreciate global connectivity. Closing the knowledge gap in international economics, the authors present the historical context, interdisciplinary grounding, and competing political perspectivesneededto encourage sound critical thinking around contemporary globalization. They provide the essential global economic tools to equip all readers to make decisions that may foster a fairer, more sustainable global system.

Exchange Rate Determination Puzzle

Exchange Rate Determination Puzzle
Author: Falkmar Butgereit
Publisher: Diplomica Verlag
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2010
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 383669543X

Still after more than thirty years of free floating exchange rates, large parts of exchange rate dynamics remain a puzzle. As this book shows, much progress has been made in explaining exchange rate movements over longer horizons. It also shows, however, that short-run movements are far more challenging to explain. The book is based upon a variety of papers, many of them released recently. A key aspiration of the literature has always been not only to explain past exchange rate behavior but also to forecast out of sample and to compare it to the simple random walk outcome. Here some development has been made after Meese and Rogoff's (1983) truculent verdict of the performance of common exchange rate models. By means of empirical analysis and descriptive statistics this book further supports the established long-run relationships between exchange rates and fundamentals such as expected productivity growth, real GDP growth, domestic investment, interest rates, inflation, government spending, and current account balances. It finds that these fundamentals affect the exchange rate to varying degrees over time. Turning to short-term exchange rate dynamics, it turns out that a different set of forces is at play. The key to explaining short-run movements is to be found in an extensive micro-foundation that factors in a pronounced heterogeneity among market participants and information asymmetries, as well as the possibility of sudden shifts in sentiment, beliefs, and the degree of risk aversion. Promising results have been obtained by order-flow analysis and high frequency data. Also, the consideration of chartism and speculators facilitates understanding for otherwise puzzling exchange rate movements. The last attempt to tackle the understanding of exchange rate behavior is the use of frequency domain analysis and in particular spectral analysis which tries to track down any cyclical patterns in the various moments of time series. And as we shall see forex indeed incorpor

Ethnographic Puzzles

Ethnographic Puzzles
Author: Kaj Århem
Publisher: Burns & Oates
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2000
Genre: Ethnology
ISBN:

This study assesses how versatile are the techniques of classical anthropology when confronted by the ethnographically unfamiliar. Each essay seeks to elucidate an empirical problem through orthodox and heterodox uses of standard techniques.

Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?

Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?
Author: James Elkins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2004-11-23
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1135963576

With bracing clarity, James Elkins explores why images are taken to be more intricate and hard to describe in the twentieth century than they had been in any previous century. Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? uses three models to understand the kinds of complex meaning that pictures are thought to possess: the affinity between the meanings of paintings and jigsaw-puzzles; the contemporary interest in ambiguity and 'levels of meaning'; and the penchant many have to interpret pictures by finding images hidden within them. Elkins explores a wide variety of examples, from the figures hidden in Renaissance paintings to Salvador Dali's paranoiac meditations on Millet's Angelus, from Persian miniature paintings to jigsaw-puzzles. He also examines some of the most vexed works in history, including Watteau's "meaningless" paintings, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, and Leonardo's Last Supper.