Hunting the 1918 Flu: One Scientist’s Search for a Killer Virus. By Kristy Duncan. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. xvi + 297 p., fig., index. ISBN 0-8020-8784-5 $35.)

University of Toronto Department of Economics

This paper considers the problem of testing an expert who makes probabilistic forecasts about the outcomes of a stochastic process. I show that, under general conditions on the tester’s prior, a likelihood test can distinguish informed from uninformed experts with high prior probability. The test rejects informed experts on data-generating processes where the tester quickly learns the true prob...

University of Toronto Department of Economics

We consider a price discrimination problem in which a seller has a single object for sale to a potential buyer. At the time of contracting, the buyer’s private type is his incomplete private information about his value, and the seller can disclose additional private information to the buyer. We study the question of whether discriminatory information disclosure can be profitable to the seller u...

8th Annual Toronto Critical Care Medicine Symposium, 30 October–1 November 2003, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

The eighth annual Toronto Critical Care Symposium was held from 30 October to 1 November 2003, in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This symposium is Canada’s premier critical care conference and attracts participants from across the country, the United States, Europe, Australia and Asia. The attendance this year was in excess of 900 people and included the disciplines of medicine, nursing, re...

The 1918 flu virus is resurrected.

Pinpointing exactly which genetic mutations allowed the virus to jump to humans will enable scientists to recognize other bird viruses that could trigger a pandemic. Taubenberger's team has already identified 25 changes in the protein sequences of the 1918 strain that have been present in subsequent human flu viruses. These mutations are likely to be particularly important, he says. One such ch...

20th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, June 16-18, 1982