Some Unorthodox Thoughts About Rising Sea Levels, Beach Erosion, and Property Rights

Unorthodox Thoughts about Asymmetric Warfare

I n the last few years the use of nerve agent in the Tokyo subway by Aum Shinrikyo and al Qaeda’s offensive leading to its 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon forced us to reevaluate the threat of terrorism to our art of operations. As a term of art, asymmetric warfare now dominates public attention. But many use the term with little understanding of its operational meaning....

Unorthodox Thoughts about Deformation, Elasticity, and Stress

The nature of elastic deformation is examined in the light of the potential theory. The concepts and mathematical treatment of elasticity and the choice of equilibrium conditions are adopted from the mechanics of discrete bodies, e. g., celestial mechanics; they are not applicable to a change of state. By nature, elastic deformation is energetically a Poisson problem since the buildup of an ela...

Some thoughts about classification

The paper contains some general remarks on the high art of data analysis, some philosophical thoughts about classification, a partial review of outliers and robustness from the point of view of applications, including a discussion of the problem of model choice, and a review of several aspects of robust estimation of covariance matrices, including the pragmatic choice of a weight function based...

Some Thoughts about Commitment Protocols

From the seminal paper by Singh [1], commitments protocols have been raising a lot of attention. The key feature of commitment protocols is their declarative nature, which allows specifying them in a way which abstracts away from any reference to the actual behaviour of the agents. By doing so, commitment protocols respect the autonomy of agents. After more than ten years from the introduction ...

Some thoughts about schizoid dynamics.