Drawing on both ethnographic and literary sources, this paper indicates that initiations into the mantra of Bālā are essential rites passage for various Tantric communities. We focus two previously unstudied texts: Bālāviṃśati stotra (“Twenty Verses Goddess”), a popular eulogy sung festive occasions in Keralan temples, Bālādīkṣāpaddhati (“A Treatise Initiation Mantra”), short treatise explainin...

It has been claimed that corpus-based TTS is unworkable because it is not practical to include representative units to cover all or most of the combinations of segments and prosodic characteristics found in general texts, a problem characterized as Large Numbers of Rare Events (LNRE). We argue that part of this problem is in its formulation, and that a closer look, including investigations into...

What a Difference a Y Makes: Female and Male Nascent Entrepreneurs in Germany In western industrialized countries men are on average more than twice as active in entrepreneurship as women. Based on data from a recent representative survey of the adult population in Germany this paper uses an empirical model for the decision to become selfemployed to test for differences between women and men in...

Random walks with long-tailed increments have many important applications in insurance, finance, queueing networks, storage processes, and the study of extreme events in nature and elsewhere. See, for example, Embrechts et al. (1997), Asmussen (1998, 1999) and Greiner et al. (1999) for some background. In this paper we study the distribution of the maximum of such a random walk over a random ti...