GP Ray Shrouder tells Marika Davies how birdwatching has become an escape from the pressures of work

• The breakdown point plays an important though at times controversial role in statistics. In situations in which it has proved most successful there is a group of transformations which act on the sample space and which give rise to an equivariance structure. For equivariant functionals, that is those functionals which respect the group structure, a non-trivial upper bound for the breakdown poi...

By means of third-order optical theory as well as ray-tracing simulations we have investigated the feasibility of wide-field imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes with a reflective prime-focus design. For a range of desired optical resolutions, we have determined the largest available field-of-view of single-piece spherical, singlepiece parabolic, tessellated spherical, tessellated parabolic...

In recent years, three main types of attacks have been developed against Feistel-based ciphers, such as DES[1]; these attacks are linear cryptanalysis[2], differential cryptanalysis[3], and the Davies and Murphy attack[4]. Using the discrete Fourier transform, we present here a quantitative criterion of security against the Davies and Murphy attack. Similar work has been done on linear and diff...