The discovery record of introduced species reflects a combination of the introduction process and the discovery process. For this reason, the discovery record does not provide a direct proxy for the record of introductions. We describe a general method for estimating the rate of introductions from the discovery record. The method is based on a statistical model of the discovery record that incl...

The development of practical agent languages has progressed significantly over recent years, but this has largely been independent of distinct developments in aspects of multiagent cooperation and planning. For example, while the popular AgentSpeak(L) has had various extensions and improvements proposed, it still essentially a single-agent language. In response, in this paper, we describe a sim...

We propose and analyze mobile service management schemes based on location-aware proxies with the objective to reduce the network signaling and communication cost in future personal communication systems (PCS). Under these schemes, a mobile user uses personal proxies as intelligent client-side agents to communication with services engaged by the mobile user. A personal proxy cooperates with the...

Recently, the concept of proxy re-encryption has been shown very useful in a number of applications, especially in enforcing access control policies. In existing proxy re-encryption schemes, the delegatee can decrypt all ciphertexts for the delegator after re-encryption by the proxy. Consequently, in order to implement fine-grained access control policies, the delegator needs to either use mult...

We provide new insights into the determinants of acquirer announcement returns with a unique sample of targets that are acquired within three years of their IPOs. Existing studies of acquisitions of private and established public targets find positive relations between acquirer announcement returns and prior target valuation changes. In our sample of recently listed targets, we measure the prio...

Solar geoengineering has been proposed as a method of meeting climate objectives, such as reduced globally averaged surface temperatures. However, because of incomplete understanding of the effects of geoengineering on the climate system, its implementation would be in the presence of substantial uncertainties. In our study, we use two fully coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation models: ...

Both sides of the institutions and growth debate have resorted largely to microeconometric techniques in testing hypotheses. In this paper, I build a panel structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model for a short panel of 119 countries over 10 years and find support for the institutions hypothesis. Controlling for individual fixed effects, I find that exogenous shocks to a proxy for institutio...

Testing the CAPM boils down to testing the mean/variance efficiency of the market portfolio. Numerous studies have examined the mean/variance efficiency of various market proxies by employing sample parameters, and have concluded that these proxies are inefficient. Shrinkage methods do not seem to help. These findings cast doubt about one of the cornerstones of modern finance. This study adopts...

Measurement of the ground reaction forces (GRF) during walking is typically limited to laboratory settings, and only short observations using wearable pressure insoles have been reported so far. In this study, a new proxy measurement method is proposed to estimate the vertical component of the GRF (vGRF) from wearable accelerometer signals. The accelerations are used as the proxy variable. An o...

A core technique used by popular proxy-based circumvention systems like Tor, Psiphon, and Lantern is to secretly share the IP addresses of circumvention proxies with the censored clients for them to be able to use such systems. For instance, such secretly shared proxies are known as bridges in Tor. However, a key challenge to this mechanism is the insider attack problem: censoring agents can im...