To the Editor:—The article of Lienhart et al. 1 must be applauded. Because of the authors’ careful and high-quality methodology, this work—begun in 1996 and covering an entire nation—was able to estimate anesthesia-related mortality in France. This work confirms the critical role of cardiac disease, aging, emergency care and hemorrhage in mortality related to anesthesia. Perhaps more importantl...

It is shown that the sample paths of Poisson shot noise with heavy-tailed semi-exponential distributions satisfy a large deviation principle with a rate function that is insensitive to the shot shape. This demonstrates that, on the scale of large deviations, paths to rare events do not depend on the shot shape.

The paper discusses stochastic models for the synoptic variability of metocean fields using spatio-temporal impulse representations combined with Markov walks of storms in space. The models are fitted to an extensive data set of ocean wave fields from the Barents Sea and verified by studying the fields duration and extreme value properties.

Barrier islands characterize up to an eighth of the global coastlines. They buffer the mainland coastal areas from storm surge and wave energy from the open ocean. Changes in their shape or disappearance due to erosion may lead to an increased impact of sea level extremes on the mainland. A barrier island threatened by erosion is Egmont Key which is located in the mouth of the Tampa Bay estuary...

Comparing and ordering of risks is a basic problem of actuarial theory and practice. Risks are generally modeled by random variables or distribution functions. There is a great variety of stochastic models in use which reflect the diversity of insurances like theft insurance, car insurance, liability insurance, etc. The diversity of insured populations is reproduced in the stochastic models by ...

Selection, the tendency of some traits to become more frequent than others in a population under the influence of some (natural or artificial) agency, is a key component of Darwinian evolution and countless other natural and social phenomena. Yet a general theory of selection, analogous to the Fisher-Tippett-Gnedenko theory of extreme events, is lacking. Here we introduce a probabilistic defini...

Statistical NLP inevitably deals with a large number of rare events. As a consequence, NLP data often violates the assumptions implicit in traditional statistical procedures such as significance testing. We describe a significance test, an exact conditional test, that is appropriate for NLP data and can be performed using freely available software. We apply this test to the study of lexical rel...

The safety of the 610 m Guangzhou New Television Tower, due to become China's tallest structure on completion, is an issue that concerns many parties because of the lack of sufficient experience, official design codes, and construction guidelines for such a skyscraper. This paper investigates the strain/stress development of this super-tall structure through the integration of finite element an...

Estimating the probability of extreme temperature events is difficult because of limited records across time and the need to extrapolate the distributions of these events, as opposed to just the mean, to locations where observations are not available. Another related issue is the need to characterize the uncertainty in the estimated probability of extreme events at different locations. Although...

Extreme and rare events are nowadays the object of intensive research. Rogue waves are extreme waves that appear suddenly in many natural systems, even in apparently calm situations. Here we study numerically the rogue wave dynamics in an optically injected semiconductor laser with external periodic forcing that is implemented via direct modulation of the laser pump current. In the region of op...