Future planetary extravehicular activities (EVAs) will go beyond what was experienced during Apollo. As mission duration becomes longer, inevitably, the astronauts on the surface of the Moon and Mars will actively plan and re-plan their own sorties. To design robust decision support aids for these activities, we have to first characterize all the different types of excursions that are possible....

Of ongoing interest within generative grammar is the proper treatment of language variation in terms of parameters. One important recent question concerns the existence of macro-parameters. Baker (2008) outlines three ways to determine whether a parameter is macro or not, one of which relates to the size of effect, or impact of a parameter. The greater the size of effect, or impact a parameter ...

An English ship's doctor treated a non-US female patient for abdominal discomfort on a foreign-flagged cruise ship off the coast of Haiti. In Mexico the patient underwent abdominal surgery, followed by complications, for which her lawyers wanted to take the ship's doctor to court in Florida, USA. A trial court granted their wish, but this decision was reversed on appeal as the factors discussed...

In this paper a new procedure to perform four parameters sine fitting is presented in a closed form, ready for standardization. This new procedure grants convergence of the algorithm, even in those cases where the traditional techniques tend to converge to local minimums of the error function. This new procedure can also be used to compute the initial values for the traditional four parameters ...

A surgeon in Scotland has amputated the legs of two consenting, physically healthy patients. Although a handful of medical professionals believe that the desire for healthy limb amputation is symptomatic of a mental disorder that can be treated only by amputation, there is currently no consensus on what causes a person to desire such a disabling intervention. As long as there is no established ...

The doargus reduction task is specialized for the extraction, flat fielding, fiber throughput correction, wavelength calibration, and sky subtraction of Argus fiber spectra. It is a command language script which collects and combines the functions and parameters of many general purpose tasks to provide a single complete data reduction path. The task provides a degree of guidance, automation, an...

Gibbs sampling requires a vector of parameters of interest that are initially unknown. These parameters will be denoted by the vectorΦ . Nuisance parameters, Θ , are also initially unknown. The goal of Gibbs sampling is to find estimates for the parameters of interest in order to determine how well the observable data fits the model of interest, and also whether or not data independent of the o...

In the problem of parametric statistical inference with a ®nite parameter space, we propose some simple rules for de®ning posterior upper and lower probabilities directly from the observed likelihood function, without using any prior information. The rules satisfy the likelihood principle and a basic consistency principle (`avoiding sure loss'), they produce vacuous inferences when the likeliho...

Data mining technology allows large volumes of data to be exploited for discovering previously unknown,possibly useful knowledge. The speed and extent of developments in information technologies have increased the power and potential of data mining.However, the privacy of personally sensitive information is not respected generally in the process,which creates ethical and legal problems in some ...

This paper provides a new approach for pricing and hedging popular highly pathdependent equity-linked contracts. We illustrate our technique with two examples: the locally-capped contracts (a popular design on the exchange-listed retail investment contracts on the American Stock Exchange) and the Cliquet option (extensively sold by insurance companies). Wilmott [17] describes these types of con...