Insidious hazards that affect humans and other living creatures are addressed in this review. Debilitation and disease that may arise from naturally occurring gases, minerals, and elements create problems with characteristics that inhibit progress toward adequate and immediate solutions: (a) Human or animal reactions are delayed, not detected until long after the original exposure; (b) sporadic...

Also, a process {Yt : t ≥ 0} is said to have independent increments if, for all t0 < t1 < . . . < tn, the n random variables Yt1 − Yt0 , Yt2 − Yt1 , ..., Ytn − Ytn−1 are independent. This condition implies that {Yt : t ≥ 0} is Markovian, but not conversely. The increments are further said to be stationary if, for any t > s and h > 0, the distribution of Yt+h− Ys+h is the same as the distributio...

An acoustic experiment was conducted to investigate the perceptual processing of native Mandarin speakers in syntactic ambiguity resolution. The statistical majority of disyllabic words in modern Chinese [17] and the prosodic theory of Binary Foot Formation in Mandarin [3], [4], [9], [10], [11], [15] point to the stipulation that the disyllabic prosodic feet have a special 'default' status in t...

Theories of presupposition in the tradition associated with Karttunen, Stalnaker and Heim relate presupposition satisfaction to the content of conversational participants’ epistemic states, usually modeled as sets of worlds. However, converging evidence from recent work on modality and from other areas of cognitive science suggests that epistemic states are better thought of as having the riche...

Disclosure limitation is an important consideration in the release of public use data sets. It is particularly challenging for longitudinal data sets, since information about an individual accumulates with repeated measures over time. Research on disclosure limitation methods for longitudinal data has been very limited. We consider here problems created by high ages in cohort studies. Because o...

Retailers, particularly those in the style-goods and fashion apparel industry, are increasingly demanding guaranteed profit margins (GPMs) from their vendors. Under a GPM stipulation, a vendor has to offer a rebate to maintain the retailer’s target margin on the item if the retailer is compelled to take a markdown from the initial price to sell out the ordered quantity for the season. Vendors d...

This paper deals with private sponsorship as a tool for the redevelopment of Italy’s vast wealth of historical-architectural public heritage sites. Italian law provides for the stipulation of sponsorship agreements by and between public sector agencies or entities (which need financial resources to restore or re-qualify property) and private sector investors (which guarantee the capital sought ...

We propose a quality-driven cross-layer optimization scheme for wireless direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) visual sensor networks (VSNs). The scheme takes into account the fact that different nodes image videos with varying amounts of motion and determines the source coding rate, channel coding rate, and power level for each node under constraints on the available bit rate...

In (1), it is shown that believe can, but know cannot, license the entailment from x Vs the rumor that p to x Vs that p (Vendler 1972, Ginzburg 1995). As I will argue in detail below, in the standard assumption that know has a proposition-taking denotation, an additional stipulation will be needed to block whatever the mechanism that licenses the entailment of believe in the case of know. In th...

Recent advances in microbiome research have brought renewed focus on beneficial bacteria, many of which are available in food and dietary supplements. Although probiotics have historically been defined as microorganisms that convey health benefits when ingested in sufficient viable amounts, this description now includes the stipulation "well defined strains," encompassing definitive taxonomy fo...