This paper investigates price uncertainties in weather derivatives contracts through a bootstrap approach. Futures prices are computed under a periodic ARMA model in an actuarial framework for two different locations, Paris and Chicago. We show that statistical errors may lead to substantial uncertainties on futures prices with confidence intervals up to 10% of the assessed prices.

In anticipation of the explosive growth of digital libraries, a complex study was undertaken seeking to evaluate 21 diverse services at 5 major academic research libraries. This work stands as a model for evaluation of digital libraries, through its focus on both the costs of operations and the impacts of the services that those operations provide. The data have been analyzed using both statist...

The functional programming community is paying increasing attention to static structure-based transformations. For example, generic control operators , such as fold, have been introduced in functional programming to increase the power and applicability of a particular kind of static transformation, called deforestation, which prevents the construction of useless intermediate data structures in ...

Ingenol is a diterpenoid with unique architecture and has derivatives possessing important anticancer activity, including the recently Food and Drug Administration-approved Picato, a first-in-class drug for the treatment of the precancerous skin condition actinic keratosis. Currently, that compound is sourced inefficiently from Euphorbia peplus. Here, we detail an efficient, highly stereocontro...

Schema closure is a property to guarantee that classes in a schema have not references to classes that are not included into it (external references). The existing methodologies solve this point including referenced classes into the schema. In this paper, a new kind of schema closure (reduction closure) is put forward. Reduction closure is based on the transformation of classes with external re...

Languages and families of binary relations are standard interpretations of Kleene algebras. It is known that the equational theories of these interpretations coincide and that the free Kleene algebra is representable both as a relational and as a language algebra. We investigate the identities valid in these interpretations when we expand the signature of Kleene algebras with the meet operation...

We present an evaluation of the non-mesonic decay widths for Λ-hypernuclei (ΛN → NN , ΛNN → NNN) within the framework of the polarization propagator method. The full Λ self-energy is evaluated microscopically in nuclear matter by using the functional approach, which supplies a theoretically well grounded approximation scheme for the classification of the relevant diagrams, according to the pres...

In this paper, we present a pattern-based software development method that preserves usability and security quality characteristics using a role-driven mapping of requirements analysis documents to architectural design artifacts. The quality characteristics usability and security are captured using specialized problem frames, which are patterns that serve to structure, characterize, and analyze...

Patterns such as problem frames and architectural styles are used here to support the formal specification and the development of information systems. New problem frames specific to information systems are proposed to describe identified sub-problems and to help the formal specification task. Recomposition is achieved through a component based approach and an architectural style that puts toget...

This commentary raises conceptual issues related to recent efforts to develop measures of subjective wellbeing (SWB). Specifically, Hills’ and Argyle’s (2002) article on the development of the 29-item Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ), and its predecessor, the 20-item Oxford Happiness Inventory (Argyle, Martin & Crossland, 1989). Instead of assessing the structure of subjective well-being (S...