In recent times, we are witnessing an increasing concern by governments and intelligence agencies to deploy mass-surveillance systems that help them fight terrorism. In this paper, we conduct a formal analysis of the overall cost of such surveillance systems. Our analysis starts with a fairly-known result in statistics, namely, the false-positive paradox. We propose a quantitative measure of th...

Forests provide significant commodity and noncommodity values to the citizens of the United States. An important and substantial role in ensuring the continued health, productivity, and sustainability of these resources is a reliable and credible inventory and monitoring program. The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the US Forest Service has been monitoring and reporting on status...

Due to reduction in petroleum production and aging production facilities, the Norwegian oil and gas industry is interested in optimization maintenance strategies and reducing costs. Currently the maintenance strategies are based on predetermined periodic (calendar or use time) preventive maintenance strategies that are developed based on statistical data and/or recommendation from the manufactu...

The scale of investigation for disturbance-influenced processes plays a critical role in theoretical assumptions about stability, variance, and equilibrium, as well as conservation reserve and long-term monitoring program design. Critical consideration of scale is required for robust planning designs, especially when anticipating future disturbances whose exact locations are unknown. This resea...

OBJECTIVES To examine the association of risk factors, age, gender, and earlier opioid requirement with the rate of dose escalation in long-term opioid therapy. METHODS This is a retrospective cohort study of 1,922 individuals identified from California's prescription drug monitoring program database who continuously used opioids from 1999 to 2007. A linear mixed-effects model was used to exa...

We review some of the recent developments of optical performance monitoring (OPM) in various aspects: (i) the enhancement of monitoring resolution, (ii) multi-impairment monitoring, and (iii) OPM network optimization. In particular, some of the studies on the optimization of performance monitoring networks to achieve the optimal monitoring locations and the number of monitoring probes are discu...