The Eternal system supports distributed object applications that must operate continuously, without interruption of service, despite faults and despite upgrades to the hardware and the software. Based on the CORBA distributed object computing standard, the Eternal system replicates objects, invisibly and consistently, so that if one replica of an object fails, or is being upgraded, another repl...

I summarize the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are described. Although the infinity of pocket universes produced by eternal inflation are unobservable, it is argued that eternal inflation has real consequences in terms of the way that predictions are extracted from theore...

The Eternal system is a CORBA 2.0-compliant system that provides, in addition to the location transparency and the interoperability inherent in the CORBA standard, support for replicated objects and thus fault tolerance. Eternal exploits the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) interface to ‘‘attach’’ itself transparently to objects operating over a commercial CORBA Object Request Broker (ORB). T...

The performance of music usually involves a great deal of interpretation by the musician. In classical music, the final ritardando is a good example of the expressive aspect of music performance. Even though expressive timing data is expected to have a strong component that is determined by the piece itself, in this paper we investigate to what degree individual performance style has an effect ...

Dynamics of eternal inflation on the landscape admits description in terms of the Martin-Siggia-Rose (MSR) effective field theory that is in one-to-one correspondence with vacuum dynamics equations. On those sectors of the landscape, where transport properties of the probability measure for eternal inflation are important, renormalization group fixed points of the MSR effective action determine...