Physical means of securing information, such as sealed envelopes and scratch cards, can be used to achieve cryptographic objectives, including ones that are hard or impossible by electronic means. So far, descriptions of such mechanisms have been informal, and as a consequence so has the associated reasoning. This paper3 takes a formal methods approach to these physical cryptography primitives....

OBJECTIVE To establish, in a case-control study, the early mortality and long-term survival after surgical correction of sealed rupture abdominal aortic aneurysm, compared to controls who underwent standard, nonruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm repair. PATIENTS AND METHODS From January 1992 to December 2002, 465 patients underwent infrarenal abdominal aortic aneurysm repair. Of those, 13 had...

The “Moufang Condition” for spherical buildings was introduced by J. Tits in the appendix of [9], as a tool to give more structure to the classification of spherical buildings of rank at least three (which are automatically “Moufang”). More recently, also the spherical buildings of rank 2 satisfying the Moufang Condition are classified [13]. Hence one could say that, on the geometric level, sph...

Summary The building sector, where heating and cooling are the major energy consumers, contributes significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions. Large savings can be achieved if buildings thermally insulated from environment. Existing high-thermal insulation materials, such as aerogels vacuum panels, vulnerable mechanical forces damage, making their installation a significant chall...

OBJECTIVE The prevalence of symptoms associated with the sick building syndrome (SBS) has recently been shown to decrease by 40% to 50% among office workers six months after they were exposed to a building with an improved ventilation system. The objective of the present study was to find whether the decrease in the prevalence of symptoms was maintained three years later. METHODS Workers from...

The increasing prevalence of auctions as a method of conducting a variety of transactions has promoted interest in modelling bidding behaviours with simulated agent models. The majority of popular research has focused on double auctions, i.e. auctions with multiple buyers and sellers. In this paper we investigate agent models of sealed bid auctions, i.e. single seller auctions where each buyer ...

This Federal Judicial Center publication was undertaken in furtherance of the Center's statutory mission to conduct and stimulate research and development for the improvement of judicial administration. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Judicial Center.

1. Introduction. Recent empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that different auction rules generate important differences in bidding behavior. Milgrom (1996) compares auctions for the sale of the radio spectrum held in the United States, New Zealand and Australia. The Australian and New Zealand auctions were characterized by wildly different prices for similar bandwidths. In the United Stat...