Life in an Oasis 1

Life and death near a windy oasis.

We propose a simple experiment to study delocalization and extinction in inhomogeneous biological systems. The nonlinear steady state for, say, a bacteria colony living on and near a patch of nutrient or favorable illumination ("oasis") in the presence of a drift term ("wind") is computed. The bacteria, described by a simple generalization of the Fisher equation, diffuse, divide A --> A + A, di...

Perennial Antarctic lake ice: an oasis for life in a polar desert.

The permanent ice covers of Antarctic lakes in the McMurdo Dry Valleys develop liquid water inclusions in response to solar heating of internal aeolian-derived sediments. The ice sediment particles serve as nutrient (inorganic and organic)-enriched microzones for the establishment of a physiologically and ecologically complex microbial consortium capable of contemporaneous photosynthesis, nitro...

securitization of mortality risks in life annuities

insurers have in the past few decades faced longevity risks - the risk that annuitants survive more than expected - and therefore need a new approach to manage this new risk. in this dissertation we survey methods that hedge longevity risks. these methods use securitization to manage risk, so using modern financial and insurance pricing models, especially wang transform and actuarial concepts, ...

Oasis.

OASIS: An Optimizing Action-Based Compiler Generator

Action Semantics is a new and interesting foundation for semantics based compiler generation. In this paper we present several analyses of actions, and apply them in a compiler generator capable of generating efficient, optimizing compilers for procedural and functional languages with higher order recursive functions.The automatically generated compilers produce code that is comparable with cod...