The authors propose the use of two new standardized measures of risk, the standardized lifetime risk and the standardized number of years of life lost. These measures maintain the advantages of standardized rates but are more readily understood without special training. In this paper, standardizing weights based on 1992 data from England and Wales are provided, and the new measures are illustra...

Ada ‘95 does not provide for a constructor mechanism with parameters for initializing newly created objects. The package Ada.Finalization provides an initialize procedure which is automatically called at object creation time, but that procedure takes only one argument, i.e. the object being operated upon. This is hardly useful, since initialization of any kind usually requires additional inform...

Since at least the dawn of history, human beings have been interested in their own origins and in the make-up of their world. Most cultures, for example, have "origins" stories in their religions and myths to explain what and who we are. But until what we call "science" gained a foothold, no explanation provided verifiable conclusions. Only with the advent of the scientific method and the ever-...

It is proven that any spherically symmetric spacetime that possesses a compact Cauchy surface and that satis es the dominant-energy and non-negative-pressures conditions must have a nite lifetime in the sense that all timelike curves in such a spacetime must have a length no greater than 10max (2m), where m is the mass associated with the spheres of symmetry. This result gives a complete resolu...

We compare multivariate aging notions of conditionally independent lifetimes with corresponding univariate aging notions of their one-dimensional marginal distributions. Let G(t|θ) (t ≥ 0) be a one-dimensional survival function indexed by θ; for simplicity’s sake, we assume here that θ is a non-negative scalar quantity; let, furthermore, Π be a probability distribution over [0,∞) and consider t...

[1] Recent modeling results have raised doubts about the ability to deglaciate from a global glaciation at atmospheric carbon dioxide levels that are realistic for a Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth. Here we argue that over the lifetime of a Snowball event, ice dynamics should lead to the development of a layer of continental and volcanic dust at the ice surface in the tropics that would significa...

[1] The globally-averaged atmospheric methane abundance determined from an extensive network of surface air sampling sites was constant at 1751 ppb from 1999 through 2002. Assuming that the methane lifetime has been constant, this implies that during this 4-year period the global methane budget has been at steady state. We also observed a significant decrease in the difference between northern ...

Carbon dioxide (CO2) has been increasing in atmospheric concentration since the Industrial Revolution. A decreasing number of stomata on leaves of land plants still provides the only morphological evidence that this man-made increase has already affected the biosphere. The current rate of CO2 responsiveness in individual long-lived species cannot be accurately determined from field studies or b...

Unstable relics with lifetime longer than the age of the Universe could be the dark matter today. Electrons, photons and neutrinos are a natural outcome of their decay and could be searched for in cosmic rays and in γ-ray and neutrino detectors. I compare the sensitivities of these three types of searches to the mass and lifetime of a generic unstable particle. I show that if the relics constit...

The Aerodyne Mobile Laboratory was deployed to the Houston Ship Channel and surrounding areas during the Benzene and Other Toxics Exposure field study in February 2015. We evaluated atmospheric concentrations of volatile organic hydrocarbons and other hazardous air pollutants of importance to human health, including benzene, 1,3-butadiene, toluene, xylenes, ethylbenzenes, styrene, and NO2. Ambi...