Regular readers of this column know that I enjoy perusing management literature, including such classics as Harvard Business Review and The McKinsey Quarterly. A recent piece in the Quarterly by James M. Manyika and his colleagues caught my eye.1 The authors name eight emerging trends that are transforming many markets and businesses, and they suggest that we explore these trends to shape outco...

University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. Introduction We live i...

The latest Thorax impact factor has climbed to a record 8.376, which is great for the journal, and owes a huge amount to very many people. We’d like to thank the Deputy and Associate Editors, the brilliant statistical team and the Editorial Board, as well as the large number of reviewers who have worked hard to help us select the best manuscripts and make sure they are as good as possible. Than...

This is a brief description of Internet search engines with emphasis on economic issues. This talk was prepared for the Angelo Costa Lecture in Rome, January 16, 2007.

Traditional concepts of optimality in economics, operations research and management sciences are characterized by maximizing (or minimizing) a single objective function, i.e., Max f(x) or Max U(J(x)) subject to constraints X. This usually explicates a unique solution x* subject to all x E X, i.e., considering only the decision alternatives Of options belonging to a fixed, constrained set. As a ...

There are numerous examples, both historic and modern, in which the six dots of the traditional braille cell have proven inadequate for a particular task. Enterprising inventors, teachers, and braille users have sought to expand the possibilities of the braille cell by increasing the number of dots from six to eight. These expansions have resulted in a cell that is two dots wide and four dots h...

This note describes a method for computing estimates of the rigid transformation G and estimates of the coordinates of a set of n points P1, . . . ,Pn in the two camera reference frames from the n pairs (x1,y ′ 1), . . . (xn,y ′ n) of noisy measurements of their corresponding images. The transformation G is called camera motion, and the point coordinates Xi, Xi of the world points in the two re...