The annual numbers of road deaths in Australia 1950-2007 are shown in Figure 11.. Fatal crash trends since 1950 fall into four distinct phases. In the first phase covering the 1950s and 1960s, national fatality levels steadily increased to reach a peak of almost 4,000 deaths in 1970. The second phase covered the 1970s and saw fatality numbers remain at nearpeak levels of around 3,500 throughout...

The topic of this lecture is the application of triangulations to shortest path problems. Only simple polygons will be considered. Given two points inside a polygon, the goal is to find the shortest path lying inside the polygon between the two points; see Fig. 1. One can think of the shortest path as a taut string connecting the two points. We begin with some definitions. Let P be a simple pol...

Specifying join predicates may become a cumbersome task in many situations e.g., when the relations to be joined come from disparate data sources, when the values of the attributes carry little or no knowledge of metadata, or simply when the user is unfamiliar with querying formalisms. Such task is recurrent in many traditional data management applications, such as data integration, constraint ...

By the 1950s, World War II had been over for several years, but its effects lingered on for families in the United States and elsewhere. For example, Japanese Americans were sometimes only allowed to purchase homes in certain areas, and, as a result, Jim Kadonaga grew up in a segregated neighborhood in East San Jose, California. Fortunately , says Kadonaga, his high school was a good one, staff...

Trees in Brownian excursions have been studied since the late 1980s. Forests in excursions of Brownian motion above its past minimum are a natural extension of this notion. In this paper we study a forest-valued Markov process which describes the growth of the Brownian forest. The key result is a composition rule for binary Galton–Watson forests with i.i.d. exponential branch lengths. We give e...

Jim Cockburn, who has died aged 82, was inaugural in several domains of psychiatric practice. He was especially interested in the need to provide patients with treatment and help close to where they lived. Such an idea is taken for granted in the current structure of services, but even as late as the 1960s it was not unusual for patients to be admitted to hospitals many miles away from the fami...

BY ROGER A. PIELKE JR., JIM ABRAHAM, ELLIOT ABRAMS, JIM BLOCK, RICHARD CARBONE, DAVID CHANG, KELVIN DROEGEMEIER, KERRY EMANUEL, ELBERT W. (JOE) FRIDAY JR., ROBERT GALL, JOHN GAYNOR, RODGER R. GETZ, TODD GLICKMAN, BRADLEY HOGGATT, WILLIAM H. HOOKE, EDWARD R. JOHNSON, EUGENIA KALNAY, JAMES (JEFF) KIMPEL, PAUL KOCIN, BYRON MARLER, REBECCA MORSS, RAVI NATHAN, STEVE NELSON, ROGER PIELKE SR., MARIA P...

We revisit three important articles published in prior issues of the Journal of Insurance Medicine (JIM) that summarize the process of selecting articles for mortality analysis and abstract preparation. The article selection and analysis recommendations put forth in these reprints are part of the core knowledge of Insurance Medicine regularly presented in Mortality courses sponsored by the Amer...

*We thank Colin Camerer, Shane Frederick, John Lynch, Jim Bettman, and Birger Wernerfelt for helpful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful for financial support to Ariely and Prelec from the Sloan School of Management, to Loewenstein from the Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change at Carnegie Mellon University (NSF grant # SBR9521914), and to Loewenstein and Prelec f...