In previous topics we investigated issues in defining disease and other health-related outcomes, in quantitating disease occurrence in populations, in relating disease rates to factors of interest, and in exploring and monitoring disease rates and relationships in populations. We have referred to cohort studies, cross-sectional, and case-control studies as the sources of the measures we examine...

While peripheral sharing is now quite common in both commercial and experimental distributed systems, processor sharing is not. The goal of processor sharing is to allow busy users in a network to take advantage of the processing power of idle machines. Numerous experimental systems have demonstrated the usefulness of the concept, but actual use of processor sharing is still quite limited. This...

This research investigates the potential usefulness of the transmuted exponentiated modified Weibull (TEMW) distribution for modelling bladder cancer data. This distribution, formed using the quadratic rank transmutation map technique, contains twenty three lifetime distributions as special cases. We obtain the analytic shapes of the density and hazard functions. Some structural properties of t...

There has been increasing use of argument-based approaches in the development of safetycritical systems. Within this approach, a safety case plays a key role in the system development life cycle. The key components in a safety case are safety arguments, which are designated to demonstrate that the system is acceptably safe. Inappropriate reasoning in safety arguments could undermine a system’s ...

In general, a newly purchased item or system is warranted for a specific period. When the system fails during the warranty period, it is repaired free of charge. Even if the system is repairable, there exists some warranty services under which the manufacturer replaces the failed system during the warranty period. This study considers a case where a manufacturer offers an additional warranty se...

Despite the huge investments by organizations in ERP implementation, maintenance, and user training, ERP implementation failures and less-than-satisfactory productivity improvements are common. End-users’ reluctance or unwillingness to adopt or use the newly implemented ERP system is often cited as one of the main reasons for ERP failures. To examine factors leading to the lack of end-user acce...

A major virtue of von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities, for example, in the theory of general financial equilibrium (GFE), is that they ensure time consistency: consumption-portfolio plans (for the future) are in fact executed (in the future) — assuming that there is perfect foresight about relevant endogenous variables. This paper proposes an alternative to expected utility, one which also delive...

Gollier and Weitzman (2010) show that if future consumption discount rates are uncertain and persistent, the consumption discount rate should decline to its lowest possible value for events in the most distant future. In this paper, I argue that the lowest possible growth rate of consumption per capita in the distant future is zero (assuming that humans do not die out). Substituting in the Rams...

In a continuous-time economy with complete markets, we show how the heterogeneity in the individual consumers’ risk attitudes and impatience would affect the representative consumer’s counterparts. Specifically, our formulas tell us how his risk tolerance and impatience will change over time, and how his impatience will be affected by the changes in aggregate consumption levels. Under the assum...

An ideal network troubleshooting system would be an almost fully automated system, monitoring the whole network at once, feeding the results to a knowledge-based decision making system that suggests actions to the operator or corrects the failure automatically. Reality is quite the contrary: operators separated in their offices try to track down complex networking failures in their own way, whi...