This paper proposes an approach to analyzing the structure of common information spaces. The approach rests on three ideas. First, information spaces can usefully be described in terms of abstract relations used by participants to organize their work and interaction with one another. Here, I focus on part-whole relations as an example. Second, coordination mechanisms (in the sense of Schmidt an...

In this paper, we consider a committee of experts that decides whether to approve or reject a proposed innovation on behalf of society. In addition to a payoff linked to the correctness of the committee’s decision, each expert receives disesteem payoffs if either he/she votes in favor of an ill-fated innovation (a type I error) or votes against an innovation that proves to be beneficial (a type...

Dawson's Integral is uðyÞ expðÀy 2 Þ R y 0 expðz 2 Þdz. We show that by solving the differential equation du=dy þ 2yu ¼ 1 using the orthogonal rational Chebyshev functions of the second kind, SB 2n ðy; LÞ, which generates a pentadiagonal Petrov–Galerkin matrix, one can obtain an accuracy of roughly ð3=8ÞN digits where N is the number of terms in the spectral series. The SB series is not as effi...

The Lambert W function is defined to be the multivalued inverse of the function w 7→ we. It has many applications in pure and applied mathematics, some of which are briefly described here. We present a new discussion of the complex branches of W , an asymptotic expansion valid for all branches, an efficient numerical procedure for evaluating the function to arbitrary precision, and a method for...

We present a comparison of the strong couplings of light (u, d, and s), c, and b quarks determined from multijet rates in flavor-tagged samples of hadronic Z0 decays recorded with the SLC Large Detector at the SLAC Linear Collider. Flavor separation on the basis of lifetime and decay multiplicity differences among hadrons containing light, c, and b quarks was made using the SLD precision tracki...

We consider the problem of computing U k+1 = Q k U k+1 ; U 0 given in nite precision (M = machine precision) where U 0 and the Q i are known to be unitary. The problem is that ^ U k , the computed product may not be unitary, so one applies an O(n 2) orthogonalizing step after each multiplication to (a) prevent ^ U k from drifting too far from the set of unitary matrices (b) prevent ^ U k from d...

Snap Rounding (SR for short) is a method for converting arbitrary-precision arrangements of line segments into a fixed-precision representation. In the previous years two variants of SR were presented: Iterated Snap Rounding (ISR) and Iterated Snap Rounding with Bounded Drift (ISRBD). Their goal was to eliminate an undesirable property that SR possesses. Prior to their appearances, the capabili...

This paper presents a method for obtaining class membership probability estimates for multiclass classification problems by coupling the probability estimates produced by binary classifiers. This is an extension for arbitrary code matrices of a method due to Hastie and Tibshirani for pairwise coupling of probability estimates. Experimental results with Boosted Naive Bayes show that our method p...

A very simple class of algorithms for the computation of the Riemann-zeta function to arbitrary precision in arbitrary domains is proposed. These algorithms out perform the standard methods based on Euler-Maclaurin summation, are easier to implement and are easier to analyse.

Positivity, or the experimental treatment assignment assumption, requires that there be both exposed and unexposed participants at every combination of the values of the observed confounders in the population under study. Positivity is essential for inference but is often overlooked in practice by epidemiologists. This issue of the Journal includes 2 articles featuring discussions related to po...