During September and October 1998, a thunderstorm experiment was carried out at NAIC in Puerto Rico, an island located in the tropics. An experimental set up was deployed on the site including UHF and VHF wind-profiler radars, an electrical field mill and a disdrometer while radiosoundings are launched twice a day in a separate place of the island, and a NexRad radar scans all over the island. ...

Sixteen pulsars have been discovered so far in blind searches of photons collected with the Large Area Telescope on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. We here report the discovery of radio pulsations from two of them. PSR J1741–2054, with period P = 413 ms, was detected in archival Parkes telescope data and subsequently has been detected at the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). Its received flux va...

This report summarizes activity for the PALFA projects P2030 (survey), P2177 (general timing) and P2180 (timing of the relativistic pulsar J1906+0746) from 2006 to mid-2007. We discuss progress made toward the goals of our original 2004 survey proposal. We describe the end to end survey data-analysis pipeline and follow-up timing analyses of discovered pulsars. We also describe data products an...

We present the system ABTWEAK, which extends the precondition-elimination abstraction of ABSTRIPS to hierarchical planners using the nonlinear plan representation as defined in TWEAK. We show that ABTWEAK satisfies the monotonic property, whereby the existence of a lowest level solution II implies the existence of a highest level solution that is structurally similar to II. This property enable...

By many accounts, the United States is in the midst of its third medical malpractice “crisis.” Physicians in several states are facing high and rising premiums. The largest national medical malpractice carrier and some large multistate physician-backed liability firms have recently left the market. Rising premiums are traced largely to increases in claims severity. Capping malpractice payments ...

Source of earnings analysis has long been a staple of life insurance policy pricing and profitability monitoring. It has grown in importance with the advent of universal life insurance and of similar contracts with non-guaranteed benefits or charges. SFAS 97 now mandates the use of source of earnings analysis for GAAP reporting of universal life-type contracts. Source of earnings analysis is eq...

Individual health insurance is more administratively costly and more prone to adverse selection (especially in the presence of community rating) than group health coverage is. In this paper we show that the individual market has been shrinking over time but that it might be stimulated if tax credits for such insurance were made available. The primary areas of factual disagreement have to do wit...

A strategic optimization model provides the ideal setting for allocating the scarce capital of a financial intermediary such as an insurance company. The goal of management is to maximize shareholder value. Capital allocation serves three primary purposes: to compare managerial performance across business units, to provide a risk indicator for regulators and other stakeholders, and to develop a...