In valuing future cash °ows standard practice is to take the current cash °ow and then extrapolate at an expected growth rate, which can vary at di®erent points in time. This practice stems form the standard way of dealing with time value of money problems under certainty. However, with uncertain cash °ows this practice underestimates the expected cash °ows when the growth rates are serially co...

This appendix describes the procedure developed by Clough and Duncan (1971) for the determination of hyperbolic parameter values for interfaces. Hyperbolic parameter values of the interfaces between concrete and dense Density Sand, medium-dense Density Sand, and dense Light Castle Sand are determined based on the results of the initial loading tests presented in Appendix C. Example calculations...

This is a survey of the information criterion approach to model selection problems. New results about context tree estimation and the estimation of the basic neighborhood of Markov random fields are also mentioned. 1. The model selection problem Let a stochastic process {Xt, t ∈ T } be given, where each Xt is a random variable with values a ∈ A, and T is an index set. The joint distribution of ...

Monte Carlo (MC) rendering systems can produce spectacular images but are plagued with noise at low sampling rates. In a recent paper [Sen and Darabi 2011b], we observed that this noise occurs in regions of the image where the sample values are a direct function of the random parameters used in the Monte Carlo system. Therefore, we proposed a way to identify MC noise by estimating this function...

BACKGROUND In chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the response of the forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) after bronchodilator application is weak. Inspiratory parameters like the forced inspiratory volume in 1 second (FIV1) and inspiratory capacity (IC) can be responsive to bronchodilators. In an individual patient with COPD, a significant bronchodilator response must at leas...

Integrals of optimal values of random optimization problems depending on a nite dimensional parameter are approximated by using empirical distributions instead of the original measure. Under fairly broad conditions, it is proved that uniform convergence of empirical approximations of the right hand sides of the constraints implies uniform convergence of the optimal values in the linear and conv...

Given the gene orders in two modern genomes, it may be difficult to decide if some genes are close enough in both genomes to infer some ancestral proximity or some functional relationship. Current methods all depend on arbitrary parameters. We explore a class of gene proximity criteria and find two kinds of natural values for their parameters. One kind has to do with the parameter value where t...

This paper describes an industrial application of case-based reasoning (CBR) in the aluminium die-casting industry: the setting of parameters of a pressure diecasting machine for a specific die. As well as describing the application, the paper shows how the system has evolved. The use of cases has given the system a flexibility which has enabled it to be used in ways that were not foreseen at t...