Consider a setting with n sellers having i.i.d. costs with log-concave density f from cumulative F , and a buyer who puts a premium i on procuring from seller i. We show how for any given 1; ; n; a simple second price bonus auction can be chosen which comes surprisingly close to giving the auctioneer the same surplus as an optimal mechanism. The bonuses depend only on the magnitude and monotoni...

Stair-cases are useful environmental landmarks for navigation in mobility aids for the partially sighted. In this paper, a texture detection method using Gabor Filters is proposed to detect distant stair-cases. When close enough, stair-cases are then detected by looking for groups of concurrent lines, where convex and concave edges are partitioned using intensity variation information. Stair-ca...

Lack of guidance for interpreting the definitions of endangered and threatened in the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) has resulted in case-by-case decision making leaving the process vulnerable to being considered arbitrary or capricious. Adopting quantitative decision rules would remedy this but requires the agency to specify the relative urgency concerning extinction events over time, cutof...

Slope rounding is discussed in the Roadside Design Guide as a practice that breaks the sharp edge in a highway cross section and the side slope. There have been past studies aimed at understanding the influence of slope rounding on vehicle trajectories for various slope conditions. These studies were conducted about twenty years ago and only looked at a small subset of vehicle types despite the...

HYPOTHESIS Glenoid erosion and medial migration of the humeral head prosthesis have been observed after most types of shoulder arthroplasty. A method of measuring the change in humeral head position with time after shoulder prosthetic arthroplasty was applied it to 14 shoulders that underwent humeral hemiarthroplasty with concentric glenoid reaming. We hypothesized that the measurement techniqu...