Aerosol optical thickness (AOT) is typically estimated from satellite radiance observations through computationally demanding deterministic retrievals based on manually constructed physical models. A statistical alternative to this deterministic method is to train regression models for AOT prediction from radiance data. This approach provides fast retrievals albeit with somewhat reduced accurac...

It has recently become apparent that the dissipation function, first defined by Evans and Searles [J. Chem. Phys. 113, 3503 (2000)], is one of the most important functions in classical nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. It is the argument of the Evans-Searles fluctuation theorem, the dissipation theorem, and the relaxation theorems. It is a function of both the initial distribution and the d...

We derive the asymptotic sampling distribution of various estimators frequently used to order distributions in terms of poverty, welfare and inequality. This includes estimators of most of the poverty indices currently in use, as well as estimators of the curves used to infer stochastic dominance of any order. These curves can be used to determine whether poverty, inequality or social welfare i...

The stochastic Eigen model proposed by Feng et al. (2007) (Journal of Theoretical Biology, 246, 28) showed that error threshold is no longer a phase transition point but a crossover region whose width depends on the strength of the random fluctuation in an environment. The underlying cause of this phenomenon has not yet been well examined. In this article, we adopt a single peak Gaussian distri...

Recently proposed deterministic classifierbased parsers (Nivre and Scholz, 2004; Sagae and Lavie, 2005; Yamada and Matsumoto, 2003) offer attractive alternatives to generative statistical parsers. Deterministic parsers are fast, efficient, and simple to implement, but generally less accurate than optimal (or nearly optimal) statistical parsers. We present a statistical shift-reduce parser that ...

Both authors have contributed to all parts of the report. Conclusions where made through discussion.