The Black–Scholes* option pricing model is commonly applied to value a wide range of option contracts. However, the model often inconsistently prices deep in-the-money and deep out-of-the-money options. Options professionals refer to this well-known phenomenon as a volatility ‘skew’ or ‘smile’. In this paper, we examine an extension of the Black–Scholes model developed by Corrado and Su‡ that s...

Dogs differ greatly in their morphological characteristics including various tail phenotypes. Congenitally short-tailed dogs are present in many breeds; however, the causative mutation located in the T-box transcription factor T gene (C189G) had only been described in the bobtailed Pembroke Welsh Corgis. We investigated here the presence of the T gene mutation in 23 other breeds (360 dogs, incl...

Deer impacts on woodlands and forests are not confined to Europe. Significant deer impacts on forests have been recorded in New Zealand (Stewart and Burrows, 1989), Japan (Shimoda et al., 1994), and the United States (Alverson et al., 1988; Stromayer and Warren, 1997; Waller and Alverson, 1997). This paper focuses on deer impacts in North America, and draws on my own research over the past 5 ye...

Black-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus) colonies can become overcrowded, and the colonies, landscape, and people affected by them may benefi t from controlled populations. Contraception is a method that may be useful, particularly where lethal control is inappropriate or illegal. We investigated if oral administration of 20,25-diazacholesterol (DiazaCon®), an inhibitor of cholesterol an...

Pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemistrina group) have been extensively used as non-human primate animal models for various human diseases in recent years, notably for AIDS research due to their sensitivity to HIV-1. Northern pig-tailed macaques (M. leonina) are distributed in China and other surrounding Southeast Asia countries. Although northern pig-tailed macaques have been bred on a large scale...

Mirtrons are introns that form pre-miRNA hairpins after splicing to produce RNA interference (RNAi) effectors distinct from Drosha-dependent intronic miRNAs, and will be especially useful for co-delivery of coding genes and RNAi. A specific family of mirtrons - 3'-tailed mirtrons - has hairpins precisely defined on the 5' end by the 5' splice site and 3' end by the branch point. Here, we presen...

In many Internet-type queues, arrival and service distributions are heavy-tailed. A difficulty with analyzing these queues is that heavy-tailed distributions do not generally have closed-form Laplace transforms. A recently proposed method, the Transform Approximation Method (TAM), overcomes this by numerically approximating the transform. This paper investigates numerical issues of implementing...