CAPITAL DECISIONS WITH TEMPORAL RESOLUTION OF UNCERTAINTY: A MEAN-VARIANCE APPROACH

Financial Economics,

NITROGEN MANAGEMENT IN SOUTHEASTERN MINNESOTA

Crop Production/Industries,

Performance bounds for polynomial phase parameter estimation with nonuniform and random sampling schemes

Copyright © 2000 IEEEEstimating the parameters of a cisoid with an unknown amplitude and polynomial phase using uniformly spaced samples can result in ambiguous estimates due to Nyquist sampling limitations. It has been shown previously that nonuniform sampling has the advantage of unambiguous estimates beyond the Nyquist frequency; however, the effect of sampling on the Cramer-Rao bounds is not well known. This paper first derives the maximum likelihood estimators and Cramer-Rao bounds for the parameters with known, arbitrary sampling times. It then outlines two methods for incorporating random sampling times into the lower variance bounds, describing one in detail. It is then shown that for a signal with additive white Gaussian noise the bounds for the estimation with nonuniform sampling tend toward those of uniform sampling. Thus, nonuniform sampling overcomes the ambiguity problems of uniform sampling without incurring the penalty of an increased variance in parameter estimation.Jonathan A. Legg and Douglas A. Gra

Can Machines Think in Radio Language?

People can think in auditory, visual and tactile forms of language, so can machines principally. But is it possible for them to think in radio language? According to a first principle presented for general intelligence, i.e. the principle of language's relativity, the answer may give an exceptional solution for robot astronauts to talk with each other in space exploration.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Siting prisons, sighting communities: geographies of objection in a planning process

This paper reviews the planning process for a Scottish prison located near a former mining village. Analysing the letters of objection submitted by residents offers an opportunity to explore local views about prison and community and to relate these to the unique social and spatial history of the area. The planning process itself structured how residents were able to express themselves and defined what counted as a relevant objection. After deconstructing this process, the paper then restores and uses as a framework for analysis three geographies of objection stripped from local responses to the development proposal: the emotional, temporal, and spatial. Emotional expressions of objection added intensity and gave meaning to claims about the historical decline of the region and also conveyed a deep sense of the proposed building site as a lived space. Particular grounds of opposition—over fear of strangers, the fragility of a local orchid, and the pollution from mining—provide an opportunity to explore the complex nature of place meaning and community identity, ultimately leading to a conclusion that the meaning of place is always in flux. The paper argues that Simmel’s classic concept of the stranger, as the outsider who comes to stay, offers a useful analytic in understanding how the quality of proximal remoteness that prisons and other unwanted developments constitute participates in a constantly evolving sense of the local

High-resolution mapping of two large-scale transpressional fault zones in the California Continental Borderland: Santa Cruz-Catalina Ridge and Ferrelo faults

New mapping of two active transpressional fault zones in the California Continental Borderland, the Santa Cruz-Catalina Ridge fault and the Ferrelo fault, was carried out to characterize their geometries, using over 4500 line-km of new multibeam bathymetry data collected in 2010 combined with existing data. Faults identified from seafloor morphology were verified in the subsurface using existing seismic reflection data including single-channel and multichannel seismic profiles compiled over the past three decades. The two fault systems are parallel and are capable of large lateral offsets and reverse slip during earthquakes. The geometry of the fault systems shows evidence of multiple segments that could experience throughgoing rupture over distances exceeding 100 km. Published earthquake hypocenters from regional seismicity studies further define the lateral and depth extent of the historic fault ruptures. Historical and recent focal mechanisms obtained from first-motion and moment tensor studies confirm regional strain partitioning dominated by right slip on major throughgoing faults with reverse-oblique mechanisms on adjacent structures. Transpression on west and northwest trending structures persists as far as 270 km south of the Transverse Ranges; extension persists in the southern Borderland. A logjam model describes the tectonic evolution of crustal blocks bounded by strike-slip and reverse faults which are restrained from northwest displacement by the Transverse Ranges and the southern San Andreas fault big bend. Because of their potential for dip-slip rupture, the faults may also be capable of generating local tsunamis that would impact Southern California coastlines, including populated regions in the Channel Islands

‘They Called Them Communists Then … What D'You Call ‘Em Now? … Insurgents?’. Narratives of British Military Expatriates in the Context of the New Imperialism

This paper addresses the question of the extent to which the colonial past provides material for contemporary actors' understanding of difference. The research from which the paper is drawn involved interview and ethnographic work in three largely white working-class estates in an English provincial city. For this paper we focus on ten life-history interviews with older participants who had spent some time abroad in the British military. Our analysis adopts a postcolonial framework because research participants' current constructions of an amorphous 'Other' (labelled variously as black people, immigrants, foreigners, asylum-seekers or Muslims) reveal strong continuities with discourses deployed by the same individuals to narrate their past experiences of living and working as either military expatriates or spouses during British colonial rule. Theoretically, the paper engages with the work of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. In keeping with a postcolonial approach, we work against essentialised notions of identity based on 'race' or class. Although we establish continuity between white working-class military emigration in the past and contemporary racialised discourses, we argue that the latter are not class-specific, being as much the creations of the middle-class media and political elite

Self-Modification of Policy and Utility Function in Rational Agents

Any agent that is part of the environment it interacts with and has versatile actuators (such as arms and fingers), will in principle have the ability to self-modify -- for example by changing its own source code. As we continue to create more and more intelligent agents, chances increase that they will learn about this ability. The question is: will they want to use it? For example, highly intelligent systems may find ways to change their goals to something more easily achievable, thereby `escaping' the control of their designers. In an important paper, Omohundro (2008) argued that goal preservation is a fundamental drive of any intelligent system, since a goal is more likely to be achieved if future versions of the agent strive towards the same goal. In this paper, we formalise this argument in general reinforcement learning, and explore situations where it fails. Our conclusion is that the self-modification possibility is harmless if and only if the value function of the agent anticipates the consequences of self-modifications and use the current utility function when evaluating the future.Comment: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) 201