type="main" xml:id="rssa12041-abs-0001" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>Motivated by the problem of cancer risk assessment near a nuclear power generating station, the paper describes a methodology for fitting a spatially correlated survival model to large retrospective cohort data sets. Retrospective cohorts, which...</p>

Product quality in the paper-making industry can be assessed by opacity of a linear trace through continuous production sheets, summarized in spectral form. We adopt a class of non-Gaussian stochastic models for continuous spatial variation to describe data of this type. The model has flexible...

This note uses the established connection between the local-EM and EMS algorithms to explore methods for smoothing mismeasured data. Implementations of local-EM are developed for several forms of censored and/or mismeasured data and their connections with other methods explored.

I analyze a model with heterogeneous investors who have incorrect beliefs about fundamentals. Investors think that they are right at first, but over time realize that they are wrong. The speed of the realization depends on investor confidence in own beliefs and arrival of new information. The...

We investigate the effect of climate change on population growth in 18th and 19th century Iceland. We find that annual temperature changes help determine the population growth rate in pre-industrial Iceland: a year 1 degree Celsius cooler than average drives down population growth rates by...

Suppose a sequence of random variables {Xn} has negative drift when above a certain threshold and has increments bounded in Lp. When p2 this implies that EXn is bounded above by a constant independent of n and the particular 0sequence {Xn}. When p[less-than-or-equals, slant]2 there are...

We consider a system of particles moving independently on a countable state space, according to a general (non-space-homogeneous) Markov process. Under mild conditions, the number of particles at each site will converge to a product of independent Poisson distributions; this corresponds to...

We study a collective decision-making process in which people interested in an issue may participate, at a cost, in a meeting, and the resulting decision is a compromise among the participants' preferences. We show that the equilibrium number of participants is small and their positions are...