In this paper we consider the relationship between the standards created by national standards bodies and long run economic growth, exploring the relationship in the context of the UK and the British Standards Institution (BSI). We suggest that standards provide a key enabling mechanism for the...

This note reassesses the basic result in Mukhopadhaya (2003) that, when jurors may acquire costly signals about a defendant’s guilt, with a larger jury size the probability of reaching a correct verdict may in fact fall, contrary to the Condorcet Jury Theorem. We show that if the jurors...

A Polya-like urn arises in studying stationary distributions and stationary sampling distributions in neutral (Fleming-Viot) genetics models with bounded mutation rates. This paper gives a detailed analysis of asymptotic properties of the urn. In particular, it is shown that in a sample of size...

The exclusion process is an interacting particle system in which particles perform random walks on a lattice except that they may not move to a position already occupied. In this paper we show how techniques derived from quantum mechanics may be used to achieve asymptotic results for an...

Ranked and size-biased permutations are particular functions on the set of probability measures on the simplex. They represent two recently studied schemes for relabelling groups in certain stochastic models, and are of particular interest in describing the limiting behaviour of such models. We...

This paper is concerned with the approximation of early stages of epidemic processes by branching processes. A general model for an epidemic in a closed, homogeneously mixing population is presented. A construction of a sequence of such epidemics, indexed by the initial number of susceptibles N,...

Comprehensive, multi-level approaches are required to address obesity. One important target for intervention is the economic domain. The purpose of this study was to synthesize existing evidence regarding the impact of economic policies targeting obesity and its causal behaviours (diet, physical...

We introduce a new, hierarchical, model for single-nucleotide polymorphism allele frequencies in a structured population, which is naturally fitted via Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. There is one parameter for each population, closely analogous to a population-specific version of Wright's...</sub>

There is currently great interest in understanding the way in which recombination rates vary, over short scales, across the human genome. Aside from inherent interest, an understanding of this local variation is essential for the sensible design and analysis of many studies aimed at elucidating...