Statistical distances have two very important uses in statistical analysis. Firstly, they can be applied naturally to the case of parametric statistical inference. The idea of minimum distance estimation has been around for a while and there are many nice properties that the minimum distance estimators enjoy. Minimum distance estimation was pioneered by Wolfowitz in the 1950s (1952, 1953, 195…
The American architect Louis Henry Sullivan described his design philosophy with the simple statement "form follows function." By this credo he meant that a structure's physical layout and design should reflect as precisely as possible how this structure will be used. Every door and window is where it is for a reason. He was talking about building skyscrapers, but this philosophy is perhaps …
For many decades multi-party computation (MPC) had been a predominantly theoretic endeavour in cryptography, but in recent years interest has arisen on the practical side. This has resulted in various implementation improvements and such protocols are becoming more applicable to practical situations. A key part in this transformation from theory to practice is in adapting theoretical protocols …
You are responsible for managing your company’s foreign exchange positions. Your boss, or your boss’s boss, has been reading about derivatives losses suffered by other companies, and wants to know if the same thing could happen to his company. That is, he wants to know just how much market risk the company is taking. What do you say? You could start by listing and describing the company’s…
In the social and behavioral sciences, statistics serve two general purposes. First, they can be used to describe what happened in a particular study (descriptive statistics). Second, they can be used to help draw conclu- sions about what those results mean in some broader context (inferential statistics). The main question in inferential statistics is whether a result, finding, or observation …
One of the unique features of the Android operating system that has allowed it to grow rapidly has been that the binaries and source code are released as open source software. You can download the entire source code of the Android operating system, and it takes up approximately 2.6 GB of disk space. In theory, this allows anyone to design and build a phone that runs Android. The idea of keeping…
Network security is currently becoming one of the main problems for the develop- ment of new technologies and services in telecommunication networks. Hackers are constantly evolving towards new attack techniques and new target tech- nologies at a very high speed [1] [2], thus making the task of building defense mechanisms a hard mission. In this context, many efforts have been done by the rese…
“The suspense was killing me. I just had to read it straight through!” Although these responses to our book would be gratifying, it’s doubtful that any book on digital security will ever garner this type of reaction. Digital security is the computer equivalent of disaster insurance. Few people care very much about it or give it much thought, and everyone hates paying for it … until a ca…
In this introductory chapter, the subject of the book is explained in more detail by focusing on two central issues of the control of networks: open-loop control of interconnected systems and synchronization. While the first topic emphasizes the computational aspects involved in controlling interconnected systems, the second theme of synchronization discusses the impact of couplings on the shap…
Subsequent to the mathematical theory of electromagnetic waves formulated by James Clerk Maxwell in 1873 [3] and the demonstration of the existence of these waves by Heinrich Hertz in 1887, Guglielmo Marconi made history by using radio waves for transat- lantic wireless communications in 1901. In 1906, amplitude modulation (AM) radio was invented by Reginald Fessenden for music broadcasting. In…
Public, Internet-based social networks can enable communication, collaboration and information collection and sharing in the health care space. About one-third of Americans who go online to research their health currently use social networks to find fellow patients and discuss their conditions,1,2 and 36 percent of social network users evaluate and leverage other consumers’ knowledge before m…
Over the last few decades project management has moved from its roots in industries such as construction and defense into the main- stream of American business. Many different industries, in particular the service sector, rely heavily on project management as an integral part of a successful strategy. In support of the widening importance of project management, a number of important professiona…
The role of inancial executives in any business has expanded signiicantly in recent years as companies become more accountable to their stake- holders and regulators. Combine this increase in accountability with the increasing sophistication of technology, risk management, inancial analy- sis, and inancial records processing, and we see that the responsibilities of inancial executives in any or…
The strategic management of human capital in public education concerns the acquisition, development, performance management and retention of top talent in the nation’s schools, particularly large, urban school districts. The Strategic Management of Human Capital (SMHC) is also the name of a new action project of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), headquartered at the CPRE…
“Maidan” is how the residents of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, usually abbreviate the name of their city’s main plaza, Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). In recent times this name has also come to connote a space of popular protests and people power in general. “Maidan” is a Turkic word for a square, and Ukrainians likely borrowed it from the Crimean Tatars or other Turkic-spe…
Questions have been raised about the social impact of widespread use of social networking sites (SNS) like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter. Do these technologies isolate people and truncate their relationships? Or are there benefits associated with being connected to others in this way? The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project decided to examine SNS in a survey that…