A MECHANISM DESIGN APPROACH TO CLIMATE‐CHANGE AGREEMENTS

We take a mechanism design perspective to investigate how environmental agreements should account for multilateral externalities, incentive compatibility, and voluntary participation by sovereign countries. The optimal mechanism involves a tradeoff between a free rider problem in the effort provision of participating countries and the necessity of inducing countries to ratify the agreement. This mechanism can be approximated by a simple menu with attractive implementation and robustness properties. Limits on enforcement and commitment might nevertheless hinder the performance of this menu, making the “business as usual” scenario more likely.     

不完美英雄:格式塔理论解读人物形象的建构过程

E·H·冈布里奇关于艺术创作的格式塔理论解答了艺术形象再现的建构机制以及观者在此过程中担任的角色,试图通过利用该理论中提出的重要概念,即"图式与修正"和"制作与匹配",对18世纪小说《弃儿汤姆·琼斯的历史》中的主人公汤姆·琼斯的人物形象进行解读.在该小说的释读中,读者不再是被动地参与,而是经历了一个心理建构的历程:由图式阶段形成的汤姆的天真、善良、热心,逐渐通过"制作与匹配"的途径,发现了汤姆自身存在的生活不检点、道德立场不强等劣根性,与之前印象比较形成反差,逐步与作家菲尔丁的创作意图靠近,通过这样一个"修正"的过程逐渐形成了与作家意图一致的人物形象,即汤姆·琼斯呈现出一个不完美英雄的形象:一个热心、正义却也不乏各种缺点的圆形人物,进而也使该人物形象更为真实、更贴近生活、贴近读者,让读者产生一种意犹未尽之感.     

THE WELFARE COST OF LAWLESSNESS: EVIDENCE FROM SOMALI PIRACY

In spite of general agreement that establishing the rule of law is central to properly functioning economies, little is known about the cost of law and order breakdowns. This paper studies a specific context of this by estimating the effect of Somali piracy attacks on shipping costs using data on shipping contracts in the dry bulk market. To estimate the effect of piracy, we look at shipping routes whose shortest path exposes them to piracy and find that the increase in attacks in 2008 led to around an 8% to 12% increase in costs. From this we calculate the welfare loss imposed by piracy. We estimate that generating around 120 USD million of revenue for Somali pirates led to a welfare loss in excess of 630 USD million, making piracy an expensive way of making transfers.     

Multiple discoveries: Distribution of roots of determinantal equations

Five statisticians including S.N. Roy found the distribution of the characteristic roots of one sample matrix in the matrix of another almost simultaneously. This paper summarizes and contrasts their different methods of deriving the basic theorem.     

Statistical aspects of linkage analysis in interlaboratory studies

This paper investigates statistical issues that arise in interlaboratory studies known as Key Comparisons when one has to link several comparisons to or through existing studies. An approach to the analysis of such a data is proposed using Gaussian distributions with heterogeneous variances. We develop conditions for the set of sufficient statistics to be complete and for the uniqueness of uniformly minimum variance unbiased estimators (UMVUE) of the contrast parametric functions. New procedures are derived for estimating these functions with estimates of their uncertainty. These estimates lead to associated confidence intervals for the laboratories (or studies) contrasts. Several examples demonstrate statistical inference for contrasts based on linkage through the pilot laboratories. Monte Carlo simulation results on performance of approximate confidence intervals are also reported.     

建立文学批评的立交桥--西方艾氏与基氏文艺批评理论图之比较

美国著名学者艾布拉姆斯<镜与灯浪漫主义文论及批评传统>一书总结了西方自柏拉图以来的文学批评史并概括为四大学说即模仿说、实用说、表现说及客观说.他还用三角形图示出作者、作品、读者和宇宙之间的关系.美国另一位学者基思在1994年出版的<批评视角>一书中继承和发展了艾氏理论,也构建了一个文学批评图,图示出作者、作品、读者、现实和文学五者之间的关系.二者的共同点都是采用了系统的方法示意文学批评理论中基本要素之间的关系.不足之处是二者都是平面图,建议在此基础上建立文学批评的立交桥.     

对视频传输协议H.26L的实现及改进

针对H.26L视频编码方案中提出的一些新算法,结合实现结果做了阐述和比较,通过比较提出了改进的算法。采用了更优越的搜索方法增加了图像搜索的质量。在消除块效应方面,采用了双向插值的方法来加以处理。在编码方面,针对H.26L提出的帧内预测编码,利用图像宏块在空间上的相关性对量化后的操作块进行判断并选择是否合并,然后再进行编码,这一改进算法在对图像质量、信噪比影响不大的情况下,使图像压缩率有较明显提高,并且算法简洁,易于理解。     

H.264视频鲁棒传输的最优宏块模式选择

分析了受损宏块的信道失真及其差错扩散,研究了宏块编码模式对信源失真和信道失真的影响,提出了结合信源信道编码的一种基于率失真优化的快速模式选择算法。通过估算不同宏块模式的信源失真和信道失真,自适应地选择最佳编码模式,使得视频序列的整体传输失真最小。模拟实验显示,相对于H.264参考软件的模式选择算法,该算法显著降低了计算复杂度并提高了视频差错恢复性能。     

H2S和SO2制备与性质一体化的微型实验探索

实验设计了H2S和SO2的制备及性质检验为一体的综合性、微型实验装置;该实验装置在分别合成H2S和SO2的同时,能完成检验H2S的两个性质实验和检验SO2的6个性质实验,检验实验互不干扰,现象明显、操作简便;所用的试剂量仅为传统实验装置的1/10~1/100.该文详细介绍了该微型实验装置的操作要求及注意事项.     

Progressively Type-II right censored order statistics from discrete distributions

Progressively Type-II right censored order statistics from continuous distributions have been studied rather extensively in the literature; see Balakrishnan and Aggarwala [2000. Progressive Censoring: Theory, Methods and Applications. Birkhäuser, Boston]. In this paper, we derive the joint and marginal distributions of progressively Type-II right censored order statistics from discrete distributions. We then use these distributions to show the non-Markovian property as well as to discuss some properties in the special case of the geometric distribution.