BATHTUB-TYPE CURVES IN RELIABILITY AND BEYOND

Finding optimal, or at least good, maintenance and repair policies is crucial in reliability engineering. Likewise, describing life phases of human mortality is important when determining social policy or insurance premiums. In these tasks, one searches for distributions to fit data and then makes inferences about the population(s). In the present paper, we focus on bathtub‐type distributions and provide a view of certain problems, methods and solutions, and a few challenges, that can be encountered in reliability engineering, survival analysis, demography and actuarial science.     

Stochastic Modelling of Times to Temperature for Furnaces Supplying Titanium Blooms to a Rolling Mill at TIMET

In conjunction with TIMET at Waunarlwydd (Swansea, UK) a model has been developed that will optimise the scheduling of various blooms to their eight furnaces so as to minimise the time taken to roll these blooms into the finished mill products. This production scheduling model requires reliable data on times taken for the various furnaces that heat the slabs and blooms to reach the temperatures required for rolling. These times to temperature are stochastic in nature and this paper identifies the distributional form for these times using the generalised F distribution as a modelling framework. The times to temperature were found to be similarly distributed over all furnaces. The identified distributional forms were incorporated into the scheduling model to optimise a particular campaign that was run at TIMET Swansea. Amongst other conclusion it was found that, compared to the actual campaign, the model produced a schedule that reduced the makespan by some 35%.     

语言手段与小说语篇人物塑造

文章着力于探讨语言符号与意义表达之间的关系,即运用文体学文体定量分析法和篇章语言学的主位—述位及其他语言学理论来描述小说语篇中所采用的语言手段对成功塑造人物所起的作用。通过分析实例语篇的择词、结构和语音、词汇、句法层面各种修辞的运用,了解小说叙述描写语言对人物性格的阐释,语篇在发生、发展、高潮过程中对人物形象塑造的逐步深入与完善以及修辞在人物形象塑造中的美学效果。总之,小说作者塑造人物形象时采用了各种语言手段,通过分析其在小说语篇中的具体运用,揭示运用语言手段在成功塑造人物形象和深入挖掘主题方面所起的作用。     

Loss functions for estimation of extrema with an application to disease mapping

It is often of interest to find the maximum or near maxima among a set of vector‐valued parameters in a statistical model; in the case of disease mapping, for example, these correspond to relative‐risk “hotspots” where public‐health intervention may be needed. The general problem is one of estimating nonlinear functions of the ensemble of relative risks, but biased estimates result if posterior means are simply substituted into these nonlinear functions. The authors obtain better estimates of extrema from a new, weighted ranks squared error loss function. The derivation of these Bayes estimators assumes a hidden‐Markov random‐field model for relative risks, and their behaviour is illustrated with real and simulated data.     

论绿色消费方式的形成

绿色消费是可持续发展的消费方式,它的形成对人类可持续发展具有重要意义。论文主张从建立可持续发展的消费价值观,建立合理的财富分配秩序,调整经济结构和生产方式,并依靠科技进步和发挥政府的主导作用来促进绿色消费的形成。     

农业产业化与城镇体系结构的相关性研究--以烟台市为例

分析了改革开放以来烟台市城镇体系的发展阶段及特征,指出了农业产业化日益成为城镇发展的主要动力,对农业产业化与城镇体系地域结构、等级规模结构、职能结构的相互关联性进行了实证分析,并对如何更好地促进农业产业化与城镇体系的协调发展提出了相应的对策。     

科学配置合并组建高校的文献信息资源

组建高校面临着全校文献信息资源的重组和合理配置 ,针对合并组建高校的文献信息资源重组和配置采取正确的对策和措施 ,发挥数字化文献信息资源的作用 ,从而充分发挥合并组建高校文献信息资源的整体效益     

战后日本海外直接投资的发展趋势

日本政府和企业在对战后影响日本海外直接投资的积极因素和消极因素的权衡中寻求其发展。战后日本海外直接投资的发展趋势是 :将加大海外直接投资的规模 ,增加对制造业的投资 ;将加强对亚洲市场的开发 ,特别将会对亚洲第二层次的国家和地区———东南亚联盟和中国沿海地区增加投资。在产业结构调整方面 ,将注重实物经济的投资 ,大企业的研究与开发也呈现出向亚洲国家和地区转移的趋势。     

中国经济增长模式转型：供给结构视角分析

本文从供给结构角度分析了自1978年以来中国经济增长模式转型的特征，并针对存在的问题提出了相应的解决对策，旨在寻求经济增长模式转型的有效路径。     

On Rates of Convergence for Bayesian Density Estimation

Abstract.  We consider the problem of estimating a compactly supported density taking a Bayesian nonparametric approach. We define a Dirichlet mixture prior that, while selecting piecewise constant densities, has full support on the Hellinger metric space of all commonly dominated probability measures on a known bounded interval. We derive pointwise rates of convergence for the posterior expected density by studying the speed at which the posterior mass accumulates on shrinking Hellinger neighbourhoods of the sampling density. If the data are sampled from a strictly positive, α -Hölderian density, with α  ∈ ( 0,1] , then the optimal convergence rate n^{− α / (2 α +1)} is obtained up to a logarithmic factor. Smoothing histograms by polygons, a continuous piecewise linear estimator is obtained that for twice continuously differentiable, strictly positive densities satisfying boundary conditions attains a rate comparable up to a logarithmic factor to the convergence rate n ^−4/5 for integrated mean squared error of kernel type density estimators.