Control System Optimization for Saturn 5 Launch Vehicles Using Gradient Techniques Final Report

Control system optimization for Saturn 5 launch vehicles using gradient technique

STATISTICS ON MODERN PRIVATE INTERNATIONAL CARTELS, 1990-2005

This report explains the principal economic and legal features of a unique set of data on 283 modern private international cartels discovered anywhere in the world from January 1990 to the end of 2005. Measured in real 2005 money, aggregate cartel sales and overcharges totaled about $1.2 trillion and$500 billion, respectively. In the early 2000s, about 35 such cartels were discovered each year. We find that global cartels comprise more than half of the sample’s affected sales and are larger, longer lasting, and more injurious than other types. In the early 2000s world-wide corporate penalties stabilized at or above $2 billion per year, one-thousand times penalties in the early 1990s. More than 40% of those penalties were from settlements in private suits, and most of the rest are fines imposed by U.S. and EU antitrust authorities. Median penalties are low: from 1.4% to 4.9% of affected sales, depending on the type of prosecution. As a proportion of damages, median fines ranged from less than 1% for EU-wide cartels to 17.6% for Canada. Private plaintiffs obtained 38% of damages from international cartelists. World wide, median real cartel penalties of all types amounted to less than 5% of overcharges. [See Summary next page for more details]cartel, price fixing, overcharge, antitrust enforcement, optimal deterrence

The application of optimal control technqiues to advanced manned missions, volume 1

Two problems are presented in the area of optimal control and its application to the design of attitude control systems for advanced complex aerospace vehicles. The problems discussed are specification of performance criteria in terms of structural load minimization and/or maximum orbital payload injection requirements of the controlled vehicle; and formulation and solution of the optimization problem such that practical control systems are obtained

Evolving database systems : a persistent view

Submitted to POS7 This work was supported in St Andrews by EPSRC Grant GR/J67611 "Delivering the Benefits of Persistence"Orthogonal persistence ensures that information will exist for as long as it is useful, for which it must have the ability to evolve with the growing needs of the application systems that use it. This may involve evolution of the data, meta-data, programs and applications, as well as the users' perception of what the information models. The need for evolution has been well recognised in the traditional (data processing) database community and the cost of failing to evolve can be gauged by the resources being invested in interfacing with legacy systems. Zdonik has identified new classes of application, such as scientific, financial and hypermedia, that require new approaches to evolution. These applications are characterised by their need to store large amounts of data whose structure must evolve as it is discovered by the applications that use it. This requires that the data be mapped dynamically to an evolving schema. Here, we discuss the problems of evolution in these new classes of application within an orthogonally persistent environment and outline some approaches to these problems.Postprin