The Burger Court—The First Ten Years

In this report we study estimation of time-delays in linear dynamical systems with additive noise. Estimating time-delays is a common engineering problem, e.g. in automatic control, system identification and signal processing. The purpose with this work is to test and evaluate a certain class of methods for time-delay estimation, especially with automatic control applications in mind. The class of methods consists of estimating the time-delay from the Laguerre transform of the input and output signals. The methods are evaluated experimentally with the aid of simulations and plots of approximation error, plots of original and Laguerre approximated input and output signals, plots of estimates, plots of RMS error, tables of ANOVA and plots of confidence intervals for different cases. The results are: Only certain input signals, e.g. steps, are useful. Systems with a not too fast dynamics give better estimation quality than pure time-delay systems despite the fact that the estimation methods were derived for pure time-delay systems. The Laguerre pole should be chosen in a certain way. The number of Laguerre functions should be as a high as possible

An investigation of error correcting techniques for OMV data

Papers on the following topics are presented: considerations of testing the Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle (OMV) system with CLASS; OMV CLASS test results (first go around); equivalent system gain available from R-S encoding versus a desire to lower the power amplifier from 25 watts to 20 watts for OMV; command word acceptance/rejection rates for OMV; a memo concerning energy-to-noise ratio for the Viterbi-BSC Channel and the impact of Manchester coding loss; and an investigation of error correcting techniques for OMV and Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF)

Bayesianism, Infinite Decisions, and Binding

We pose and resolve several vexing decision theoretic puzzles. Some are variants of existing puzzles, such as ‘Trumped’ (Arntzenius and McCarthy 1997), ‘Rouble trouble’ (Arntzenius and Barrett 1999), ‘The airtight Dutch book’ (McGee 1999), and ‘The two envelopes puzzle’ (Broome 1995). Others are new. A unified resolution of the puzzles shows that Dutch book arguments have no force in infinite cases. It thereby provides evidence that reasonable utility functions may be unbounded and that reasonable credence functions need not be countably additive. The resolution also shows that when infinitely many decisions are involved, the difference between making the decisions simultaneously and making them sequentially can be the difference between riches and ruin. Finally, the resolution reveals a new way in which the ability to make binding commitments can save perfectly rational agents from sure losses