Investment Risk Appraisal

Standard financial techniques neglect extreme situations and regards large market shifts as too unlikely to matter. This approach may account for what occurs most of the time in the market, but the picture it presents does not reflect the reality, as the major events happen in the rest of the time and investors are ‘surprised’ by ‘unexpected’ market movements. An alternative fuzzy approach permits fluctuations well beyond the probability type of uncertainty and allows one to make fewer assumptions about the data distribution and market behaviour. Fuzzifying the present value criteria, we suggest a measure of the risk associated with each investment opportunity and estimate the project’s robustness towards market uncertainty. The procedure is applied to thirty-five UK companies and a neural network solution to the fuzzy criterion is provided to facilitate the decision-making process. Finally, we discuss the grounds for classical asset pricing model revision and argue that the demand for relaxed assumptions appeals for another approach to modelling the market environment

Orbiting deep space relay station. Volume 3: Implementation plan

An implementation plan for the Orbiting Deep Space Relay Station (ODSRS) is described. A comparison of ODSRS life cycle costs to other configuration options meeting future communication requirements is presented

Orbiting Deep Space Relay Station (ODSRS). Volume 1: Requirement determination

The deep space communications requirements of the post-1985 time frame are described and the orbiting deep space relay station (ODSRS) is presented as an option for meeting these requirements. Under current conditions, the ODSRS is not yet cost competitive with Earth based stations to increase DSN telemetry performance, but has significant advantages over a ground station, and these are sufficient to maintain it as a future option. These advantages include: the ability to track a spacecraft 24 hours per day with ground stations located only in the USA; the ability to operate at higher frequencies that would be attenuated by Earth's atmosphere; and the potential for building very large structures without the constraints of Earth's gravity

Mariner Mars 1964 telecommunication system

Radio, telemetry, and command subsystems of Mariner IV telecommunication syste

Soft computing in investment appraisal

Standard financial techniques neglect extreme situations and regards large market shifts as too unlikely to matter. Such approach accounts for what occurs most of the time in the market, but does not reflect the reality, as major events happen in the rest of the time and investors are ‘surprised’ by ‘unexpected’ market movements. An alternative fuzzy approach permits fluctuations well beyond the probability type of uncertainty and allows one to make fewer assumptions about the data distribution and market behaviour. Fuzzifying the present value criteria, we suggest a measure of the risk associated with each investment opportunity and estimate the project’s robustness towards market uncertainty. The procedure is applied to thirty-five UK companies traded on the London Stock Exchange and a neural network solution to the fuzzy criterion is provided to facilitate the decision-making process. Finally, we suggest a specific evolutionary algorithm to train a fuzzy neural net - the bidirectional incremental evolution will automatically identify the complexity of the problem and correspondingly adapt the parameters of the fuzzy network

An empirical investigation of the relationship between the real economy and stock returns for the United States

This paper tests for the relationship between excess returns and economic growth rates in the U.S., using a Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) approach. The system includes monthly data for inflation, consumption, narrow money supply and personal disposable income and each equation has up to 24-lagged Autoregressive terms. After removing the four major shocks associated with Black Monday, the Asian Crisis, “9·11” and its anniversary, we cannot find any ARCH behaviour in either the excess returns or the money series. The models are reduced to their parsimonious forms and the inflation and real consumption equations are corrected for ARCH. To make the result more robust we reduce our system to four equations by conditioning on income and testing the remaining equations for stability. The SUR model suggests strong long-run feedback between the financial sector and the real economy firstly through inflation, then consumption while the influence of real money supply appears transitory. Consumption is more sensitive to the economic variables in short and long run as compared with stock market windfalls

Attracted Diffusion-Limited Aggregation

In this paper, we present results of extensive Monte Carlo simulations of diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA) with a seed placed on an attractive plane as a simple model in connection with the electrical double layers. We compute the fractal dimension of the aggregated patterns as a function of the attraction strength \alpha. For the patterns grown in both two and three dimensions, the fractal dimension shows a significant dependence on the attraction strength for small values of \alpha, and approaches to that of the ordinary two-dimensional (2D) DLA in the limit of large \alpha. For non-attracting case with \alpha=1, our results in three dimensions reproduce the patterns of 3D ordinary DLA, while in two dimensions our model leads to formation of a compact cluster with dimension two. For intermediate \alpha, the 3D clusters have quasi-2D structure with a fractal dimension very close to that of the ordinary 2D-DLA. This allows one to control morphology of a growing cluster by tuning a single external parameter \alpha.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. E (2012

Erratum: IRAS observations of irregular galaxies

In Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS) observations of irregular galaxies, galactic blue luminosities were based on standard optical definitions. The blue luminosities (L sub B) were derived from the blue absolute magnitude (M sub B) or form the in band flux. However, the L sub B system for spiral galaxies was based on quasi-bolometric (rather than in band) fluxes. The formulation and resulting statements are corrected

Development of quality assurance methods for epoxy graphite prepreg

Quality assurance methods for graphite epoxy/prepregs were developed. Liquid chromatography, differential scanning calorimetry, and gel permeation chromatography were investigated. These methods were applied to a second prepreg system. The resin matrix formulation was correlated with mechanical properties. Dynamic mechanical analysis and fracture toughness methods were investigated. The chromatography and calorimetry techniques were all successfully developed as quality assurance methods for graphite epoxy prepregs. The liquid chromatography method was the most sensitive to changes in resin formulation. The were also successfully applied to the second prepreg system

Sex Differences in Elite Swimming with Advanced Age Are Less Than Marathon Running

The sex difference in marathon performance increases with finishing place and age of the runner but whether this occurs among swimmers is unknown. The purpose was to compare sex differences in swimming velocity across world record place (1st–10th), age group (25–89 years), and event distance. We also compared sex differences between freestyle swimming and marathon running. The world\u27s top 10 swimming times of both sexes for World Championship freestyle stroke, backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly events and the world\u27s top 10 marathon times in 5-year age groups were obtained. Men were faster than women for freestyle (12.4 ± 4.2%), backstroke (12.8 ± 3.0%), and breaststroke (14.5 ± 3.2%), with the greatest sex differences for butterfly (16.7 ± 5.5%). The sex difference in swimming velocity increased across world record place for freestyle (P \u3c 0.001), breaststroke, and butterfly for all age groups and distances (P  \u3c 0.001) because of a greater relative drop-off between first and 10th place for women. The sex difference in marathon running increased with the world record place and the sex difference for marathon running was greater than for swimming (P \u3c 0.001). The sex difference in swimming increased with world record place and age, but was less than for marathon running. Collectively, these results suggest more depth in women\u27s swimming than marathon running