Optical Synoptic Telescopes: New Science Frontiers

Over the past decade, sky surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have proven the power of large data sets for answering fundamental astrophysical questions. This observational progress, based on a synergy of advances in telescope construction, detectors, and information technology, has had a dramatic impact on nearly all fields of astronomy, and areas of fundamental physics. The next-generation instruments, and the surveys that will be made with them, will maintain this revolutionary progress. The hardware and computational technical challenges and the exciting science opportunities are attracting scientists and engineers from astronomy, optics, low-light-level detectors, high-energy physics, statistics, and computer science. The history of astronomy has taught us repeatedly that there are surprises whenever we view the sky in a new way. This will be particularly true of discoveries emerging from a new generation of sky surveys. Imaging data from large ground-based active optics telescopes with sufficient etendue can address many scientific missions simultaneously. These new investigations will rely on the statistical precision obtainable with billions of objects. For the first time, the full sky will be surveyed deep and fast, opening a new window on a universe of faint moving and distant exploding objects as well as unraveling the mystery of dark energy.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Management of a Capital Stock by Strotz's Naive Planner

A generalized version of the capital management problem posed in a classic paper by R. H. Strotz is analyzed for the case of the "naive" planner who fails to anticipate any impending change in his own preferences. By imposing progressively stronger restrictions on the primitives of the problem --- namely, the planner's discounting function, his utility index function, and the investment technology --- the path of the capital stock is characterized first implicitly as the solution to a differential equation and then explicitly via formulae that may or may not be expressible in closed form. Inasmuch as this procedure turns out to leave the discounting function essentially unrestricted, the theory can accommodate, in particular, decision makers who discount time according to the type of hyperbolic curve said to be suggested by psychological studies. Strategies for numerical computation of capital paths are discussed and are demonstrated in sample planning problems.consumption, computation, hyperbolic discounting, time preference.