Biology, Ecology, and Management of Deer in the Chicago Metropolitan Area W-87-R-8, Annual Job Progress Report

Annual Job Progress Report July 1, 1986 - June 30, 1987 issued September 28, 1987. Includes Appendix A: Helminthic and protozoan parasites of white-tailed deer in urban areas of northeastern Illinois, Jose G. Cisneros; Appendix B: Recommendations for a cooperative new initiative on urban deer management for Cook County, Illinois; Appendix C: Recommendations for deer removal on O'Hare International Airport.Report issued on: 28 September 1987INHS Technical Report prepared for Illinois Department of Conservation Division of Wildlife Resource

Deep Indeterminacy in Physics and Fiction

Indeterminacy in its various forms has been the focus of a great deal of philosophical attention in recent years. Much of this discussion has focused on the status of vague predicates such as ‘tall’, ‘bald’, and ‘heap’. It is determinately the case that a seven-foot person is tall and that a five-foot person is not tall. However, it seems difficult to pick out any determinate height at which someone becomes tall. How best to account for this phenomenon is, of course, a controversial matter. For example, some (such as Sorensen (2001) and Williamson (2002)) maintain that there is a precise height at which someone becomes tall and such apparent cases of indeterminacy merely reflects our ignorance of this fact. Others maintain that there is some genuine – and not merely epistemic – indeterminacy present is such cases and offer various accounts of how best to account for it. Supervaluationists (such as Keefe (2008)), for example, claim that the indeterminacy with respect to vague terms lies in their not having a single definite extension. Rather, each term is associated with a range of possible precise extensions or precisifications such that it is semantically unsettled which is the correct extension. One precisification of ‘tall’ might allow that anyone over five feet ten inches is tall, whereas another would only allow those over six foot to qualify; but no precisification will take someone who is five foot to be tall, and someone who is seven foot will count as tall on all precisifications. Thus – while someone who is seven foot will be determinately tall and someone who is five foot determinately not so – it will be indeterminate whether someone who stands at five foot eleven inches is tall. Yet, it is important to stress that putative cases of indeterminacy are not limited to vague predicates of this kind. Philosophers have invoked indeterminacy in discussions of topics as diverse as moral responsibility (Bernstein (forthcoming)), identity over time (Williams (2014)), and the status of the future (Barnes and Cameron (2009)). In this paper, we focus on two areas where discussion of various kinds of indeterminacy has been commonplace: physics and fiction. We propose a new model for understanding indeterminacy across these domains and argue that it has some notable advantages when compared to earlier accounts. Treating physics and fiction cases univocally also indicates an interesting connection between indeterminacy in these two areas

Typed Norms for Typed Logic Programs

As typed logic programming becomes more mainstream, system building tools like partial deduction systems will need to be mapped from untyped languages to typed ones. It is important, however, when mapping techniques across that the new techniques should exploit the type system as much as possible. in this paper, we show how norms which play a crucial role in termination analysis, can be generated from the prescribed types of a logic program. Interestingly, the types highlight restrictions of earlier norms and suggest how these norms can be extended to obtain some very general and powerful notions of norm which can be used to measure any term in an almost arbitrary way. We see our work on norm derivation as a contribution to the termination analysis of typed logic programs which, in particular, forms an essential part of offline partial deduction systems

Cues from neuroepithelium and surface ectoderm maintain neural crest-free regions within cranial mesenchyme of the developing chick

Within the developing vertebrate head, neural crest cells (NCCs) migrate from the dorsal surface of the hindbrain into the mesenchyme adjacent to rhombomeres (r)1 plus r2, r4 and r6 in three segregated streams. NCCs do not enter the intervening mesenchyme adjacent to r3 or r5, suggesting that these regions contain a NCC-repulsive activity. We have used surgical manipulations in the chick to demonstrate that r3 neuroepithelium and its overlying surface ectoderm independently help maintain the NCC-free zone within r3 mesenchyme. In the absence of r3, subpopulations of NCCs enter r3 mesenchyme in a dorsolateral stream and an ectopic cranial nerve forms between the trigeminal and facial ganglia. The NCC-repulsive activity dissipates/degrades within 5-10 hours of r3 removal. Initially, r4 NCCs more readily enter the altered mesenchyme than r2 NCCs, irrespective of their maturational stage. Following surface ectoderm removal, mainly r4 NCCs enter r3 mesenchyme within 5 hours, but after 20 hours the proportions of r2 NCCs and r4 NCCs ectopically within r3 mesenchyme appear similar

Requirement of Pax6 for the integration of guidance cues in cell migration

Data accessibility. Cell trajectories data and a summary of directedness and angle values are deposited at Dryad: http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.53512. Funding MA was funded by an Alban International Research Studentship (code: E07D400602UY).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Sponsored Search Auctions with Markovian Users

Sponsored search involves running an auction among advertisers who bid in order to have their ad shown next to search results for specific keywords. Currently, the most popular auction for sponsored search is the "Generalized Second Price" (GSP) auction in which advertisers are assigned to slots in the decreasing order of their "score," which is defined as the product of their bid and click-through rate. In the past few years, there has been significant research on the game-theoretic issues that arise in an advertiser's interaction with the mechanism as well as possible redesigns of the mechanism, but this ranking order has remained standard. From a search engine's perspective, the fundamental question is: what is the best assignment of advertisers to slots? Here "best" could mean "maximizing user satisfaction," "most efficient," "revenue-maximizing," "simplest to interact with," or a combination of these. To answer this question we need to understand the behavior of a search engine user when she sees the displayed ads, since that defines the commodity the advertisers are bidding on, and its value. Most prior work has assumed that the probability of a user clicking on an ad is independent of the other ads shown on the page. We propose a simple Markovian user model that does not make this assumption. We then present an algorithm to determine the most efficient assignment under this model, which turns out to be different than that of GSP. A truthful auction then follows from an application of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism. Further, we show that our assignment has many of the desirable properties of GSP that makes bidding intuitive. At the technical core of our result are a number of insights about the structure of the optimal assignment

New International Evidence on Real Estate as a Portfolio Diversifier

This paper provides an international comparison of the benefits of including real estate assets in mixed-asset portfolios. Real estate returns are desmoothed using a variant of the Geltner (1993) approach, and Bayes-Stein estimators are used to increase the stability of portfolio weight estimations. Both unhedged and hedged analyses are conducted. Real estate is found to be an effective portfolio diversifier, and even more so when both domestic and international real estate assets are considered. The optimal allocation to real estate is 15% to 25%, and remains stable when the level of the standard deviation of real estate is altered. Real estate allocation between domestic and nondomestic assets, however, varies substantially across countries, depending on whether returns are hedged or not.

International Evidence on Real Estate as a Portfolio Diversifier

This paper provides an international comparison of the benefits of including real estate assets – both domestic and international – in mixed-asset portfolios. Data from seven countries on three continents are considered for a common time period (1987-2001) to facilitate comparisons. Real estate returns are desmoothed using a variant of the Geltner (1993) approach, and Bayes-Stein estimators are used to increase the stability of portfolio weight estimations. Both unhedged and hedged analyses are conducted. Real estate is found to be an effective portfolio diversifier, and even more so when both domestic and international real estate assets are considered. The optimal allocation to real estate is in the 15 to 25% range, and remains remarkably constant in the various analyses. The breakdown of the real estate allocation between domestic and non-domestic assets, however, is found to vary substantially across countries and depending on whether returns are hedged or not.