A note on Hubbert's hypotheses and techniques

Many have attempted to forecast the date of the production peak and the volume of the ultimate reserves of a mineral commodity, using techniques derived from Hubbert's thesis. This note aims at exploring the scientific foundations and therefore the scope of validity of these forecasting techniques. Looking at the basic assumptions of Hubbert's thesis, it concludes that these techniques should not be used to forecast neither the peak (or plateau) of the annual production rate, nor the ultimate reserves of any mineral, unless given exceptional conditions.

Nonasymptotic analysis of adaptive and annealed Feynman-Kac particle models

Sequential and quantum Monte Carlo methods, as well as genetic type search algorithms can be interpreted as a mean field and interacting particle approximations of Feynman-Kac models in distribution spaces. The performance of these population Monte Carlo algorithms is strongly related to the stability properties of nonlinear Feynman-Kac semigroups. In this paper, we analyze these models in terms of Dobrushin ergodic coefficients of the reference Markov transitions and the oscillations of the potential functions. Sufficient conditions for uniform concentration inequalities w.r.t. time are expressed explicitly in terms of these two quantities. We provide an original perturbation analysis that applies to annealed and adaptive Feynman-Kac models, yielding what seems to be the first results of this kind for these types of models. Special attention is devoted to the particular case of Boltzmann-Gibbs measures' sampling. In this context, we design an explicit way of tuning the number of Markov chain Monte Carlo iterations with temperature schedule. We also design an alternative interacting particle method based on an adaptive strategy to define the temperature increments. The theoretical analysis of the performance of this adaptive model is much more involved as both the potential functions and the reference Markov transitions now depend on the random evolution on the particle model. The nonasymptotic analysis of these complex adaptive models is an open research problem. We initiate this study with the concentration analysis of a simplified adaptive models based on reference Markov transitions that coincide with the limiting quantities, as the number of particles tends to infinity.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/14-BEJ680 in the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

A note on Hubbert's hypotheses and techniques

CERNA WORKING PAPER SERIES 2011-03Many have attempted to forecast the date of the production peak and the volume of the ultimate reserves of a mineral commodity, using techniques derived from Hubbert's thesis. This note aims at exploring the scientific foundations and therefore the scope of validity of these forecasting techniques. Looking at the basic assumptions of Hubbert's thesis, it concludes that these techniques should not be used to forecast neither the peak (or plateau) of the annual production rate, nor the ultimate reserves of any mineral, unless given exceptional conditions

Di-boson results at ATLAS

Pairs of gauge boson produced in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s}$ of 7 TeV are reconstructed with the ATLAS detector in their leptonic final states. Based on samples of integrated luminosity $L=1.0 fb^{-1}$ (for WW, WZ and ZZ) and $35 pb^{-1}$ (for W\gamma and Z\gamma) of 2011 and 2010 LHC data, the total di-boson production cross sections are measured. They are found, together with the kinematic distributions of the selected di-boson systems to be compatible with the expectation from the Standard Model. The di-boson production also gives a handle on possible anomalous triple gauge boson couplings, for which 95% confidence limits are set.Comment: Presented at the 2011 Hadron Collider Physics symposium (HCP-2011), Paris, France, November 14-18 2011, 4 pages, 7 figure

Commes – Le Mont Cavalier

Date de l'opération : 2007 (PC) Inventeur(s) : Giraud Pierre (SDA) Présentation Cette opération de sondages a été réalisée dans le cadre du programme collectif de Recherche sur les sites fortifiés protohistoriques de hauteur en Basse-Normandie. Le mont Cavalier ou butte d’Escure est localisé sur la commune de Commes à proximité de la route de Bayeux à Port-en-Bessin. Il s’agit d’un site fortifié installé sur un éperon calcaire aux pentes escarpées dominant la vallée de l’Aure. Un important re..