Determining source cumulants in femtoscopy with Gram-Charlier and Edgeworth series

Lowest-order cumulants provide important information on the shape of the emission source in femtoscopy. For the simple case of noninteracting identical particles, we show how the fourth-order source cumulant can be determined from measured cumulants in momentum space. The textbook Gram-Charlier series is found to be highly inaccurate, while the related Edgeworth series provides increasingly accurate estimates. Ordering of terms compatible with the Central Limit Theorem appears to play a crucial role even for nongaussian distributions.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure

From Fetish to Fashion: Japanese Style as Commodity in 19th and 20th Century Britain

Japanese representation in art and design brought about an age when, according to a reporter at a 1878 international exhibition in Paris, “even the greatest mistresses of European crafts lay down their weapons in shame.”1 women’s fashions were able to transcend national borders through the development of Japanese designs, Orientalist ideals, and the importance of the body. Eastern eroticism was heightened through British designers, as seen in the development of the Western kimono. From Fetish to Fashion focuses on how the relationship between the state and culture can be established by an unexpected medium: women’s fashion. This thesis examines how the British women’s fashion designers of the second half of the nineteenth century accessed themes of Japanese design following the opening of Japan to foreign trade. It also examines the nexus of state politics and culture in an Orientalist frame, exposing the relationship of Japanese trade and the rising fascination with Japanese culture. By incorporating traditional Japanese motifs of naturalism and the symbolism of the geisha seen in exhibitions and expositions, designers were able to produce a new genre of fashion that would influence the relationship between Britain and Japan leading up to the twentieth century. Japonism in fashion ushered in a wave of Orientalism toward Japan, creating a cultural fascination that would grow into a unique form of cultural appropriation

L\'{e}vy-based growth models

In the present paper, we give a condensed review, for the nonspecialist reader, of a new modelling framework for spatio-temporal processes, based on L\'{e}vy theory. We show the potential of the approach in stochastic geometry and spatial statistics by studying L\'{e}vy-based growth modelling of planar objects. The growth models considered are spatio-temporal stochastic processes on the circle. As a by product, flexible new models for space--time covariance functions on the circle are provided. An application of the L\'{e}vy-based growth models to tumour growth is discussed.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/07-BEJ6130 the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

Assessing Relative Volatility/Intermittency/Energy Dissipation

We introduce the notion of relative volatility/intermittency and demonstrate how relative volatility statistics can be used to estimate consistently the temporal variation of volatility/intermittency when the data of interest are generated by a non-semimartingale, or a Brownian semistationary process in particular. This estimation method is motivated by the assessment of relative energy dissipation in empirical data of turbulence, but it is also applicable in other areas. We develop a probabilistic asymptotic theory for realised relative power variations of Brownian semistationary processes, and introduce inference methods based on the theory. We also discuss how to extend the asymptotic theory to other classes of processes exhibiting stochastic volatility/intermittency. As an empirical application, we study relative energy dissipation in data of atmospheric turbulence.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, v3: major revision, this version contains an application to electricity prices that was omitted from the published versio