Ruth Ellis in the Condemned Cell: Voyeurism and Resistance

When Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be executed in England and Wales in July 1955, execution had long been something which took place in private. It is a well established argument that the ending of public execution in 1868 made the practice mundane and bureaucratic, and ‘wrung out of it any trace of the ceremonial and festive’. However, whilst many twentieth-century executions were carried out with little attention from the press or public, there were also ‘spectacular’ cases which commanded high levels of interest and were intensively reported. These cases demonstrated that the execution audience still existed and craved details about the final, tense days of the condemned, when the Home Secretary’s exercise of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy was the only thing that could save them from the gallows. The hanging of Ruth Ellis was one such case

Studies in the History of Probability and Statistics. XXXV: Multiple decrements or competing risks

Given two states A and B such that individuals in state A have mutually exclusive probabilities, possibly dependent on the time spent in state A, of leaving that state because of (i) death, or (ii) passage to state B, what is the probability of an individual passing to state B and dying there within a given period? This problem has been of great interest and importance to actuaries for over 100 years and the solutions of their professional contemporaries have appeared in their textbooks. Twenty-five years ago statisticians felicitously named the technique the theory of competing risks (Neyman, 1950) and developed the formulae ab initio in the framework of Markov processes. Consideration of the problem started with Daniel Bernoulli's smallpox mathematics and continued with pension fund financing involving the payment of annuities to invalid lives. Most of the currently accepted techniques were developed during the nineteenth century. This article reviews the history both of actuarial and statistical contributions to the literatur

Three months journeying of a Hawaiian monk seal

Hawaiian monk seals (Monachus schauinslandi) are endemic to the Hawaiian Islands and are the most endangered species of marine mammal that lives entirely within the jurisdiction of the United States. The species numbers around 1300 and has been declining owing, among other things, to poor juvenile survival which is evidently related to poor foraging success. Consequently, data have been collected recently on the foraging habitats, movements, and behaviors of monk seals throughout the Northwestern and main Hawaiian Islands. Our work here is directed to exploring a data set located in a relatively shallow offshore submerged bank (Penguin Bank) in our search of a model for a seal's journey. The work ends by fitting a stochastic differential equation (SDE) that mimics some aspects of the behavior of seals by working with location data collected for one seal. The SDE is found by developing a time varying potential function with two points of attraction. The times of location are irregularly spaced and not close together geographically, leading to some difficulties of interpretation. Synthetic plots generated using the model are employed to assess its reasonableness spatially and temporally. One aspect is that the animal stays mainly southwest of Molokai. The work led to the estimation of the lengths and locations of the seal's foraging trips.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/193940307000000473 the IMS Collections (http://www.imstat.org/publications/imscollections.htm) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

High efficiency SiO2-TiO2 hybrid sol-gel antireflective coating for infrared applications

Sol-gel derived antireflective thin films were created for chalcogenide glass substrates in the 1.5-5 mu m wavelength range of infrared region. Presented herein is a preparation and characterization of the hybrid sol-gel created including particle size, refractive index, pH, and Fourier transform infrared FTIR transmission spectra. It is shown that an increase of not less than 8% and up to 25.1% transmission is achieved using sol-gel derived antireflective coatings

Studies on a fusarium disease of corn and sorghum (Preliminary)

A new fusarium disease of corn made its appearance in Iowa, during the season of 1914, seriously injuring the corn crop 01\u27 the state and causing a loss estimated at more than $15,000,000. It was not confined to Iowa, for reports of a similar disease were sent to the Iowa Agricultural Experiment station by H. B. Clark of Blair, Neb., who found an abundance of it there and elsewhere in that state. One of the authors observed the fusarium that same season in western I Illinois and northern Missouri and Dr. E. C. Stakman reported that it occurred in Minnesota. In the following year, 1915, the disease was again abundant, tho not as severe as in 1914

The New Meteor Radar at Penn State: Design and First Observations

In an effort to provide new and improved meteor radar sensing capabilities, Penn State has been developing advanced instruments and technologies for future meteor radars, with primary objectives of making such instruments more capable and more cost effective in order to study the basic properties of the global meteor flux, such as average mass, velocity, and chemical composition. Using low-cost field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), combined with open source software tools, we describe a design methodology enabling one to develop state-of-the art radar instrumentation, by developing a generalized instrumentation core that can be customized using specialized output stage hardware. Furthermore, using object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques and open-source tools, we illustrate a technique to provide a cost-effective, generalized software framework to uniquely define an instrument s functionality through a customizable interface, implemented by the designer. The new instrument is intended to provide instantaneous profiles of atmospheric parameters and climatology on a daily basis throughout the year. An overview of the instrument design concepts and some of the emerging technologies developed for this meteor radar are presented

Corn Stalk and Corn Root Diseases in Iowa

Although it has been generally believed that corn is Jess subject to the attacks of fungus than any other agricultural crop, it is estimated that corn smut, corn rust and bacterial disease damage the crops in Iowa to the extent of $8,000,000 annually. In 1914 the attention of the Botanical section of the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station was called to a new and important disease attacking corn which was later found to be wide spread in the state, working great damage

Responding to the crisis: Economic stabilisation grants

This article reviews some of the mainstream policies proposed to tackle the economic crisis of 2008-09 and its aftermath, and goes on to advocate a policy of economic stabilisation grants (ESGs). It argues that ESGs, which would be paid to every citizen at a rate that could be varied according to the severity of the crisis, would be more effective in boosting aggregate demand and more efficient in terms of resource allocation. Unlike the alternatives, ESGs would also address directly two key issues deriving from the process of globalisation, namely the growth of systemic uncertainty and rising inequality