Blockchain Papers

É. Sanchez-Palencia

No abstract is available for this record.

Beattie, Bruce R.

No abstract is available for this record.

B. Balamurugan, T. Poongodi, M. R. Manu, S. Karthikeyan · 5 authors

The moving image archive of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) includes a copy of the film The Double Day (1975), cataloged in the series Moving Images Relating to International Development Programs and Activities, 1979–1991, a collection of more than eight hundred titles “created to provide information on assistance programs supported by the Agency for International Development (AID).”1 Yet, The Double Day does not, in fact, directly depict or engage with any specific development or aid initiative. Instead, the film—directed by US-based Brazilian filmmaker Helena Solberg as part of the International Women’s Film Project collective and described as “the first Latin American feminist documentary”—examines the gendered dynamics of paid and unpaid labor through the testimonies of women from Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico.2 Its presence in the USAID archive is likely a consequence of its funding history, having received support from the Inter-American Foundation, a USAID-affiliated entity; the development agencies of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; the United Nations Development Program; and US philanthropist Calvin Cafritz.3These transnational funding structures not only enabled the film’s production but also determined its archival destination, which renders legible its place within the history of international development.4 The Double Day’s institutional trajectory reflects the shifting configurations of aid, gender, and media during a historic moment when women were being repositioned at the center of what Arturo Escobar has described as development’s “regimes of visuality.”5 Especially relevant to The Double Day’s production and exhibition was the international institutional framework of Women in Development (WID). Emerging in the early 1970s and culminating in United Nations’ proclamation of 1975 as International Women’s Year, WID emphasized women’s participation in the global economy as both an index and mechanism of development. Indeed, The Double Day premiered at the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, held in Mexico City.6 Within this context, the film forms part of a broader trajectory of media use by international organizations that intensified during the 1970s—as best exemplified by Media Habitat, a collection of 236 documentary films commissioned by the United Nations to represent urban and rural development initiatives for the 1976 Habitat Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver. As a policy-shaping initiative, Media Habitat primarily featured films from the Global South intended not only to illustrate but also to help codify standardized audiovisual markers of “underdevelopment” that determined access to the emerging global economic order and to international aid.7Framed in relation to these international institutions and their operations, The Double Day could similarly be considered “development media”—exemplifying the type of nonfiction media produced and distributed outside of the commercial film circuits whose aspects and subcategories have been variously described in scholarship as nontheatrical, useful, sponsored, institutional, industrial, educational, or nonprofessional/amateur.8 Scholars working in this area have emphasized the institutional contexts of such media’s production and exhibition infrastructures as shaping its instrumentalized effects. From a feminist perspective, such an approach is crucial to grappling with the broader question of how “gender impacts [these works’] shape, content, and trajectories.”9 Yet we also argue that, taken in isolation, the institutional and infrastructural contexts are insufficient to account for the complex relationship between media and development, potentially not only limiting our understanding of the reach and impact of development but also distorting our interpretive conclusions. For example, to categorize The Double Day as “development media” is to overlook the film’s place within Solberg’s directorial oeuvre, as well as within the histories of both transnational women’s filmmaking and radical Latin American documentary cinema to which it simultaneously belongs. Such exclusive framing is especially limiting given that women globally were disproportionately engaged in nonfiction production throughout the twentieth century—sometimes by political choice but more often due to structural exclusions from fiction filmmaking. Even in nonfiction historiography, however, institutional media has remained particularly marginal, reinforcing hierarchies that separate such works from the aesthetic and authorial frameworks through which film history has been constructed.10 This marginalization not only tends to erase women’s contributions but also presumes a “weak” or derivative authorship, rendering these films unworthy of the interpretive attention needed to apprehend their aesthetic and political complexity.11 The same dynamic is likely to structure assumptions about “development media” as well.Categorizing The Double Day exclusively within this category would further prompt us to assume top-down institutional analyses that have been characteristic of both institutional media methodologies and the scholarship on development at large. This, in turn, would risk obscuring this film’s radical Marxist approach to women’s labor as well as its concrete contribution to activism and its attendant grassroot structures. In Mexico City, The Double Day became a catalyst for feminist solidarity in practice when one of the film’s protagonists, Bolivian activist and trade unionist Domitila Barrios de Chungara, was invited to participate in the Tribune of Non-Governmental Organizations held alongside the official UN conference.12 There, Barrios de Chungara challenged Western feminist priorities by reframing the debate around labor, class, and imperialism, helping to articulate a shared Third World feminist agenda that significantly departed from the developmentalist vision of the United Nations and USAID.13 Seen through the lens of activist media, The Double Day helped forge transnational solidarity networks by enabling information exchange across the diverse voices that shaped its making—from the women featured in the film to the activists who circulated it—revealing a considerably more dynamic interplay between institutional and grassroots or contingent media practices.Moreover, the film’s Latin American context—reflected in Solberg’s formation in Brazil as the only woman in Cinema Novo, its focus on women from across the region, and its premiere and key reception in Mexico City—requires grappling with the regional specificities of the very notion of development in its multiple iterations.14 Far from being an epistemological and political framework imposed solely by the Global North, both the practices of development and the theoretical foundations of developmentalism (understood as a broad and polysemic set of discourses) were shaped through the active participation of Latin American economists.15 Within this iteration, underdevelopment, as a constitutive notion of developmentalism, became central to a distinctly critical strand, which by the late 1960s became known as the dependency theory.16 This same approach is reflected in some of the best-known Latin American radical film manifestos of the time, arising precisely from the same milieus to which Solberg belonged.17These various considerations of the film’s history illustrate the methodological challenges confronting feminist scholars seeking to assess the impact of development on media projects, theories, and practices. To disregard the developmentalist context of such works by emphasizing their political aesthetics and affects risks reproducing a romanticized narrative of heroic resistance (albeit from a feminist perspective). Yet to engage exclusively with their institutional and material infrastructures risks naturalizing developmentalism’s political and epistemological foundations at the expense of the goals and beliefs of the many women who participated in these projects. The contradictions and ambivalences that animate such histories call for feminist frameworks capable of holding both institutional complicity and radical possibility in view.This challenge resonates with ongoing debates about the politics of the archive and what Allyson Field has termed “the practice of informed speculation.”18 As she reminds us, feminist, queer, and decolonial methodologies have long taught us to “press at the limits” of the archive to “inoculate our scholarship against our evidence’s afflictions.”19 The concern that the evidence we draw on in our analysis reproduces the very structures and blind spots of the dominant ideology and therefore shapes and delimits our interpretation becomes particularly urgent when engaging the developmentalist media corpus. Informed speculation offers an alternative by inviting the experimental, creative, and speculative rewriting of history, mobilizing the archive “in a project that runs counter to the original purpose, or the imperative to preserve, or the conditions that led to erasure.”20 Yet, as Field cautions, such speculative gestures must remain grounded in a deep and “intimate familiarity with the archive” that we are working with and against. Building on this imperative, we suggest that the developmentalist archive, in particular, demands expansion and critical reconsideration in ways that unsettle the very disciplinary frameworks through which it has been studied as well as the larger institutional contexts for such knowledge production.Our focus on The Double Day in the opening of this introduction thus foregrounds the entanglements of institutional and grassroots forces, local and international contexts, structural and interpersonal relations, and creative and economic factors that have shaped not only this film but the broader ecosystem of development media projects—and their preservation—over time. Addressing such a constellation involves transgressing methodologically entrenched divisions between political economy and aesthetics, between material infrastructures and affective regimes; reckoning with divergent periodizations across film history and world economics; and situating these within the local specificities of women’s movements and international institutional programs. It also demands attentiveness to the coexistence of multiple, and sometimes competing, understandings of development—each historically, geographically, and ideologically situated.We imagine this special issue as an opening toward a critical dialogue, not only about how such an approach might be enacted in practice but also about the far-reaching ways development paradigms have shaped both our objects of study and the contours of the field itself. The decision to center institutionally sponsored films across all the essays in this issue is deliberate and enables us to highlight institutional critique as a vital methodological imperative within our analytical framework. Created within the frameworks of international organizations, state agencies, or NGOs, these films’ histories make legible the institutional logics that underwrite their production. Yet our critique does not stop at these specific entities. Rather, we argue for a broader interrogation of the political conditions and institutional infrastructures that shape media and knowledge production more generally. This includes contemporary corporations embedded in the digital platform economy, from streaming services to the rapid expansion of AI. Equally critical is a reflexive examination of academia itself, where departments of economics, political science, and centers for development have played a formative role in producing and legitimizing developmentalist theories and policy frameworks. While the humanities and arts have at times offered critical alternatives, they have also frequently mirrored and reinforced many of the same developmentalist assumptions. A feminist analysis of the nexus between development and media must therefore unsettle not only dominant archives but also the institutional and disciplinary foundations of our own scholarly practices.As scholars, we share the complex position of navigating the same tensions between institutional complicity and emancipatory aspiration as many of the media-makers whose work we study. Mirroring our subjects is also the transnational, collective mode of this special issue’s own production as it emerges from an ongoing informal working group we have sustained over several years. While relying on institutional and disciplinary affordances—such as university funding for conferences or access to academic publishing platforms—we have been working toward creating a community that exceeds, and often resists, the prevailing logics of our academic institutions. Our aim has been to create a space for shared inquiry and mutual support that pushes back against disciplinary siloing and technocratic neoliberal assessment modes of both labor and knowledge production—and this certainly extends to our experience collaborating with the journal editors throughout the publication process. Our goal has been to examine both the persistence and variability of developmentalism, understood as what Gustavo Esteva calls a “powerful but fragile semantic constellation,” as a conceptual formation that has historically inspired, legitimized, and mobilized media projects across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.21 And gendered biopolitics, from population control to gender mainstreaming, have remained integral to development policies and media practices, recurring across formats from institutional newsreels to film festivals.We share the conviction that, far beyond the history of nonfiction institutional media, development (as both a broad ideological project and a network of material and institutional practices) and developmentalism (as a set of discourses and theoretical models associated with development) have exerted a far-reaching influence on film and media cultures at large. As such, they must be treated as a major force in shaping global film and media systems and also the many ongoing assumptions behind their critical discourses. The discipline of communication studies was founded on modernization theory governed by Cold War goals of dissemination of Western liberal democracy around the world, while “an area studies framework allowed compartmentalizing Western and non-Western outcomes of technologies that were always claimed to be universal.”22 Despite critique from postcolonial and critical race studies, many of these frameworks have remained foundational for media theory.23 In historical scholarship, as we increasingly move beyond “modernity” as a dominant conceptual anchor, engaging with practices and discourses of development opens more precise analytical pathways. These film and media’s entanglements with the logics of and economic and the associated with as well as their conceptual underdevelopment, and impact in as diverse as and of media aesthetic and paradigms in film and film and funding are developmentalist assumptions to the they to underwrite the narrative and logics of and global media from the structure of the film to the cultures of argue that a examination of the historical entanglements between film and developmentalist aesthetics, modes of as well as infrastructures and critical the and that our contemporary media is a of the historical contours of development as a field of inquiry embedded within a of some of the methodologies by the featured in this special a of this complex history, to the larger at in media, development, and gender all its development a it as an of be with practices as divergent as and in In as we work on this the of the of the USAID the ideological that have the history of international the and of this on the global its a from development as a global practice and as an institutional and which over the has as a with its own media Yet or does not erase the historical impact of these the contradictions they have reflected and over the as the of development several crucial to the economic theories of development initiatives to and through the of the development an international policy framework at from the Global to the of the Global the by the political role of and the of the International the on was challenged by dependency theory and at development as global structural the neoliberal of the the Programs by the and World imposed and as conditions for and forms of assistance became known as the major markers for international development development has moving beyond economic to such as the Human Development and the Development and from international organizations such as the United Nations to a broader network of These frameworks increasingly of and liberal of and with what in many ways to various while the of the to development’s epistemological more scholarship has toward a of its and material the field has to a of and critical by and scholars, which development as a dynamic of conceptual and political to these the studies in this special issue call for sustained analysis in place of In we draw from a of and that in of of gender and to this special issue engage that and from Mexico to contemporary specific local historical of global distinctly feminist methodologies as well as attention to studies that this issue a in the global history of development on and documentary work in Mexico how early women infrastructures as of while US films an early of state and transnational on a outside the Global as the of developmentalist both the and markers of development media, its to the and Latin central grounded in archival also women’s in transnational and the methodological of archives on study of the series to a a digital media not by but by women not as but as subjects and within circuits of neoliberal and the aesthetics and of how development’s has models of to contemporary neoliberal paradigms of and analysis how digital and gender and practices, discourses on and their of these essays the of some of the historical of developmentalist as the question of the role of the state within such on a notion of economic as a and the dominant of development that the state as the for and through infrastructural projects. This understanding of development was shared across both of the as well as in the Third The United and the increasingly mobilized international in the of the modes of international at the postcolonial of policy and ideological These programs were at the expansion of their and of while with the and decolonial of The conceptual between modernization and development that the Cold in of and hierarchies of that long and As an of postcolonial their role as of international aid concern about the of Western development projects. In alternative across the Global South that to structural between and through policies of and In many they were further the global structures. In Latin for example, this approach was through organizations such as the United Nations for Latin and the both developmentalist projects and their have taken many forms historically, and they have and they have been to a of projects, and postcolonial and development has been and in ways and with frequently political While many of these alternative frameworks the embedded in dominant Western they often technocratic and assumptions. gender and gender as for the of to be shaped by This becomes particularly in the media that of development where women frequently a crucial associated with and women were as both the subjects and of their participation in the and labor often as the index of In this study of from the 1970s how women were as of this as these about women’s urban and recurring and of a within the own of and critique that official examination of archives and enables a feminist interrogation of their mobilizing a of the in the of contribution to this issue similarly the of a dynamic within as well as across ideological the of women’s and the media of the and as active in labor and as integral to the technocratic women became of as their labor remained a of and analysis and archival with attention to the specific of and It also transnational that as a and affective a nexus of and practices through which gender, media, and developmentalism one film not as a but as part of the of alongside and work a broader concern of this special media as a of developmentalist projects. The debates the World and which international such as the United Nations and a critical historical for such primarily by postcolonial and of the for the of media and communication infrastructures in as to counter Western The a between and economic how systems of media and reinforced global hierarchies of and in an agenda that supported and alternative media infrastructures across postcolonial contexts, the framework gender as an analytical This “gender in the 1970s by of the Women in Development in relation to The Double its political critique of with its broader to center women in development policy through and This was also in of media, which was shaped by its international reach and audiovisual production and and and Yet, as WID institutional it also to the and of the women’s development programs often by in These were by a of studies, and on and the to of women’s presence and through the of their economic and In this on the filmmaker this history directly by the and of for women by the WID framework during the with and agencies the of and against Women in at the of the neoliberal turn, when institutional media often the only to access and support to projects. The an by this dynamic as of the from the Global South are to engage with the developmentalist assumptions funding models that their similarly the as a in developmentalist media history by the of and centers on the Film a between of and the attention toward the and labor by and work was foundational the of and the of audiovisual aid, as both a of development projects and a critical for their the in this issue argue for a with media, gender, and developmentalism as an field of that is and shaped by feminist and methodologies and that challenge the entanglements between academic knowledge production and and technocratic development And while methodological these dynamics at the structural the of feminist in media and cinema by this the very a

Donald Ornstein, Louis Sucheston

A recent theorem of Orey [12] (see also [1], [6], [7], [13]) asserts that if $T$ is an $L_1$ operator induced on a discrete measure space by an irreducible recurrent aperiodic Markov matrix, then the condition (C) holds: $f \epsilon L_1, \int f = 0$ implies that $T^n f$ converges to zero in $L_1$. In an attempt to determine when (C) holds for more general operators, we at first prove the following (Theorem 1.1): Let $T$ be a positive linear contraction operator on $L_1$; if $T^nf$ and $T^{n+1}f$ intersect slightly, but uniformly in $f$ in the unit sphere of $L_1$, then $T^nf - T^{n+1}f$ converges to zero in norm. (C) follows if $T$ is conservative and ergodic (Corollary 1.3). In Section 2 we derive from this a simple proof of Orey's theorem. The main result of the paper is in Section 3 and could be called a "zero-two" theorem: Let $P(x, A)$ be a Markov kernel, and assume that there is a $\sigma$-finite measure $m$ such that for each $A, m(A) = 0$ implies $P(x, A) = 0$ a.e. and $m(A) > 0$ implies $\sum^\infty_{n=0} P^{(n)}(x, A) = \infty$ a.e. Then the total variation of the measure $P^{(n)}(x, \cdot) - P^{(n+1)}(x, \cdot)$ is either a.e. 2 for all $n$ or it converges a.e. to 0 as $n \rightarrow \infty$. In Section 4 it is shown that a version of the zero-two theorem essentially contains the Jamison-Orey generalization of Orey's theorem to Harris processes. Section 1 and Section 2 of this paper do not assume any knowledge of either operator ergodic theory or probability. Some known results in ergodic theory are applied in Section 3, but the proof of the main theorem does not depend on them.

William Michael Lloyd Holcombe

The theory of near-rings has arisen in a variety of ways. There is a natural desire to generalise the theory of rings and skew fields by relaxing some of their defining axioms. It has also been the hope of some mathematicians that certain problems in group theory, particularly
\ninvolving permutation groups and group representations, may perhaps be clarified by developing a coherent algebraic theory of near-rings. Moreover, there is an increasing recognition by mathematicians in many branches of the subject, both pure and applied, of the ubiquity of
\nnear-ring like objects.
\n
\nThe first steps in the subject were taken by Dickson and Zassenhans with their studies of 'near-fields', and by Wielandt with his classification of an important class of abstract near-rings. Papers by Frohlich, Blackett, Betsch and Laxton developed the theory considerably. Lately authors such as Beidleman, Ramakotaiah, Tharmanatram, Maxson, Malone and Clay have all added to our knowledge.
\n
\nThe history of the subject has been strongly influenced by our knowledge of ring theory, and although this has often been beneficial it must not be overlooked that a number of important problems in near-ring theory have no real parallel in the theory of rings. It is probably best to try to preserve a balance, and not to endeavour exclusively, either to generalise theorems from ring theory irrespective
\nof their usefulness, or to ignore the theory of rings and attempt to formulate a completely independent theory. In many cases our results are generalisations of theorems from ring-theory but at certain important junctures we will explicitly use the fact that we are dealing with a near-ring which is not a ring. This is a very interesting
\ndevelopment in the subject.
\n
\nWe proceed, in the first chapter, with a review of the terms and notation that will be used in this thesis.
\n
\nWhere definitions and concepts are of a specialized or technical nature and only used in one section, it seems more sensible to postpone introducing them until a more natural point in the proceedings.
\n
\nChapter 2 gives a summary of the results on the various radicals corresponding to the Jacobson radical for associative rings. Most of these results are well known and readily available in the literature. We also consider near-rings with one, or more, of these radicals zero.
\n
\nWe defined, in Chapter 1, three different types of primitive
\nnear-ring, which are all genuine generalisations of the ring theoretic concept. Of these three, the two most important are 2-primitive and 0-primitive near-rings. In Chapter 3, we examine 2-primitive near-rings with certain natural conditions imposed on them. A theorem is obtained
\nwhich could be considered to be the equivalent result for near-rings of the theorem classifying simple, artinian rings, due originally to Wedderburn and redeveloped by Jacobson.
\n
\nChapters 4 and 5 deal with 0-primitive near-rings satisfying
\ncertain conditions. Chapter 5 is a generalisation of Chapter 4, but we felt that the mathematical techniques involved would be clearer if the special case in Chapter 4 was expounded first. In these two chapters we classify a sizeable class of 0-primitive near-rings with identity.
\nand descending chain condition on right ideals.
\n
\nSeveral types of prime near-rings have been developed in the
\nliterature. In Chapter 6 we examine these and related concepts.
\n
\nIn the theory of rings, Goldies' classification of prime and
\nsemi-prime ring with ascending chain conditions, has been of immense importance. Whether such a result could be obtained in the theory of near-rings is a matter for conjecture, at the moment. We have made a start on the problem with the construction of a class of near-rings which
\nbehave in a very similar way to Prime rings with the Goldie chain conditions. This is the content of Chapter 7. The inspiration for its came mainly from the proof of Goldies' first theorem, due to C. Procesi, which is featured in Jacobson's book. (Jacobson [1]).
\n
\nChapter 8, is an attempt to initiate the development of a theory of vector groups and near-algebras which would play an important röle-in the future theory of near-rings, in a way, perhaps, similar to the Ale vector spaces and algebras play in ring theory. This may lead, in time, to results on 2-primitive near-rings with identity and a minimal right
\nideal, for example, or a Galois theory for certain 2-primitive nearrings. For the former problem, the experience of the semi-group theorists (Hoehake [1] etc. ) may prove useful.
\n
\nFinally a note on the numbering of results and definitions etc. If a reference is made, containing only two numbers, e. g. 1.12 then this means, "item 12 of section 1 of the present chapter". If a reference reads: 3.1.12, then this means "item 12 of section 1 of Chapter 3.

Vasudha Chopra, Sukanya Das

Given the increasing demand pressure on water resources coupled with supply holdups and institutional failures, fresh-water resources are increasingly susceptible to depletion and could potentially add to water stress in India. A vast demand-supply gap necessitates water conservation, including recycling measures. India has a great potential in wastewater treatment, and one of the ways to address it is decentralisation of wastewater treatment given its environmental benefits. Based on the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM), this study assesses Delhi urban households’ willingness to pay for the Operation & Maintenance (O&M) costs of a local Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTP) that supplies residential complexes treated water for toilet-flushing. The study found that if freshwater prices rise sufficiently for consumers, they may be willing to subsidise a decentralized WWTP to cover at least their non-potable water uses. In addition, the co-provision of such public goods can become an important supplement to urban municipal finance.

Jiarun Hu, Qian Luo, Jiaen Zhang

Security breaches of the cryptocurrency exchanges usually cause the price fluctuation in the market. Approximately one hundred cryptocurrency thefts, including hacks and scams, has occurred since 2012 to 2018, half of which are hacks of Bitcoins. Based on the thirty Bitcoin hacks, this study portrays the general price pattern during the hack. And it illustrates the link between the size of the hack and the subsequent price change of Bitcoin. The tests reveal that the larger the volume of the hack, the stronger the price drop. However, a similar obvious relationship does not exist for the recovery of the price. The study might be the first piece of research focus on the hacks and the price pattern in a short time period.

Vasilis Kostakis, Chris Giotitsas

The still raging financial crisis of 2007–2008 has enabled the emergence of several alternative practices concerning the production, circulation, and use of money. This essay explores the political economy of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Specifically, we examine the context in which this digital currency is emerging as well as its nature, dynamics, advantages, and disadvantages. We conclude that Bitcoin, a truly interesting experiment, exemplifies “distributed capitalism” and should be mostly seen as a technological innovation. Rather than providing pragmatic answers and solutions to the current views on the financial crisis, Bitcoin provides some useful and timely questions about the principles and bases of the dominant political economy. A ECONOMIA POLÍTICA DO BITCOINResumoO aquecimento da crise financeira de 2007-2008 permitiu o surgimento de várias práticas alternativas em matéria de produção, circulação e uso do dinheiro. Este ensaio explora a economia política do ecossistema Bitcoin. Especificamente, vamos examinar o contexto em que essa moeda digital está emergindo, bem como a sua natureza, dinâmica, vantagens e desvantagens. Concluímos que Bitcoin, uma experiência verdadeiramente interessante, exemplifica "capitalismo distribuído" e deve ser visto principalmente como uma inovação tecnológica. Em vez de fornecer respostas e soluções pragmáticas para os pontos de vista atuais sobre a crise financeira, Bitcoin fornece algumas perguntas úteis e oportunas sobre os princípios e as bases da economia política dominante.

William C. Hsiao, Alan Maynard

On behalf of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons/Congress of Neurological Surgeons Joint Section on Disorders of the Spine and Peripheral Nerves, it is my great privilege to introduce these Guidelines for the Management of Acute Cervical Spine and Spinal Cord Injuries. These guidelines represent the initial installment of a more comprehensive guidelines initiative from the Joint Section on behalf of all practicing neurosurgeons and their patients. The Section is grateful to the small working group who devoted considerable time and effort to the generation of this outstanding document. We would like to formally recognize the Joint Section on Trauma for their important collaboration on this project. The Section would also like to acknowledge and thank the parent organizations, the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, for their guidance of and support for this project, most notably through the efforts of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons/ Congress of Neurological Surgeons Guidelines Committee. The Section is also deeply indebted to Michael Apuzzo and the staff of Neurosurgery for their advice and editorial assistance in preparing this document for publication. The application of Neurosurgery’ s rigorous peer-reviewed editorial process has clearly enhanced the quality, balance, and stature of this document. Perhaps most importantly, Neurosurgery has provided an extraordinary vehicle for the widespread dissemination and ultimate incorporation of these guidelines to improve the care and enhance the outcomes of patients with traumatic cervical spine and spinal cord injuries. One of the truly important functions of organized neurosurgery is the generation of evidenced-based clinical practice guidelines. Properly developed, such guidelines can answer important questions, resolve uncertainty, identify areas of deficient knowledge and opportunities for future scientific investigation, standardize treatment, and improve the quality of care and the outcomes for patients. The now widely disseminated head trauma guidelines, for example, have clearly made a difference in the outcomes of patients with severe head injury. Guidelines development is a highly structured process with rigorous methodological criteria and exacting standards. It is a time-, labor-, and resource-intensive process that has served as a significant obstacle to more widespread guidelines development throughout neurosurgery. In the past, clinical practice guidelines have been developed by publicly supported epidemiologists and methodologists who understood study design, data analysis, and the guidelines process, but not the disease. This absence of context and clinical perspective significantly limited the value and relevance of their results. Alternatively, clinician-generated guidelines often took the form of methodologically flawed consensus panels and expert opinion, also of limited value. The Joint Spine Section recognized the importance of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and the challenges of their development. The appropriate clinical expertise, strict adherence to established methodological standards for guidelines development, and considerable resource investment for the development, dissemination, and maintenance of the guidelines documents were deemed crucial to our guidelines initiative. Cervical spine and spinal cord injury was chosen as the initial guidelines topic because of the personal, social, and economic devastation of these injuries, their complex nature, and the high level of uncertainty, as reflected in wide practice variations, as to the value and indications for many of the aspects of evaluation and treatment. The clinical practice guidelines contained in this supplement to Neurosurgery represent a remarkable effort. They address the key issues related to the evaluation and management of these complex conditions that are relevant to the treating physician. In every chapter, the pertinent issues are succinctly stated, the published data are comprehensively presented in the evidentiary tables, and the evidence is thoroughly discussed and critically evaluated throughout the text. The linkage between the quality of the evidence and the strength of the recommendations was not a “black box” process but an open, deliberative exercise by skilled experts guided by a rigorous set of standards. Despite the strength and potential value of this document, it is important to acknowledge the inherent limitations of clinical practice guidelines. This, or any other, evidence-based clinical practice guidelines document does not represent the definitive source of knowledge on the stated topic. Rather, it represents recommendations of varying strength and certainty based on an analysis of the best available published data. These data, however, are often conflicting, flawed, or incomplete, and there are unavoidable elements of potential bias from subjectivity, perspective, and experience of the individuals and group involved in the analysis and interpretation of these data. In essence, proof is a relative term based on the interpretation of evidence. Furthermore, it is subject to different standards. A relevant example comes from the field of jurisprudence, where the standard of proof (i.e., guilt) for criminal trials is “beyond a reasonable doubt,” whereas the standard for civil courts must simply reflect “a preponderance of evidence” or “more likely than not.” These different standards evolved because of the perceived different consequences of a wrongful verdict. Moreover, as Stephen Haines likes to note, the verdict “not guilty” does not mean innocent; it merely says not proved. Such are the vagaries associated with the interpretation of even scientific evidence. Principled people can look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions subject to their own personal perspective, experience, and stake in the result. Nevertheless, the Joint Section and Guidelines Development Group went to great lengths to identify and avoid—or at least minimize—these potential problems. The working group adopted the most widely recognized and rigorous standards for guidelines development. A diverse panel of experts with expertise in spine, trauma, and epidemiology brought relevant clinical, scientific, and methodological competence to enhance both the analytical and the deliberative aspects of this process. Periodic outside reviews were routinely obtained for topics or areas of contention or uncertainty to add additional perspective and balance. Above all, the process was accountable and transparent at every stage. Ultimately, we offer these guidelines as a living document to those professionals who treat patients with traumatic spinal injury. We hope each practitioner will critically evaluate these guidelines and come to his or her own conclusion on how, whether, and when to implement its recommendations. It may be used either as a reference or as a basis for standardized protocols of evaluation and management of the patients with traumatic spinal injury. For clinical and basic science researchers, we hope that it will identify and catalyze scientific investigation in areas of deficient knowledge. As a Section, we stand firmly behind this important document and will continuously update the recommendations as new knowledge and understanding is developed. We sincerely believe that these guidelines can improve the care and enhance the outcomes of patients with traumatic injuries to the cervical spine and spinal cord.

Kurt Kreith

1. Introduction.The classical Sturmian theorem of ordinary differential equations deals with functions u(x) and v(x) which are, respectively, solutions of differential equations(1) Um-^^j+tumO,(2) Mv=-l{J^+yv = 0.Under the assumption that "F is larger than M" (in the sense that a(x) ä a(x) > 0 and c(x) £ y(x)) one can infer information about all solutions of (2) from knowledge about a particular nontrivial solution of (1)-i.e. if u(xx) = u(x2)=0 then every solution of (2) has a zero in [xx, x2].These ideas have been generalized to second order elliptic equations by several authors ([l]-[4]) considering elliptic operators and also by Protter [5] and Swanson [6] considering the nonselfadjoint case.Given a proper relation among the coefficients of F and M and that Lu=0 has a nontrivial solution with nodal domain Ü, then it can be shown that every solution of Mv = 0 has a zero in Í2.While all the above proofs of this fact make essential use of some sort of ordering among elliptic operators, the nature of this ordering is never defined in operator-theoretic terms.The results of §2 below suggest that it is an order relationship between certain resolvents of the differential operators F and M which underlies the separation properties characteristic of Sturmian theorems.It will be shown that quite general operator equations in a Banach space 3S satisfy a type of Sturmian theorem if the operators' resolvents satisfy prescribed positivity requirements with respect to a cone SP.In order to apply this theory to differential operators, one must first establish the corresponding positivity properties for their resolvents.This is done in §3 for sufficiently regular nonselfadjoint second order elliptic operators, and the general theory of §2 is then applied in the proof of two Sturmian theorems and the establishment of criteria for certain Green's functions to be positive.

Harry N. Scheiber

Historians have recently given much attention to the active, formative role of state governments in the American economy before the Civil War.1 The states exercised nearly exclusive control over many aspects of economic life, and in such areas as labor, banking, and corporation policy the federal government interfered relatively little. The consequence was considerable decentralization of power in policymaking, together with variations in policy from state to state.2 Perhaps in no policy area were variations so dramatic as in state legislation on banking. In some states banking was prohibited outright, while in others the state government itself established and operated banks, sometimes on a monopoly basis. Elsewhere, safety funds were established and banks required to meet minimum standards of specie reserve and the like; and in a few states, stringent regulatory policies were pursued, with public commissioners given considerable discretion in administering policy.3

Grace Wahba

Let $\{X(t), t = \cdots -1, 0, 1, \cdots\}$ be a $P$ dimensional zero mean stationary Gaussian time series, $X(t) = \begin{pmatrix}X_1(t)\\X_2(t)\\\vdots\\X_P(t)\end{pmatrix}$ we let $R(\tau) = EX(t)X' (t + \tau)$, where $R(\tau) = \{R_{ij}(\tau), i,j = 1, 2, \cdots P\}$, and $F(\omega) = (2\pi)^{-1} \sum^\infty_{\tau=-\infty}e^{-i\omega\tau}R(\tau)$. It is assumed that $\sum^P_{i,j=1} \sum^\infty_{\tau=-\infty} |\tau| |R_{ij}(\tau)| < \infty$, and hence $F(\omega)$ exists and the elements possess bounded derivatives. It is further assumed that $F(\omega)$ is strictly positive definite, all $\omega$. Knowledge of $F(\omega)$ serves to specify the process. $F(\omega)$, and $S$, the covariance matrix of $x = \begin{pmatrix}x_1 \\ x_2\ \\ vdots\\x_P\end{pmatrix}$, a Normal $(0, S)$ random vector are known to enjoy many analogous properties. (See [7].) To cite two examples, the hypothesis that $X_i(s)$ is independent of $X_j(t)$ for $i \neq j = 1, 2, \cdots P$, any $s, t$, is equivalent to the hypothesis that $F(\omega)$ is diagonal, all $\omega$, while the hypothesis that $x_i$ is independent of $x_j$, for $i \neq j = 1, 2, \cdots P$ is equivalent to the hypothesis that $S$ is diagonal. The conditional expectation of $x_1$, given $x_2, \cdots x_P$ is \begin{equation*}E(x_1\mid x_2, \cdots x_P) = S_{12}S^{-1}_{22}\begin{pmatrix}x_2 \\ \vdots \\ x_P\end{pmatrix}, S = \bigg(\begin{array}{c|c} S_{11} & S_{12} \\ \hline S_{21} & S_{22}\end{array} \bigg)\end{equation*}. The corresponding regression problem for stationary Gaussian time series goes as follows. If \begin{equation*}E\{X_1(t)\mid X_2(s), \cdots X_P(s), s = \cdots -1, 0, 1, \cdots\} = \sum^P_{j=2} \sum^\infty_{s=-\infty} b_j(t - s)X_j(s)\end{equation*} then $B(\omega)$, defined by $B(\omega) = (B_2(\omega), \cdots B_P(\omega)), B_j(\omega) = \sum^\infty_{s=-\infty} b_j(s)e^{i\omega s}$ satisfies \begin{equation*}B(\omega) = F_{12}(\omega)F_{22}^{-1}(\omega), \quad F(\omega) = \bigg(\begin{array}{c|c}f_{11}(\omega) & F_{12}(\omega) \\ \hline F_{21}(\omega) & F_{22}(\omega)\end{array} \bigg).\end{equation*} It is interesting to ask how well these and similar analogies carry over to sampling theory and hypothesis testing. Goodman [3] gave a heuristic argument to support the conclusion that $\hat{F}_X(\omega_k)$, a suitably formed estimate of the spectral density matrix $F(\omega_k)$ has the complex Wishart distribution. The question is met here by the following results. Firstly if $\hat{F}_X(\omega_l), l = 1, 2, \cdots M$ are estimates of the spectral density matrix, each consisting of averages of $(2n + 1)$ periodograms based on a record of length $T$, with the $\omega_l$ equally spaced and $(2n + 1)M \leqq \frac{1}{2} T$, then it is possible to construct, on the same sample space as $X(t), M$ independent complex Wishart matrices $\hat{F}{\bar{\bar{X}}}(\omega_l), l = 1, 2, \cdots M$ such that $\{\hat{F}_X(\omega_l), l = 1, 2, \cdots M\}$ converge simultaneously in mean square to $\{\hat{F}_{\bar{\bar{X}}}(\omega_l), l = 1, 2,\cdots M\}$, as $n, M$ get large. Secondly, it is legitimate to use the natural analogies from multivariate analysis to test hypotheses about time series. One example is presented, as follows. The likelihood ratio test statistic for testing $S$ diagonal is $|\hat{S}|/\mathbf{\prod}^P_{i=1} \hat{s}_{ii}$ where $\hat{S} = \{\hat{s}_{ij}$ is the sample covariance matrix. The analogous statistic $\psi$ for testing $X_i(s), X_j(t)$ independent, $i,j 1 = 2, \cdots P$ from a record of length $T$ is $\psi = \prod^M_{l=1} \lbrack|\hat{F}_X(\omega_l)|/\prod^P_{i=1} \hat{f}_{ii}(\omega_l)\rbrack$ where $\hat{F}_X(\omega_l) = \{\hat{f}_{ij}(\omega_l)\}$ are the sample spectral density matrices as above. Letting ${\bar{dbar{\psi}}} = \prod^M_{l=1} \lbrack|\hat{F}_{\bar{\bar{x}}}(\omega_l)|/\prod^P_{i=1} \hat{h}_{ii}(\omega_l)\rbrack$ where $\hat{F}_{\bar{\bar{x}}}(\omega_l) = \{\hat{h}_{ij}(\omega_l)\}$ are the independent complex Wishart matrices referred to above, we show $EC_{n,M} |\log \psi - \log {\bar{\bar{\psi}}} \rightarrow 0$ for large $n, M$, where $C_{n,M}$ are chosen to make the result non-trival. The method of proof applies to any statistic which is a product over $l$ of sufficiently smooth functions of the entries of $\hat{F}_X(\omega_l)$. Applications to estimation and testing in the regression problem will appear elsewhere [8]. The distribution theory of functions of complex Wishart matrices has been well investigated by a number of authors [3] [5] [6], and hence can be easily applied here to statistics like ${\bar{\bar{\psi}}}$. The results above are shown for $P = 2$, it is clear that the proofs extended to any (fixed) finite $P$. The proofs proceed as follows, via a theorem which has somewhat more general application. For each $T$, let $X$ be the $2 \times T$ random matrix $X = \binom{X_1}{X_2} = \begin{pmatrix}X_1(1), \cdots, X_1(T)\\X_2(1), \cdots, X_2(T)\end{pmatrix}$ and let the $2T \times 2T$ covariance matrix $\Sigma$ be given by $\Sigma = \begin{pmatrix}\sum_{11} \sum_{12} \\ \sum_{21} \sum_{22}\end{pmatrix}$ where $\Sigma_{ij} = EX_i'X_j. \{\hat{F}_X(\omega_l)\}$, the sample spectral density matrices described above based on a record of length $T$, are each of the form $\hat{F}_X(\omega_l) = T^{-1}XQX'$ where $Q$ is a $T \times T$ circulant matrix with largest eigenvalue $ = T(2n + 1)^{-1} \leqq \frac{1}{2}M < <T$. We define circulant matrices $\bar{\Sigma}_{ij}$ which approximate $\Sigma_{ij}$, and a random matrix $\bar{X}$ on the sample space of $X$, $\bar{X} = \binom{\bar{X}_1}{\bar{X}_2} = \begin{pmatrix}\bar{X}_1(1), \cdots, \bar{X}_1(T)\\\bar{X}_2(1), \cdots, \bar{X}_2(T)\end{pmatrix}$ with $E\bar{X}_i'\bar{X}_j = \bar\Sigma_{ij}$. The $2T$ eigenvalues of the block circulant matrix $\bar\Sigma = \begin{pmatrix}\bar\Sigma_{11} \bar\Sigma_{12} \\ \bar\Sigma_{21} \bar\Sigma_{22}\end{pmatrix}$ will be the $2T$ eigenvalues of the $T$ matrices $\{F(2\pi j/T),j = 1, 2, \cdots T\}$. The distribution of random matrices of the form $T^{-1}\bar{X}Q\bar{X}'$ where $Q$ is any circulant matrix are relatively simple to investigate due to the fact that all circulant matrices commute, and their eigenvalues may be exhibited as simple functions of the elements. Circulant quadratic forms in random vectors with circulant covariance matrices are well known in the literature, (See [1] and references cited there). Let $\hat{F}_{X,Q} = T^{-1}XQX'$ and $\hat{F}_{\bar{X},Q} = T^{-1}\bar{X}Q\bar{X}'$ where $Q$ is now any $T \times T$ (real or complex) quadratic form with largest absolute eigenvalue $\leqq q$. The main Theorem allows the replacement of $X$ by $\bar{X}$ in the analysis, and is, that under the assumptions on $F(\omega)$ and $R(\tau)$, for any $T$, \begin{equation*}\tag{1.1} E \operatorname{tr} (\hat{F}_{X,Q} - \hat{F}_{\bar{X},Q})(\hat{F}_{X,Q} - \hat{F}_{\bar{X}, Q})^{\ast'} \leqq cq^2/T^2\end{equation*} where $c$ is a constant depending only on $F(\omega)$ and $R(\tau)$. A lemma, essentially allowing the replacement of $F(\omega)$ by a suitably chosen step-function, together with the application of (1.1) gives the results concerning the $\{\hat{F}_X(\omega_l)\}$ an $\lambda$. Since $\hat{R}(\tau)$, the sample (circularized) autocorrelation function is also of the form $T^{-1}XQX'$ with $Q$ circulant we obtain an easy corollary on the distribution of $\{\hat{R}(\tau)\}$.

John A. Ross, Oliver D. Finnigan

The Korean family planning program from 1964 to 1968 is considered in its entirety. The program is financed primarily by Korean government appropriations (averaging about $2 million in past years from central and local budgets) but also is supported substantially by foreign agencies such as the Population Council SIDA and AID. The Planned Parenthood Federation of Korea working in cooperation with the government is financed by about $200000 yearly from Korean government and foreign sources. The program has offered the IUD condom and vasectomy to every couple without charge. Accomplishments include adoption of the loop or vasectomy by 1/3 of couples with wife below age 45 elicitation of the best response among illiterate and low-income families and in rural areas reduction of crude birth rate by roughly 10% as of 1968 by IUDs inserted through mid-1968 and launching a pill program for IUD drop-outs starting with an unknown method a population of 30 million was informed of it and their approval won. Approaches used in the program have included strong governmental policy; implementation through the existing health structure; decentralization of functions to local and provincial government levels; payment by government of physicians and fieldworkers involved as well as vasectomy acceptors for work lost; high fieldworker density; fixation of target quotas with positive and negative sanctions on workers; and full use of mass media. Problems to be dealt with involve funding doctorless and remote areas and termination rates. The problems have been obtaining the funds; areas that are doctorless and that are remote; the training of workers; funds for maintenance and supply systems; shortcomings of the present contraceptive methods; and the changing of field-worker duties.

Hans Raupach

Abstract Capital and Management in Socialist Economies The idea, that an economy can be operated by methods of central planning to realize the economic optimum like the model of a private business corporation, proved to be successful only in the first periods of (“extensive”) industrialization. Growing product differentiation increased the danger of disallocation of resources. The solution of microeconomic allocation problems turned out to be most unsatisfactory. Since 1962, reforms try to decentralize decision making in the individual enterprise striving mostly for production aims planned centrally. The problem of appropriate investment and success criteria for the system’s management remains unsolved. While in sectors of the economy, where large sums of capital are needed, ex ante central planning is necessary, the problem is different in manufacturing industry. Here, an efficient selection from the abundance of continually and acceleratingly renewing technical progress can be made only with decentralized rules of efficiency, which, however, must be based on market prices. But the choice of a soviet director is limited by problems of financing and supply. He may calculate approximately the technical effect of investment, but he cannot evaluate its economic effect, since prices have been set since long and do not reflect the permanently changing relations of scarcity of resources, Besides, the certain profit from selling established products is frequently preferred to the risk of innovation. The industrial reform of 1965 has focused on the relation of the profit from sold production and the invested capital stock. It emphasizes the importance of investment financing from enterprize profits and credit (in contrast to the usual allotment of means for investment by central authorities). A greater flexibility in fulfilling the plan can be observed, but management’s investment choices are still very limited. The centrally planned supply of investment cannot keep pace with increased decentralized investment demands. The reason for the stated inferiority of socialist economies in realizing technical progress is ultimately the absence of a capital market. Its role for most investment decisions can be substituted only most imperfectly by central planning.

Lucien Chincholle

A gas or vapor bubble moving in translation in a liquid and varying its volume propels itself by a rocket effect, which occurs in foams moving in pressure or temperature fields with a non-zero gradient. It is notably observed in boiling and centrifugal pump operation, which latter features the following two characteristic bubble types : __ 1. Gas bubbles, which are apt to emerge faster from the pump than the liquid; 2. Vapor bubbles (cavitalion). When a bubble in translatory motion implodes, energy is transferred: potential pressure energy is converted info kinetic implosion energy, which in turn becomes kinetic translation energy. The instrument for this energy transfer process is a "micro-jet" following the bubble. It is shown that a considerable increase in kinetic translation energy density occurs, which is converted into potential pressure energy on impact against a solid obstacle. The resulting pressures (10,000 kg/sq.cm) explain the mechanical aspect of cavitation erosion. Several experimental results have confirmed these theoretical considerations. The development of a rotoscope is also described, this being a device enabling a centrifugal pump impeller (for example) to be "stopped" so that only the relative motion of the flow particles remains. Unlike with a stroboscope, time exposures can he taken with this device. With more thorough knowledge of foam mechanisms, and especially of cavitalion bubble behavior, it should be possible to design cavitation erosion-proof impeller blades.

Janusz Wierzbicki

The principles of unity and complexity introduced into the Polish State budget in 1951 are no longer fully observed. In particular, certain funds administered by local councils have appeared gradually in the last years, on the basis of the budget law of 1958 which admitted making some budget expenses dependent on definite budget revenues. Moreover, some funds have been created outside the local budgets. These deserve special attention as a new phenomenon which becomes increasingly important for the local councils activities and especially for councils of the lowest level. The development of decentralized funds seems to be desirable firstly in the economic micro-regions, such as villages and towns, in order to accelerate their development. The augmentation of the role of decentralized funds would also be advisable in counties and provinces provided they constitute regions with specific economic structure. Decentralized funds should be first of all used to finance local investments, the more so that this would be in accordance with the main destination of the funds already administered by local councils. In this way, decentralized funds could in the future be transformed into the local investment budgets. The considerable development of decentralized funds in this country, in particular of those of the lowest level of local administration, seems, moreover, to prove that local budgets at this level, which since 1951 have been incorporated into the State budget, are not fully adequate for financing local councils activities. This suggests that a reform of local budgets of the lowest level is advisable, which would make their administration more similar to that of decentralized funds. The author considers in detail the perspectives and conditions of s&apos;uch a reform of the local budgets of the lowest level, as well as the prospects and conditions of further development of the decentralized funds if no budget reform takes place. He discusses especially the links between decentralized funds and local budgets in this last case. The other subject of the author&apos;s consideration is the advisability of financing the local councils activities by bank credit or by credit granted by central funds administered by budget authorities

John G. Thompson

No abstract is available for this record.

John Van Ryzin

This paper is concerned with repetitive sequential play in finite statistical games (decision problems) from the statistician's point of view. We shall assume that the statistician's move at stage $k$ may depend on the previous $k - 1$ moves of Nature as well as the random variable $\mathbf{X}_k = (X_1, \cdots, X_k)$, where the $X_i$ are independent observations (r.v.'s) (possibly vector-valued) from the sequence of statistical games, $k = 1, 2, \cdots$. The play is repetitive in the sense that each component game is identical in structure, with only the moves of the statistician and Nature changing. Furthermore, we impose no assumptions regarding the behavior of the parameter sequence of Nature's moves. The statistician does have the added disadvantage that the finite class of distributions in the component game is not fully specified. However, he does know that class in question has: either (i) all members with discrete distributions or (ii) all members with $q$-dimensional a.e. continuous Lebesgue densities. This same problem when the distributions are fully known has been treated in [6] for statistical as well as more general games in which Nature's space is finite. In the case where the distributions are completely specified but the history of the past moves is unknown to the statistician, see [20], [22], [27], and [28]. The development in this paper is closely connected to and motivated by these results, particularly those of the preceding paper [27]. If for fixed $N$, the empirical distribution $p_N$ of Nature's moves is known, then the statistician could use as a rule for each of the $N$ component games a strategy Bayes against $p_N$ having risk $\phi(p_N)$. In all the papers cited in the previous paragraph, the aim was to construct for the statistician, when $p_N$ is unknown and $N$ not specified, a sequence of randomized decision functions whose $N$th average loss minus $\phi(p_N)$ approaches zero (or has an upper bound approaching zero) in a suitable sense as the number of repetitions of play, $N$, increases. However, in the case of statistical games, all of the above results require that the finite class of distributions be fully specified. In this paper we remove that assumption by estimating the distributions sequentially based on past moves and observations. Then in the present play of the component game the statistician substitutes these estimators into a procedure which is Bayes against the empirical distribution of Nature's previous moves. The resulting sequence of procedures is shown to be "asymptotically good" in the sense that the average loss over the $N$ games $W_N$ minus the Bayes risk $\phi(p_N)$ approaches zero (in an appropriate sense) as $N$, the number of games played, increases. In Section 2 we introduce notation and preliminaries. Section 3 discusses play in repetitive games and defines the proposed sequential procedures $\mathbf{t} = \{\mathbf{t}_k\}$. In Section 4 we prove preliminary results upon which all proofs are founded. Section 5 considers the discrete case giving uniform (in sequences of Nature's moves) convergence theorems (as $N \rightarrow \infty$) for the quantity $W_N - \phi(p_N)$. Theorem 5.1 is a uniform convergence theorem of $O(N^{-\frac{1}{2}})$ of the expected value of $W_N - \phi(p_N)$ for finite discrete classes, each member of which is non-degenerate and satisfies a certain tail probability condition. Under the same conditions, Theorem 5.2 gives uniform convergence to zero in probability for the quantity $N^{\frac{1}{2}} (\log N)^{-1} \{W_N - \phi(p_N)\} \text{as} N \rightarrow \infty$. Uniform convergence of $W_N - \phi(p_N) \rightarrow 0$ in probability for general non-degenerate finite discrete class is presented in Theorem 5.3. Section 6 treats the estimation problem for densities needed to form the randomized strategy sequences $\mathbf{t}$ in the continuous case. The results stated are based on a paper by Cacoullos [3] generalizing the univariate results of Parzen [15]. In Section 7, we present results for the continuous case. Theorem 7.1 and its corollary give uniform convergence of $W_N - \phi(p_N)$ to zero in probability and of its expectation to zero, respectively. The finite continuous classes of Theorem 7.1 are very general in the sense that each member is a continuous a.e. density. Finally, in Section 8 we draw certain conclusions and relate our results to similar results obtained elsewhere. The novelty of the paper rests in the fact that through the past history of Nature's moves and the observations connected with past play, one can construct a sequential strategy, $\mathbf{t} = \{\mathbf{t}_k\}$, with very little knowledge about the finite class of distributions, which approaches asymptotic "optimal" play. The lack of knowledge on the finite class of distributions distinguishes this work from the related "repetitive type" problems in games and/or decision theory treated in [1], [2], [4], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [12], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], and [29]. For possible applications of this work see Neyman [14], especially his Example 3 and his discussion relating to the work of Blackwell [2].

G J JARVIS, C MCCULLOCH

Case reports of three residents of Ontario with clinical histoplasmic chorioretinitis are presented. The diagnosis was made on the basis of the clinical appearance, the presence of calcified lesions in the chest, a negative skin test to tuberculin, and a positive skin test to toxoplasmin. All patients were treated with intravenous amphotericin B. Except for transitory elevation of blood urea nitrogen, there were no serious complications from the drug and in all cases the lesions in the eyes were improved. Histologic or cultural proof of the presence of fungus in the eye is not available, but clinical and laboratory findings can combine to point to the diagnosis of histoplasmosis. In such cases, since vision is at stake, treatment with amphotericin B should be considered.

R. N. Bradt

Professor Keeping's book is a text for a one-year course (90-100 hours) for students having a knowledge of elementary calculus-second or third year students.It is unusually complete in that it is difficult to think of a topic which is not treated, at least briefly, but which one might like to see included in such a course.As would be expected of a widely ranging book at this level, many results are stated without proof but it is by no means a " how to do it" book.In addition to the usual elementary probability theory, standard distributions, and classical estimation and testing, one finds, e.g. the cumulants and Ar-statistics, sampling techniques, sequential and nonparametric procedures, fixed, random and mixed models as well as latin square and incomplete block designs considered, and a last chapter which looks at multivariate problems and introduces stochastic processes.There is a laudable concern for the power of the tests discussed and the required non-central distributions are introduced.Appropriate tables, a large number of exercises (with answers) and a thirty page appendix on various mathematical topics are included as well.The price paid for the virtue of comprehensiveness is, of course, the brevity of some particular parts; one cannot have everything.However, one might reasonably suggest that the briefer the treatment the more precise should be the statements.This book is somewhat marred by puzzling, misleading, or false statements, e.g. both the sample and population moments are defined to be the " rth moment of X about zero"; "If T is sufficient, so is any function of T" (p.125); the variance of a maximum likelihood estimator is asserted to be the Cramer-Rao lower bound; in discussing the Mann-Whitney U-test, it is not clear at given points just what alternatives are being considered and while one statistic is described as the test statistic, we are instructed to reject for small values of another.

Yasuo Kotaka

(1) As it is shown in the answering rate itself, concern of top management on the rationalization of business finance is very sincere. (2) As for depreciation system, contraction of depreciation terms and general or partial widening of the rooms for arbitrary depreciation are earnestly desired. (3) Corporate tax has been intensely criticized, and opinion of the majority takes its revision as a premise for financial rationalization. (4) Regarding budget system, opinion of the majority asserts concentrative management, but not a few recognize the necessity of decentralized system. (5) Upon internal audit and concept of cost, a fundamental shift from the traditional idea is fairly evident.

H. F. Trotter

One of the features of the text is an elaborate code which is used to refer to certain axioms, definitions, and theorems.For example, TIr is the Theorem on Irrational Numbers, which runs as follows: "If a non-zero rational number 'r is combined with an irrational number p by any one of the four operations of arithmetic, the result produced is an irrational number; in symbols, r + p, r -p, p -r, rp, r/p, p/r are irrational numbers."According to the author 1 s preface, "Experience in classroom teaching shows that the students use the code with alacrity and effectiveness in making full and concise proofs, " This reviewer feels that the book under review is a worthy addition to the literature; but on the whole he found the exposition somewhat clumsy.In a few places terms are used before they are explained (e.g."empty set," page 99) and in c some places no explanation is offered where one is clearly required, (e.g.01 is used, but never defined.Since 31 is defined, the reviewer presumes that no knowledge of factorials is assumed.)Functions are never mentioned, even though the use of functions could have simplified the treatment considerably.These objections, however, may possibly be regarded as minor.Finally, the exercises in the book are many in number and generally non-computational in nature.

Jan Zdzitowiecki

Digitalizacja i deponowanie archiwalnych zeszytów RPEiS sfinansowane przez MNiSW w ramach realizacji umowy nr 541/P-DUN/2016

Chase C. Mooney, Edward Williamson

Abstract : The year 1935 marked the establishment of the General Headquarters Air Force, the first official recognition that the development of effective airpower necessitated authority for independent action. The purpose of this monograph is to show the organizational growth of the Army air arm from 1935 to September 1945 and to trace the ideas and influences that affects its development. Most significant of these was the continuous effort to attain an autonomous air force, one with a large degree of control over its own affairs internally and the necessary voice in determining its operational activities. Important internal developments included the establishment and implementation of an Air Staff, the application of management devices, the improvement of programming methods, the consolidation of AAF Headquarters offices, and decentralization of command responsibilities.