Distribution

It has been said that every generation of historians seeks to rewrite what a previous generation had established as the standard interpretations of the motives and circumstances shaping the fabric of historical events. It is not that the facts of history have changed. No one will dispute that the battle of Waterloo occurred on June 11, 1815 or that the allied invasion of Europe began on June 6, 1944. What each new age of historians are attempting to do is to reinterpret the motives of men and the force of circumstance impacting the direction of past events based on the factual, social, intellectual, and cultural milieu of their own generation. By examining the facts of history from a new perspective, today's historians hope to reveal some new truth that will not only illuminate the course of history but also validate contempo rary values and societal ideals. Although it is true that tackling the task of developing a new text on logistics and distribution channel management focuses less on schools of philosophical and social analysis and more on the calculus of managing sales campaigns, inventory replenishment, and income statements, the goal of the management scientist, like the historian, is to merge the facts and figures of the discipline with today's organizational, cultural, and economic realities. Hopefully, the result will be a new synthesis, where a whole new perspective will break forth, exposing new directions and opportunities.

The Dirichlet distribution appears in many areas of application, which include modelling of compositional data, Bayesian analysis, statistical genetics, and nonparametric inference. This book provides a comprehensive review of the Dirichlet distribution and two extended versions, the Grouped Dirichlet Distribution (GDD) and the Nested Dirichlet Distribution (NDD), arising from likelihood and Bayesian analysis of incomplete categorical data and survey data with non-response. The theoretical properties and applications are also reviewed in detail for other related distributions, such as the inverted Dirichlet distribution, Dirichlet-multinomial distribution, the truncated Dirichlet distribution, the generalized Dirichlet distribution, Hyper-Dirichlet distribution, scaled Dirichlet distribution, mixed Dirichlet distribution, Liouville distribution, and the generalized Liouville distribution. Key Features: Presents many of the results and applications that are scattered throughout the literature in one single volume. Looks at the most recent results such as survival function and characteristic function for the uniform distributions over the hyper-plane and simplex; distribution for linear function of Dirichlet components; estimation via the expectation-maximization gradient algorithm and application; etc. Likelihood and Bayesian analyses of incomplete categorical data by using GDD, NDD, and the generalized Dirichlet distribution are illustrated in detail through the EM algorithm and data augmentation structure. Presents a systematic exposition of the Dirichlet-multinomial distribution for multinomial data with extra variation which cannot be handled by the multinomial distribution. S-plus/R codes are featured along with practical examples illustrating the methods. Practitioners and researchers working in areas such as medical science, biological science and social science will benefit from this book.

One notable new direction this century in the study of primes has been the influx of ideas from probability. The goal of this book is to provide insights into the prime numbers and to describe how a sequence so tautly determined can incorporate such a striking amount of randomness. The book opens with some classic topics of number theory. It ends with a discussion of some of the outstanding conjectures in number theory. In between are an excellent chapter on the stochastic properties of primes and a walk through an elementary proof of the Prime Number Theorem. This book is suitable for anyone who has had a little number theory and some advanced calculus involving estimates. Its engaging style and invigorating point of view will make refreshing reading for advanced undergraduates through research mathematicians.

This book provides the statistical basis for quantitative risk management by presenting and explaining the most important distributions. Distributions describe the occurrence and impact of a risk. They are a prerequisite for risk aggregation, risk analysis and risk assessment as required by the German revision standards IDW PS 340, StaRUG and FISG. This book portrays the distributions that are fundamental for enterprise risk management and shows when and how they are used. These include the Bernoulli distribution, the binomial distribution, the Poisson distribution, the uniform distribution, the triangular distribution, the PERT distribution, the modified PERT distribution, the trapezoidal distribution, the custom distribution, the normal distribution, the lognormal distribution, the Weibull distribution, the expert distribution, the poly distribution and the compound distribution. Furthermore, the book explains how the parameterisation of the distributions can be done via expert estimates or algorithmic calibration.

This book introduces the key stages of niche-based habitat suitability model building, evaluation and prediction required for understanding and predicting future patterns of species and biodiversity. Beginning with the main theory behind ecological niches and species distributions, the book proceeds through all major steps of model building, from conceptualization and model training to model evaluation and spatio-temporal predictions. Extensive examples using R support graduate students and researchers in quantifying ecological niches and predicting species distributions with their own data, and help to address key environmental and conservation problems. Reflecting this highly active field of research, the book incorporates the latest developments from informatics and statistics, as well as using data from remote sources such as satellite imagery. A website at www.unil.ch/hsdm contains the codes and supporting material required to run the examples and teach courses.

Volume V in the acclaimed Real Utopias Project series, edited by Erik Olin Wright. Are there ways that contemporary capitalism can be rendered a dramatically more egalitarian economic system without destroying its productivity and capacity for growth? This book explores two proposals, unconditional basic income and stakeholder grants, that attempt just that. In a system of basic income, as elaborated by Philippe van Parijs, all citizens are given a monthly stipend sufficient to provide them with a no-frills but adequate standard of living. This monthly income is universal rather than means-tested, and it is unconditional - receiving the basic income does not depend upon performing any labor services or satisfying other conditions. It affirms the idea that as a matter of basic rights, no one should live in poverty in an affluent society. In a system of stakeholder grants, as discussed by Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott, all citizens upon reaching the age of early adulthood receive a substantial one-time lump-sum grant sufficiently large so that all young adults would be significant wealth holders. Ackerman and Alstott propose that this grant be in the vicinity of $80,000 and be financed by an annual wealth tax of roughly 2 percent. A system of stakeholder grants, they argue, "expresses a fundamental responsibility: every American has an obligation to contribute to a fair starting point for all."

This book is a useful overview of results in multivariate probability distributions and multivariate analysis as well as a reference to harmonic analysis on symmetric cones adapted to the needs of researchers in analysis and probability theory.

How Amazon combined branding and relationship marketing with massive distribution infrastructure to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. Amazon is ubiquitous in our daily lives—we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, receive messages on our smartphone about the progress of our latest orders. In Buy Now, Emily West examines Amazon’s consumer-facing services to investigate how Amazon as a brand grew so quickly and inserted itself into so many aspects of our lives even as it faded into the background, becoming a sort of infrastructure that can be taken for granted. Amazon promotes the comfort and care of its customers (but not its workers) to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. West shows how Amazon has cultivated personalized, intimate relationships with consumers that normalize its outsized influence on our selves and our communities. She describes the brand’s focus on speedy and seamless ecommerce delivery, represented in the materiality of the branded brown box; the positioning of its book retailing, media streaming, and smart speakers as services rather than sales; and the brand’s image control strategies. West considers why pushback against Amazon’s ubiquity and market power has come mainly from among Amazon’s workers rather than its customers or competitors, arguing that Amazon’s brand logic fragments consumers as a political bloc. West’s innovative account, the first to examine Amazon from a critical media studies perspective, offers a cautionary cultural study of bigness in today’s economy.