Terminal Event

When Joe Durant gets news of an airplane crash outside Seattle, a "terminal event" with no survivors, the distressed former National Transportation Safety Board investigator rushes to the site -- his wife was one of the passengers. Desperate to find answers for his devastated fifteen-year-old daughter, his hunt for clues becomes obsessive. But while he meticulously wades through the wreckage and collects evidence pointing to sabotage, higher powers are determined to blame the tragedy on pilot error. Now the bomber has stepped forward and promised to strike again within ten days...and Durant must race to avert another ghastly catastrophe. Exploring the grimly fascinating world of NTSB crash investigators in riveting, authentic detail, Terminal Event is a page-turning suspense thriller whose shocking ending will leave you gasping.

This book presents models and statistical methods for the analysis of recurrent event data. The authors provide broad, detailed coverage of the major approaches to analysis, while emphasizing the modeling assumptions that they are based on. More general intensity-based models are also considered, as well as simpler models that focus on rate or mean functions. Parametric, nonparametric and semiparametric methodologies are all covered, with procedures for estimation, testing and model checking.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of two colocated international workshops EPEW 2005 (European Performance Engineering Workshop) and WS-FM 2005 (Web Services and Formal Methods) held in Versailles, France in September 2005. The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. For EPEW 2005 only 10 papers - of the 32 submitted - were accepted for presentation; they deal with queueing theory, bounding techniques, stochastic model checking, communication schemes analysis for high-speed LAN, QOS analysis in wireless ad-hoc networks and optical networks analysis. The main topics of the 10 papers accepted for WS-FM 2005 - from 27 submissions - include: protocols and standards for WS (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, etc.); languages and description methodologies for Choreography/Orchestration/Workflow (BPML, XLANG and BizTalk, WSFL, WS-BPEL, etc.); coordination techniques for WS (transactions, agreement, coordination services, etc.); semantics-based dynamic WS discovery services (based on Semantic Web/Ontology Techniques or other semantic theories); security, performance evaluation and quality of service of WS; semi-structured data and XML related technologies; comparisons with different related technologies/approaches.

The design and functioning of an information system improve to the extent that the system can handle the questions people ask. Surprisingly, however, researchers in the cognitive, computer, and information sciences have not thoroughly examined the multitude of relationships between information systems and questions -- both question asking and answering. The purpose of this book is to explicitly examine these relationships. Chapter contributors believe that questions play a central role in the analysis, design, and use of different kinds of natural or artificial information systems such as human cognition, social interaction, communication networks, and intelligent tutoring systems. Their efforts show that data structures and representations need to be organized around the questioning mechanisms in order to achieve a quick retrieval of relevant useful information.

The papers in this volume discuss important methodological advances in several important areas, including multivariate failure time data and interval censored data. The book will be an indispensable reference for researchers and practitioners in biostatistics, medical research, and the health sciences.

The existence of rapid and even catastrophic turnovers within the Phanerozoic ecosystems has been discussed controversially for more than 170 years. Since 1980 this discussion has become even more intensive after the hypothesis of Alvarez, explaining the end-Cretaceous mass extinction as the result of a huge asteroid impact on the Earth. This theory stimulated several thousand papers and is still controversial. The international research programme on "Global Biological Events in Earth History" attempts to bring the discussion back to the facts by using multidisciplinary investigations of the major Phanerozoic events. The results of an international group of experts are presented giving a wealth of information and a thorough discussion of the causes of the various global events.