In many applications, assumptions about the log-concavity of a probability distribution allow just enough special structure to yield a workable theory. This paper catalogs a series of theorems relating log-concavity and/or log-convexity of probability density functions, distribution functions,...

"Cotton is the largest source of export receipts of several West African countries. Statistics however show a decreasing tendency in cotton yields and an increasing tendency in pesticide use. Under this circumstances there appear to be potential payoffs from the use of biotechnology products in...

The adjustable parameters of probability distributions adopted by extremal optimization (EO) and its modified versions play a critical role in controlling their performances. Unlike the traditional static probability distribution based strategy, this paper presents a novel method called...

Global warming is widely predicted to decrease crop yields in tropical, sub-tropical and Mediterranean climatic regions as a result of a speeding up of phenological development and shortening of the time to maturity. We used a well-tested simulation model, APSIM-Sorghum, to evaluate the impact...

Periodic-orbit (PO) formulas for chaotic-diffusion probability distributions (PDs) are examined in the case of the perturbed Arnol'd cat map on the cylinder. This translationally invariant system exhibits a transition from uniform to nonuniform hyperbolicity as the perturbation parameter is...

A thermodynamic-like characterization of Colombia’s presidential election is presented. We assume that the electoral system consists of citizens embedded in a political environment, and that this environment can be considered as an information bath characterized by the entropic parameter q...

It is widely believed that the power-law is a proper probability distribution being effectively applied for evolution in τ-EO (extremal optimization), a general-purpose stochastic local-search approach inspired by self-organized criticality, and its applications in some NP-hard problems,...