Surface temperature is a major indicator of climate change. To test for the presence of an upward trend in surface-temperature (global warming), sophisticated statistical methods are typically used which depend on implausible and/or unverifiable assumptions, in particular on the availability of...

In practice, it is often impossible to assess the validity of the smoothness assumptions crucial to standard tests for singularities in the spectrum. We therefore propose new tests which are completely insensitive to sharp peaks in the absolutely continuous part of the spectrum. Using Neyman...

It is shown that in the linear normal regression model asymptotically the expected value of the penalty term implied by the Akaike-BIC can, under certain circumstances, be smaller than that implied by the AIC. Consequences for consistency are discussed.