This book is a first attempt to link well-known plant resistance phenomena with emerging concepts in molecular biology. Resistance phenomena such as the local lesion response, induced resistance, "green islands" and resistance in various crop plants are linked with new information on gene-silencing mechanisms, gene silencing suppressors, movement proteins and plasmodesmatal gating, downstream signalling components, and more.

This book provides a concise introduction to convex duality in financial mathematics. Convex duality plays an essential role in dealing with financial problems and involves maximizing concave utility functions and minimizing convex risk measures. Recently, convex and generalized convex dualities have shown to be crucial in the process of the dynamic hedging of contingent claims. Common underlying principles and connections between different perspectives are developed; results are illustrated through graphs and explained heuristically. This book can be used as a reference and is aimed toward graduate students, researchers and practitioners in mathematics, finance, economics, and optimization. Topics include: Markowitz portfolio theory, growth portfolio theory, fundamental theorem of asset pricing emphasizing the duality between utility optimization and pricing by martingale measures, risk measures and its dual representation, hedging and super-hedging and its relationship with linear programming duality and the duality relationship in dynamic hedging of contingent claims

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) followed a reasonable process for redesigning the National Automotive Sampling System Crashworthiness Data System (NASS-CDS), which is a nationally representative sample of police-reported motor-vehicle traffic crashes. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has standards and guidelines that specify the professional principles and practices that agencies should follow and the level of quality and effort expected when redesigning an existing survey, such as NASS-CDS. This book assesses the process NHTSA used to redesign NASS-CDS; and the potential for this redesign to improve the NASS-CDS sample.