New Releases by Michael Harrison

Suggests the real people and events which inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Homes and his adventures.

More than 100 poems, old and new, to celebrate the Christmas season.

This paper considers a world in which pension funds may default, the cost of the associated risk of default is not borne fully by the sponsoring corporation, and there are differential tax effects. The focus is on ways in which the wealth of the shareholders of a corporation sponsoring a pension plan might be increased if the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) follow simple and naive policies. Under the conditions examined, the optimal policy for pension plan funding and asset allocation is shown to be extremal in a certain sense. This suggests that the IRS and the PBGC may wish to use more complex regulatory procedures than those considered in the paper.

Consider a storage system, such as an inventory or cash fund, whose content fluctuates as a (micro, sigma sq) Brownian motion in the absence of control. Holding costs are continuously incurred at a rate proportional to the storage level, and we may cause the storage level to jump by an desired amount at any time except that the content must be kept nonnegative. Both positive and negative jumps entail fixed plus proportional costs, and our objective is to minimize expected discounted costs over an infinite planning horizon. A control band policy is one that enforces an upward jump to q whenever level zero is hit, and enforces a downward jump to Q whenever level S is hit (O

Examines charges recently made in the British press of involvement of Prince Edward, grandson of Queen Victoria, in the London murders of the still unidentified Jack the Ripper.

Tales written as an homage to Edgar Allan Poe''s creation, C. Auguste Dupin.

Story of the conception, building and handling of the prefabricated ports that were taken to Normandy''s invasion beaches by the Allies in June 1944.