This article has two goals: descriptive and theoretical. On the descriptive side, the article presents a grammar of gliding and epenthesis of Upper Sorbian. The descriptive goal is worthy because Upper Sorbian has a highly complex but regular and productive system of gliding and epenthesis. Upper Sorbian stands out from a typological point of view because it has ten [sic] different strategies to satisfy Onset.

On the theoretical side, the question is whether Optimality Theory that has been designed to solve conspiracies can deal with the complexities of Upper Sorbian. The answer is that it cannot unless it is modified to admit derivational levels. A point of interest is that level 1 in Upper Sorbian must be defined as the root level, not as the expected stem level that includes roots and affixes. Further, it is demonstrated that Itô and Mester’s Crisp Edge constraint makes wrong predictions for Upper Sorbian, so a new constraint, Multi, is postulated. Also, the analysis bears on the issue of positional markedness versus positional faithfulness and the question of whether Duke of York derivations should be admitted in phonology.

Due to the vast ocean area and limited human and material resources, hydrographic survey must be carried out in a selective and well-planned way. Therefore, scientific planning of hydrographic surveys to ensure the effectiveness of navigational charts has become an urgent issue to be addressed by the hydrographic office of each coastal state. In this study, a reasonable calculation model of hydrographic survey cycle is established, which can be used to make the plan of navigational chart updating. The paper takes 493 navigational charts of Chinese coastal ports and fairways as the research object, analyses the fundamental factors affecting the hydrographic survey cycle and gives them weights, proposes to use the BP neural network to construct the relationship between the cycle and the impact factors, and finally establishes a calculation model of the hydrographic survey cycle. It has been verified that the calculation cycle of the model is effective, and it can provide reference for hydrographic survey planning and chart updating, as well as suggestions for navigation safety.

Cystoisospora belli is a coccidian parasite of humans, with a direct fecal–oral transmission cycle. It is globally distributed, but mainly found in tropical and subtropical areas. Many cases of C. belli infections have been reported in patients with HIV, and in patients undergoing immunosuppressive therapy for organ transplants or those treated for tumours worldwide. Unsporulated or partially sporulated oocysts of C. belli are excreted in feces. When sporulated oocysts in contaminated water or food are ingested, asexual and sexual stages of C. belli are confined to the epithelium of intestines, bile ducts and gallbladder. Monozoic tissue cysts are present in extra-intestinal organs (lamina propria of the small and large intestine, lymph nodes, spleen, and liver) of immunosuppressed humans. However, a paratenic host has not been demonstrated. Cystoisospora belli infections can be persistent, lasting for months, and relapses are common; the mechanism of relapse is unknown. Recently, the endogenous stages of C. belli were re-examined and attention was drawn to cases of misidentification of non-protozoal structures in the gallbladder of patients as C. belli. Here, we review all aspects of the biology of C. belli, including morphology, endogenous stages, prevalence, epidemiology, symptoms, diagnosis and control.

We investigate the supports of extremal martingale measures with prespecified marginals in a two-period setting. First, we establish in full generality the equivalence between the extremality of a given measure Q and the denseness in $L^1(Q)$ of a suitable linear subspace, which can be seen in a financial context as the set of all semistatic trading strategies. Moreover, when the supports of both marginals are countable, we focus on the slightly stronger notion of weak exact predictable representation property (WEP) and provide two combinatorial sufficient conditions, called the ‘2-link property’ and ‘full erasability’, on how the points in the supports are linked to each other for granting extremality. When the support of the first marginal is a finite set, we give a necessary and sufficient condition for the WEP to hold in terms of the new concepts of 2-net and deadlock. Finally, we study the relation between cycles and extremality.

We construct a shifted version of the Turán sieve method developed by R. Murty and the second author and apply it to counting problems on tournaments. More precisely, we obtain upper bounds for the number of tournaments which contain a fixed number of restricted $r$-cycles. These are the first concrete results which count the number of cycles over “all tournaments”.

Cyclical fluctuations in prices and production have long characterized the United States hog industry. Recent evidence suggests that the length of the hog cycle has changed. In order to determine whether the change in cycle length is statistically significant, the bootstrap technique is employed to derive confidence intervals for point estimates of the hog cycle. Application of the bootstrap technique to time series models is discussed and empirical results are presented. It is concluded that the hog cycle is undergoing rather complicated changes based on cycle lengths that are calculated to be statistically different from zero.

The annihilating-ideal graph of a commutative ring $R$, denoted by $\mathbb{A}\mathbb{G}\left( R \right)$, is a graph whose vertex set consists of all non-zero annihilating ideals and two distinct vertices $I$ and $J$ are adjacent if and only if $IJ\,=\,\left( 0 \right)$. Here we show that if $R$ is a reduced ring and the independence number of $\mathbb{A}\mathbb{G}\left( R \right)$ is finite, then the edge chromatic number of $\mathbb{A}\mathbb{G}\left( R \right)$ equals its maximum degree and this number equals ${{2}^{\left| \min \left( R \right) \right|-1}}-\,1$; also, it is proved that the independence number of $\mathbb{A}\mathbb{G}\left( R \right)$ equals ${{2}^{\left| \min \left( R \right) \right|-1}}$, where $\min \left( R \right)$ denotes the set of minimal prime ideals of $R$. Then we give some criteria for a graph to be isomorphic with an annihilating-ideal graph of a ring. For example, it is shown that every bipartite annihilating-ideal graph is a complete bipartite graph with at most two horns. Among other results, it is shown that a finite graph $\mathbb{A}\mathbb{G}\left( R \right)$ is not Eulerian, and that it is Hamiltonian if and only if $R$ contains no Gorenstain ring as its direct summand.

For a given list assignment $L\,=\,\{L\left( v \right)\,:\,v\,\in \,V\left( G \right)\}$, a graph $G\,=\,\left( V,\,E \right)$ is $L$-colorable if there exists a proper coloring $c$ of $G$ such that $c\left( v \right)\,\in \,L\left( v \right)$ for all $v\,\in \,V$. If $G$ is $L$-colorable for every list assignment $L$ having $\left| L\left( v \right) \right|\,\ge \,k$ for all $v\,\in \,V$, then $G$ is said to be $k$-choosable. Montassier (Inform. Process. Lett. 99 (2006) 68-71) conjectured that every planar graph without cycles of length 4, 5, 6, is 3-choosable. In this paper, we prove that every planar graph without 5-, 6- and 10-cycles, and without two triangles at distance less than 3 is 3-choosable.

Let ${{G}_{1}},\,{{G}_{2}},\,.\,.\,.\,,\,{{G}_{t}}$ be arbitrary graphs. The Ramsey number $R\left( {{G}_{1}},\,{{G}_{2}},\,.\,.\,.,{{G}_{t}} \right)$ is the smallest positive integer $n$ such that if the edges of the complete graph ${{K}_{n}}$ are partitioned into $t$ disjoint color classes giving $t$ graphs ${{H}_{1}},\,{{H}_{2}},\,.\,.\,.\,,\,{{H}_{t}}$, then at least one ${{H}_{i}}$ has a subgraph isomorphic to ${{G}_{i}}$. In this paper, we provide the exact value of the $R({{T}_{n}},\,{{W}_{m}})$ for odd $m,\,n\,\ge \,m-1$, where ${{T}_{n}}$ is either a caterpillar, a tree with diameter at most four, or a tree with a vertex adjacent to at least $\left\lceil \frac{n}{2} \right\rceil \,-\,2$ leaves, and ${{W}_{n}}$ is the wheel on $n\,+\,1$ vertices. Also, we determine $R\left( {{C}_{n}},\,{{W}_{m}} \right)$ for even integers $n$ and $m,\,n\,\ge \,m\,+\,500$, which improves a result of Shi and confirms a conjecture of Surahmat et al. In addition, the multicolor Ramsey number of trees versus an odd wheel is discussed in this paper.

The primitive finite permutation groups containing a cycle are classified. Of these, only the alternating and symmetric groups contain a cycle fixing at least three points. This removes a primality condition from a classical theorem of Jordan. Some applications to monodromy groups are given, and the contributions of Jordan and Marggraff to this topic are briefly discussed.

We study solvency of insurers in a practical model where in addition to basic insurance claims and premiums, economic factors like inflation, real growth and returns on the investments affect the capital developments of the companies. The objective is to give qualitative descriptions of risks by means of crude estimates for finite time ruin probabilities. In our setup, the economic factors have a dominant role in the estimates. In addition to this theoretical view, we will focus on applied interpretations of the results by means of discussions and examples.

The first version of the paper was presented in ASTIN Colloquium in Helsinki 2009. The colloquium was dedicated to Teivo Pentikäinen.

Emitted particles arrive at the counter with prolonging dead time so that the interarrival times and the lengths of impulses in any dead time are independent but not necessarily identically distributed random variables, and whenever the counter is idle then the following evolution starts from the beginning. For this class of counters we derive the probability laws of the numbers of particles arriving at the counters during their dead times, and the Laplace transform of the cycle, respectively.