Public policies are often made without much recourse to economic reasoning. Economists are often unaware of what is happening in the world of public affairs. As a result, both the quality of public decision-making and the role that economists play in it are less than optimal. This feature contains short articles on topics that are currently on the agendas of policy-makers, thus illustrating the role of economic analysis in illuminating current debates. Suggestions for future columns and comments on past ones should be sent to

Lithium ion batteries should always be prevented from overheating and, hence, thermal monitoring is indispensable. Since only the surface temperature of the battery can be measured, a thermal model is needed to estimate the core temperature of the battery, which can be higher and more critical. In this paper, an online parameter identification scheme is designed for a cylindrical lithium ion battery. An adaptive observer of the core temperature is then designed based on the online parameterization methodology and the surface temperature measurement. A battery thermal model with constant internal resistance is explored first. The identification algorithm and the adaptive observer is validated with experiments on a 2.3 Ah 26650 lithium iron phosphate/graphite battery. The methodology is later extended to address temperature-dependent internal resistance with nonuniform forgetting factors. The ability of the methodology to track the long-term variation of the internal resistance is beneficial for battery health monitoring.Index Terms-Adaptive estimation, core temperature, lithium ion battery, state of health.

Chemotherapy with MACC, in combination with thoracic radiotherapy, did not result in significant survival advantage compared with radiation alone (P greater than 0.2) in patients with medically inoperable or unresectable stage III non-small cell lung cancer.

Supercomputer companies such as Cray, Silicon Graphics, and SRC Computers now offer reconfigurable computer (RC)

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