This paper investigates the problem of quantifying longevity risk in a quantile perspective. In this field, the idea of deepening the expected changes of future mortality rates over a single year is gaining. In the following the authors propose an approach which combines a stochastic model for the evolution of mortality rates and a quantile analysis of the mortality distribution in order to capture the trend component of longevity. An ex post analysis is proposed, relying on the past mortality experience of the Italian male population measured in the period of 1954-2008.

We analyze a peer-assisted Video-on-Demand (VoD) system in which users contribute their upload bandwidth to the redistribution of a video that they are downloading or that they have cached locally. Our target is to characterize the additional bandwidth that servers must supply to immediately satisfy all requests to watch a given video. We develop an approximate fluid model to compute the required server bandwidth in the sequential delivery case, as well as in controlled nonsequential swarms.

Abstract. The topic of interest rate restrictions and their legal implications represents a delicate subject about which a recent inventory of EU authorities was developed. This is aimed to inspection of the so called principle of "good morals" against usury for the Member States. The most recent Italian law regulating legal rates of interest applied in loans, sets a threshold under which loan interest rates have to remain for being nonusurious, in the sense that if the loan rate lies outside the threshold, it becomes a usury rate and has to be prosecuted.