An interesting recent paper by Falk and Kaufmann[11] notes, with an element of surprise, that the percentile bootstrap applied to construct confidence intervals for quantiles produces two-sided intervals with coverage error of size n−½, where n denotes sample size. By way of contrast, the error would be O(n−1) for two-sided intervals in more classical problems, such as intervals for means or variances. In the present note we point out that the relatively poor performance in the case of quantiles is shared by a variety of related procedures. The coverage accuracy of two-sided bootstrap intervals may be improved to o(n−½) by smoothing the bootstrap. We show too that a normal approximation method, not involving the bootstrap but incorporating a density estimator as part of scale estimation, can have coverage error O(n−1+∈), for arbitrarily small ∈ > 0. Smoothed and unsmoothed versions of bootstrap percentile-t are also analysed.

Let Fn be a free group of finite rank n with basis {x1,…, xn}. Let be a variety of groups and write for the verbal subgroup of Fn corresponding to . (See [11] for information on varieties and related concepts.) Every automorphism of Fn induces an automorphism of the relatively free group Fn/V, and those automorphisms of Fn/V arising in this way are called tame. If is the variety of all metabelian groups and n ╪ 3 then every automorphism of Fn/V is tame [2, 4, 12]. But this is an exceptional situation. For many (and probably most) other varieties , Fn/V has non-tame automorphisms for all sufficiently large n. This holds for the variety of all nilpotent groups of class at most c where c ≥ 3 [1, 3] and for nearly all product varieties including, in particular, the variety of all groups whose derived groups are nilpotent of class at most c, where c > 2 [10, 13].

The two main results of this paper are:

(i) The set of properly algebraic elements of a Jordan system (algebra, triple system or pair) over an uncountable field is an ideal.

(ii) For a semiprimitive Banach Jordan system, the socle, the largest properly algebraic ideal, the largest properly spectrum-finite ideal and the largest von Neumann regular ideal all coincide.

In this article we study the convergence behaviour of least squares approximations of various types by radial basis functions, i.e. least squares approximations from spaces spanned by radially symmetric functions φ (‖· −xj‖). Here the xj are given ‘centres’ in ℝn which we assume to lie on a grid. The inner products with respect to which the least squares problem is considered are discrete and Sobolev, i.e. may involve derivative information. Favourable estimates for the least squares errors are found that are shown to decrease as powers of the gridspacing. The work on discrete least squares approximations also gives rise to the construction of prewavelets from radial function spaces with respect to a discrete Sobolev inner product, which are discussed in the paper as well.

In this paper we use Takeuchy–Ulbrich's cohomology of complexes of categories with abelian group structure to introduce a cohomology theory for simplicial sets, or topological spaces, with coefficients in symmetric cat-groups . This cohomology is the usual one when abelian groups are taken as coefficients, and the main topological significance of this cohomology is the fact that it is equivalent to the reduced cohomology theory defined by a Ω-spectrum, {}, canonically associated to . We use the spaces to prove that symmetric cat-groups model all homotopy type of spaces X with Πi(X) = 0 for all i ╪ n, n + 1 and n ≥ 3, and then we extend Eilenberg–MacLane's classification theorem to those spaces: .

We prove an equivariant version of Galin's theorem on versal deformations of infinitesimally symplectic matrices. Matrix families of codimension zero and one are classified, and the results are used to study the movement of eigenvalues in one parameter families.