Parameter estimation is a subject that is standard fare in the many books available on statistics. These books range from the highly theoretical expositions written by statisticians to the more practical treatments contributed by the many users of applied statistics. This text is an attempt to strike a balance between these two extremes. The particular audience we have in mind is the community involved in the design and implementation of signal processing algorithms. As such, the primary focus is on obtaining optimal estimation algorithms that may be implemented on a digital computer. The data sets are therefore assumed to be samples of a continuous-time waveform or a sequence of data points. The choice of topics reflects what we believe to be the important approaches to obtaining an optimal estimator and analyzing its performance. As a consequence, some of the deeper theoretical issues have been omitted with references given instead. <...>

Approximately 380 million years ago, something strange and significant happened on Earth. That time is part of an interval of Earth’s history called the Devonian period by scientists such as geologists and paleontologists, but in more popular imagination, it is known as the Age of Fishes. The reason for this is that after about 200 million years of earlier evolution, the vertebrates—animals with backbones—had produced an explosion of fishlike animals that lived in the nearshore lagoons, river estuaries, and lakes of the time. The strange thing that happened from the middle to the later parts of the Devonian period is that some of these fishlike animals evolved limbs with digits—fingers and toes. Over the ensuing 350 million years, these tetrapods gradually evolved from their aquatic ancestry into walking terrestrial vertebrates. These have dominated the land ever since this initial explosive radiation allowed them to colonize and exploit the land and its opportunities. The tetrapods, with their limbs and fingers and toes, include ourselves as humans, so that this distant Devonian event is profoundly significant for humans as well as for the planet <...>

The Gas Processors Suppliers Association is an organization of companies with specialized knowledge of the supply and service needs of the gas processing and related industries. A major service to them is embodied in the Engineering Data Book, which was first published in 1935. Over 150,000 copies of the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Editions of the book were distributed for use throughout the world by engineers, operating personnel, and students. The Twelfth Edition of the Engineering Data Book, available in two versions — FPS and SI — is an attempt to assemble, in a single compilation, basic design information together with data and procedures that can be used by field and plant engineers to determine operating and design parameters. It is also intended as an aid to design engineers who, in spite of increasing availability of computer routines and other sophisticated design methods, require a general reference work as a guide to accepted engineering practice for estimating, feasibility studies, preliminary design, and for making on-site operating decisions <...>