Rerandomization is a strategy for improving balance on observed covariates in randomized controlled trials. It has been both advocated and advised against by renowned scholars of experimental design. However, the relationship and differences between stratification, rerandomization, and the combination of the two have not been previously investigated. In this paper, we show that stratified designs can be recreated by rerandomization and explain why, in most cases, stratification on binary covariates followed by rerandomization on continuous covariates is more efficient than rerandomization on all covariates at the same time.

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The contact discontinuity is one of the basic wave patterns in gas motions. The stability of contact discontinuities with general perturbations for the NavierStokes equations and the Boltzmann equation is a long standing open problem. General perturbations of a contact discontinuity may generate diffusion waves which evolve and interact with the contact wave to cause analytic difficulties. In this paper, we succeed in obtaining the large time asymptotic stability of a contact wave pattern with a convergence rate for the NavierStokes equations and the Boltzmann equation in a uniform way. One of the key observations is that even though the energy norm of the deviation of the solution from the contact wave may grow at the rate (1+ t) 1 4, it can be compensated by the decay in the energy norm of the derivatives of the deviation which is of the order of (1+ t) 1 4. Thus, this reciprocal order of decay rates for the time

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