Individual behavior is influenced by factors intrinsic to the decision-maker but also associated with other individuals and their ownerships with such relationship intensified by geographic proximity. The land management literature is scarce in the spatially integrated analysis of biophysical and socio-economic data. Localized land management decisions are likely driven by spatially-explicit bu...

Conservation scientists emphasize the importance of maintaining a connected network of protected areas to prevent ecosystems and populations from becoming isolated, reduce the risk of extinction, and ultimately sustain biodiversity. Keeping protected areas connected in a network is increasingly recognized as a conservation priority in the current era of rapid climate change. Models that identif...

In the last few years, traffic congestion has become a growing concern due to increasing vehicle ownerships in urban areas. Intersections are one of the major bottlenecks that contribute to urban traffic congestion. Traditional traffic signal control systems cannot adjust the timing pattern depending on road traffic demand. This results in excessive delays for road users. Adaptive traffic signa...

Economic models play a significant role in performance of grid implementation. In this paper, we studied Double auction and Contract-Net-Protocol, which are two of the widely used economic models in grid computing. Economic models facilitate harnessing grid resources across distributed ownerships. However, dynamic nature of these resources imposes further challenge in seamless collaboration. Ag...

We make a formal sociologic study of the concept of free will. By using the language of mathematics and logic, we define what we call everlasting societies. Everlasting societies never age: persons never age, and the goods of the society are indestructible. The infinite history of an everlasting society unfolds by following deterministic and probabilistic laws that do their best to satisfy the ...

This research investigates the current status of business process reengineering (BPR) in China by answering the following two questions: How do Chinese business executives view benefits, critical success factors, and major obstacles of BPR implementation? What are the managerial implications of BPR in China? Data were collected by means of survey questionnaires to senior managers in Beijing and...

This paper explores situations where tenants in public houses, in a specific neighborhood, are given the legislated right to buy the houses they live in or can choose to remain in their houses and pay the regulated rent. This type of legislation has been passed in many European countries in the last 30–35 years (the U.K. Housing Act 1980 is a leading example). The main objective with this type ...

Virtual Reality (VR) becomes accessible to mimic a "real-like" world now. People who have a VR experience usually can be impressed by the immersive feeling, they might consider themselves are actually existed in the VR space. Self-consciousness is important for people to identify their own characters in VR space, and illusory ownership can help people to "build" their "bodies". The rubber hand ...

Although a late starter with regard to privatising State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), Ireland was recently ranked 8 among OECD countries in terms of relative privatisation activity. This paper presents the first detailed analysis of the programme since the first divestiture in 1991. It explores how the rationale for selling SOEs has evolved and argues that privatisation has been pursued on the bas...

This paper examines the problem of combining multiple partitionings of a set of objects into a single consolidated clustering without accessing the features or algorithms that determined these partitionings. This problem is an abstraction of scenarios where different organizations have grouped some or all elements of a common underlying population, possibly using different features, algorithms ...