Synonymous with the obvious euphoria and panegyric extolment surrounding the exponential advances in modern science, there is a growing body of weighty privacy concerns uttered over the extent to which the potential ramifications that the commercialisation of certain technological innovations may have. One technology presently inflaming privacy advocates " is radio frequency identification (her...

Progressive Taxation in a Tournament Economy Not enough is known about the responsiveness of individuals, in particular those who tend to work under different incentives, to changes in marginal tax rates. We ask whether changes in marginal tax rates are less distortionary for workers engaged in a contest. To examine this potential rationale for a more progressive tax code, we first model the ef...

Business Intelligence (BI) offers great opportunities for strategic analysis of current and future business operations; however, existing BI tools typically provide data-oriented responses to queries, difficult to understand in terms of business objectives and strategies. To make BI data meaningful, we need a conceptual modeling language whose primitive concepts represent business objectives, p...

The term conceptual simulation refers to a type of everyday reasoning strategy commonly called "what if" reasoning. It has been suggested in a number of contexts that this type of reasoning plays an important role in scientific discovery; however, little direct evidence exists to support this claim. This article proposes that conceptual simulation is likely to be used in situations of informati...

The problem of online coloring an unknown graph is known to be hard. Here we consider the problem of online coloring in the relaxed situation where the input must be isomorphic to a given known graph. All that foils a computationally powerful player is that it is not known to which sections of the graph the vertices to be colored belong. We show that the performance ratio of any online coloring...

• What is the range and pattern of variability in landscape structure under “natural” and anthropogenic disturbance regimes? RMLANDS provides a mechanistic approach for evaluating disturbance and succession processes over broad spatial (100,000's of ha) and temporal scales (100's of years) not possible or practical with empirical field studies. Moreover, RMLANDS allows us to ask “what if” quest...

Although case-based reasoning (CBR) was introduced as an alternative to rule-based reasoning (RBR), there is a growing interest in integrating it with other reasoning paradigms, including RBR. New hybrid approaches are being piloted to achieve new synergies and improve problem-solving capabilities. In our approach to integration, CBR is used to satisfy multiple numeric constraints, and RBR allo...

I magine that you are driving to a movie theater to watch a film. You look for a place to park as you approach the cinema, and show time is coming up. You feel some time pressure not to miss all the previews, and you are motivated to try to minimize your total travel time, including driving and then walking from wherever you park. What is the best strategy to follow in this case? Should you par...

One of the most important resources we need today is electricity to carry out comfortably our day-to-day activities. While many nations in the world are abundantly enjoying this resource, more than 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity. Most of these people are from developing nations typically from Africa and India. They happen to be poor and living in remote villages and mounta...