1. Introduction: context and scope of the study In the spirit of the growing environmental awareness in the past decades, we witness nowadays an increasing interest in biodiversity, both locally and worldwide. Biodiversity requires our attention for two reasons. First, it provides a wide range of benefits to mankind and human activities. Second, many human activities have contributed to unprece...

Property valuation is a particularly complex and large problem domain that requires diverse, highly sophisticated skills, expertise and knowledge. Experienced valuers have framed sets of assumptions to be applied in estimating the ‘most likely selling price’ or the ‘worth’ of a property. In order to implement a valuation, these valuers use mathematical models called ‘valuation methods’. Previou...

This paper introduces weakly growing context-sensitive grammars. Abstract-1 Such grammars generalize the class of growing context-sensitive grammars (studied by several authors), in that these grammars have rules that “grow” according to a position valuation. If a position valuation coincides with the initial part of an expoAbstract-2 nential function, it is called a steady position valuation. ...

Bruce Kingma is a Professor in the School of Information Studies and Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University; e-mail: [email protected]. Kathleen McClure is Systems Librarian at the Okefenokee Regional Library System, e-mail: [email protected]. © 2015 Bruce Kingma and Kathleen McClure, Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) CC BY-NC. This study me...

One of the most widely appreciated problems of contingent valuation is the potential manipulability of the method, thus subjecting it to possible strategic bias. This paper shows that under usual conditions this problem also holds for market-based methods, such as travel cost and hedonic pricing. However, not all formats of these valuation methods are manipulable. This paper finds positive resu...

The nature of most accidents at the construction sites shows that the construction industry is unique. Factor involved include human behaviour, different construction sites, the difficulties of works, unsafe safety culture, dangerous machinery and equipment being used, and non-compliance to the various set procedures. Study shows that an accident and injury at the worksite is often the result o...

Executive Summary Introduction Much recent planning policy and reform has been informed by the view that planning inhibits economic growth. value of planning, focusing primarily on economic and financial value, while recognising the importance of broader social and environmental value. Remarkably, given the debates around planning reform in the UK, it represents the only recent and wide-ranging...