Approaches for forecasting wildfire suppression costs in advance of a wildfire season are demonstrated for two lead times: fall and spring of the current fiscal year (Oct. 1–Sept. 30). Model functional forms are derived from aggregate expressions of a least cost plus net value change model. Empirical estimates of these models are used to generate advance-of-season forecasts. Cost forecasts invo...

The unjust distributional consequences of climate change, and its potentially negative aggregate effect on economic growth and welfare are two reasons to be concerned about climate change. Our knowledge of the impact of climate change is incomplete. Monetary valuation is difficult and controversial. The effect of other developments on the impacts of climate change is largely speculative. Noneth...

We estimate a structural model of optimal life-cycle housing and consumption in the presence of realistic labor income and house price uncertainties. The model postulates constant elasticity of substitution between housing service and nonhousing consumption, and explicitly incorporates a house adjustment cost. Our estimation fits the crosssectional and time-series household wealth and housing p...

OBJECTIVES To present new estimates of the average lifetime costs per child maltreatment victim and aggregate lifetime costs for all new child maltreatment cases incurred in 2008 using an incidence-based approach. METHODS This study used the best available secondary data to develop cost per case estimates. For each cost category, the paper used attributable costs whenever possible. For those ...

In many practical applications, the need arises to aggregate data of varying dimension. Following from the self-identity property, some recent studies have looked at the stability of aggregation operators in terms of their behavior as the dimensionality is increased from n−1 to n. We use the penalty-based representation of aggregation functions in order to investigate the conditions for weighti...

In the last few decades SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) has become the new trend in the IT industry. Many organizations tend to migrate to SOA in order to cope with the rapidly changing business. Effort estimation of SOA projects has become a real challenge to project managers due to the limited literatures addressing this issue. The traditional effort estimation techniques do not fit SOA p...

Ranking-aware queries have been gaining much attention recently in many applications such as search engines and data streams. They are, however, not only restricted to such applications but are also very useful in OLAP applications. In this paper, we introduce aggregation ranking queries in OLAP data cubes motivated by an online advertisement tracking data warehouse application. These queries a...

More than 90% of Malaysian roads are constructed using asphaltic concrete. However, previous investigations of asphaltic concrete have mainly concentrated on the macroscopic properties of the composite materials based on the assumption that the mixtures are homogeneous and isotropic. This paper applies a digital image processing technique to compare the orientations of coarse aggregate particle...