Environmental ethicists believe it is immoral for human action to result in the extinction of a species. The US Endangered Species Act of 1973 codifies this belief. This paper describes an ongoing case study involving the development of a DSS model to predict the price of Florida scrub habitat. This habitat is crucial to the survival of the Florida scrub-jay, a bird found only in Florida that i...

Sustainability has become a popular notion in current environmental policy analysis. Various definitions of this concept can be found in the literature. Analytically, the notion is relevant in the integration of socio-economie developments with environmental effects in order to obtain insight into (potential) environmental conflicts. Important in the operationalization of sustainability is the ...

The humanities have not enjoyed preeminence in academe since the Scientific Revolution marginalized the old trivium. But they long continued to play a subordinate educational role by helping constitute the distinguishing culture of the elite. Now even this subordinate role is becoming expendable as devotees of the profit motive seek to reduce culture to technological delivery of cultural produc...

Can we trust without any reliable truth information? Most trust architectures work in a similar way: a trustor makes some observations, rates the trustee, and makes recommendations to his friends. When he faces a new case, he checks his trust table and uses recommendations given by trustworthy friends to decide whether he will undertake a given action. But what if the observations that are used...

Have you ever wished to know and actually feel what your friends feel so you could help them better? Or maybe you have wondered how it is to be one of those celebrities you admire? And how about to become an apple for example? To experience lazy days of hanging on a tree enjoying sunshine and being washed by rains? Or maybe it feels the opposite – a hard life of fighting against worms, decay, a...

If one imagines two horses with identical genetic makeup with equal physiological ability, ridden by jockeys with equal riding skill and with the same way of riding a race, being raced against each other, all things being equal the two horses should finish at exactly the same time. But what if one of the horses were given ‘formula X’ to improve its performance, enabling it to win outright. ‘For...

This paper is part of a project to match real-world descriptions of instances of objects to models of objects. We use a rich ontology to describe instances and models at multiple levels of detail and multiple levels of abstraction. The models are described using qualitative probabilities. This paper is about the problem of type uncertainty; what if we have a qualitative distribution over the ty...

Optimality Theory (OT) is a formal linguistic model in which grammars consist of a universal set of violable constraints that are ranked in a language-particular hierarchy. Lower-ranked constraints are often forcibly violated in order to improve satisfaction of higher-ranked constraints. The optimal or most harmonic pronunciation of a given word is that output candidate which best fulfills the ...

Attention gradually shifted to open market operations. With this activity the monetary authority did not have to await the initiative of the commercial banks in the creation of reserves. Through an affirmative use of open market purchases or sales, the Federal Reserve had acquired the initiative in the creation of reserves. But this did not prove to be the perfect answer. Particularly was this ...