In fact, the development of a fully operational GIS for forest management will likely incorporate each activity as two distinct stages in its development (see Crain and MacDonald 1983, Jordan and Erdle 1990). For example, spatial data input, editing, and simple maps characterize the inventory and monitoring stage. In the modeling stage, overlays, reclassifications and suitability analyses are i...

Tcl[1] is an interpreted high level language suitable for scripts, small scale systems, prototypes and embedding in larger applications. C++ is a powerful compiled language that provides support for object oriented programming and is suitable for building large complex systems. But what if you could move from C++ to Tcl and back again with the ease of an object reference and a dynamically bound...

Decision Guidance Systems provide supply managers with a powerful tool to handle complex sourcing issues. Supply organizations have several hundreds of items on one complex bid. Satisfying both user and multiple business unit objectives requires software that allows the sourcing team to rapidly analyze an unlimited number of alternatives. Doing so enables the firm to realize a higher percentage...

A pivotal moment in my graduate career occurred when a colleague confided that he saw literary study as the study of human behavior, and all study of human behavior as the study of human biology. Thus, he continued, literary study ought properly to be a sub-field of the biological sciences (Constable, personal communication). On this view, English programs would be housed in Biology Departments...

Ramsey’s theorem says that for every clique H1 and for every graph H2 with no edges, all graphs containing neither of H1, H2 as induced subgraphs have bounded size. What if, instead, we exclude a graph H1 with a vertex whose deletion gives a clique, and the complement H2 of another such graph? This no longer implies bounded size, but it implies tightly restricted structure that we describe. The...

Many intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) offer feedback and guidance through structured dialogs with their students, which often take the form of a sequence of hints. However, it is often difficult to replicate the complexity and responsiveness of human conversation with current natural language understanding and production technologies. Although ITSs reveal enough information to continue solvi...

Constructing structurally complex reservoir models at the appraisal stage is a complex task, with a high-degree of uncertainty. The lack of an intuitive set of modeling and visualization tools that support expert visual interpretation from geophysicists and geologists significantly increases the challenge. We present a set of interactive software tools to reservoir modeling in the appraisal sta...

It was a hot humid morning as always in the small village of Amokwasuaso in Ghana’s western region. We sat in the small, dilapidated community meeting hall awaiting the arrival of a World Bank fact-finding mission. The Amokwasuaso community has achieved some celebrity in Ghana as the first community to have the rights to manage wildlife devolved to its residents by the State. The fact-finding m...

We study the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model for riffle shuffles and ask ’How many times must a deck of cards be shuffled for the deck to be in close to random order?’. In 1992, Bayer and Diaconis gave a solution which gives exact and asymptotic results for all decks of practical interest, e.g. a deck of 52 cards. But what if one only cares about the colors of the cards or disregards the suits focu...