Although most secondary schools use management information systems (MISs), these systems are primarily used for clerical purposes and are not used to a significant extent to support higher order managerial activities. This situation is less than desirable, as schools are receiving more discretion in developing school policies and MISs could be offering important assistance in this respect. Our ...

Pattern search methods are a class of direct search methods for nonlinear optimization. Since the introduction of the original pattern search methods in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they have remained popular with users due to their simplicity and the fact that they work well in practice on a variety of problems. More recently, the fact that they are provably convergent has generated renewed...

Supplementary section for Understanding Networked Applications: A First Course, Morgan Kaufmann, 1999. Copyright notice: Permission is granted to copy and distribute this material for educational purposes only, provided that this copyright notice remains attached. The underlying technology for transporting a bit stream on a communication link is digital communication. In networked computing, th...

Today, network address translators, or NATs, are everywhere. Their ubiquitous adoption was not promoted by design or planning but by the continued growth of the Internet, which places an ever-increasing demand not only on IP address space but also on other functional requirements that network address translation is perceived to facilitate. This article presents a personal perspective on the his...

Most mornings, the line begins to form at dawn: scores of silent women with babies strapped to their backs, buckets balanced on their heads, and in each hand a bright-blue plastic jug. On good days, they will wait less than an hour before a water tanker rumbles across the rutted dirt path that passes for a road in Kesum Purbahari, a slum on the southern edge of New Delhi. On bad days, when ther...

Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, is a brilliant journalist and an able economist. Why Globalization Works is an excellent example of the author’s capacity for examination and analysis. The book is based on a series of articles on globalization that originally appeared in the FT, and on his Hayek Memorial Lecture to the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. Wol...