Negotiated settlements are a form of regulation of public utilities that is alternative or complementary to the conventional process of litigation. Since the early 1960s they have been seen primarily as a means of coping with a regulatory backlog and as saving regulatory processing time. More recently legal scholars and practitioners suggest that settlements better serve the needs of the partie...

This paper examines the case for usage-based pricing in the Internet. We extend earlier work by Mackie-Mason and Varian [21] on congestion-based pricing in a single network to the case of multiple, competing carriers, and examine the problem of settlements between service providers that arises. With optimal congestion prices, it will probably be necessary to allocate revenues to the multiple, c...

Excavation works in urban areas require a preliminary risk damage assessment. In historical cities, the prediction of building response to settlements is necessary to reduce the risk of damage of the architectural heritage. The current method used to predict the building damage due to ground deformations is the Limiting Tensile Strain Method (LTSM) [3]. This method is based on an uncoupled soil...

Lack of sanitation facilities is a common occurrence in informal settlements that are common in most developing countries. One challenge with sanitation provision in these settlements is the cost and financing of sanitation. This study aimed at estimating the cost of sanitation, and investigating the social and economic dynamics within Kisumu's informal settlements that hinder provision and upt...

Internationally, settlement informality (informal housing and informal settlements) is increasing, not decreasing. Thus, according to United Nations estimates, there are currently 924 million people living in various forms of slums and unauthorized or informal settlements (UN Habitat, 2003, p2). In Sub-Saharan Africa 71,9% of urban dwellers lived in slums (ibid). In South Africa, official gover...

Characterizing and understanding social-ecological systems (SESs) is increasingly necessary to answer questions about the development of sustainable human settlements. To date, much of the literature on SES analysis has focused on “neat” systems involving a single type of resource, a group of users, and a governance system. While these studies provide valuable and specific insights, they are of...

Thessaly is a low relief region in Greece where hundreds of Neolithic settlements/tells called magoules were established from the Early Neolithic period until the Bronze Age (6,000 - 3,000 BC). Multi-sensor remote sensing was applied to the study area in order to evaluate its potential to detect Neolithic settlements. Hundreds of sites were geo-referenced through systematic GPS surveying throug...

Technology and business models share a common evolution within the Internet. To enable deployment of the technology within a service environment there is also the need to create a robust and stable business model. This tied destiny of technology and business factors is perhaps most apparent within the area of the interconnection of Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Here there is both an intera...