Recent years have borne witness to a striking increase in expenditures on legal services.’ Various critics of the U.S. legal system have accordingly argued that amounts currently spent on or in anticipation of disputes are socially excessive, and several writers have attempted to address the issue through economic analysis.’ Much of the economic literature has centered on the choice between lit...

Organizations survive or disappear primarily thanks to the quality of management that leads them. Decision-making is not the only, but the basic function of management that contributes most to the success or failure of the organization.  e manager is the one who makes decisions and decision-making is the essence of planning. Planning is the fi rst and most important function of management as a...

The resilient supplier selection is a complex multi-criteria decisionmaking problem involving both quantitative and qualitative factors which may be in conflict and may also be uncertain. In this context, a fuzzy based Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method has been proposed to deal with inaccurate, incomplete and imperfect information of expert judgment....

Evaluation is a systematic determination of a subject's merit, worth and significance, using criteria governed by a set of standards. It can assist an organization, program, project or any other intervention or initiative to assess any aim, realisable concept/proposal, or any alternative, to help in decisionmaking; or to ascertain the degree of achievement or value in regard to the aim and obje...

A versatile, actuator-based open machine architecture is needed to meet the increasing performance demands of modern mechanical systems. Actuators in such systems must have a complete knowledge of operating characteristics, with the ability to reconfigure resources to adapt to different conditions or user-choices.This generality of response is termed as intelligence. To achieve this objective, ...

Transparency in decision-making, involving the establishment of explicit goals and objectives combined with open, facilitative procedures, has recently been advocated as an important principle for effective environmental impact assessment (EIA). This paper examines recent changes to EIA practice in Western Australia that emphasise clear procedures for decision-making. Current practices focus on...

This paper presents a new reliable algorithm of loss of mains detection for distributed generation. One of the technical issues created by DG interconnection is inadvertent islanding. Islanding occurs when a portion of the distributed system becomes electrically isolated from the remainder of the power system, yet continues to be energized by DG connected to the isolated subsystem. It can be de...

Landscape visualization is a useful tool in understanding forest dynamics and in assessing various management practices. However, the application of this technology remains very challenging. We propose criteria for landscape visualization so that users can judge the quality of the visualization. We also identify the challenges in developing visualizations and discuss the limitations and advanta...

Scientists have proposed various theories to explain why adolescents are more likely than children or adults to make decisions that result in accidents, suicide, homicide, addiction, and other negative outcomes. According to one theory, the part of the brain that says, “That’ll feel good—go for it” matures before the part that says, “Hold on, there could be a downside here.” Another theory hold...