This paper outlines ongoing research that is investigating ways to increase the supply of high quality planting materials for smallholder forestry in the Philippines. A Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) of the nursery sector that had been developed previously by one of the authors was further refined during a planning and implementation workshop for the ACIAR Smallholder Nursery project. The refine...

The Commanding Officer (CO) on a submarine makes numerous subtle perceptual judgments, assessments of complex situations, and decisions under conditions of time pressure, high stakes, shifting goals, dynamic conditions, and uncertainty. The objective of our project was to deeply understand and clarify the nature of the decisions made by a CO so that we could develop recommendations for a potent...

In this paper submitted to the special session on “System Dynamics and Organizational Learning: purposes, practices and pitfalls”, we describe a system dynamics intervention using the principles of Group Model Building to uncover the deep-seated issues in a long-standing problem area of an organization. In describing this intervention, we will outline how we used causal loop diagrams to represe...

HAC estimators are known to produce test statistics that reject too frequently in finite samples. One neglected reason comes from using the OLS residuals when constructing the HAC estimator. If the regression matrix contains high leverage points, such as from outliers, then the OLS residuals will be negatively biased. This reduces the variance of the OLS residuals and the HAC estimator takes th...

The pharmaceutical industry is in a R&D productivity crisis. Rapidly increasing development costs, decreasing profitability of new medical entities and missing breakthrough innovations are negatively affecting the future of the pharmaceutical industry. This complex problem requires a systems thinking approach to find effective solutions. In this study, a general pharmaceutical R&D productivity ...

Third party liability insurance settlements are by their nature the result of negotiations between the claimant, or his/her representative, and a representative of the insurer, acting on behalf of the policyholder (Ross, 1980). When substantial non-economic or general damages are expected in any settlement, such as in auto bodily injury liability claims, the nature of the settlement process mus...

S U M M A R Y Robust magnetotelluric response function estimators are now in standard use in electromagnetic induction research. Properly devised and applied, these have the ability to reduce the influence of unusual data (outliers) in the response (electric field) variables, but are often not sensitive to exceptional predictor (magnetic field) data, which are termed leverage points. A bounded ...

Cloud computing has increasingly been drawing attention these days. Each big company in IT hurries to get a chunk of meat that promises to be a whopping market in the future. At the same time, information is always associated with security and risk problems. Nowadays, the handling of these risks is no longer just a technology problem, with a good deal of literature focusing on risk or security ...

Purpose – University campuses behave as complex systems, and sustainability in higher education is best seen as an emergent quality that arises from interactions both within an institution and between the institution and the environmental and social contexts in which it operates. A framework for strategically prioritizing campus sustainability work is needed. This paper seeks to address these i...

The primary purpose of this paper is to illustrate the protean symptomatology of a group of growths known collectively as the malignant lymphomata or lymphoblastomata. Much discussion centres on the exact nomenclature of these conditions, and no attempt is made here to elucidate this matter. Gall and Mallory (1942) discuss the problems involved, and suggest a cytological basis for subdivision; ...