During recent decades large changes in vegetation biomass have been observed in arctic and alpine areas. While these temporal trends have been clearly linked to changing climatic conditions, the drivers of local spatial variation in biomass are still relatively poorly understood. Thus, we examine the effects of abiotic conditions (as measured by ten variables representing topography, soil prope...

High price of chippers and small scale of forestry management area seemed to create a standstill situation of chip utilization system in Japan. By combining the benefits of small scale forestry and low price chippers, a simple and low-cost chip supply model could be established, creating new employments opportunities. The object of this study is to propose the benefits of a chip supply system i...

The nuclear phase-out and the increased share of renewable distributed generation implicate new challenges for transforming the electric power system into an environmentally sustainable, reliable and cost-efficient system. An important component in transforming the electric power system is the reliable substitution of large controllable power plants by small generation units (photovoltaic syste...

To understand the transformation of banking in the post-communist transition, this paper examines the cost efficiency of 289 banks in 15 east European countries. The findings showed that banking systems in which foreign-owned banks have a larger share of total assets record lower costs and that the association between a country’s progress in banking reform and cost efficiency is non-linear. Ear...

This paper describes the process of developing an approach to evaluating the cost-efficiency of Finnish electricity distribution companies for regulation purposes. The process consisted of three main stages 1) describing of the problem and exploring the key factors, 2) finding measurable quantities for the most essential factors, and 3) selecting the final model to be used in the regulation. Th...

Symbolic PDBs and Merge-and-Shrink (M&S) are two approaches to derive admissible heuristics for optimal planning. We present a combination of these techniques, Symbolic Merge-and-Shrink (SM&S), which uses M&S abstractions as a relaxation criterion for a symbolic backward search. Empirical evaluation shows that SM&S has the strengths of both techniques deriving heuristics at least as good as the...

We introduce a video distribution architecture where the prefix of the video is delivered on demand by a prefix server while the body of the video is broken in equal length segments and each segment is periodically transmitted by a central server. The combination of open-loop distribution for the video body and closed-loop multicast transmission for the video prefix makes the overall system hig...

A wide array of alternatives has been proposed as the common metrics with which to compare the climate impacts of different emission types. Different physical and economic metrics and their parameterizations give diverse weights between e.g. CH4 and CO2, and fixing the metric from one perspective makes it sub-optimal from another. As the aims of global climate policy involve some degree of ambi...

Crossover designs are well-known to have major advantages when comparing the effects of various non-curative treatments. We compare efficiencies of several crossover designs along with the Balaam’s design with that of a parallel group design pertaining to longitudinal studies where event time can only be measured in discrete time intervals. With equally sized sequences, the parallel group desig...

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Computer Science at ODU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Computer Science Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ODU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Repository Citation Bhagavathi, D.; Gurla, H.; Olariu, S.; Schwing, J. L.; and Zhang, J., "Timeand Co...