tor several decades, electricity production and use have been a growing source of concern among individuals and groups monitoring the quality of the environment. Emissions from coalfired power plants, impacts of hydroelectric development, and risks associated with nuclear energy use have been particular targets for political action, dating to the early days of the environmental movement in the ...

A slack-based feasible interior point method is described which can be derived as a modification of infeasible methods. The modification is minor for most line search methods, but trust region methods require special attention. It is shown how the Cauchy point, which is often computed in trust region methods, must be modified so that the feasible method is effective for problems containing both...

A task was initiated to improve the energy absorption capability of an existing aircraft seat through costeffective retrofitting, while keeping seat-weight increase to a minimum. This task was undertaken as an extension of NASA ongoing safety research and commitment to general aviation customer needs. Only vertical crash scenarios have been considered in this task which required the energy abso...

Prior research has shown that flexibility within mental budgets allows consumers to make exceptions to budget rules in order to justify indulgent choices. However, other research has suggested that too stringent of mental budgets can lead to self-control failure through self-control depletion and the “what-the-hell” effect. We propose that including slack, defined as a region of constrained fle...

■ Abstract Although human-induced changes to the global environment and natural biotic resources, collectively labeled “global change” and the “biodiversity crisis,” have accelerated with industrialization over the past 300 years, such changes have a much longer history. Particularly since the rise of agriculturally based societies and associated population expansion during the early Holocene, ...

The variable regions of five human immunoglobulin heavy chains of the V(H)III subgroup have been totally sequenced. Three of the heavy chains belonged to the IgG class and two to the IgA class. Examination of these sequences, and comparison with additional published heavy chain sequences, showed that a total of four hypervariable regions is characteristic of human heavy chain variable regions. ...

The firefighter problem (FFP) is used as a model to simulate how a fire breaks out and spreads to its surroundings over a discrete time period. The goal is to deploy a given number of firefighters on strategic points at each time step to contain the fire in a most efficient way, so that as many areas are saved from the fire as possible. In this paper we introduce a new solution representation f...

Energy and environmental issues are crucially interrelated. There are two concurrent problems which may determine the future of the human society; depletion of the resources such as oil, and environmental damages associated with the resource use. Resources once utilized are ultimately transformed to differerent forms of wastes whereas some of them are accumulated in air and water, causing persi...

In this paper, we employ the reduced basis method for the efficient and reliable solution of parametrized optimal control problems governed by scalar coercive elliptic partial differential equations. We consider the standard linear-quadratic problem setting with distributed control and unilateral control constraints. For this problem class, we propose two different reduced basis approximations ...