Since the catastrophic Sumatra-Andaman tsunami took place in 2004, 16 other tsunamis have resulted in significant damage and 14 in casualties. We review the fundamental changes that have affected our command of tsunami issues as scientists, engineers and decision-makers, in the quest for improved wisdom in this respect. While several scientific paradigms have had to be altered or abandoned, new...

This paper presents a novel approach for leveraging automatically extracted textual knowledge to improve the performance of control applications such as games. Our ultimate goal is to enrich a stochastic player with highlevel guidance expressed in text. Our model jointly learns to identify text that is relevant to a given game state in addition to learning game strategies guided by the selected...

Underground mining method selection is one of the most crucial decisions that should be made by mining engineers. Choosing a suitable underground mining method to carry out extraction from a mineral deposit is very important in terms of the economics, safety and the productivity of mining operations. The aim of this study is developing a fuzzy model to selection the optimum mining method by usi...

Product development includes many different types of decision-making by engineers and managers. Design decisions determine the product form and specify the manufacturing processes to be used. Development decisions control the progress of product development projects by specifying which activities should happen, their sequence, and who should perform them. This paper introduces the concept of a ...

Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political scientist and historian who visited America in 1831, is quoted frequently on the distinctions he found between the New and Old Worlds. But some of his other comments highlighted similarities across civilizations: “The village or township is the only association which is so perfectly natural that, wherever a number of men are collected, it seems to const...

The dynamics of ‘‘vicious,’’ continuously growing civilizations ~domains!, which engage in ‘‘war’’ whenever two domains meet, is investigated. In the war event, the smaller domain is annihilated, while the larger domain is reduced in size by a fraction e of the casualties of the loser. Here e quantifies the fairness of the war, with e51 corresponding to a fair war with equal casualties on both ...

exceeded anything that the Earth has experienced for millions of years, and the growth rate has been unprecedented. But such long-term views are sometimes hard to grasp. What is the timescale relevant for society today? Perhaps it is more instructive to consider just the period over which civilization has developed, from the time when the first cities were established around 6000 years ago. If ...