Forests provide significant commodity and noncommodity values to the citizens of the United States. An important and substantial role in ensuring the continued health, productivity, and sustainability of these resources is a reliable and credible inventory and monitoring program. The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the US Forest Service has been monitoring and reporting on status...

Due to reduction in petroleum production and aging production facilities, the Norwegian oil and gas industry is interested in optimization maintenance strategies and reducing costs. Currently the maintenance strategies are based on predetermined periodic (calendar or use time) preventive maintenance strategies that are developed based on statistical data and/or recommendation from the manufactu...

Although there has been a growing body of literature on post-disaster participatory reconstruction, a shared understanding on a participatory approach is insufficient. A design charrette is a participatory planning that is particularly suitable for situations in which multidisciplinary professionals and non-professional stakeholders collaborate to accomplish target tasks in a short period of ti...

Much of the literature on citizen participation in the budget process links the council-manager form of government with higher levels of citizen participation, assuming the council-manager form represents professional administration. This is contradictory to the reality that different forms of government have “borrowed” features from each other and many now have mixed forms of government (i.e.,...

Using data from a national living standards survey undertaken in late 1993, this paper disaggregates and explores the economics of livelihood generation and class in rural South Africa in an effort to contribute to the ongoing and vociferous debate in South Africa about poverty and its alleviation. Pursuant to the suggestion of participants in a recent participatory poverty assessment, this pap...

In this article, we describe the implementation of a virtual factory communication system using the manufacturing message specification (MMS) standard and its companion standards (MMS-CS). In particular, a number of virtual networked machines based on the MMS-CS standard are designed and implemented for the virtual factory environment. Additionally, the MMS internet monitoring system (MIMS) is ...

After attending an educational session on hosting journal clubs at the 2013 Annual Meeting & Exhibition, American Society of Consultant Pharmacists, Seattle, Washington, two third-year professional pharmacy students created a student-run journal club through the University of Rhode Island's ASCP student chapter. Three journal club sessions were held during the spring semester and were open to a...

We present our efforts of applying information visualization techniques to the domain of microseismic monitoring. Microseismic monitoring is a crucial process for a number of tasks related to oil and gas reservoir development, e.g., optimizing hydraulic fracturing operations and heavy-oil stimulation. Microseismic data has many challenging features including high dimensionality and uncertainty....

Syncope is a common presenting symptom, and is often a challenging diagnostic dilemma because of its various underlying causes. A careful initial clinical assessment with directed investigations is crucial in arriving at a presumptive diagnosis. Prolonged cardiac monitoring technologies have improved diagnostic accuracy in the more difficult cases.