One of the major environmental issues currently facing New Zealand is that of the sustainability of pastoral farming on North Island hill country. To be sustainable, a system must be resource conserving, environmentally compatible, socially supportive and commer-cially competitive. The Resource Management Act defines sustainable management as managing the use, development and protection of natu...

We present an information-theoretic analysis of Darwin’s theory of evolution, modeled as a hill-climbing algorithm on a fitness landscape. Our space of possible organisms consists of computer programs, which are subjected to random mutations. We study the random walk of increasing fitness made by a single mutating organism. In two different models we are able to show that evolution will occur a...

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Vimal K. Derebail, JulieAnne G. McGregor, Romulo E. Colindres, Harsharan K. Singh and Abhijit V. Kshirsagar Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, Department of Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA; UNC Kidney Center, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA and Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel H...

in this research, a sol-modified composite electrodeposition technique that combines the sol-gel method with the conventional electrodeposition process was utilized to deposit ni-tio2 nanocomposite coatings. cyclic voltammetry and chronoamperometry techniques were applied to study the influence of the tio2 sol concentration on the deposits’ electrochemical behavior. the results clearly showed t...

We propose a simple and semi-parametric estimator for the tail index of a regular varying elliptical random vector. Since, for univariate random variables, our estimator boils down to the Hill estimator and it inherits the simplicity and asymptotic properties, we name it after Bruce M. Hill. The estimator is based on the distance between an elliptical probability contour and the outer – or exce...

Enforced hill-climbing is an effective deterministic hillclimbing technique that deals with local optima using breadth-first search (a process called “basin flooding”). We propose and evaluate a stochastic generalization of enforced hill-climbing for online use in goal-oriented probabilistic planning problems. We assume a provided heuristic function estimating expected cost to the goal with fla...

A great deal has been written, especially since the war, on off street parking. You have heard of the crying need for more off street parking in order to meet the needs of shoppers and thereby avoid a process of decentralization. Many parking authorities have been established and millions of dollars of public money invested in park­ ing facilities to provide space for all comers on a completely...

I n his farewell address to the nation, President Eisenhower told Americans that the military–industrial complex offered enormous potential for abuse if not properly constrained. The problem has become much larger than he imagined. We now have a selfsustaining and self-regulating national militaryindustrial-surveillance-politicalmedia-prison-energy-academicreligious-medical-legal-think-tank com...

Sir,?In the January issue of the Indian Medical Gazette, you have a note on hill diarrhoea as it occurs at Darjeeling and Poona and suggest a record of the experience of Civil Surgeons at other hill stations. From an experience of three years at Ootacamund, the "Queen of Hill Stations," the period including four "seasons," and from information gathered from my predecessors as Civil Surgeon, or ...