a Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 72 It'enhua Road, Shenyang, 110015 China School of Natural Resources, University of Missouri-Columbia, 203M ABNR Building, Columbia, MO 65211 USA " Department of Forest Ecology and Management, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1630 Linden Dr., Madison, WI 53706 USA R' '-' $a Received 3 September 1999; received in revised form 29 Septem...

In a grid computing environment, it is important to be capable of agilely quantifying the quality of service achievable by each alternative composition of resources. This capability is an essential driver to not only efficiently utilizing the resources but also promoting the virtual economy. In this paper, we design an efficient scheduling algorithm of minimizing completion time for component-b...

Engineering consulting services constitutes a key knowledge-intensive sector that has existed for a long time, but has gained new importance as a result of the intensification of knowledge-based competition. The emergence of the new economy challenges the ways that engineering consultants have traditionally created and applied new knowledge. Professional engineering services have typically been...

Inspired by Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, many economists have postulated the existence of invisible forces that drive economic markets. These market forces interact in complex ways making it difficult to visualize or understand the interactions in every detail. Here I show how these forces can transcend a zero-sum game and become a win-win business interaction, thanks to emergent social syne...

The emergence of profit-based online platforms for the peer-to-peer sharing of consumer goods provides new means for the end users to derive profit from their possessions. The success of these platforms relies heavily on the behavior of their participants. Using an agent-based model simulating these behaviors via different scenarios, we show how these mechanisms are efficient to improve the inf...

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Objective: One of the long-term goals and strategies of the country for development in the 20-year vision plan is the development of the knowledge-based economy, so that with pursuing this strategy, Iran could become a knowledge-based economy by 1404. The purpose of this research is to explain the economic status of Iran among regional competitors based on the components of knowledge-based econ...

The bio-based economy can and should be to the 21 century what the fossil-based economy was to the 20 century. Agriculture will be core to the bio-based economy, providing source materials for commodity items, e.g. liquid fuels and value-added products such as chemicals and materials. For example, a hectare (2.47 acres) of biomass crop converted to 16,800 L (4,450 gallons) of ethanol at a cost ...