It is widely recognised that delta-hedged positions in options can be used to trade volatility. To facilitate volatility trading for their clients, several institutions routinely offer variance swaps. A variance swap is a financial contract that upon expiry pays the difference between a standard historical estimate of daily return variance and a fixed rate determined at inception. As in any swa...

Articles 7 What Makes an Early Adopter? Transforming Landscapes One Farmer at a Time by Alicia Calle, MESc 2008 15 Ignorance or Exclusion? Forest Knowledge and Social Hierarchies in Community-Level Conservation in the Petén, Guatemala by Micha Rahder, MESc 2008 21 Conservation in Flux: Pursuing Social Resilience in Mozambique and Peru by James Leslie, joint MESc-MBA 2008 28 Understanding Stakeh...

BACKGROUND Because of the high concentration of oil refining and petrochemical facilities, the industrial area of the lower Mississippi River of South Louisiana has been termed the Industrial Corridor and has frequently been referred to as the "Cancer Corridor". AIMS To quantitatively assess the "Cancer Corridor" controversy based on mortality data available in the public domain, and to ident...

The establishment of corridors can offset the negative effects of habitat fragmentation by connecting isolated habitat patches. However, the practical value of corridor planning is minimal if corridor identification is not based on reliable quantitative information about species-environment relationships. An example of this need for quantitative information is planning for giant panda conservat...

At lunchtime it’s crucial for people to get to the food trucks as quickly as possible. The building is represented by a graph G = (V,E) where each room, landing, or other location is represented by a vertex and each corridor or stairway is represented by an edge. Each corridor has associated capacity c, meaning that at most c people can pass through the corridor at once. Traversing a corridor f...

Wireless sensor networks are expected to play an essential role as a social infrastructure to realize our safe and secure living environment. In such a network, critical information must be transmitted faster and more reliably than other information. We propose a distributed transmission mechanism which enables emergency packets to be carried with high reliability and low latency along a prefer...

A k-dense corridor through a finite set, S, of n points in the plane is the open region of the plane that is bounded by two parallel lines that intersect the convex hull of S and such that the region contains k points of S. The problem of finding a widest k-dense corridor arises in robot motion-planning. In this paper, efficient solutions are presented for several versions of this problem. Resu...

Being a mosaic of miscellaneous habitats, the Toruń Valley is a refuge for numerous species of animals, who find their shelter here, food and favourable places for reproduction. Countrywide, the Valley is also an important natural ecological corridor for those animals. Regarding this function, the Vistula River is of particular significance within the described area. This study presents species...

Many problems in computational sustainability involve constraints on connectivity. When designing a new wildlife corridor, we need it to be geographically connected. When planning the harvest of a forest, we need new areas to harvest to be connected to areas that have already been harvested so we can access them easily. And when town planning, we need to connect new homes to the existing utilit...