The continuous decline in Earth’s biodiversity represents a major crisis and challenge for the 21st century, and there is international political agreement to slow down or halt this decline. The challenge is in large part impeded by the lack of knowledge on the state and distribution of biodiversity – especially since the majority of species on Earth are un-described by science. All conservatio...

In a recent paper on sustainable consumption Eva Heiskanen and Mika Pantzar introduced consumer behavior to the discussion of global sustainability.1 In fact, they argued that consumers bear the main responsibility for environmental degradation in a market economy. While there is also a need to take into account the behavior of businesses, given the severe damages that companies cause by not ta...

The continuous decline in Earth’s biodiversity represents a major crisis and challenge for the 21st century, and there is international political agreement to slow down or halt this decline. The challenge is in large part impeded by the lack of knowledge on the state and distribution of biodiversity – especially since the majority of species on Earth are un-described by science. All conservatio...

We analyze the use of built-in policies, or macro-actions, as a form of domain knowledge that can improve the speed and scaling of reinforcement learning algorithms. Such macro-actions are often used in robotics, and macro-operators are also well-known as an aid to state-space search in AI systems. The macro-actions we consider are closed-loop policies with termination conditions. The macro-act...

purchase and consumption are an inseparable part of man’s social actions and play a vital role in allocating resources for the production of various products, their distribution pattern as well as economic, political and social development. if this issue is to be seen from the perspective of consumer behavior, consumption patterns and purchasing are considered a cultural phenomenon to be explai...

The MSC macro package facilitates LaTEX users to easily include Message Sequence Charts in their texts. This article describes the motivation for developing the MSC macro package, the features of the MSC macro package, and the design of the MSC macro package.

Enhanced Inter Cell Interference Coordination (eICIC) for co-channel deployments of pico cells throughout a macro cell layout is studied. In particular, we analyze a scenario where only some macro cells have picos deployed, while other macro cells have no small cells. The challenge for such highly irregular scenarios is how to operate eICIC, and especially how to coordinate macro-cell muting. O...

The importance of production systems in artificial intelligence has been repeatedly demonstrated by a number of expert systems. Much effort has therefore been expended on finding an efficient processing mechanism to process production systems. While data-flow principles of execution offer the promise of high programmability for numerical computations, we study here variable resolution actors, c...