Location Choice by Households and Polluting Firms: An Evolutionary Approach

environmental policy;game theory;household economics;pollution;location choice

The design and implementation of an infrastructure for multimedia digital libraries

We develop an infrastructure for managing, indexing and serving multimedia content in digital libraries. This infrastructure follows the model of the Web, and thereby is distributed in nature. We discuss the design of the Librarian, the component that manages meta data about the content. The management of meta data has been separated from the media servers that manage the content itself. Also, the extraction of the meta data is largely independent of the Librarian. We introduce our extensible data model and the daemon paradigm that are the core pieces of this architecture. We evaluate our initial implementation using a relational database. We conclude with a discussion of the lessons we learned in building this system, and proposals for improving the flexibility, reliability, and performance of the syste

Adaptive interpolation of discrete-time signals that can be modeled as autoregressive processes

This paper presents an adaptive algorithm for the restoration of lost sample values in discrete-time signals that can locally be described by means of autoregressive processes. The only restrictions are that the positions of the unknown samples should be known and that they should be embedded in a sufficiently large neighborhood of known samples. The estimates of the unknown samples are obtained by minimizing the sum of squares of the residual errors that involve estimates of the autoregressive parameters. A statistical analysis shows that, for a burst of lost samples, the expected quadratic interpolation error per sample converges to the signal variance when the burst length tends to infinity. The method is in fact the first step of an iterative algorithm, in which in each iteration step the current estimates of the missing samples are used to compute the new estimates. Furthermore, the feasibility of implementation in hardware for real-time use is established. The method has been tested on artificially generated auto-regressive processes as well as on digitized music and speech signals

Laboratory mid-IR spectra of equilibrated and igneous meteorites. Searching for observables of planetesimal debris

Meteorites contain minerals from Solar System asteroids with different properties (like size, presence of water, core formation). We provide new mid-IR transmission spectra of powdered meteorites to obtain templates of how mid-IR spectra of asteroidal debris would look like. This is essential for interpreting mid-IR spectra of past and future space observatories, like the James Webb Space Telescope. We show that the transmission spectra of wet and dry chondrites, carbonaceous and ordinary chondrites and achondrite and chondrite meteorites are distinctly different in a way one can distinguish in astronomical mid-IR spectra. The two observables that spectroscopically separate the different meteorites groups (and thus the different types of parent bodies) are the pyroxene-olivine feature strength ratio and the peak shift of the olivine spectral features due to an increase in the iron concentration of the olivine

Simlandscape: serious gaming in participatory spatial

In an attempt to improve support for contemporary spatial planning practice, Simlandscape has been developed. In this document the development of Simlandscape as ¿serious game¿ in digital form is described. In its current state, Simlandscape exists in two methodological forms; as an analogue game and as a planning support system using GIS for research and design. The game focuses on simulation of plan processes and on the resulting transformation of areas involved. Players interact with an analogue area model. The planning support system focuses on design and evaluation of plan scenarios and the data handling and presentation accompanying this process. A major challenge now is to integrate, upgrade and digitize components of the analogous game with the planning support system. Several interesting components (practical and scientific) of this project are identified and are discussed