Watershed Management Research - Challenging Career for Young Scientists

Watershed management is fast becoming a popular catch-phrase as water shortages develop, though few people realize it is still more a concept or aim than a course of action. The idea of watershed management goes back to antiquity. But what we have done or know about it is mostly a development of the last 25 years, starting with the big conservation programs of the “thirties.\u27\u27 To a public then desperately concerned with pulling itself out of a great economic depression, talk about controlling little waters meant little and might well have been interpreted by some as ushering in a government-sponsored program for child care and guidance

Another Year Passes

The three outstanding events of the club last spring quarter were \u27the Foresters’\u27 Banquet; the Veishea Parade and Open-House; and the Spring Campfire

Thermodynamics as a theory of decision-making with information processing costs

Perfectly rational decision-makers maximize expected utility, but crucially ignore the resource costs incurred when determining optimal actions. Here we propose an information-theoretic formalization of bounded rational decision-making where decision-makers trade off expected utility and information processing costs. Such bounded rational decision-makers can be thought of as thermodynamic machines that undergo physical state changes when they compute. Their behavior is governed by a free energy functional that trades off changes in internal energy-as a proxy for utility-and entropic changes representing computational costs induced by changing states. As a result, the bounded rational decision-making problem can be rephrased in terms of well-known concepts from statistical physics. In the limit when computational costs are ignored, the maximum expected utility principle is recovered. We discuss the relation to satisficing decision-making procedures as well as links to existing theoretical frameworks and human decision-making experiments that describe deviations from expected utility theory. Since most of the mathematical machinery can be borrowed from statistical physics, the main contribution is to axiomatically derive and interpret the thermodynamic free energy as a model of bounded rational decision-making.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figures, (under revision since February 2012

Farmers' bulletin (United States. Dept. of Agriculture)

Describes types of trees, vines, and grasses that can be planted in the southern United States to prevent soil erosion