California Carbon Offsets and Working Forest Conservation Easements

California’s cap-and-trade system is a vital laboratory for testing the effectiveness of this market-driven approach in meeting greenhouse gas emission reduction goals and the use of forestry-based carbon offsets within these systems generally. Based on this experience, this Article explores one of the primary challenges, layering offsets with working forest conservation easements, which currently limits opportunities to effectively use these tools in concert. Ultimately, this market may need to foster and rely on natural linkages with working forest conservation easements to develop these offsets and to better ensure that the critical societal objectives of these projects are being met

An application of dynamic programming to pattern recognition

technique which has found only limited usage in the Industrial and Business Management fields which are home to many other of the OR techniques. Its main application has been in problems o

A prototypical approach to machine learning

This paper presents an overview of a research programme on machine learning which is based on the fundamental process of categorization. This work draws upon the psychological theory of prototypical concepts . This theory is that concepts learnt naturally from interaction with the environment (basic categories) are not structured or defined in logical terms but are clustered in accordance with their similaritry to a central prototype, representing the "most typical" member. A structure of a computer model designed to achieve categorization is outlined and the knowledge representational forms and developmental learning associated with this approach are discussed

Rational expectations modelling in O.R

The conventional OR approach to managing a system is, in outline, firstly to create a model of the existing system, secondly, to investigate changes in the model which improve or control the behaviour of the model and thirdly, to implement these changes in the system. It is assumed that the model incorporating these changes will be a valid representation of the system after the changes, in as far as the original model was a valid representation of the original system, and can thus be used to assess the benefits and disbenefits arising from the changes

A.I. approaches in statistics

The role of pattern recognition and knowledge representation methods from artificial Intelligence with in statistics is considered. Two areas of potential use are identified and one, data exploration, is used to illustrate the possibilities. A method is presented to identify and seperate overlapping groups within cluster analysis, using an A.I. approach. The potential of such 'intelligent' approaches is stressed

Knowledge representation for basic visual categories

This paper reports work on a model of machine learning which is based on the psychological theory of prototypical concepts. This theory is that concepts learnt naturally from interaction with the environment (basic categories) are not structured or defined in logical terms but are clustered in accordance with their similarity to a central prototype, representing the "most typical'' member

The cytoplasm of living cells: A functional mixture of thousands of components

Inside every living cell is the cytoplasm: a fluid mixture of thousands of different macromolecules, predominantly proteins. This mixture is where most of the biochemistry occurs that enables living cells to function, and it is perhaps the most complex liquid on earth. Here we take an inventory of what is actually in this mixture. Recent genome-sequencing work has given us for the first time at least some information on all of these thousands of components. Having done so we consider two physical phenomena in the cytoplasm: diffusion and possible phase separation. Diffusion is slower in the highly crowded cytoplasm than in dilute solution. Reasonable estimates of this slowdown can be obtained and their consequences explored, for example, monomer-dimer equilibria are established approximately twenty times slower than in a dilute solution. Phase separation in all except exceptional cells appears not to be a problem, despite the high density and so strong protein-protein interactions present. We suggest that this may be partially a byproduct of the evolution of other properties, and partially a result of the huge number of components present.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl