The Value of Information: A Background Paper on Measuring the Contribution of Space-Derived Earth Science Data to National Resource Management

This study, prepared at the request of the Office of Earth Science at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), describes a general framework for conceptualizing the value of information and illustrates how the framework might be used to value information from earth science data collected from space. The framework serves two purposes. One purpose is provision of a common basis by which to conduct and evaluate studies of the value of earth science information that serves a variety of uses, from improving environmental quality to protecting public health and safety. The second purpose is to better inform decisionmakers about the value of data and information. Decisionmakers comprise three communities: consumers and producers of information, public officials whose job is to fund productive investment in data acquisition and information development (including sensors and other hardware, algorithm design and software tools, and a trained labor force), and the public at large.Value of information, earth science, natural resource economics

Allocation of Orbit and Spectrum Resources for Regional Communications: What's at Stake?

Contentious debate surrounds allocation of the geostationary orbit and electromagnetic spectrum, two resources used by communications satellites. An extensive economics literature alleges that the nonmarket administrative allocative procedures now in place are highly inefficient, but no research has empirically estimated the welfare loss. This paper develops a conceptual framework and a computerized model to estimate the economic value of the resources, the size and distribution of welfare costs associated with the present regulatory regime, and the potential gains from more market-like allocation.

Some Issues at the Forefront of Public Policy for Environmental Risk

The lay of the policy land for addressing and managing environmental risk includes the hillock of the precautionary principle, the mountain of the practice and ethics of monetary valuation, and the tectonic plates of real-world innovations in markets and trading exchanges for nonmarketed environmental goods. This paper offers an overview of these contemporary and as yet unresolved issues and asks how each might be addressed in disparate environmental risks such as lightning, climate change, and severe weather. The overview focuses on issues that may be of interest to the American Meteorological Society’s annual policy colloquium.risk, environment, public policy, economics

Insiders, Outsiders, and Straddlers: A New Writing Fellows Program in Theory, Context, and Practice

There seems little question that writing centers have been increasingly visible and accessible (Jablonski; Nagelhout and Rutz; Spigelman and Grobman). The University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) University Writing Center has raised its profile on campus and become more accessible by providing tutoring and other options, too. We provide in-class workshops on topics ranging from avoiding plagiarism to successful peer review. In addition, we have made efforts toward disciplinary writing through workshops in Social Work and Education; academic boot camp sessions in Community Health Sciences, Engineering, and Psychology; and faculty development in various fields and disciplines. These efforts are well supported by both our campus and the literature (Barnett and Blumner; Macauley and Mauriello; Mauriello, Macauley, and Koch; Nelson and Evertz)University Writing Cente

Stratification and enumeration of Boolean functions by canalizing depth

Boolean network models have gained popularity in computational systems biology over the last dozen years. Many of these networks use canalizing Boolean functions, which has led to increased interest in the study of these functions. The canalizing depth of a function describes how many canalizing variables can be recursively picked off, until a non-canalizing function remains. In this paper, we show how every Boolean function has a unique algebraic form involving extended monomial layers and a well-defined core polynomial. This generalizes recent work on the algebraic structure of nested canalizing functions, and it yields a stratification of all Boolean functions by their canalizing depth. As a result, we obtain closed formulas for the number of n-variable Boolean functions with depth k, which simultaneously generalizes enumeration formulas for canalizing, and nested canalizing functions

Earth Observations in Social Science Research for Management of Natural Resources and the Environment: Identifying the Contribution of the U.S. Land Remote Sensing (Landsat) Program

This paper surveys and describes the peer-reviewed social science literature in which data from the U.S. land remote sensing program, Landsat, inform public policy in managing natural resources and the environment. The Landsat program has provided the longest collection of observations of Earth from the vantage point of space. The paper differentiates two classes of research: methodology exploring how to use the data (for example, designing and testing algorithms or verifying the accuracy of the data) and applications of data to decisionmaking or policy implementation in managing land, air quality, water, and other natural and environmental resources. Selection of the studies uses social science-oriented bibliographic search indices and expands results of previous surveys that target only researchers specializing in remote sensing or photogrammetry. The usefulness of Landsat as a basis for informing public investment in the Landsat program will be underestimated if this body of research goes unrecognized.natural resources policy, environmental policy, Landsat, social science, environmental management

On Enumeration of Conjugacy Classes of Coxeter Elements

In this paper we study the equivalence relation on the set of acyclic orientations of a graph Y that arises through source-to-sink conversions. This source-to-sink conversion encodes, e.g. conjugation of Coxeter elements of a Coxeter group. We give a direct proof of a recursion for the number of equivalence classes of this relation for an arbitrary graph Y using edge deletion and edge contraction of non-bridge edges. We conclude by showing how this result may also be obtained through an evaluation of the Tutte polynomial as T(Y,1,0), and we provide bijections to two other classes of acyclic orientations that are known to be counted in the same way. A transversal of the set of equivalence classes is given.Comment: Added a few results about connections to the Tutte polynomia

Equivalences on Acyclic Orientations

The cyclic and dihedral groups can be made to act on the set Acyc(Y) of acyclic orientations of an undirected graph Y, and this gives rise to the equivalence relations ~kappa and ~delta, respectively. These two actions and their corresponding equivalence classes are closely related to combinatorial problems arising in the context of Coxeter groups, sequential dynamical systems, the chip-firing game, and representations of quivers. In this paper we construct the graphs C(Y) and D(Y) with vertex sets Acyc(Y) and whose connected components encode the equivalence classes. The number of connected components of these graphs are denoted kappa(Y) and delta(Y), respectively. We characterize the structure of C(Y) and D(Y), show how delta(Y) can be derived from kappa(Y), and give enumeration results for kappa(Y). Moreover, we show how to associate a poset structure to each kappa-equivalence class, and we characterize these posets. This allows us to create a bijection from Acyc(Y)/~kappa to the union of Acyc(Y')/~kappa and Acyc(Y'')/~kappa, Y' and Y'' denote edge deletion and edge contraction for a cycle-edge in Y, respectively, which in turn shows that kappa(Y) may be obtained by an evaluation of the Tutte polynomial at (1,0).Comment: The original paper was extended, reorganized, and split into two papers (see also arXiv:0802.4412

Cycle Equivalence of Graph Dynamical Systems

Graph dynamical systems (GDSs) can be used to describe a wide range of distributed, nonlinear phenomena. In this paper we characterize cycle equivalence of a class of finite GDSs called sequential dynamical systems SDSs. In general, two finite GDSs are cycle equivalent if their periodic orbits are isomorphic as directed graphs. Sequential dynamical systems may be thought of as generalized cellular automata, and use an update order to construct the dynamical system map. The main result of this paper is a characterization of cycle equivalence in terms of shifts and reflections of the SDS update order. We construct two graphs C(Y) and D(Y) whose components describe update orders that give rise to cycle equivalent SDSs. The number of components in C(Y) and D(Y) is an upper bound for the number of cycle equivalence classes one can obtain, and we enumerate these quantities through a recursion relation for several graph classes. The components of these graphs encode dynamical neutrality, the component sizes represent periodic orbit structural stability, and the number of components can be viewed as a system complexity measure