Orson Welles: Ten Years After His Death

ORSON WELLES ONCE REFLECTED on his own work in the following way: "Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat." In many ways that could stand as the story of Orson Welles himself -- failure, death and lost paradises are serious stuff to be sure; but in speaking of a man who changed forever the way we look at movies, should we not speak of found paradises as well as lost, of victories and defeats? With his passing in October of 1985, the most obvious temptation is to do to his death what Welles himself did to his most famous creation, Charles Foster Kane: ignore the warnings of NO TRESPASSING and plunge into the biographical details of what no doubt was a fascinating but ultimately tragic life, not unlike that of..

A genetic algorithm for finding realistic sea routes considering the weather

Kuhlemann S, Tierney K. A genetic algorithm for finding realistic sea routes considering the weather. Journal of heuristics. 2020;26:801–825.The weather has a major impact on the profitability, safety, and environmental sustainability of the routes sailed by seagoing vessels. The prevailing weather strongly influences the course of routes, affecting not only the safety of the crew, but also the fuel consumption and therefore the emissions of the vessel. Effective decision support is required to plan the route and the speed of the vessel considering the forecasted weather. We implement a genetic algorithm to minimize the fuel consumption of a vessel taking into account the two most important influences of weather on a ship: the wind and the waves. Our approach assists route planners in finding cost minimal routes that consider the weather, avoid specified areas, and meet arrival time constraints. Furthermore, it supports ship speed control to avoid areas with weather conditions that would result in high fuel costs or risk the safety of the vessel. The algorithm is evaluated for a variety of instances to show the impact of weather routing on the routes and the fuel and travel time savings that can be achieved with our approach. Including weather into the routing leads to a savings potential of over 10% of the fuel consumption. We show that ignoring the weather when constructing routes can lead to routes that cannot be sailed in practice. Furthermore, we evaluate our algorithm with stochastic weather data to show that it can provide high-quality routes under real conditions even with uncertain weather forecasts