Religion, many times, is one of the phenomena that is misunderstood and often rejected due to apprehension. There is an expected "norm" within our culture for religion and those that fall outside that "norm" are typically criticized for their beliefs. Within Christianity there are a number of extremist groups that follow millennial doctrines and believe they are living in the end times. These organizations tend to view the government as oppressive, disrespectful, immoral and corrupt. Because of this when an incident occurs with one of these millennial groups and the government steps in to control the situation, the way it responds is critical. This is an examination of three incidents with American radical religious groups and the formal reactions to them by the United States government. The three incidents I will analyze are the incident with the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, the incident with the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, and the incident with the Montana Freemen at Justus Township, and how the government handled each of these interactions. I will evaluate Mark Juergensmeyer's theories and patterns of cosmic war and performance violence, and Catherine Wessinger's categories and guidelines for radical religious groups and how she claims the government and media should interact with them. The criteria I will use for evaluation will be how well their theories help us to understand the beliefs and actions of the group. Too often the government is unable to interact constructively with these groups because they do not understand their beliefs, and thereby provoke further violence. What is needed is a shift in attitude, a realization that the language of the groups is not "Bible Babble". Juergensmeyer and Wessinger have a unique perspective because they have directly interacted with radical religious groups and can provide the government with an insider understanding of the worldview of such religious groups, what it means to them through their eyes. I provide a list of guidelines derived from these two scholars, for the government and media to follow that will aid in constructive interaction with millennial groups and aid in peaceful negotiations in the future.

This dissertation describes the work carried out by me in the Preservation Services Branch of the National Library of Australia during the period 1983 to early 1984. Conservation activities at the Library are organised in three broad categories, with the following goals: . preparation for exhibitions . ongoing full conservation of the Library collections, in a staged process . methods development and materials investigation. The internship program was devised to allow time to be spent in each of these three areas. The amount of time spent in each area roughly reflected the allocation of conservation staff resources to each section at that time. In the exhibitions program, objects were prepared for display at the National Gallery of Australia. These included watercolours and hand-coloured prints. Under the ongoing conservation program, a wide range of paper objects were treated. Objects from the Library's Special Collections are treated in order of priority determined by Librarian staff. Works treated included newspapers, both bound and unbound, movie posters, and magazines. Work in the third area involved both routine testing method's of conservation materials, involvement in a phase preservation project, and investigations into new methods of preventive conservation.

This thesis studies Production Scheduling in a multistage hybrid flowshop facility. It first states the general Production Planning and Scheduling problem and highlights some drawbacks of classical solutions. A theoretical decomposition-based approach is introduced whose main issue is to overcome non-efficient capacity utilization. By using Branch and Bound methods, an in-depth analysis of the scheduling part of the system is then carried out throughout the study and development of upper and lower bounds as well as branching schemes. Already-existing and new heuristics are presented and compared on different shop floor configurations. Five different heuristic approaches are studied. By scheduling the HFS one stage at a time the first approach uses different stage sequencing orders. The second and third approaches are mainly list heuristics. The second approach uses ideas derived from the multistage classical flowshop with a single machine per stage, while the third approach uses classical dispatching priority rules. The fourth and fifth approaches, respectively, use random scheduling and local search techniques. Statistical analysis is carried out in order to compare the heuristics and to select the best of them for each shop configuration. Already-existing and new lower bounds on the single stage subproblem are also presented and compared. Three new lower bounds are developed: a dual heuristic based bound, a partially preemptive bound and a heuristic for the so-called subset bound. Some of these lower bounds use a network flow algorithm. A new version of the “Preflow Push” algorithm which runs faster than the original one is presented. The best lower bounds are selected based on numerical tests. Two branch and bound algorithms are presented, an improved version of the sequence enumeration method and a generalization of the so-called interval branching method, along with several bounding strategies. Based on the upper and lower bound studies, several branch and bound algorithms are presented and compared using numerical tests on different shop floor configurations. Eventually, an Object Model for Scheduling Algorithm Implementations (OMSAI), that has been used for the computer implementation of the developed algorithms, is presented.

In the paper, we minimize the holding cost of the safety stock held in a supply chain modeled as a general network. By our assumption, the demand is bounded by a concave function. This fact allows us to formulate the problem as a deterministic optimization. We minimize a concave function over a discrete polyhedron. The main goal of the paper is to describe an algorithm to solve the problem without assuming any particular structure of the underlying supply chain. The algorithm is a branch and bound algorithm. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

This thesis studies Production Scheduling in a multistage hybrid flowshop facility. It first states the general Production Planning and Scheduling problem and highlights some drawbacks of classical solutions. A theoretical decomposition-based approach is introduced whose main issue is to overcome non-efficient capacity utilization. By using Branch and Bound methods, an in-depth analysis of the scheduling part of the system is then carried out throughout the study and development of upper and lower bounds as well as branching schemes. Already-existing and new heuristics are presented and compared on different shop floor configurations. Five different heuristic approaches are studied. By scheduling the HFS one stage at a time the first approach uses different stage sequencing orders. The second and third approaches are mainly list heuristics. The second approach uses ideas derived from the multistage classical flowshop with a single machine per stage, while the third approach uses classical dispatching priority rules. The fourth and fifth approaches, respectively, use random scheduling and local search techniques. Statistical analysis is carried out in order to compare the heuristics and to select the best of them for each shop configuration. Already-existing and new lower bounds on the single stage subproblem are also presented and compared. Three new lower bounds are developed: a dual heuristic based bound, a partially preemptive bound and a heuristic for the so-called subset bound. Some of these lower bounds use a network flow algorithm. A new version of the “Preflow Push” algorithm which runs faster than the original one is presented. The best lower bounds are selected based on numerical tests. Two branch and bound algorithms are presented, an improved version of the sequence enumeration method and a generalization of the so-called interval branching method, along with several bounding strategies. Based on the upper and lower bound studies, several branch and bound algorithms are presented and compared using numerical tests on different shop floor configurations. Eventually, an Object Model for Scheduling Algorithm Implementations (OMSAI), that has been used for the computer implementation of the developed algorithms, is presented.

Dans cette thèse, nous étudions différents modèles, déterministes et stochastiques, pour les problèmes de dimensionnement de réseaux. Nous examinons également le problème du sac-à-dos stochastique ainsi que, plus généralement, les contraintes de capacité en probabilité. Dans une première partie, nous nous consacrons à des modèles de dimensionnement de réseaux déterministes, possédant de nombreuses contraintes techniques s'approchant de situations réalistes. Nous commençons par étudier deux modèles de réseaux de télécommunications. Le premier considère des réseaux multi-couches et des capacités sur les arcs, tandis que le second étudie des réseaux mono-couche, sans capacité, où les commodités doivent être acheminées sur un nombre K de chemins disjoint de taille au plus L. Nous résolvons ces deux problèmes grâce à un algorithme de ``branch-and-cut' basé sur la décomposition de Benders de formulations linéaires pour ces problèmes. La nouveauté de notre approche se situe principalement dans l'étude empirique de la fréquence optimale de génération de coupes au cours de l'algorithme. Nous étudions ensuite un problème d'expansion de réseaux de transmission électrique. Notre travail étudie différents modèles et formulations pour le problème, les comparant sur des réseaux brésiliens réels. En particulier, nous montrons que le re-dimensionnement permet des réductions de coût importantes. Dans une seconde partie, nous examinons des modèles de programmation stochastique. Premièrement, nous prouvons que trois cas particuliers du problème de sac-à-dos avec recours simple peuvent être résolu par des algorithmes de programmation dynamique. Nous reformulons ensuite le problème comme un programme non-linéaire en variables entières et testons un algorithme ``branch-and-cut' basé l'approximation extérieure de la fonction objective. Cet algorithme est ensuite transformé en un algorithme de ``branch-and-cut-and-price', utilisé pour résoudre un problème de dimensionnement de réseau stochastique avec recours simple. Finalement, nous montrons comment linéariser des contraintes de capacité en probabilité avec variables binaires lorsque les coefficients sont des variables aléatoires satisfaisant certaines propriétés.

No description available.

The late Arthur Silver Morton has contributed immensely to our understanding and preservation of western Canadian history. One of Mortons joys was locating remains of long forgotten fur trade posts. As a result, a large number of the Saskatchewan fur trade posts that we know of were located and recorded by Morton. The majority of Mortons investigations took place throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Morton consulted whatever historic sources were available to him at the time: numerous historic documents, ethnographic accounts and local histories.<p> There has been archaeological evidence that suggests Morton misidentified numerous fur trade post sites. For example, research at the Hudsons Bay Companys South Branch House (1786-1794), which Morton identified in 1944, has sparked some controversy as to whether or not it is that particular post. As a result, this provides the author with an excellent chance to examine how Morton identified Saskatchewan fur trade posts and to determine through archaeological excavations and historical documents the accuracy of Mortons historical site designation at South Branch House.<p> A critical approach to Mortons work will determine how accurate his work is for contemporary archaeological investigations of fur trade posts. Furthermore, this thesis may provide historical archaeologists with insights as to how to go about identifying fur trade posts, which will contribute to our overall understanding of the western Canadian fur trade.

This thesis is about solving the manpower planning problem concerning stangand transitioning of pilots. The objective of the planning is to have enoughpilots to satisfy the demand while minimizing the cost. The main decisions totake are how many pilots to hire, which pilots to train and which courses toschedule. The planning problems that arise are both large and dicult whichmakes it important to use ecient solution methods. Seniority rules betweenpairs of pilots are the most complicating factor.A major part in the solution process is the solving of mixed integer programs.The emphasis in the thesis is to develop and test adaptations of the branch andbound algorithm to solve mixed integer programs faster. One of these is abranching principle that takes a problem specic structure into account. Agraph of implications is constructed from the seniority rules and this graph isthen used to estimate the impact of each branching candidate. The implementedmethods outperform the software XPRESS on some instances, while for mostinstances the performance is comparable.

We introduce a very simple but efficient idea for branch & bound (B&B) algorithms in global optimization (GO). As input for our generic algorithm, we need an upper bound algorithm for the GO maximization problem and a branching rule. The latter reduces the problem into several smaller subproblems of the same type. The new B&B approach delivers one global optimizer or, if stopped before finished, improved upper and lower bounds for the problem. Its main difference to commonly used B&B techniques is its ability to approximate the problem from above and from below while traversing the problem tree. It needs no supplementary information about the system optimized and does not consume more time than classical B&B techniques. Experimental results with the maximum clique problem illustrate the benefit of this new method. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operations