The paper is concerned with communication within a team of players trying to coordinate in response to information dispersed among them. The problem is nontrivial because they cannot communicate all information instantaneously, but have to send longer or shorter sequences of messages, using coarse codes. We focus on the design of these codes and show that members may gain compatibility advantages by using identical codes, and that this can support the existence of several, more or less efficient, symmetric equilibria. Asymmetric equilibria may exist only if coordination across different sets of members is of sufficiently different importance. The results are consistent with the stylized fact that firm differ even within industries and that coordination between divisions is harder than coordination inside divisions. / Center for Innovation in Product Development at MIT under NSF Cooperative Agreement Number EEC-9529140.

Zugl.: Erlangen, Nürnberg, University, Diss., 2008.

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 1997. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-67). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Fire is the most significant natural disturbance agent in the MSdm biogeoclimatic subzone and has a determinant role in the dynamics of lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta ssp. latifolia Engelm.ex S.Wats.) dominated forests. Fire severity is a controversial term that usually refers to a qualitative measure of the fire effects on soil and vegetation and ultimately on ecosystem sustainability. The main objective of the thesis was to evaluate methods for quantifying and modelling the effects of fire severity on live biomass and dead organic matter and post-fire coarse woody debris (CWD) dynamics. A review of the representation of fire in models was conducted and several of the most commonly used fire models in North America have been described in terms of fire severity representation. The potential for developing the fire severity concept as a fire effects descriptor in an ecosystem management model were assessed. Severity matrices summarizing the probabilities of occurrence for fires of varying severity were constructed for two sites in the MSdm biogeoclimatic subzone of British Columbia, using weather data and past fire records. These matrices provide information to improve fire representation in the ecosystem based model FORECAST by quantifying the effects of fire severity on dead and live biomass components. Although this represents only a preliminary step, the severity matrix approach appears toprovide a viable methodology for improving the representation of fire effects in FORECAST. Patterns of post-fire coarse woody debris (CWD) accumulation were also assessed in the context of model development. Data were collected from a chronosequence of fire affected sites in the MSdm subzone of the TFL 49 Kelowna. The ability of the FORECAST model to simulate accumulation patterns in CWD and soil organic matter and nitrogen following fire was tested by comparing model outputs with field data. The evaluation of the model against chronosequence-derived data highlighted the fact that caution needs to be taken when using such data for model testing. The very slow recruitment pattern for new CWD illustrates the need to retain sources of CWD recruitment following fire by not salvage logging all killed trees and/or surviving live trees.

Current ASIC only designs which interface with a general purpose processor are fairly restricted as far as their ability to be upgraded after fabrication. The primary intent of the research documented in this thesis is to determine if the inclusion of FPGAs in existing ASIC designs can be considered as an option for alleviating this constraint by analyzing the performance of such a framework as a replacement for the parsing logic in a typical network switch. This thesis also covers an ancilliary goal of the research which is to compare the various methods used to reconfigure modern FPGAs, including the use of self initiated dynamic partial reconfiguration, in regards to the degree in which they interrupt the operation of the device in which an FPGA is embedded. This portion of the research is also conducted in the context of a network switch and focuses on the ability of the network switch to reconfigure itself dynamically when presented with a new type of network traffic.

Fire is the most significant natural disturbance agent in the MSdm biogeoclimatic subzone and has a determinant role in the dynamics of lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta ssp. latifolia Engelm.ex S.Wats.) dominated forests. Fire severity is a controversial term that usually refers to a qualitative measure of the fire effects on soil and vegetation and ultimately on ecosystem sustainability. The main objective of the thesis was to evaluate methods for quantifying and modelling the effects of fire severity on live biomass and dead organic matter and post-fire coarse woody debris (CWD) dynamics. A review of the representation of fire in models was conducted and several of the most commonly used fire models in North America have been described in terms of fire severity representation. The potential for developing the fire severity concept as a fire effects descriptor in an ecosystem management model were assessed. Severity matrices summarizing the probabilities of occurrence for fires of varying severity were constructed for two sites in the MSdm biogeoclimatic subzone of British Columbia, using weather data and past fire records. These matrices provide information to improve fire representation in the ecosystem based model FORECAST by quantifying the effects of fire severity on dead and live biomass components. Although this represents only a preliminary step, the severity matrix approach appears toprovide a viable methodology for improving the representation of fire effects in FORECAST. Patterns of post-fire coarse woody debris (CWD) accumulation were also assessed in the context of model development. Data were collected from a chronosequence of fire affected sites in the MSdm subzone of the TFL 49 Kelowna. The ability of the FORECAST model to simulate accumulation patterns in CWD and soil organic matter and nitrogen following fire was tested by comparing model outputs with field data. The evaluation of the model against chronosequence-derived data highlighted the fact that caution needs to be taken when using such data for model testing. The very slow recruitment pattern for new CWD illustrates the need to retain sources of CWD recruitment following fire by not salvage logging all killed trees and/or surviving live trees.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2010. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 200 p. : ill. (some col.), maps. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 154-167).

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 1987. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 60-65). Also available on the World Wide Web.

The ability to accurately represent polymer melts at various levels of coarse graining is of great interest because of the wide range of time and length scales over which relevant process take place. Schemes for developing effective interaction potentials for coarse-grained representations that incorporate microscopic level system information are generally numerical and thus suffer from issues of transferability because they are state dependent and must be recalculated for different system and thermodynamic parameters. Numerically derived potentials are also known to suffer from representability problems, in that they may preserve structural correlations in the coarse-grained representation but many often fail to preserve thermodynamic averages of the coarse-grained representation. In this dissertation, analytical forms of the structural correlations and effective pair potentials for a family of highly coarse-grained representations of polymer melts are derived. It is shown that these effective potentials, when used in mesoscale simulations of the coarse-grained representation, generate consistent equilibrium structure and thermodynamic averages with low level representations and therefore with physical systems. Furthermore, analysis of the effective pair potential forms shows that a small long range tail feature that scales beyond the physical range of the polymer as the fourth root of the number of monomers making up the coarse-grained unit dominates thermodynamic averages at high levels of coarse graining. Because structural correlations are extremely insensitive to this feature, it can be shown that effective interaction potentials derived from optimization of structural correlations would require unrealistically high precision measurements of structural correlations to obtain thermodynamically consistent potentials, explaining the problems of numerical coarse-graining schemes. This dissertation includes previously published and unpublished co-authored material.