State resource management and role of remote sensing

Remote sensing by satellite can provide valuable information to state officials when making decisions regarding resources management. Portions of California's investment for Prosperity program which seem likely candidates for remote sensing include: (1) surveying vegetation type, age, and density in forests and wildlife habitats; (2) controlling fires through chaparal management; (3) monitoring wetlands and measuring ocean biomass; (4) eliminating ground water overdraught; (5) locating crops in overdraught areas, assessing soil erosion and the areas of poorly drained soils and those affected by salt; (6) monitoring coastal lands and resources; (7) changes in landscapes for recreational purposes; (8) inventorying irrigated lands; (9) classifying ground cover; (10) monitoring farmland conversion; and (11) supplying data for a statewide computerized farmlands data base

Metallic film diffusion for boundary lubrication Patent

Metallic film diffusion for boundary lubrication in aerospace engineerin

Gas lubricant compositions Patent

High temperature gas lubricant consisting of two fluoro-bromo-methane

The Evolution of Overconfidence

Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health, to sports, business, and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence-believing you are better than you are in reality-is advantageous because it serves to increase ambition, morale, resolve, persistence, or the credibility of bluffing, generating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which exaggerated confidence actually increases the probability of success. However, overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Here, we present an evolutionary model showing that, counter-intuitively, overconfidence maximizes individual fitness and populations will tend to become overconfident, as long as benefits from contested resources are sufficiently large compared to the cost of competition. In contrast, "rational" unbiased strategies are only stable under limited conditions. The fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable in a wide range of environments may help to explain why overconfidence remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters, and costly wars.Comment: Supplementary Information include

Pilot dynamic response to sudden flight control system failures and implications for design

Pilot dynamic response to sudden flight control system failure

Sub-structural Niching in Estimation of Distribution Algorithms

We propose a sub-structural niching method that fully exploits the problem decomposition capability of linkage-learning methods such as the estimation of distribution algorithms and concentrate on maintaining diversity at the sub-structural level. The proposed method consists of three key components: (1) Problem decomposition and sub-structure identification, (2) sub-structure fitness estimation, and (3) sub-structural niche preservation. The sub-structural niching method is compared to restricted tournament selection (RTS)--a niching method used in hierarchical Bayesian optimization algorithm--with special emphasis on sustained preservation of multiple global solutions of a class of boundedly-difficult, additively-separable multimodal problems. The results show that sub-structural niching successfully maintains multiple global optima over large number of generations and does so with significantly less population than RTS. Additionally, the market share of each of the niche is much closer to the expected level in sub-structural niching when compared to RTS

COMMODITY POLICY ISSUES FOR THE 1980S

Agricultural and Food Policy,

Friction and wear of hexagonal metals and alloys as related to structure and lattice parameters in vacuum to 10-10 millimeter of mercury

Friction and wear characteristics of metals and alloys related to structure and lattice parameters in high vacuu