Concentrations of pollutants in the atmosphere have increased dramatically over the last century and many of these changes are attributable to anthropogenic activities. The influence of acid rain has been well studied, but there has been no extensive exploration of other pollutants, such as toxic chemicals, heavy metals and radionuclides. Natural ecosystems, especially forests, tend to accumulate many of these pollutants which subsequently can affect ecosystem health. These contaminants may be very damaging to the environment in Eastern Europe, where the rapid disappearance of forest is the result not only of contamination but also of poor forest management practices. The current book is designed to reduce the uncertainty in our current knowledge of forest radioecology. The three topics it embraces are (a) Modelling, (b) Measurements and Data, and (c) Countermeasures and Risk Assessment.

Human health as well as aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems are threatened from increa sing levels of environmental radiation of various sources, many of them of anthropoge nic causality: large areas of the former Soviet Union suffer from radioactive pollution, in particular after the Chemobyl accident; the increase in the incidence of UVB radiati on at the Earth's surface as a result of a progressive depletion of stratospheric ozone is a global problem that requires international concerted actions; in areas of former uranium mining the natural radiation level is substantially increased due to elevated radon levels; a growing portion of the population involved in air traffic is exposed to increased levels of natural radiation; and with the International Space Station an increasing number of astronauts will be exposed to the complex field of cosmic radiation. To estimate the corresponding risks, a better knowledge of the underlying radiobiological mechanisms at the molecular, cellular and system level is required. This book is the result of a multidisciplinary effort to discuss the current state of knowledge of the fundamental processes that result from interactions of environmental radiation -ionizing as well as UV radiation -with living matter and the existing radiati on protection concepts, and then to define future research work needed as fundamental information for the assessment of risks from increased levels of environmental radiation to human health and ecosystem balance. It comprises the key lectures and statements presented at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop.

This volume contains selected papers that were presented at the International Conference COMPUTATIONAL FINANCE 1997 held at London Business School on December 15-17 1997. Formerly known as Neural Networks in the Capital Markets (NNCM), this series of meetings has emerged as a truly multi-disciplinary international conference and provided an international focus for innovative research on the application of a multiplicity of advanced decision technologies to many areas of financial engineering. It has drawn upon theoretical advances in financial economics and robust methodological developments in the statistical, econometric and computer sciences. To reflect its multi-disciplinary nature, the NNCM conference has adopted the new title COMPUTATIONAL FINANCE. The papers in this volume are organised in six parts. Market Dynamics and Risk, Trading and Arbitrage strategies, Volatility and Options, Term-Structure and Factor models, Corporate Distress Models and Advances on Methodology. This years' acceptance rate (38%) reflects both the increasing interest in the conference and the Programme Committee's efforts to improve the quality of the meeting year-on-year. I would like to thank the members of the programme committee for their efforts in refereeing the papers. I also would like to thank the members of the computational finance group at London Business School and particularly Neil Burgess, Peter Bolland, Yves Bentz, and Nevil Towers for organising the meeting.

Many organizations are embracing knowledge management as a source of strategic advantage. But already people are asking: "what comes next?" Likewise almost every large organization is heavily involved in e-commerce and turning their organizations into e-businesses. At the moment most e-commerce is focused on selling traditional products and services through the new medium of the Internet. However, the more an organization evolves into an e-business, the more they can exploit knowledge flows between themselves and their marketplace. This book draws together the two strands of knowledge and e-business into the emerging field that this book has called k-business. A k-business is one that turns an organization's knowledge assets into knowledge products and services and uses the Internet to market and deliver them online. Despite its newness, the Delphi Group have forecast that within 5 years person-to-person information e-commerce (a major aspect of k-business) will be a $5 billion business leveraging $50 billion in sales of other products and services.
Capitalizing on Knowledge aims to give professionals and managers early insights into how to develop successful k-businesses. It takes a critical and balanced view of the building blocks of a k-business including knowledge productizing, e-commerce enablers and Internet marketing. It draws on lessons from successes and failures in the dot.com landscape and of the early pioneers of knowledge markets. The writing style engenders interest and readability supported by diagrams, screen images, check lists and frameworks. There are 'points to ponder' to stimulate thinking and decision-making. Five case studies and over 50 illustrative examplesprovide insights into the application of the book's concepts. No other book brings all the elements of a k-business together in one place to provide a thought provoking yet practical companion for those who want to capitalize on their knowledge.
Demonstrates how the overlap of the two high profile strands of e-business and knowledge management is creating new k-business opportunities
Describes new business models for marketing knowledge over the Internet
Provides practical guidelines for packaging knowledge and participating in knowledge markets.

The authors explain the ways in which uncertainty is an important factor in the problems of risk and policy analysis. This book outlines the source and nature of uncertainty, discusses techniques for obtaining and using expert judgment, and reviews a variety of simple and advanced methods for analyzing uncertainty. Powerful computer environments and good graphical techniques for displaying uncertainty are just two of the more advanced topics addressed in later chapters.

"Artful scenario spinning is a form of convergent thinking about divergent futures. It ensures that you are not always right about the future but--better--that you are almost never wrong about the future. The technology is powerful, simple, and enjoyable, and so is Schwartza s book." --Stewart Brand What increasingly affects all of us, whether professional planners or individuals preparing for a better future, is not the tangibles of life--bottom--line numbers, for instance--but the intangibles: our hopes and fears, our beliefs and dreams. Only stories--scenarios--and our ability to visualize different kinds of futures adequately capture these intangibles. In The Art of the Long View, now for the first time in paperback and with the addition of an all--new Usera s Guide, Peter Schwartz outlines the "scenaric" approach, giving you the tools for developing a strategic vision within your business. Schwartz describes the new techniques, originally developed within Royal/Dutch Shell, based on many of his firsthand scenario exercises with the worlda s leading institutions and companies, including the White House, EPA, BellSouth, PG&E, and the International Stock Exchange.

How do managers of a firm choose between alternative finan cial policies? Can the choice of a particular financial policy affect the value of the firm? Since the early 1960s, the debate on these questions has been lively and interesting as economists have inves tigated the effect on the value of the firm of relaxing the various assumptions in the celebrated Modigliani-Miller theory. Further more, even if we stick to the MM-assumptions (that is, we assume perfect and complete capital markets, no taxes and symmetric information), and we therefore know that only optimally chosen investments determine firm's value, another interesting question arises: How does the structure of ownership affect investment de cisions (and, in turn, values)? This research monograph attempts to analyze some of the issues involved in this debate. It belongs to the area of mathematical economics and is intended to appeal to mathematical economists as well as economists and mathemati cians. It is meant to deal with economically relevant problems in a mathematically adequate way. To decide whether or not it succeeds in this task, it is up to the reader. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Margaret Bray for her supervi sion of my PhD thesis in Economics at the London School of Eco nomics from which this book resulted. She helped me as friend and adviser through many struggles in the last three years and invested a great amount of work in this thesis."

This book helps readers develop a comprehensive understanding of diagnostics for strategic decision-making, with a focus on a method called rapid due diligence. This method presents a compelling solution to the need for effective diagnostics, drawing on academic rigor, critical thinking, systems dynamics, and advanced practicum to enable sound strategic decision-making. Guiding the reader through the six stages of the process from discovery, through analysis, synthesis, and interpretation, Thompsen engages all typical postgraduate disciplines in producing insights for practical application. Drawing on similarities with applied social science research, the rapid due diligence method is supported with scores of techniques, tools, instructions, guidelines, practical advice, and examples. Detailed cases and abbreviated examples of a variety of real strategic situations are provided from organizations operating in North America, Europe, Asia, India, and Australia. Ideal for graduate students, organizational leaders, and decision makers, this book is designed to invite deeper understanding and practical application of a strategic diagnostic process that discovers insights for achieving positive results.

This volume contains a collection of papers presented at the 13th Interna- tional Conference on MUltiple Criteria Decision Making held in Cape Town during 6--10 January 1997. This was one of the regular conferences of the International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making, which are held at approximately two-yearly intervals. The 13th conference was attended by 143 delegates from 35 countries, and 123 papers were presented. Some of the papers which were presented are included in another volume published by Springer, namely the "festschrift" for Professor Stanley Zionts of Buffalo, New York, entitled Essays in Decision rnaJcing: A Volume in Honour of Stan- ley Zionts (edited by Mark H Karwan, Jaap Spronk and Jyrki Wallenius). The present volume provides a record of the technical part of the pro- ceedings of the conference. In reflecting back on January 1997, however, memories return of the social occasions, and the camaraderie which devel- oped amongst the MCDM community. Early January, at the height of the southern summer, is carnival time in Cape Town, and the mood is infectious, and was enhanced amongst those from the northern hemisphere (the major- ity of delegates) who overnight went from winter'chills (as low as -30 C) to over 30 C.

Recent debate in both Europe and North America has focussed on how clinicians make judgments and decisions, how these may be evaluated and how they could be improved. This volume provides students, teachers and practitioners with a comprehensive introduction to the main descriptive and prescriptive approaches to judgment and decision making in clinical medicine. The contributors, who include psychologists, economists, decision theorists, statisticians, lawyers and sociologists, as well as medical specialists, provide examples of recent empirical research and its applications, as well as outlining the relevant concepts and theories. Policy-capturing models, data-based aids, expert ('knowledg-based') systems and decision analysis are the main techniques introduced, with attention to both their methodological bases and practical evaluation. Also included in the collection are a series of papers which consider the economic, ethical and legal contexts of clinical activity and the education and wider socialization of clinicians. Issues surrounding the 'cost-effective' use of resources, the obtaining of 'informed consent' from patients and ethical behaviour under uncertainty are highlighted.

Network optimization is important in the modeling of problems and processes from such fields as engineering, computer science, operations research, transportation, telecommunication, decision support systems, manufacturing, and airline scheduling. Recent advances in data structures, computer technology, and algorithm development have made it possible to solve classes of network optimization problems that until recently were intractable. The refereed papers in this volume reflect the interdisciplinary efforts of a large group of scientists from academia and industry to model and solve complicated large-scale network optimization problems.

Decision Analysis for Management Judgment is unique in its breadth of coverage of decision analysis methods. It covers both the psychological problems that are associated with unaided managerial decision making and the decision analysis methods designed to overcome them. It is presented and explained in a clear, straightforward manner without using mathematical notation. This latest edition has been fully revised and updated and includes a number of changes to reflect the latest developments in the field.

The challenges faced by 21st-century businesses, organizations and governments are characterized as being fundamentally different in nature, scope and levels of impact from those of the past. As problems become increasingly complex and wicked, conventional reductive approaches and data-based solutions are limited. The authors argue that practical wisdom is required. This book provides an integral and practical model for incorporating wisdom into management decision making. Based on a cross-disciplinary conceptualization of practical wisdom, the authors distinguish systematically between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom-based decision making. While they suggest that data, analytics, information and knowledge can assist decision-makers to better deal with complex and wicked problems, they argue that data-based systems cannot replace optimized human decision-making capabilities. These capabilities, the authors explain, include a range of qualities and characteristics inherent in philosophical, psychological and organizational conceptions of practical wisdom. Accordingly, in this book, the authors introduce a model that identifies the specific qualities and processes involved in making wise decisions, especially in management. The model is based on the empirical fi ndings of the authors' studies in the areas of wisdom and management. This book is a practical resource for professionals, practitioners, and consultants in both the private and public sectors. The theoretical discussions, critical arguments, and practical guidelines provided in the book will be extremely valuable to students at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as upper-level postdoctoral researchers looking at business management strategies.

Meta-heuristics have developed dramatically since their inception in the early 1980s. They have had widespread success in attacking a variety of practical and difficult combinatorial optimization problems. These families of approaches include, but are not limited to greedy random adaptive search procedures, genetic algorithms, problem-space search, neural networks, simulated annealing, tabu search, threshold algorithms, and their hybrids. They incorporate concepts based on biological evolution, intelligent problem solving, mathematical and physical sciences, nervous systems, and statistical mechanics. Since the 1980s, a great deal of effort has been invested in the field of combinatorial optimization theory in which heuristic algorithms have become an important area of research and applications. This volume is drawn from the first conference on Meta-Heuristics and contains 41 papers on the state-of-the-art in heuristic theory and applications. The book treats the following meta-heuristics and applications: Genetic Algorithms, Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search, Networks & Graphs, Scheduling and Control, TSP, and Vehicle Routing Problems. It represents research from the fields of Operations Research, Management Science, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science.

Planning in a general sense is concerned with the design of communication and decision making mechanisms in organizations where information and choice are decentralized. Non-cooperative planning theory as it is developed in this book treats the incentive aspects hereof. It stresses how strategic behavior and opportunism may impede planning, and how this can be coped with via the organization of communication and decision making, the design of information and control systems, and the development of incentive schemes. In particular, the book contains a thorough investigation of incentive provision in information production.

Most real-life problems involve making decisions to optimally achieve a number of criteria while satisfying some hard or soft constraints. In this book several methods for solving such problems are presented by the leading experts in the area. The book also contains a number of very interesting application papers which demonstrate theoretical modelling, analysing and solution of real-life problems.

This book is the cuhnination of many years' research inspired by the pioneering and seminal works of Sah and Stiglitz. We gratefully acknowledge the influence of these two authors, whose ideas and contributions have brought us together on this collabo ration, despite our divergent scientific backgrounds (while Catalani is interested in quantitative methods, Clerico is a non-quantitative economist) . We thank the Editor of the Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Economiche e Commerciali for permission to use slightly modified versions of papers published in that Review (they are the content of Chapters I and III of Part I, and of Chapter I of Part II). We heartily thank Ms. Laura McLean for carefully revising our English. The publication of this book has been made possible by a grant from the Department of Economics, University of Turin, Italy. Torino, July 1995 Mario S. Catalani Giuseppe F. CIeri co CONTENTS Introduction 1 PART I Some models of decision making structures I. How and when unanimity is a superior decision rule 15 II. Majority rules and efficiency of the decision process 31 III. Team cooperation vs. independent assessment 41 IV. Leadership and dependence 59 V. The decision making process of political organizations 75 PART II Pyramid decision structures I. Pyramidal structures: a preliminary note 91 II. Other properties of pyramids 103 III. Pyramids and dependence 117 IV. Organization, loyalty, and efficiency 133 Conclusions 151 References 163 Mario S."

In practical management, a policy maker often has to make a choice from among various alternatives. Quite often, there are several conflicting criteria to take into account. In addition, some criteria are non-numeric: they can only be expressed as `more' or `less'. The QUALIFLEX method for multicriteria analysis has been developed by the Netherlands Economic Institute to handle such problems. It is designed for use at all levels of decision making, both in the public and private sector. QUALIFLEX has the following features: simultaneous use of qualitative and quantitative data; full flexibility with regard to alternatives and criteria; scores in their own, natural measures; different weighting options for the criteria; sensitivity analysis of the relative weights of the criteria; the result is an optimal ranking of the alternatives. GBP/LISTGBP The Decision Support System QUALIFLEX 2.3 is a fully revised version of the program Micro-Qualiflex. The main improvements are: now user friendly and menu driven; graphical presentation; reversibility and data editing; optional input from (dBase) files.

An insight into the latest results from the world of operations research - a wide-ranging field, as is shown by the book's 24 sections, corresponding to the conference program itself. Although problems of a primarily methodological nature are discussed, the emphasis is placed firmly on practical subjects, such as reports from the fields of healthcare, environmental protection, logistics and traffic engineering. This selection also clearly illustrates the extent to which OR is spreading into and already interwoven in other scientific disciplines.

The Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning presents clear, actionable guidance for every product owner, product and program manager, business analyst, requirements engineer, and project manager seeking to improve agile analysis and planning. Renowned author and consultant Howard Podeswa teaches best practices drawn from agile and agile-adjacent frameworks, including ATDD, BDD, DevOps, CI/CD, Kanban, Scrum, SAFe, XP, Lean Thinking, Lean Startup, Circumstance-Based Market Segmentation, and theories of disruptive innovation. He offers a comprehensive agile roadmap for analyzing customer needs and planning product development, including discussion of legacy business analysis tools that still offer immense value to agile teams.

Using a running case study, Podeswa walks through the full agile product lifecycle, from visioning through release and continuous value delivery. You learn how to carry out agile analysis and planning responsibilities more effectively, using tools such as Kano analysis, minimum viable products (MVPs), minimum marketable features (MMFs), story maps, product roadmaps, customer journey mapping, value stream mapping, spikes, and the definition of ready (DoR). Podeswa presents each technique in context: what you need to know and when to apply each tool. Read this book to

• Master principles, frameworks, concepts, and practices of agile analysis and planning in order to maximize value delivery throughout the product's lifecycle
• Explore planning and analysis for short-term, long-term, and scaled agile initiatives using MVPs and data-informed learning to test hypotheses and find high-value features
• Split features into MMFs and small stories that deliver significant value and enable quick wins
• Refine, estimate, and specify features, stories, and their acceptance criteria, following ATDD/BDD guidance
• Address the unique analysis and planning challenges of scaled agile organizations
• Implement 13 practices for optimizing enterprise agility

In this contributed volume, issues of what counts as evidence of risk are discussed. The authors show that value judgements enter into expert and non-expert characterization of evidence of risk, but they deny that this means that no choice about risk management is better than another, and demonstrate the possibility and importance of objectively grounded risk assessment.

A well-crafted business plan generates enthusiasm for your idea and boosts your odds of success--whether you're proposing a new initiative within your organization or starting an entirely new company. Creating Business Plans quickly walks you through the basics. You'll learn to: * Present your idea clearly * Develop sound financial plans * Project risks--and rewards * Anticipate and address your audience's concerns Don't have much time? Get up to speed fast on the most essential business skills with HBR's 20-Minute Manager series. Whether you need a crash course or a brief refresher, each book in the series is a concise, practical primer that will help you brush up on a key management topic. Advice you can quickly read and apply, for ambitious professionals and aspiring executives--from the most trusted source in business. Also available as an ebook.