environment and world history Burke, Edmund; Pomeranz, Kenneth
2009, 20090309, c2009., 2009-04-08, 20090101, Letnik:
9
eBook, Book
Since around 1500 C.E., humans have shaped the global environment in ways that were previously unimaginable. Bringing together leading environmental historians and world historians, this book offers ...an overview of global environmental history throughout this remarkable 500-year period. In eleven essays, the contributors examine the connections between environmental change and other major topics of early modern and modern world history: population growth, commercialization, imperialism, industrialization, the fossil fuel revolution, and more. Rather than attributing environmental change largely to European science, technology, and capitalism, the essays illuminate a series of culturally distinctive, yet often parallel developments arising in many parts of the world, leading to intensified exploitation of land and water. The wide range of regional studies-including some in Russia, China, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Southern Africa, and Western Europe-together with the book's broader thematic essays makesThe Environment and World Historyideal for courses that seek to incorporate the environment and environmental change more fully into a truly integrative understanding of world history. CONTRIBUTORS: Michael Adas, William Beinart, Edmund Burke III, Mark Cioc, Kenneth Pomeranz, Mahesh Rangarajan, John F. Richards, Lise Sedrez, Douglas R. Weiner
Alone among Muslim countries, Morocco is known for its own national form of Islam, "Moroccan Islam." However, this pathbreaking study reveals that Moroccan Islam was actually invented in the early ...twentieth century by French ethnographers and colonial officers who were influenced by British colonial practices in India. Between 1900 and 1920, these researchers compiled a social inventory of Morocco that in turn led to the emergence of a new object of study, Moroccan Islam, and a new field, Moroccan studies. In the process, they resurrected the monarchy and reinvented Morocco as a modern polity. This is an important contribution for scholars and readers interested in questions of orientalism and empire, colonialism and modernity, and the invention of traditions.
•We propose a new single parameter local search heuristic algorithm.•Instead of a cooling schedule, it employs information from its previous iterations.•We compare it with a range of well-known ...cooling schedule based metaheuristics.•Our method outperforms them on the majority of standard benchmark instances.•It also withstands a non-linear rescaling of a problem where the above methods fail.
This paper introduces a new and very simple search methodology called Late Acceptance Hill-Climbing (LAHC). It is a local search algorithm, which accepts non-improving moves when a candidate cost function is better than it was a number of iterations before. This number appears as a single algorithmic input parameter which determines the total processing time of the search procedure. The properties of this method are experimentally studied in this paper with a range of Travelling Salesman and Exam Timetabling benchmark problems. Also, we present a fair comparison of LAHC with well-known search techniques, which employ a cooling schedule: Simulated Annealing (SA), Threshold Accepting (TA) and the Great Deluge Algorithm (GDA). In addition, we discuss the success of the method in winning an international competition to automatically solve the Magic Square problem. Our experiments have shown that the LAHC approach is simple, easy to implement and yet is an effective search procedure. For most of the studied instances (especially for the large sized ones), its average performance is better than competitor methods. Moreover, the LAHC approach has an additional advantage (in contrast to the above cooling schedule based methods) in its scale independence. We present an example where the rescaling of a cost function in the Travelling Salesman Problem dramatically deteriorates the performance of three cooling schedule based techniques, but has absolutely no influence upon the performance of LAHC.
Hyper-heuristics: a survey of the state of the art Burke, Edmund K; Gendreau, Michel; Hyde, Matthew ...
The Journal of the Operational Research Society,
12/2013, Letnik:
64, Številka:
12
Journal Article
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Hyper-heuristics comprise a set of approaches that are motivated (at least in part) by the goal of automating the design of heuristic methods to solve hard computational search problems. An ...underlying strategic research challenge is to develop more generally applicable search methodologies. The term hyper-heuristic is relatively new; it was first used in 2000 to describe heuristics to choose heuristics in the context of combinatorial optimisation. However, the idea of automating the design of heuristics is not new; it can be traced back to the 1960s. The definition of hyper-heuristics has been recently extended to refer to a search method or learning mechanism for selecting or generating heuristics to solve computational search problems. Two main hyper-heuristic categories can be considered: heuristic selection and heuristic generation. The distinguishing feature of hyper-heuristics is that they operate on a search space of heuristics (or heuristic components) rather than directly on the search space of solutions to the underlying problem that is being addressed. This paper presents a critical discussion of the scientific literature on hyper-heuristics including their origin and intellectual roots, a detailed account of the main types of approaches, and an overview of some related areas. Current research trends and directions for future research are also discussed.
•We present an orchestrated survey of the most prominent techniques for automatic generation of software test cases.•The survey covers symbolic execution, model-based, combinatorial, search-based and ...adaptive random testing techniques.•For each technique, basic concepts and research challenges are reported, and future research directions are envisioned.•Each technique is surveyed by a world renowned expert(s) and active researcher(s) on the topic in a self-contained section.•The experts’ contributions were coordinated and the paper was edited by the orchestrators/editors into a consistent paper.
Test case generation is among the most labour-intensive tasks in software testing. It also has a strong impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of software testing. For these reasons, it has been one of the most active research topics in software testing for several decades, resulting in many different approaches and tools. This paper presents an orchestrated survey of the most prominent techniques for automatic generation of software test cases, reviewed in self-standing sections. The techniques presented include: (a) structural testing using symbolic execution, (b) model-based testing, (c) combinatorial testing, (d) random testing and its variant of adaptive random testing, and (e) search-based testing. Each section is contributed by world-renowned active researchers on the technique, and briefly covers the basic ideas underlying the method, the current state of the art, a discussion of the open research problems, and a perspective of the future development of the approach. As a whole, the paper aims at giving an introductory, up-to-date and (relatively) short overview of research in automatic test case generation, while ensuring a comprehensive and authoritative treatment.
The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often ...framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries, increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to critically examine culturally constructed views of the environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the questionable policies and practices born of these environmental imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge production. Contributors: Samer Alatout, Edmund Burke III, Shaul Cohen, Diana K. Davis, Jennifer L. Derr, Leila M. Harris, Alan Mikhail, Timothy Mitchell, Priya Satia, Jeannie Sowers, and George R. Trumbull IV
•New upper and lower bounds for benchmark nurse rostering instances.•A general model which can be applied to a wide variety of staff rostering problems.•A powerful dynamic programming method used to ...solve sub-problems.
This paper presents the results of developing a branch and price algorithm and an ejection chain method for nurse rostering problems. The approach is general enough to be able to apply it to a wide range of benchmark nurse rostering instances. The majority of the instances are real world applications. They have been collected from a variety of sources including industrial collaborators, other researchers and various publications. The results of entering these algorithms in the 2010 International Nurse Rostering Competition are also presented and discussed. In addition, incorporated within both algorithms is a dynamic programming method which we present. The algorithm contains a number of heuristics and other features which make it very effective on the broad rostering model introduced.
This paper presents an investigation of a simple generic hyper-heuristic approach upon a set of widely used constructive heuristics (graph coloring heuristics) in timetabling. Within the ...hyper-heuristic framework, a tabu search approach is employed to search for permutations of graph heuristics which are used for constructing timetables in exam and course timetabling problems. This underpins a multi-stage hyper-heuristic where the tabu search employs permutations upon a different number of graph heuristics in two stages. We study this graph-based hyper-heuristic approach within the context of exploring fundamental issues concerning the search space of the hyper-heuristic (the heuristic space) and the solution space. Such issues have not been addressed in other hyper-heuristic research. These approaches are tested on both exam and course benchmark timetabling problems and are compared with the fine-tuned bespoke state-of-the-art approaches. The results are within the range of the best results reported in the literature. The approach described here represents a significantly more generally applicable approach than the current state of the art in the literature. Future work will extend this hyper-heuristic framework by employing methodologies which are applicable on a wider range of timetabling and scheduling problems.
Abstract
Multi-graphs where several edges connect a pair of nodes are an important modelling approach for many real-world optimisation problems. The multi-graph structure is often based on ...infrastructure and available connections between nodes. In this study, we conduct case studies for a special type of constrained routing and scheduling problems. Using the airport ground movement problem as an example, we analyse how the number of parallel edges and their costs in multi-graph structure influence the quality of obtained solutions found by the routing algorithm. The results show that the number of parallel edges not only affects the computational complexity but also the number of trade-off solutions and the quality of the found solutions. An indicator is further proposed which can estimate when the multi-graph would benefit from a higher number of parallel edges. Furthermore, we show that including edges with dominated costs in the multi-graph can also improve the results in the presence of time window constraints. The findings pave the way to an informed approach to multi-graph creation for similar problems based on multi-graphs.
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