A tool to help conservation managers prioritise their actions to protect wildlife has been developed. The tool, based on a mathematical model, can provide guidance on conserving endangered species as well as dealing with pests and diseases. It may help conservation managers understand how best to use their limited resources.

One of the greatest challenges facing today’s environmental policymakers is how to deal with complex risks, such as those associated with climate change. These risks are difficult to deal with because they are not precisely calculable in advance. Where there is scientific uncertainty about the full extent of possible harms but ‘doing nothing’ is also risky, decision-makers may use the precautionary principle. This Future Brief explores the role of the precautionary principle in EU law and policy, and examines key points of discussion drawn from the evidence.

Myke is getting ready for a big trip, Grey recorded a Vlog, and they both give some thoughts on the updated #MultiPadLifestyle.

A new study finds that the decision to vaccinate a child is as much social and cultural as it is science-based.

Find out when it's best to shell out your cash in exchange for tickets.

Actor and environmentalist says President stood up to Big Oil by delaying project and calling for more environmental reviews.

With the 1,700-mile oil pipeline now likely on hold until 2013, here's a roundup of reactions from 10 people closely involved in the debate.

Apple is defending its decision to have its products removed from the EPEAT environmental standards certification program. Speaking to The Loop, Apple spokesper

Going for the guzzlers when oil prices are cyclical simply isn't smart.

An ongoing look at how the attitudes of financial decision makers in the US are evolving during the COVID-19 pandemic.

An ongoing look at how the attitudes of financial decision makers in the UK are evolving during the COVID-19 pandemic.

An ongoing look at how the attitudes of financial decision makers in China are evolving during the COVID-19 pandemic.

An ongoing look at how the attitudes of financial decision makers in Italy are evolving during the COVID-19 pandemic.

So, you've decided to lose weight. You're changing your eating habits, you began to exercise... But do you know what the most difficult part is? It's ability to stay on track. Here are few tips that will help you to stay on track.

Third solo LP also has two songs named to 2017's Top 200 Blues Songs

Examples Include Pepsi, Wells Fargo, Target, Starbucks, Samsung, Volkswagen and more. Foreword by Best-selling Author Marshall Goldsmith

Nova pays its field service engineers by salary only with no overtime compensation for the many overtime hours they regularly work

Louis is the multi-award-winning author of 'Miracles of Direction' and 'Book of Proverbs: Wisdom Vs Wilderness'

David Garvin, Harvard Business School professor. Also: Judith Ross on retaining your top performers during times of change.

Sydney Finkelstein, Tuck School of Business professor and author of "Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes."

Tom Davenport, Babson College professor and coauthor of "Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results."

Tom Davenport, Babson College professor and coauthor of "Judgment Calls: Twelve Stories of Big Decisions and the Teams That Got Them Right."

Ram Charan, coauthor of "Boards that Lead," talks about what he's learned in three decades of helping executives make tough decisions.

Stanford's Ron Howard, one of the fathers of decision analysis, explains how it's done.

Therese Huston, Ph.D. and author of "How Women Decide," offers research-based tips for both men and women on how to make high quality, defensible decisions -- and sell them to your team.

Erin Meyer, professor at INSEAD, discusses management hierarchy and decision-making across cultures. Turns out, these two things don’t always track together. Sometimes top-down cultures still have strong consensus-driven decision-making styles — and the other way around. Meyer helps break down and map these factors so that managers working across cultures can adapt. She’s the author of the article, "Being the Boss in Brussels, Boston, and Beijing" in the July-August 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Jennifer Riel, an adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management, presents a model way to solve problems: integrative thinking. It’s taking the best from two inadequate options to come up with a successful solution. She gives examples from the film industry to show how CEOs have put the process to work. Riel is the co-author, along with Roger Martin, of the book “Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking.”

Kathryn Hume, VP of integrate.ai, discusses the current boundaries between artificially intelligent machines, and humans. While the power of A.I. can conjure up some of our darkest fears, she says the reality is that there is still a whole lot that A.I. can't do. So far, A.I. is able to accomplish some tasks that humans might need a lot of training for, such as diagnosing cancer. But she says those tasks are actually more simple than we might think - and that algorithms still can't replace emotional intelligence just yet. Plus, A.I. might just help us discover new business opportunities we didn't know existed.

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

• San Antonio City Council in Texas has unanimously voted to label terms including "Chinese virus" and "kung-fu virus" as hate speech.
• It was responding to a growth in racist and antisemitic incidents in the city, triggered by the coronavirus crisis.
• "Unfortunately, during times of crises, we do see the best of humanity and sometimes we also see the worst," said Mayor Ron Nirenberg. 
• Senator Ted Cruz called the decision "nuts," saying that the city council was "behaving like a lefty college faculty lounge." 
• It comes after Trump faced criticism for his use of the term "Chinese virus" at a White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The city of San Antonio in Texas has unanimously passed a resolution condemning the use of terms such as "Chinese virus" and "kung-fu virus" as hate speech.

It also encouraged residents to report "any such antisemitic, discriminatory or racist incidents" to the relevant authorities following several incidents in the city since the pandemic began, reports San Antonio's WOAI-TV.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

NOW WATCH: Inside London during COVID-19 lockdown

See Also:

• Shanghai Disneyland cast members told to wear face masks and avoid guest contact ahead of next week's reopening as China emerges from pandemic
• Half of all Brooklynites are white, but 97.5% of the borough's social distancing arrests were of people of color
• Russia is fast becoming a coronavirus epicenter, with health workers still reporting PPE shortages. Putin is already thinking about reopening.

Lord Swraj Paul today met PM Narendra Modi and conveyed his appreciation of the recent decision of Indian government to treat NRI investments at par with resident investments.

This is the first instance when a fund house is shutting its schemes because of coronavirus related pandemic.

"At trial, the Antitrust Division argued that Sabre’s acquisition of Farelogix would extinguish a crucial constraint on Sabre’s market power and would result in higher prices and less innovation. While we are disappointed with the court’s decision, we appreciate the court’s thoughtful consideration of this important case. We will closely review the court’s opinion and consider next steps in light of our commitment to preserving competition for the benefit of the American consumer."

Sabre Corporation and Farelogix, Inc. announced today the termination of their merger agreement.

For handicappers, it doesn't get much better than Saturday's feast of wagering opportunities, but bettors will have a long, challenging day choosing where the bankroll should be distributed. How big do you wanna go at breakfast with those juicy betting races from Dubai? Then, a half-hour after the World Cup goes off, things keep rolling with […]

The post The Xpressbet Weekend Bankroll: Decisions, Decisions appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

An opinion was filed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today, affirming the United States District Court’s entry of summary judgment for the National Park Service in a lawsuit titled “River Runners for Wilderness, et al v. Stephen P. Martin, et al. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/united-states-court-of-appeals-for-the-ninth-circuit-rules-in-favor-of-national-park-service-in-lawsuit-challenging-grand-canyon-national-parks-colorado-river-management-plan.htm

https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/2010-03-05_fmp_rod.htm

Prior to the existence of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Forest Service district rangers had considerable latitude to make resource management decisions and execute management plans with relatively little encumbrance by documentation and process requirements.

In recent years, the Forest Service and the public have placed increasing priority on making sure that management of public lands takes into account the needs of nearby communities, regional residents, national residents, and even members of the public who may not currently visit public lands.

Forests significantly influence the global carbon budget: they store massive amounts of carbon in their wood and soil, they sequester atmospheric carbon as they grow, and they emit carbon as a greenhouse gas when harvested or converted to another use.

Current efforts to improve the scientific basis for fire management on public lands will benefit from more efficient transfer of technical information and tools that support planning, implementation, and effectiveness of vegetation and hazardous fuel treatments. The technical scope, complexity, and relevant spatial scale of analytical and decision-support tools differ considerably, which provides a challenge to resource managers and other users who want to select tools appropriate for a particular application. This publication provides a state-of-science summary of tools currently available for management of vegetation and fuels. Detailed summaries include a description of each tool, location where it can be obtained, relevant spatial scale, level of user knowledge required, data requirements, model outputs, application in fuel treatments, linkage to other tools, and availability of training and support. Streamlined summaries in tabular format allow users to rapidly identify those tools that could potentially be applied to a specific management need. In addition, an interdisciplinary team process is described that facilitates application of tools and decisionmaking at different spatial scales.

This report reviews the growing literature on the concept of agency-citizen interactions after large wildfires. Because large wildfires have historically occurred at irregular intervals, research from related fields has been reviewed where appropriate. This issue is particularly salient in the West where excess fuel conditions indicate that the large wildfires occurring in many states are expected to continue to be a major problem for forest managers in the coming years. This review focuses on five major themes that emerge from prior research: contextual considerations, barriers and obstacles, uncertainty and perceptions of risk, communication and outreach, and bringing communities together. It offers ideas on how forest managers can interact with stakeholders for planning and restoration activities after a large wildfire. Management implications are included.

It is time for the Premier League to make a decision and put your most northerly subjects out of their agony

He was granted leave to seek a judicial review into claims the DoH unlawfully directed a watchdog body to suspend some checks on facilities during the Covid-19 emergency

Washington, D.C.—March 2, 2020— Patient and health advocacy groups representing millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions are applauding the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear arguments in the case of Texas v. United States this term. The...

Since the first free agent signing of the modern era back in 1974, there have been several free agent deals that shook the baseball world and realigned power across the Majors. Here's a look at several moves that changed the landscape of baseball, and in some cases, were downright shocking:

We study the specification and verification of hyperproperties for probabilistic systems represented as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Hyperproperties are system properties that describe the correctness of a system as a relation between multiple executions. Hyperproperties generalize trace properties and include information-flow security requirements, like noninterference, as well as requirements like symmetry, partial observation, robustness, and fault tolerance. We introduce the temporal logic PHL, which extends classic probabilistic logics with quantification over schedulers and traces. PHL can express a wide range of hyperproperties for probabilistic systems, including both classical applications, such as differential privacy, and novel applications in areas such as robotics and planning. While the model checking problem for PHL is in general undecidable, we provide methods both for proving and for refuting a class of probabilistic hyperproperties for MDPs.

Bitvector filtering is an important query processing technique that can significantly reduce the cost of execution, especially for complex decision support queries with multiple joins. Despite its wide application, however, its implication to query optimization is not well understood.

In this work, we study how bitvector filters impact query optimization. We show that incorporating bitvector filters into query optimization straightforwardly can increase the plan space complexity by an exponential factor in the number of relations in the query. We analyze the plans with bitvector filters for star and snowflake queries in the plan space of right deep trees without cross products. Surprisingly, with some simplifying assumptions, we prove that, the plan of the minimal cost with bitvector filters can be found from a linear number of plans in the number of relations in the query. This greatly reduces the plan space complexity for such queries from exponential to linear.

Motivated by our analysis, we propose an algorithm that accounts for the impact of bitvector filters in query optimization. Our algorithm optimizes the join order for an arbitrary decision support query by choosing from a linear number of candidate plans in the number of relations in the query. We implement our algorithm in Microsoft SQL Server as a transformation rule. Our evaluation on both industry standard benchmarks and customer workload shows that, compared with the original Microsoft SQL Server, our technique reduces the total CPU execution time by 22%-64% for the workloads, with up to two orders of magnitude reduction in CPU execution time for individual queries.

This paper investigates a class of optimal control problems associated with Markov processes with local state information. The decision-maker has only local access to a subset of a state vector information as often encountered in decentralized control problems in multi-agent systems. Under this information structure, part of the state vector cannot be observed. We leverage ab initio principles and find a new form of Bellman equations to characterize the optimal policies of the control problem under local information structures. The dynamic programming solutions feature a mixture of dynamics associated unobservable state components and the local state-feedback policy based on the observable local information. We further characterize the optimal local-state feedback policy using linear programming methods. To reduce the computational complexity of the optimal policy, we propose an approximate algorithm based on virtual beliefs to find a sub-optimal policy. We show the performance bounds on the sub-optimal solution and corroborate the results with numerical case studies.

Uncut Gems is one of those "his own worst enemy" capers. You know, the kind of movie where you sit there for two hours watching some doofus constantly trip over his own laces — usually figuratively, sometimes literally — on the way to a personal epiphany about how all his bad choices and lack of useful self-awareness have led him to whatever unpleasant place they lead him to.…