by Ronnie E. Thebeau., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2001., Includes bibliographical references (p. 149).

The main goal of this study is to document the biogeographical patterns, current status and conservation of 24 species of vascular plants in Mexico, all of them recorded in some risk category in the Mexican official publication named 'Norma Oficial…

Build is a tool for keeping modular systems in a consistent state by managing the construction tasks (e.g. compilation, linking, etc.) associated with such systems. It employs a user supplied system model and a procedural description of a task to…

Requirements acquisition is one of the most important and least well supported parts of the software development process. The Requirements Apprentice (RA) will assist a human analyst in the creation and modification of software requirements. Unlike current requirements analysis tools,…

Los trabajos arqueológicos que se llevan a cabo en el yacimiento de la Edad del Bronce de Terlinques (Villena, Alicante) han proporcionado un excepcional conjunto de husos o bobinas de hilo de junco. Éstos se hallaban almacenados en el interior…

The article provides up-to-date knowledge about the availability and use of emergency contraception (EC) necessary for primary care nurses. Emergency contraception is defined as a post-coital method under female control which produces an effect before implantation. The three licensed forms…

This report elucidates the linguistic representation of temporal relations among events. This involves examining sentences that contain two clauses connected by words like once, by the time, when, and before. Specifically, the effect of the tenses of the connected clauses…

The typical subroutines that compute $\\sin(x)$ and $\\exp(x)$ bear little resemblance to our mathematical knowledge of these functions: they are composed of concrete arithmetic expressions that include many mysterious numerical constants. Instead of programming these subroutines conventionally, we can express…

This paper describes a method for limiting vibration in flexible systems by shaping the system inputs. Unlike most previous attempts at input shaping, this method does not require an extensive system model or lengthy numerical computation; only knowledge of the…

In recent years, researchers in artificial intelligence have become interested in replicating human physical reasoning talents in computers. One of the most important skills in this area is predicting how physical systems will behave. This thesis discusses an implemented program…