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The effort to categorize nature dates at least to Aristotle and is still ongoing. The study of categories is termed "ontology"-a field Whose use in the philosophy' of social science has most recently been revived. Last April 1998, the State University of New York at Buffalo hosted a conference on "Applied Ontology: A Marvin Farber Conference in Law and Institutions in Society." The following papers were selected from the group of papers presented at the conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate and fast path computation is essential for applications such as onboard navigation systems and traffic network routing. While a number of heuristic algorithms have been developed in the past few years for faster path queries, the accuracy of them are always far below satisfying. In this paper, we first develop an agglomerative graph partitioning method for generating high balanced traverse distance partitions, and we constitute a three-level graph model based on the graph partition scheme for structuring the urban road network. Then, we propose a new hierarchical path computation algorithm, which benefits from the hierarchical graph model and utilizes a region pruning strategy to significantly reduce the search space without compromising the accuracy. Finally, we present a detailed experimental evaluation on the real urban road network of New York City, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to generate optimal fast paths and to facilitate real-time routing applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a restudy of the 13 New York communities included in the national sample for Brunner's three studies of 140 agricultural villages made in 1924, 1930, and 1936. The paper reports on changes in population 1920&ndash1970, in Dun and Bradstreet business listings 1921&ndash1970, in community boundaries 1936&ndash1974, and in school district boundaries, in 85 community services and facilities and 15 types of voluntary associations 1960&ndash1974, and in industries 1964&ndash1974. The presence of planning and zoning boards in 1974 is noted. All centers were rural by census definition in 1920; 10 still were in 1970. The evidence shows growth and decline, stability and change, depending on the individual community and the time period. Except for a minority of the communities, the evidence suggests that stability and growth prevail over decline. Vitality is generally greater in the noneconomic sectors than in the economic. Differentiation has increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the experiences of two secondary school students in preparing entries in economics for social science competitions at the Intel Science Talent Search in New York City. Zahir Zaveri and Daniel Pedisich were students at Schreiber High School in Port Washington, New York. They chose to seek a mentor to direct their research than attend a university training program. They had contacted William Greene, Chairman of the Department of Economics at the Stern School of Business at New York, after they had located him on the web page. The students researched suggested readings that would help them focus their studies and submitted periodic progress reports and literature reviews to Dr. Greene. They made heavy use of the Bobst Library of New York University. The background material of Zahir was provided by internet resources and archived books and papers provided by the Bobst Library and the Stern's Department of Economics. They achieved of success in these competitions and they gained skills in public speaking, cooperative work, organization, performance under great pressure and the creation of multimedia presentation.

The article presents responses on the article of S.G. Grant concerning the New York State social studies framework. Sandra Mathison blames the paper for not making the framework as an instantiation of an on-going political argument. Stephen C. Fleury contends broadly that an array of social forces influence the decisions of teachers and educators. It states that Fleury and Madison want to condemn the New York State Education Department (SED) for trying to regulate and control teachers and teaching.

The pioneering works in Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) — notably Schelling (1969) and Epstein and Axtell (1996) — introduced the method for testing hypotheses in "complex thought experiments" (Cederman 1997, 55). Although purely theoretical experiments can be important, the empirical orientation of the social sciences demands that the gap between modeled "thought experiments" and empirical data be as narrow as possible. In an ideal setting, an underlying theory of real-world processes would be tested directly with empirical data, according to commonly accepted technical and methodological standards. A possible procedure for narrowing the gap between theoretical assumptions and empirical data comparison is presented in this paper. It introduces a two-stage process of optimizing a model and then reviewing it critically, both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view. This procedure systematically improves a model's performance until the inherent limitations of the underlying theory become evident. The reference model used for this purpose simulates air traffic movements in the approach area of JFK International Airport in New York. This phenomenon was chosen because it provides a testbed for evaluating an empirical ABM in an application of sufficient complexity. The congruence between model and reality is expressed in simple distance measurements and is visually contrasted in Google Earth. Context knowledge about the driving forces behind controlled approaches and genetic optimization techniques are used to optimize the results within the range of the underlying theory. The repeated evaluation of a model's 'fitness' — defined as the ability to hit a set of empirical data points — serves as a feedback mechanism that corrects its parameter settings. The successful application of this approach is demonstrated and the procedure could be applied to other domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]