ABSTRACT
B.l INTRODUCTION The world of science and technology is laden with a plethora of data to be used in analysis, modeling, and design. Contemporary data-gathering methods permit the acquisition of great volumes of information with little effort, so the principal need is to reduce the raw numbers into a significant set of parameters which have meaning for the purposes at hand. The winnowing of the data field into nuggets of golden kernels is the task facing all those who stand at the crucial place in the visceral stream of technological life.
