Editorial Note

Most of the research papers presented here are more than a decade old. In my attempt to edit these documents, I tried to preserve the original text as much as possible. Apart from correcting typos and unfortunate wording I left the text unchanged. Whenever I found a section that seemed outdated or in need of complementation I added a paragraph in

[2013] a different type of font prepended with the year in brackets

to append thoughts that are helpful to put the original statements in perspective based on today's knowledge.

Many original links are not functional today. I replaced the links with what I found on the internet at a different URL.