Abstract: The present invention provides a method for allocating appointment time windows. The steps of this method include creating a statistical estimate of a daily schedule comprising a series of estimated service orders. An actual service order is then received. This actual service order is inserted into the daily schedule by using a set of scheduling instructions for determining the least cost to employ the available service resources. At this point, this actual service order does not have a system imposed time window. The set of scheduling instructions is used to determine a time window surrounding this insertion point. If the customer accepts this time window, then the closest estimated service order is replaced by this actual service order, and the daily schedule is recomputed based upon the revised set of service orders to yield a revised daily schedule.

Abstract: A self-supporting baking mold that includes a base member having a fanciful shape with a perimeter that is more complex than a simple circle and a depending sidewall coupled to said base member. The baking mold is sufficiently rigid to support a quantity of batter without being disposed in a muffin pan or other external supporting structure.

Abstract: A system for analyzing similarities between a first and second corpus or between a set of concepts and a corpus uses natural language processing and machine intelligence methods to replace terms or phrases in the corpus with concepts, determine the frequency of each concept in the corpus, and convert the corpus into a concept frequency file to enable easy comparison of the two corpuses or easy retrieval of items from the corpus that contain concept. Difference analysis and a combination of content and spectral analysis may be employed.