"Greater, more honorable and more useful to the republic": Plebeian offices in Machiavelli's "perfect" constitution

Making Computers More Useful and More Usable

97 Useful computers which are not usable are of little help; but so are usable computers which are not useful. One of the major goals of our research is to achieve these two goals simultaneously. We claim that useful computers have to be complex systems with a rich functionality. To make these systems usable and to exploit their power, we have constructed a variety of computer-based intelligent...

Creating a More Perfect Union:

Federal constitutions are viewed as incomplete contracts that must be renegotiated among self-interested, reelection-seeking politicians. Even when collectively sub-optimal, they are difficult to renegotiate if each state government faces electoral incentives to ignore externalities and federation-wide collective goods. Vertically integrated political parties help resolve this problem by creati...

Making CP-Nets (More) Useful

Preferences have been studied in philosophy, economics, psychology, and computer science and have a wide range of applications, such as e-commerce, recommender systems, decision support systems, and control of automated systems. A variety of methods have been proposed for modeling preferences. The one that I consider here is that of conditional preference networks (CP-nets). First studied by Bo...

Addiction Studies in Iran Neuroscientists Need to Do More

How can the audiogram be more useful?

The Canadian Hearing and Auditory Research Translation (CHART) group is a newly formed taskforce to develop collaborative research initiatives. Initial discussions centered on diagnostic improvements for middle ear disease, auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder, tinnitus and presbycusis. Central to these discussions was the widely held view that the standard audiogram and its interpretation is ...