This is the fifth part in a series addressing the most common health concerns as we age. Previous parts have discussed cardiovascular disease, weight loss and blood sugar. In this installment, I will discuss cognitive health and the steps we can take to improve brain function as we age. Cognitive health is vital to independence, productivity and quality of life. The thought of losing cherished ...

When engineering an automated planning model, domain authors typically assume a static, unchanging ground-truth world. Unfortunately, this assumption can clash with reality, where domain changes often rapidly occur in best practices, effectors, or known conditions. In these cases, remodeling the domain causes domain experts to ensure newly captured requirements integrate well with the current m...

L of seeing patients, I ran into my first patient on a downtown street. The probability of this “chance” meeting would have been strikingly lower in New York City or Washington, D.C. When a colleague or co-worker develops a medical problem, the options for acquiring a caregiver are often dramatically greater in a large city than they are in a small town. More often in a small town, the patient ...

Topology maintenance, or how to handle the possibly concurrent joining and leaving of nodes, is acentral problem for structured peer-to-peer networks. A good topology maintenance protocol should runefficiently, fully maintain the topology, and should not unduly restrict concurrency. In this paper, wepresent such a protocol for a multi-ring topology called Ranch. The protocol is effi...

It is conventional wisdom that transparency in cartels– monitoring of competitors’ prices, sales, and profits– facilitates collusion. However, in several recent cases cartels have instead gone out of their way to preserve the privacy of their participants’actions and outcomes. Towards explaining this behavior, we show that cartels can sometimes sustain higher profits when actions and outcomes a...

We have successfully demonstrated a polarization-maintaining (PM) fused silica microfiber by adiabatically tapering a conventional PM fiber. Compared to standard single-mode microfibers, the proposed PM microfibers exhibit robust polarization, preserving characteristics under the presence of external perturbations, such as bending. A polarization-extinction ratio of 16 dB is typically obtained ...

One of the main cost of maintenance is continual retesting. Testing will be characterized as the construction of pathways that reach from inputs to some interesting zone of a program. This zone could be a bug or a desired feature. In this reachability view, the goal of testing is to show that a test set uncovers no bugs while reaching all desired features. A system is hard to maintain if it is ...

With the dramatic proliferation of case based reasoning sys tems in commercial applications many case bases are now becoming legacy systems They represent a signi cant portion of an organization s assets but they are large and di cult to maintain One of the contribut ing factors is that these case bases are often large and yet unstructured they are represented in natural language text Adding to...

We introduce the aspect of maintenance to code mobility with its major problem of keeping track of code migrating through computer networks. Our approach introduces the concept of mobile, lightweight knowledge repositories to support the maintenance of applications deploying mobile code in highly distributed computing environments. Our proposed system establishes a virtual global database with ...