We study a model of opinion formation where the opinions in conflict are not equivalent. This is the case when the subject of the decision is to respect a norm or a law. In such scenarios, one of the possible behaviors is to abide by the norm and the other to ignore it. The evolution of the dynamics is implemented through an imitation mechanism, in which agents can change their opinions based o...

Thing-oriented programming (TP) is an emerging programming model which overcomes some of the limitations of current practice in software development in general and of object-oriented programming (OOP) in particular. Ercatons provide an implementation of the model. TP does not describe a new programming language. The so-called “ercato virtual machine” or “ercato engine” implements the ideas disc...

Most research on machine learning has focused on scenarios in which a learner faces a single, isolated learning task. The lifelong learning framework assumes that the learner encounters a multitude of related learning tasks over its lifetime, providing the opportunity for the transfer of knowledge among these. This paper studies lifelong learning in the context of binary classification. It pres...

Computer graphics is always growing, in both the techniques it employs and the areas in which it’s applied. We continually see waves of new approaches and applications coming from other fields. At first, these new ideas meet some resistance. People question, “Is this really computer graphics?” However, these original, controversial views often become central to computer graphics. This special i...

Academic pursuits are inseparable from the medium within which they take place - life. The lives of medical trainees can present many challenges that are independent of academic demands. Poor psychological health has been found to develop in medical trainees. Can medical educators minimize this decline in well-being? Positive education - learning skills for traditional academia and to foster ha...

Punctuated Equilibrium Looking at the history of tech­ nological innovation, you begin to see a pattern. A technology is developed that changes how people live. Over a period of time, the technology remains essen­ tially the same, with perhaps a few minimal changes. Then, sud­ denly, somebody comes up with a radically different technology that quickly makes the previous tech­ nology obsolete. E...

In this paper we examine a phenomenon which has proved difficult to account for using standard assumptions of current syntactic theory, namely extraposition. Starting with Rosenbaum (1967), all analyses we are aware of (with the exception of Emonds (1976)) treat extraposition as adjunction of a phrase to some right peripheral projection of a matrix sentence. This adjunction may either be analyz...

As security has always been an afterthought of innovation, the IoT (Internet Things), in general, and authentication, particular, become a serious research challenge. Although many authentication protocols have proposed literature during past decade, most them do not fulfill performance requirements. Furthermore, only very small number these can be used Thing-to-Thing (T2T) architectures, where...